LETTERS FROM QUBEC: A Philosophy for Peace and Justice Howard Richards

LETTERS FROM QUBEC: A Philosophy for Peace and Justice Howard Richards International Scholars Publications San Francisco London Bethesda 1996 PREFACE There are people who write in order to make a living. I live to write. The explanation of my unusual purpose in life is, I think, that I hate unnecessary suffering and believe there is a chance that by writing I can help to reduce it. Some people become hospital volunteers for the reason that leads me to write. Something is wrong with our world. Very wrong. Fundamentally wrong. That it is extremely difficult to think out and put into words exactly what it is that is so fundamentally wrong is part and parcel of the problem. It is, however, necessary to make the effort and to put it into words. Otherwise our efforts to help will be blind. vi VOLUME ONE: Philosophy for Peace and Justice Tell all the truth but tell it slant success in circuit lies Emily Dickinson I am dreaming an economy made of fibers of light light upon light a world where law bends into the fabric of being Michael Fitzgerald vii viii CONTENTS Introduction to Volume I ................................................. ix

Letter 1 Think Globally, Act Locally......................................... l Letter 2 Claudels Hope ................................................... 9 Letter 3 The Love of Wisdom ............................................. 15 Letter 4 Rationality ..................................................... 21 Letter 5 Please Do Not Understand Me Too Quickly .......................... 27 Letter 6 Hunger ........................................................ 29 Letter 7 The Abatement of the Little Mother. ................................ 39 Letter 8 Friedmans Guillotine............................................. 45 Letter 9 Irrational Rationality ............................................. 53 Letter 10 The Night Walker, the Blue Lady, the Frog Stone, the Chicken in the Road ................................................ 59 Letter 11 A Dialogue on Metaphysics with Veronica ........................... 71 Letter 12 Plato as a Creator of Culture ...................................... 83 Letter 13 Plato as Ecologist............................................... 89 Letter 14 Plato as cologiste ............................................... 97 Letter 15 Aristotle and Matthew Miller on Friendship ........................ 101 Letter 16 The Bronze Shape.............................................. 109 Letter 17 Hello Aristotle ................................................ 119 Letter 18 The Spiritual Life ............................................. 129 Letter 19 Dancing With Tears in My Eyes .................................. 139 Letter 20 The Heavenly Interpretation of Desire. ............................ 147 Letter 21 Perpetua et Constans ............................................ 155 Letter 22 To Each Her Own ............................................. 159 Letter 23 Ray Ortegas Philosophy ........................................ 165 Letter 24 Some Contributions of Philosophy to the Construction of the Metaphysics of Economic Society ....................... 175 Letter 25 The Mystical Kernel in the Rational Shell ........................ 187 ix x Introduction to Volume I INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME l The many-faceted Restless pattern of things that has a name. I call it The power of a name To take all the pieces and call them one Even if its a pretence

(myriad)

Once there was a woman whose name was Name. That was the name her parents gave her. When people asked her, What is your name? she would answer, Name. Often the people did not believe her answer, even though it was true. They were not ready to understand the unusual way her parents had used language when they chose Name as her name. I mention the woman named Name because in this book I will sometimes use language in unusual

ways. Please remember that what I say may be true even when the way I use language is surprising. Our daughter Shelley is the author of the poem above. When she was eleven she was a member of a gang composed of herself and three other professors kids. When her mother asked what the gang did, Shelley said they sat under a tree on campus and talked about The Point. When her mother and I asked why they talked about The Point, she said they talked about it because the gang could not do anything else until they decided what The Point was. We lived and worked in Chile for many years, and in the course of my work I got to know a young man named Eduardo, who, when he was 11 years old, worked all day sitting under a tree sewing together strings of tobacco leaves so that they could be hung up to dry. He knew what The Point was: it was survival. Eduardo was not a backward peasant boy living in a remote part of the world where people grow for themselves the food they eat. He was integrated into the global economy as a supplier of tobacco to a cigarette company operating under a license agreement with a multinational corporation. Shelley was also integrated into the global economy, as the daughter of a professor at a well-endowed private college, many of whose assets are held as stocks of multinational corporations. Situated as they are in different positions with respect to the world economic system, which is at once our mother and our master, the source of the food that nourishes us and the source of the competition that disciplines us, is there any way Shelley and Eduardo can understand each other? There is. I call it philosophy. The name of this book begins with Letters... The word letter is from the Latin littera and the French lettre. Letter originally signified an individually written character, such as the letter a. Then its meaning was expanded to include anything written, and after that its meaning was contracted to signify only something written to a particular person or persons; with its new xi LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I meaning letter gradually replaced the older words missive and epistle. I use the word because I want my philosophy to be thought of as written by a particular person and addressed to particular persons. The labor organizer Cesar Chavez, for whom I did some work as a lawyer before Caroline and I moved to Chile, was once asked how he organized the farm workers union. He replied, First I organized one person, and then another person, and then another person, and then another person, and then another person,... and so on. That is how I think of my readers: first one person, then another person, then another person.... I hope people will read slowly, taking time to relate what they find here to other things they are reading and to what is happening in their lives. Letters from Qubec is divided into 52 parts, 50 letters and two introductions (one for the first volume and one for the second volume); a person who reads one letter or introduction per week will finish in a year. The letters are named from Qubec because that is where they were written for the most part. I have at one time or another written letters from many places, most notably California where I grew up, Connecticut where I went to college, Chile, England where I did graduate work, and Indiana. When I became a tenured professor at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I asked myself, What is tenure for? Then I answered, The institution of tenure is justified, if at all, because it enables people who have a purpose to go ahead and try to achieve their purpose, without worrying about money or prestige. I remembered that in the last two generations no man and only one

woman in my family had ever succeeded in getting a steady job, much less tenure, and I knew I wanted to do something for people like the people I grew up with, white hearing in mind that in most of the world being poor is worse than being poor in the United States, and also hearing in mind that poverty is only one of several tightly interrelated problems that the human species must solve. I gave myself a scholarship to spend part of every year in Qubec; we all moved there for part of each year and our two daughters, Shelley and Laura, enrolled in local schools to learn French. I wrote philosophical letters at the Caf Krieghof on the Rue Carrier. I am reluctant to say that my philosophy is about love, but I suppose that eventually I will have to say that it is, because it is. My philosophical work is oriented by the conviction that love requires us to try to understand our non-loving society in order to change it. But love is such an abused word that I am reluctant to say it. If there were a law against word abuse, love would be taken from its parents and put in a foster home. However, as Roland Barthes has pointed out, in modern society no word escapes abuse; no, not one. There is no privileged language outside ideology. We seek in vain a firm ground for our statements in the pure meanings of untainted words; we seek in vain a pure platform on which to stand while denouncing the corruption of society. The vocabulary of our denunciation comes from one of societys institutions, language, which is infected at least as much by lack of truth and lack of caring as societys other institutions. So, Love, old friend; poor, abused, corrupted, cheated, deceived, and prostituted word, your corruption is no more nor less than that of the other words. And I cannot abandon you or them. I love the phrase, a path with heart. I ran across it in a novel by Carlos Castaneda. Who said it to whom, when, I dont remember. I dont remember anything about the book except a path with heart. That is enough. Ive taken to making decisions by asking myself the question, Is this a path with heart? If someone says to me, How about going to a movie? I say to myself, Is this a path with heart? If I were going to be dragged into the movie without really wanting to go, or if I would be drifting into the movie for lack of anything else to do, then I say no. If all of me wants to do it, body and soul, then it is a path with heart and I answer, Lets go! xii Introduction to Volume I The phrase path with heart says that there is more to getting from here to there than following the shortest or fastest or cheapest route. If there were no more to moving through life than going from here to there by starting at the beginning and arriving at the end, then the rational choice would be to die soon after birth a short, quick, cheap trip from sperm to worm. Most people wisely prefer a more circuitous route toward a more multifaceted objective, a path out of the cradle endlessly rocking, through singing the body electric, listening to the word whispered by the waves, reaching hands across the water, adoring long lovely undulating death. I want the reader to move through this book body and soul; to engage these letters personally; to test them in the light of her or his experience; to discuss them with friends; to question them, fight them, accept, reject, use, lose, gain, assimilate, accommodate, reorganize, transform, synthesize. This is raw material. We are the work. xiii xiv Letter 1

THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY The organizing of human action requires communication. Communication, in turn, requires a common code, i.e., a shared system of symbols used in sending messages from one person to another. In the absence of a common code attempts at communication will fail, and the desired cooperative action will not develop. It is not in general sufficient that the sharing of a common code consist merely of all speakers using a single language, such as English. The level of communication needed for effective organizing requires a harmony of vocabulary, thought, and feeling, which is often lacking even among those who speak the same language. The lack of a common code can also be called, following Antonio Gramsci, fragmentation. Because of fragmentation it is a struggle to find or create shared meanings. Philosophy, conceived as a method for creating shared meanings, can improve communication and in that way help to build the harmony of mind and will that is needed to organize concerted action. The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our actions. George Eliot As far back as I can remember, I have always wanted to do good. Given this feature of my character, it is not surprising that once in my life I fell in with a coterie of soup-kitchen organizers. We decided that during the last part of each month there should be community meals for people living on welfare. We chose the phrase community meals because we wanted the hungry themselves to participate in organizing them, in ways that would build self-respect and dignity, overcome apathy, and empower the people to move forward together. We knew there were hungry people in our small midwestern town, which spreads out for several miles among the cornfields behind the thicket of neon announcing our home to the casual traveler who whizzes past us on the interstate highway. On the first day of each month the public welfare office gives out stamps which can be exchanged for food at grocery stores. Since the stamps are allotted according to fixed eligibility rules, the amount of stamps received is not finely proportioned to the needs of individuals. Some people get more food stamps than they need, which gives rise to complaints from taxpayers that public funds are being wasted. Others get fewer stamps than they need. We knew that several hundred people were running low on food at the end of each month. Marjorie Loomis, the woman who is in charge of food stamp distribution, told us that approximately 2,000 people (about 5 percent of the population of our town) stood in line outside her office on the first of January, in the cold of midwinter. She reasoned that since they took the trouble to stand in line they must have been out of stamps; otherwise they would have come a few days later and gotten their January stamps without waiting. About 300 people return to the welfare office toward the end of each month to ask for 1 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I more help, even though they know, or should know, that the welfare office can do nothing more for them. The considerations just mentioned partially explain why I am sitting here today, the 28th of January of the year of our Lord 1986, at 8:23 p.m., in the main (and only) room of Christ Tabernacle at Third and Pearl, watching first Raymond, then Ruth, and now Roger munch macaroni and meat loaf. A few minutes ago I walked over to the line of serving tables stretched

along one wall of the tabernacle and served myself some wilted lettuce soaked in vinegar. Sitting here without eating would have made me more conspicuous than I already was, so I put some lettuce on my plate. I am embarrassed to be associated with a project that is having little success. We have served only 31 people so far today, and, what is worse, we are inching very slowly toward empowering the poor, if we are moving in that direction at all. Our community meals are run by us for them, even though our professed intention is to help organize meals run by the poor for the poor. We said we wanted to facilitate networking among public assistance clients, but no networking is happening. Roger is staring at his plate while he eats, pretending that he does not know I am here; opposite us and about six feet away sit nine middle-class volunteers on a bench behind a row of tables laden with food that well-wishers thought welfare clients might like to eat. Oh well. I may as well go get myself some chocolate pie and try to see this situation in a positive light. Maybe faithful persistence is what is most important in the long run. Maybe justice and peace and ecological balance are only apparently brought closer in the great moments when it is obvious that something is being accomplished, like the day when a million people gathered in Washington to protest the Vietnam War, or the hazy evening in Managua when the dictator was finally compelled to sneak out of his bunker and fly to asylum in Paraguay, or the morning when the Greenpeace fleet of small inflatable boats intervened between the whaling ships and the whales off the Iceland coast, or the moment when Bull Connor surrendered to the nonviolent black schoolchildren of Birmingham, Alabama. Maybe the real reason why the world holds together and creeps slowly forward is to be found in thousands of little meetings where practically nobody shows up, and in countless little projects carried out more-or-less badly by people who are moreor-less well intentioned, more-or-less incompetent, more-or-less inspired, and very persistent. It is not difficult to discover the problems that limit our community dinner here at Christ Tabernacle to being only a small step forward. One problem is that we middle-class do-gooders find it difficult to get in touch with the agenda of the welfare clients. When we try to find out what they want by talking with them, we find that our vocabularies and outlooks do not match theirs, and we suspect that they do not trust us or like us. Another problem is that they do not communicate well with each other. Each is proud and angry in her or his own way, most are discouraged, some are mendacious, some lascivious; their individual personalities do not easily combine to form a united group. However, although it is not difficult to discover the problems, it is difficult to solve them. It is hard to organize grass-roots networks. It is hard to do anything that requires communication. It is even difficult to begin at a very basic level to establish communication between one person and another. For example, I have been sitting next to Roger for half an hour, eating first macaroni, then wilted lettuce, and now pie, but we have not gotten past exchanging names. I know what the problem is, but I do not know how to solve it. In my relationship to Roger, I have been avoiding playing the role of cheery, talkative, take-charge organizer, because I know from experience the pitfalls of that approach, but now, even though I still have confidence that eventually the bond between us will grow, I am going through a phase when I feel like a useless blob. 2 Letter 1 If Roger and I are going to cooperate, we are going to have to communicate. In order to communicate we must, so to speak, tune in on the same wavelength. One could also say that Roger and I need to share a common code, borrowing the word code from the field of semiotics, the

general theory of signs pioneered by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce (born 1839, died 1914). A code is a system of symbols used in sending messages. Roger cant send me a message unless we share a code; he cant send me a good message unless we share a good code. Roger and I need to share a good code so we can get some good messages going back and forth from Roger to me and from me to Roger. I prefer to think that the lack of a good code to facilitate communication between Roger and me is neither my fault nor his. I prefer to blame society. Ive blamed myself so much lately that my conscience is exhausted, and anyway in a certain sense it really is societys fault. If the general atmosphere provided by the surrounding society had given us appropriate meanings to work with, then Roger and I would be rapping and grooving at Third and Pearl over Jell-O and pie. Thats what would happen if we could improve society by putting into circulation more patterns of meaning, more common codes. One way to look at philosophy is to say that during its long history it has provided society with some of the codes people use when they communicate and organize. Philosophy has been and is a meaning-making activity. Without putting too much emphasis on the word code, I suggest that there are four important similarities among three apparently disparate activities. The three apparently disparate activities are: 1. A simple case of code-making, such as Samuel F. B. Morse composing the Morse Code by matching the letters of the alphabet with short and long sound signals, so that, for example, three short sounds mean the letter S. 2. The making of systems of ideas by philosophers, so that, for example, rational, just, wise, courageous, temperate, and virtuous are established as words with related meanings. 3. Roger and I attempting to get the two of us into one frame of reference, so that we can converse and cooperate. The four important similarities among these three apparently disparate activities are: 1. Somebody, or some group, has to establish the conventions that constitute the code. 2. Once the code is made, it can be used to send messages. 3. Characteristics of the code determine and limit the kinds of messages that can be sent. 4. The code is formed by an ensemble of words or other symbols interrelated so that every part is what it is by virtue of its place in the whole. Philosophy is pertinent to organizing soup kitchens, partly because the context of a soup kitchen is a larger society whose symbols have been given meaning by philosophers as well as by other makers of culture, and partly because both guests and servers need to do philosophy on the soup kitchen floor in order to build human bonds and (eventually) to link the bonds to form networks. Contexts differ, but in important ways the process of meaning-making is the same. It is my belief that as he stares at his Jell-O Roger is implicitly asking me, Who are you and what are you doing here? and it is my further belief that his question is similar to the question, Who are we and what are we doing here? which the ancient Hebrews, the Africans, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Hindus, and the rest of humanity have always asked with reference to the place of our bewildered species in this starry cosmos. 3 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I My reflections are interrupted by a hymn. In a corner of the room two large women and one large man with a guitar are singing: Weve got the power In the name of Jesus Weve got the power

In the name of the Lord The church of Jesus Is still alive. The spectacle of three amateur musicians in a black church in Indiana singing Weve got the power strikes me as pathetic. I wish they had the power to lift up the poor and bring justice to the land, and perhaps spiritually they do, hut materially they evidently do not. One of the members of the organizing committee, Harry Perkins, views the singers differently: as offensive. Harry is convinced that there are hungry people out on the streets who stay on the streets instead of coming in for a free meal because they would rather be hungry than proselytized. He thinks we are not reaching the needy because we are holding the meal in a church, and because we are letting the entertainers sing so loudly that they can be heard a block away. Meanwhile, Marjorie Loomis (the person who disburses food stamps at the welfare office) has joined Roger and me at our table, and has begun to tell us about Charles Darwin (English biologist, author of The Origin of Species, 1809-1882). Marjorie comes from a large Tennessee family, in which the father made it a practice to assemble his family every Sunday in order to lecture them on Darwin. One of the things she learned from her father was that if human genes are damaged, it takes them seven generations to recover. The moral of Marjories story is that people should use their food stamps wisely, in order to avoid damaging the genes of their children. Fragmented consciousness is a concept that describes the minds of the people here at the tabernacle. The idea of fragmented consciousness comes from the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Consciousness is fragmented in the sense that we lack unifying ideas in our relationships to each other, and also in the sense that each of our minds is internally fragmented. The singers want the church of Jesus to be alive, while Harry Perkins wishes it were dead. Harry and the singers do not share a conception of the world; because their thoughts are incongruent, their wills cannot be united. Marjorie learned from her father an odd (and false) theory about genes; her beliefs on that subject are a fragment of folklore disconnected from the main body of her own beliefs, and also disconnected from the main body of scientifically verified information that our society collectively possesses. According to Gramsci (and I agree with him), part of the explanation of the extraordinary fragmentation of consciousness found even in a small group of ordinary people like us here at Christ Tabernacle, is that ordinary people have for the most part not been deeply involved in the production of knowledge and ideology. Another, closely related, part of the explanation of our fragmentation is that the prevailing ideas do not describe the life experience of the lower classes, because the prevailing ideas were produced by the upper classes, mainly for themselves and for their own purposes. The minds of the subordinate classes contain an incoherent collection of ideas, which have come to them for diverse and somewhat accidental reasons. Their minds live like scavenger fish at the bottom of the ocean who feed on scraps thrown overboard from passing ships. The ships have routes and destinations, but the scrap-eaters do not know them. For example, Charles Darwin produced a coherent theory of evolution, which has since been modified by other biologists, but his theory became incoherent in the process of arriving at Third and Pearl. Marjories version is a misunderstood scrap. Gramsci calls the process through which frag4 Letter 1 ments of the coherent thought of elites enter the minds of the masses sedimentation. Sediments are formed from bits and pieces of the thinking of the powerful, which drift downward and enter in distorted form into the minds of the powerless. The thoughts of the mighty are often produced as

weapons designed to advance their interests, which are opposed to the interests of other mighty people, whose armories also include intellectual weapons. The powerless may pick up intellectual scraps without ever learning what the fight is about or was about, since yesterdays ideological battles are often the sources of the scraps which fill their (perhaps I should say our) minds. I have not emphasized that an effect of a coherent ideology promoted by members of a powerful class may be to legitimize the status quo, and thereby to keep the lower classes in their place. Gramsci does emphasize the role that certain coherent sets of ideas (such as laissez-faire economics) play in keeping the poor poor, but I have downplayed it because I want to emphasize that fragmentation in itself lack of coherence as distinct from the prevalence of a particular kind of coherence is a source of powerlessness. I say to myself, silently, imagining I am talking to Roger but really speaking from myself to myself in the backward corners of my brain, Roger, dear Roger, please start a conversation. Please break the ice. I want to help the hungry to feed themselves; I want to empower the downtrodden. Do you understand me? I am afraid you do not. Do I understand you? No. Is it your fault? No. Is it my fault? No. Lack of communication is a problem bigger than both of us. Having finished my imaginary conversation with Roger in the dark backward corners of my brain, I feel impelled to address a few more words to you, the reader of this letter. I am offering this homely story of a small frustrating experience because it illustrates two great facts. It illustrates the fact that the mending of our broken world is to be done, if at all, by tiny unspectacular steps, thread by thread. And it illustrates the fragmentation of our culture. I have used a concept from semiotics, code, and two concepts from Gramsci, fragments and sedimentation, to shed light on my embarrassment, and on our common predicament. (By the way, fragments in Italian is frammenti. I mention this because I like the way frammenti sounds; it reminds me of lasagna.) I am trying to show that what appear to be personal failings are often social failings; our culture does not support us when we need support. We please, God, dont let me get too preachy about this psychologize our problems too much. We ask, What is wrong with me? when we should ask, What is wrong with the culture? Asking the right question, we get the right answer: the right answer is that what is wrong with the culture (any culture, but I will pay special attention to modernity, i.e., to certain cultural patterns manifest at Third and Pearl which characterize the modern age and the global system) needs more software, i.e., more codes and other communicative resources, to facilitate more cooperation. I am, in general, convinced, despite my disappointment with the way things are going here at the community meal, that by studying the meaning-making activity called philosophy, we can make the pursuit of peace and justice more effective. Everyone can participate in the intellectual and moral reform Gramsci called for when he proposed to combine the virtues of elite thinking, namely coherence and command of the products of scientific research, with virtues that can only be possessed by a democratic philosophy, namely accessibility to the majority and usefulness in serving the interests of every person. The result will be a new rationality coherent, scientific, accessible, and solidary. P.S. (8:55 p.m.) Roger and I finally have made a good start toward building communication. Family. We are talking about sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, children, mothers, and fathers. Family themes are leading naturally into health themes, as we share our thoughts and feelings about relatives diseases. Roger is sad because his mother suffers from arthritis and he cannot do anything to help her. 5 6

7 8 Letter 2 CLAUDELS HOPE Having just told you a story about the role of philosophy in facilitating cooperation by constructing resources for communication, I hasten to reply to a complaint that I often hear when I tell such stories. The complaint is about me as much as it is about philosophy, and it is that we (philosophy and I) are too rational. Although I do not want to tell you about my love life, and anyway you probably do not want to know about it, I do want to insist from the beginning that I regard myself as a great sensualist. I do not mean to say that if the Olympic Games included an event called Fun Having I would necessarily be a gold medalist; I might not even make the team; nevertheless, in my own minor league way, and regardless of what others may think about me, I manage to find creative ways to enjoy life as it goes by. I am not complaining. Those of us who have chosen to identify with pain (the pain of the homeless; the pain of the polluted earth; the pain of cancer victims...) are not incapable of pleasure. I believe that what I have just said is generally true, but I am confessing that in my own case I insist on it partly for personal and unworthy motives, because one of the minor irritations I have had to put up with in life has been people who think I need to be taught how to enjoy it. I believe that I enjoy it well enough without their instruction. I will now explain my beliefs and my attitude, but I must warn you that I will digress, or seem to digress. Here is my motto; it is from the French poet Paul Claudel (1868-1955): There is something better than being fou; it is to seek first the Kingdom of God and its justice. (See Matt. 6:33.) I leave the word fou untranslated; its meaning is roughly that of the English word crazy. Fou comes from the same Latin root as our English words foolish, fool, phooey, and folly. Fou is spelled fou if a vowel follows, and folle if the vowel following starts a word feminine in gender. A French dictionary, the Petit Larousse, defines fou as: 1. said of one who has lost reason, or 2. whose behavior is extravagant, or 3. who is beside him or her self; or, 4. contrary to reason. Fou is an integral part of certain indispensable French idiomatic expressions, including the following: fou rire an uncontrollable laugh fou de joie beside oneself with joy fou de douleur beside oneself with pain une folle passion a mad passion folle dpense outrageous expense succs fou prodigious success herbes folles weeds 9 LETTERS EROM QUBEC: Vol. I According to my motto from Claudel, there is something better than being fou. It is hard to believe there could be something better than fou, because fou is so much fun. Claudel says what is better is the kingdom of God and its justice, and that must include a reference to reason. Since fou is contrary to reason, reason must be contrary to fou. The way Claudel structured his sentence, God

and justice ended up allied with the anti-fou, or at least with the non-fou, since they cannot be better than it without at least being different from it. Reason is, on this view, apparently in trouble, since if what we today call rational behavior aims to compete with being fou for the allegiance of human hearts, it will surely lose. Faced with a choice between modern calculating rationality and mad passion, who would hesitate? Reason would be forever a wallflower. Reasons plight is, however, less desperate than at first appears, for what Claudel had in mind was to make her beautiful and to restore her to her ancient office as guide of life. I support Reason and take a critical view of the irrational passions which the people of today seek as they flee from the decrepit modern reason which has given us so much death and so much boredom. In what follows I will briefly take a critical view of only one irrational passion. It is not the first passion that spontaneously comes to mind when one is asked to name an example of a passion; it is, however, sufficiently representative of the genus. It is a passion by which I and many others are tempted, and one to whose temptations I intend discerningly to succumb, and by which I hope others will allow themselves consciously to be borne away. I mean the passion to do good. Let us consider the negative of Claudels proposition. Resolved: there is nothing better than being fou. Corollary: if doing good is our passion, then there is nothing better than doing good follement. (Follement is the adverbial form of fou.) I am almost persuaded to endorse the negative when I read critiques of modern rationality. The choice is this: to renovate rationality to make it perform again the office of Reason, of Holy Wisdom, guide to life. Or to abandon the idea of Reason altogether, regarding her as sick beyond cure. Normally I choose the first of these alternatives; when I read certain authors I am tempted to endorse the second. The very difficulty of our position, writes Thomas Merton (BritishAmerican Catholic monk and poet, 1915-1968), comes from the fact that every definite program is now a deception, every precise plan is a trap, every easy solution is intellectual suicide. Every definite program is now a deception. With respect to humanitys principal problems in the twentieth century, I must agree with Merton. When I read in the newspapers about a new plan for ending hunger, or achieving national security, or saving the environment, I am skeptical. When I hear that the Defense Department has developed another rational plan to deter war, I shudder and wonder whether I will live long enough to die of natural causes. When a government agency or private think tank completes a comprehensive study of poverty in the USA and proposes a rational plan for eliminating poverty at an affordable price, I say, Hold on to your coat, sister; its going to be a cold winter. But while agreeing with Merton, I find that I need reason. I am a fragmented soul, the product of a fragmented culture. I am not one of those people, of whom I have known some, who are confident that all will turn out well if they follow the guidance of their feelings; they have enormous confidence in their instincts, in their gut reactions, in their parents, in their moral formation, in their upbringing generally. They say, If it feels right, it is right. It is as if they were well-tuned violins, which never sound a false note. How such people come into existence in our chaotic twentieth century I do not know; I do not believe they are the majority. As for myself, I am perhaps not in the majority either, but part of a minority at the other extreme. I say, If it feels right, it is likely to be wrong. I imagine myself to be like an inaccurate clock, which frequently needs to be corrected by comparison with a standard that keeps better time. 10 Letter 2 Many feelings are about rejection. I cannot count the times people have come to me upset because

they were dropped by a friend, dumped by a lover, divorced by a spouse, dismissed from a job, or denigrated in the student evaluations of their classes. People get upset when they are treated like nobody, treated like trash, or told to move on by the police. Some of the saddest grown-ups were children whose parents did not want them, and nobody has ever wanted them since. So what do I do when people come to me with low self-esteem and upset feelings? Do I tell the rejected they can be cured by expressing their depression and rage? No. I say we need to think about the structure of a society that makes the rejection of people a central part of its institutions. But that is not all I say. I also say, Why not be happy? You are indulging in your feelings of rejection because you are making demands on people. You are being sad in order to demand that somebody do something you want. But all you are achieving with your negative feelings is your own misery. This, too, is part of my advice to victims. Suppose that the following describes our plight: we need reasons for our actions, but the very rationality that is at the core of our culture is diseased. The irrationality of the current rationality, which we desperately need to overcome, is deeply embedded in our way of life; the rationality that governs our daily tasks is on the whole influenced more by money than by science. Suppose that Reason no longer speaks for our passions, forcing us to embrace mad passions if we are to have passion in our lives at all. Suppose that the passion to do good can only be effective if we have what Martin Luther King, Jr. called a tough mind and a tender heart, and that, furthermore, complicating but not contradicting the point made by King, what passes in our world for tough-mindedness is often disastrously misleading. The very difficulty of our position comes from the fact that every definite program is now a deception, every precise plan is a trap, every easy solution is intellectual suicide. If the foregoing describes the way things are, then it will be difficult to find ways to get some perspective on our modern rationality to see it from a distance, so that we can reflect on it and renovate it. It will be hard to find ways to reason about Reason, to criticize Reason, to improve and transform rationality in the name of something better than fou. Reforming rationality will be like braiding tangled yarn. Progress will be irregular. Progress will be interrupted by periods spent trying to figure out how we got into the tangle we are in, so we can unravel the yarn we must reweave. For Reason. Doing philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein (Austrian philosopher, 1889-1951) suggested, is like trying to show a fly the way out of a bottle. The predicament of the fly in the bottle is that a direct flight does not lead to freedom. Just when the fly is attempting to fly out, it is trapping itself in. Similarly, rationality sometimes deceives us. It sometimes appears self-evident that whatever the problem may be, the way to advance toward a solution is to undertake a study of the problem, and later to devise a plan for solving the problem based on the conclusions of the study. Like the fly in the bottle, we do not suspect that the apparent way out may be trapping us in. When Wittgenstein implied that philosophy serves to show people the way out of conceptual mazes, as if they were flies in a bottle, he referred to his own way of doing philosophy. His method did not consist of making moves in straightforward logical arguments as much as it consisted of providing context. He helped his readers to inspect bits of apparently logical reasoning by, so to speak, looking at them carefully as they functioned in the midst of real-life situations. In addition to looking at context, as Wittgenstein did, I want to go back to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Descartes, Kant, Marx, and Heidegger, whom I admire as great builders of Reason. What a few philosophers have done in the past, namely, create shared meanings, all humanity women, men, black, brown, yellow, white, and red can learn how to do now. We can learn from the architects of the Western tradition, a tradition that has in 11

LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I many ways turned out badly; and, especially, we can learn how to do what they did: how to recode a culture. I have been encouraged by finding that when I study the history of philosophy my conclusions are similar, although opposite, to the conclusions of Professor Jacques Derrida, who holds the history of philosophy chair at the University of Paris. Derrida finds that philosophers have erroneously affirmed the existence of unity, where in fact there is difference. My view is that most major philosophers have constructively created concepts which affirm the existence of unity, and in so doing have created social unity. A better rationality, of the kind we need, would be, precisely, a logic of unity, which would help humanity to work together to cope with its urgent problems. The inverse similarity of Derridas conclusions to mine is comforting. I feel like a student of algebra who gets 37.6142 as the answer to a problem, and finds that the correct answer given in the back of the book is -37.6142.1 feel that I got everything right but the minus sign. And that all I need is a convincing reason for saying that both the negative and the positive answer are correct, as in the problem of finding the square root of four, where the correct answer is both +2 and -2. Derrida calls his philosophy deconstruction. I follow John Dewey (American philosopher, 18591952), in choosing to speak of reconstruction. Derridas books are written at an advanced level for sophisticated readers if you do not believe me, pick one of them up and look at it. His style and audience are suitable for his purpose, since in order to deconstruct illusions created by the philosophers of the past, it is necessary to reach the people who are likely to have been misled by the illusions, i.e., those who have read the philosophers of the past. The democratic reconstruction of ideas and institutions, on the other hand, calls for mass participation not just explaining to the public the results philosophy has reached, but mass participation in doing philosophy, in places like soup kitchens and factories, as well as in schools. Consequently, although I do not expect to achieve complete clarity, I am trying to write in a way that ordinary people can understand and relate to. For Reason. I propose a next step, which I trust you will find plausible. In Letter 3 I will write about ancient Greece, about Greece in the times when philosophers began their work of modifying human culture. (I regard human culture itself as a modification of biologically-based behavior-guiding mechanisms.) We will examine the meaning of the word wisdom, through n consideration of its origins, and therefore we will examine the origin of the word philosophy, which in Greek means love of wisdom. To some extent we will also examine the meanings of words like rational, rationality, and reason, although a more complete consideration of the latter will be undertaken a little later, in Letter 4. Onward, upward, and forward! 12 13 14 Letter 3 THE LOVE OF WISDOM Philosophy can be defined as the love of wisdom. Wisdom, according to Plato, is that knowledge which serves as the guiding principle of just, even-tempered, and courageous actions. Otherwise put, wisdom is the rule of the rational. Since to show some tendency toward guidance by wisdom is part of what it means to be human, all normal humans are philosophers. If we want to form a correct judgment of the influence that language exerts over thought, we

ought to bear in mind that our European languages as found at the present time have been moulded to a great extent by the abstract thought of philosophers. (Franz Boas, Handbook of American Indian Languages.) This letter is about wisdom. I will begin with a minor detail which most people do not learn In their history classes. It expresses a lesson very important for the future, if any, of life. On one of the holidays that was celebrated in ancient Athens, there was a ceremony in which maidens carried secret gifts from the temple of Athena, goddess of wisdom and protectress of the city, to the temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love. The maidens returned hearing secret gifts from Aphrodite to Athena. I mention this detail for its symbolic value, because even though there are people who mistakenly confuse the rule of wisdom with the rule of cold rationality, in human history wisdom has only succeeded in ruling, to the small extent that she has succeeded, when she has allied herself, however secretly, with passion. Next I will discuss the original (and still best) definition of philosophy. The word philosophy comes from the ancient Greek philosophia, which in turn comes from two Greek words, philia and sophia. Philia means friendly or brotherly love, affection, or fondness, and is an ancestor of such English words as Philadelphia, which means City of Brotherly Love, and philanthropist, which means lover of humanity. Sophia means wisdom, and is an ancestor of such English words as sophisticated. The beautiful domed basilica that still stands today in the city of Istanbul, Turkey, having been built many centuries ago when the city was named Constantinople and its rulers spoke Greek, is called Hagia Sophia, the Temple of Holy Wisdom. A philosopher, therefore, according to the original meanings of the Greek roots from which the word philosophy is composed, is a lover of wisdom. Pythagoras (Greek, sixth century BC) is said to have been the first to call himself a philosophos. He was one of many people who either called themselves philosophers or were so called by others before the time of Plato (Greek philosopher, 428-348 or 347 BC). Nevertheless, I count philosophy conceived as a practical guide to life coupled with a doctrine justifying that guide to life, as beginning with Plato and with his teacher Socrates (Greek philosopher, 470-399 BC). Socrates doctrines were preserved and elaborated by Plato, and adopted by Plato as part of Platos own philosophy. What has remained of the works of the earlier philosophers is so fragmentary that it fails to provide readers with comprehensive discussions of what wisdom is. Now I want to share some of my whimsical fantasies about wisdom. I find that I am rarely able to get through a letter with a straight face. Thoughts come to me which make my mind wander off into comical daydreams, like the thought that I, a college professor, am one of the 15 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I inheritors of the proud, too proud, title philosopher. I do enjoy thinking of myself as a lover of wisdom, and I like to encourage other people to think of me as one. I have prepared a bumper sticker to advertise my passion, which says, Honk if you love wisdom. Although I do not now own an automobile, I have imagined buying one and putting the sticker on its bumper. I have also daydreamed other ways to get publicity. For example, I might request a listing in the commercial pages of the telephone book; under the letter between Pet Shops and Physicians & Surgeons there would be the brief notation: Philosophers See Lovers of Wisdom. And under L, after Laundries and before Lubricants, there would be a listing of Lovers of Wisdom. The listing would include all local residents with telephones whose souls were aflame with the desire to

pursue truth and to change their lives by putting the truth into practice. About three-quarters of the way down the list would appear my name and telephone number. However, probably I will not act out my fantasies. Although in principle one should not be ashamed, but honored, to be known as a lover of wisdom, in practice the effect on ones reputation of declaring in public ones sentiments toward wisdom would be adverse. Other people would be offended if one advertised oneself in a way suggesting that one loved wisdom more than they did; they would want to know why ones name was in the telephone book and theirs was not. They would say that they loved wisdom too, that they were and had been from the moment of their birth fully qualified members of a species biologically classified as homo sapiens. homo sapiens is the one and only extant species of the genus homo, which is specifically distinguished from the other (extinct) members of the genus by the possession of wisdom. That is what sapiens means; it is an adjectival form of the Latin noun sapientia, which means wisdom. If one counts the secret philosophers, those who are philosophers at heart while pretending to be something else; and if one counts not only those whose souls burn with desire for wisdom but also those who quietly respect her; and if one counts those who go out every night on hot dates with Silliness and only flirt on an occasional Saturday afternoon with Wisdom; then the number of philosophers is very large. The philosophers are more numerous than the bourgeoisie, more numerous than the proletariat, more numerous than the peasantry; they outnumber India and China combined. If there were membership cards for members of the human race, and if my card were about to expire, and if I were filling out an application for a new card, and if I were asked to state on the application form what personal qualities I had which made me eligible to renew my membership, I would write on the form, I am not entirely indifferent to wisdom. Seriously now; since some degree of interest in wisdom, however slight, is a defining feature of what it means to be human, it follows that a creature that showed no signs of a tendency to govern its conduct rationally would not ordinarily be considered human. We might make exceptions for such cases as people who have been in comas for years on life-support systems, newborns, and certain kinds of insane people, all of whom we would call human in spite of their temporary or even permanent lack of capacity for wisdom, but, on the whole, except for certain special cases for which we make special exceptions, all humans to some degree seek and love wisdom, and therefore all humans are philosophers. In this respect, I note with approval the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). Piaget shows that the minds of children are best understood when children are thought of as little philosophers. Children, like grown-ups, have a desire to make sense of life. For example, when I was very young, I was introduced to one of my grandmothers, whom I learned to call Grandma. Later, I was introduced to my other grandmother, whom I decided to call, More Grandma. Just as Piaget said, I acted like a little philosopher, making sense. Everyone should know something about the classic original source of the idea of wisdom in Western philosophy: Plato. For me, the following brief discussion of Plato and his definition 16 Letter 3 of wisdom is, besides a basic introduction to this classic original source, a means to bring together several points I am developing. They are: 1. Philosophy is an activity which constructs codes. 2. Philosophy constructs, in particular, the meanings of words like rationality, and therefore philosophy can help us to create the new rationality we need.

3. Philosophy is the love of wisdom. 4. Our common understanding of what philosophy means, what it is and isnt, comes largely from Plato. 5. All normal humans are philosophers. A careful examination of the five statements above will show that they do not contradict each other. Nevertheless, it might seem that the five statements above lead in rather different directions, insofar as they suggest different images of what the activity called philosophy does. The following analysis of what Plato meant by the word wisdom will carry us forward in our efforts to determine what wisdom is and what an appropriate form of wisdom for todays world would be, and at the same time it will show some of my reasons for believing all five of the statements above to be simultaneously true. True and moving in the same direction toward hope. Plato was one of the first to formulate the meaning of wisdom (i.e., in Greek, of sophia). More of Platos writings survive than those of any other of the earliest definers of wisdom. He was the one who founded the most enduring school, the Academy. Platos ideas influenced his pupil Aristotle, the apostle Paul, the writer or writers of the Gospel according to St. John, and many other thinkers. The meaning of the Greek word for wisdom was carried over into its Latin equivalent (sapientia), and from there to its French equivalent (sagesse). By the time of Geoffrey Chaucer (English poet, 1342 or 1343-1400), the English word wisdom was being used to stand for the meanings expressed by the older words from Greece and Rome, both in translations of the Bible into English and in secular texts. Phonetically, the English word is Anglo-Saxon, being a cousin of the German word Weisheit. The common ancestor of wisdom and Weisheit seems to have been the old German word weistum, which referred to a legal sentence or precedent. In Book IV of his long dialogue, The Republic, Plato discusses the nature of wisdom. The context of the discussion is an attempt by the participants in the dialogue to design a good society. The explicit purpose of Book IV is to define justice; thus the definition of wisdom emerges as a byproduct of broader inquiries whose stated aims are to discover what justice is, and to design justice into the structure of a good society. Plato takes for granted certain ideas accepted in the culture of Greece in the fourth century before Christ, notably the idea that a good society, like a good person, possesses four virtues, namely, courage, wisdom, even-temperedness, and justice. That these ideas about virtue were accepted does not mean, of course, that the Greeks behaved virtuously; on the contrary, the Greeks were rowdies. Their appreciation of macho bravery was on the whole greater than their appreciation of quieter virtues like justice and even-temperedness. So when Plato picked out and used old sayings about the four virtues he was not telling the Greeks to behave exactly as they always had; he was picking out a recognized theme in the existing culture in order to strengthen it and refine it, and thus to improve peoples behavior. Platos plan in Book IV is to approach the definition of justice by first defining the other three virtues: courage, wisdom, and even-temperedness. It is as if he were a hunter trying to 17 LETTERS FROM QUBEC Vol. l isolate his quarry, justice, by making it stand alone, separate from its companions. Wisdoms part in carrying out Platos plan begins early. The good society that the characters in Platos dialogue are in the process of planning is affirmed to be wise because 11 possesses good judgment. That is to say, a good society must be able to deliberate well so that its decisions lead to good choices (in Greek, euboulia). Clearly, then, Plato goes on, this source of good choices must be some special sort of knowledge or craftpersons skill (episteme), since it is by episteme, not

ignorance, that people judge well. Sophia is the required special sort of knowledge. Wisdom is not the special attribute of anybody at all who knows how to make good judgments about anything; it is not, for example, the episteme of carpenters who know how to make good judgments about carpentry. Wisdom belongs rather to those who deliberate and make decisions about the city as a whole. This ruling minority has a special knowledge (i.e., in Greek, a special episteme), which is a true wisdom (an onti sophen), which permits good decisions (euboulon). Plato returns to wisdom a few pages later when he comes to the grand finale of Book IV, where justice, or, to speak more accurately, the just person in the just society, is isolated and defined. The just person, Plato says, is self-controlled. The just person lives harmoniously, a friend to self rather than self-tormented. Every action is guided by wisdom in business transactions, in the care of the body, and in public life. Wisdom is the guiding principle of just and beautiful action. It is also, Plato shows, essential to courage, since knowledge is required to distinguish the brave act from the foolhardy act; and to even-temperedness, since wise counsel leads a person to shun excessive passions. Wisdom is, in brief, practice-guiding knowledge (in Greek praxei epistemen). Unjust actions, on the contrary, are foreign to wisdom. Ignorance, which is the opposite of wisdom, is the mental condition that oversees injustice. In other dialogues, and in other passages of The Republic, Plato portrays wisdom as the rule of the rational. Regarding wisdom as a form of rule is perhaps implicit in the passages already discussed, since those who make decisions for the society are the rulers. Elsewhere Plato draws a parallel between the society and the individual soul; just as those with responsibility for the whole use wisdom in making social decisions, so within the soul the rational part (logistiche psyche) guides the other parts of the soul, and, of course, the body. Both a person and a society display courage, even-temperedness, and justice when action is governed by wisdom. Let me pause now for a moment to look at the kinds of things Plato is doing in terms of the five claims about philosophy listed above. 1. He is establishing a set of meanings, a code, which will permit those who come after him in the Western tradition to communicate about wisdom and other virtues. He draws on what exists, reinforcing the code by using it to send messages, and he modifies what exists as he organizes the text in his own way. 2. He is constructing the meaning of wisdom, and hence the meaning of love of wisdom, i.e., of philosophy. 3. He is constructing a doctrine about rationality and its use in the guidance of life. (In the texts discussed, the relevant Greek ancestors of our English word rationality are episteme, sophia, and logistiche, a form of logos.) 4. He, Plato, is carrying out his own characteristic activity, which we call philosophy. He is becoming a paradigm of what future ages will mean when they call someone n philosopher. 5. He is doing, in an especially intense and concentrated way, what every human does, namely, trying to make sense of the world, deliberating about how to live, and modifying the language by using words in his own characteristic ways. 18 Letter 3 Since wisdom is the rule of rationality, it is pertinent to ask what Plato had in mind when he spoke of rationality. We find some clues in the words he used. The rational part of the soul, whose rule is wisdom, is the logistiche psuche, that is to say, the part of the soul that has logos. Logos is

famously translated as rule, principle, reason, etc., but its simplest and most basic translation is word. (Thus it is translated in the Authorized Version of the Gospel of John, Chapter 1, Verse 1: In the beginning was the word.) The idea that wisdom consists of rule by reasoning that has words echoes the religious concept that wisdom consists in obeying the divine word. It anticipates a number of modern concepts, among them the theory of the Soviet psycholinguists which holds that language is the main medium through which the individuals behavior comes under social control. When Plato says wisdom is a kind of knowledge, the word translated as knowledge is episteme. episteme is a word originally used for craft-knowledge, as in the knowledge of how to cobble shoes that is passed down from father to son in a family of cobblers. Athena, by the way, is the goddess of craft-knowledge, especially the craft-knowledge handed down from mother to daughter. Wisdom is the craft-knowledge supporting the skill of those who practice the greatest of the crafts, the craft of government. Many crimes have been committed in the name of reason. One example is enough: Hitler commanded the burning of Jews in ovens as the rational solution to the Jewish problem. But there is still hope for homo sapiens in spite of all the crimes the species has committed under the guidance of the possession which defines it, its wisdom. The glory of the human being as a rational animal does not lie in any particular application of rationality or any particular concept of rationality. It lies in the possibility of correcting the mistakes of the past. Wisdom is never final; it is constantly under construction, as Plato, to his lasting credit, recognized by leaving his dialogues open-ended. Rationality, having been constructed by human beings, can be reconstructed by human beings. Philosophy is a hopeful activity because its conclusions are in principle always subject lo criticism and waiting to be improved. The love of wisdom will not pass away until the last human is dead, because philosophy is not a particular cultural construction; it is the process of making certain types of cultural constructions, notably those that define what it is to act according to reason. This process creates the codes that improve communication and organization. Before I close I want to discuss another story about the rule of wisdom, which is the rule of rationality, another story featuring Athena, wisdoms goddess, one which is told by the Greek poet Aeschylus (525-456 BC). Aeschylus gives at the end of his Oresteiad a version of an ancient myth about the origin of law courts. There was a murder. The murder was avenged by a second murder. Will there be a third to avenge the second, a fourth to avenge the third, on and on? Athena, goddess of wisdom and protectress of the city, has a better idea: a trial. The trial will lead to only one more murder (i.e., to capital punishment) if the murderer is convicted; to zero more murders if he is acquitted. A jury of 12 is chosen; testimony is heard; closing arguments are made; a verdict is handed down: innocent. I want to make two points. Neither concerns whether the verdict or the reasons for it were right or wrong. My first point is that the story represents the rule of rationality, which is, whatever the verdict, better than the alternative of indefinitely continued violence. My second point concerns the angry accusers of the second murderer. The accusers were avenging deities known as Furies, the gloomy children of the night. Athenas great invention, the inauguration of the rule of law, almost failed because the Furies threatened to disregard the verdict and to take bloody revenge in spite of it. Athena saved legality from stillbirth by persuading the Furies to give up revenge in exchange for the right to come and live in the lower rooms of her temple underground, seated on thrones in subterranean chambers. 19

LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Here is another ancient lesson about the rule of wisdom: not only loving passions, but also hating passions, need to be incorporated into the structure of her power. In my next letter I will pursue wisdom by asking: If wisdom is the rule of rationality, then what is rationality? And in particular, What is rationality now in the twentieth century? 20 Letter 4 RATIONALITY In our society, rationality performs functions similar to those Plato wanted wisdom to perform. The rule of reason is an ideal, or, rather, a set of ideals, for the guidance of actions. When a person in our society acts in a way which deviates from the norms that reason prescribes, she or he is appropriately criticized as irrational. But rationality has several definitions, and the difficulty of limiting the definitions to a manageable few makes us question the whole process of looking for definitions, spurring us to seek a different approach to philosophy. With these letters I am leading you deeper and deeper into philosophy. With purposes. Philosophy is not a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer her own solitude; philosophy is a conversation, which while it moves and softens explains whence and why. The why of these letters can be stated in three words: peace and justice. Their thesis is that to build the sustainable future these short, pregnant words evoke, humanity must deconstruct and reconstruct the cultural foundations of the global system. This letter begins my attempt to approach and uncover one of those foundations: rationality. However, I hesitate at the outset because of self-doubt. I want to write something helpful about rationality, something that will do some good. At least I think I do. I think I want to be helpful. But how can I prove that I want to be helpful? I search my heart for evidence of my sincerity. I want to know my real motives for writing this. Since I have a modern mind, I suspect that my conscious motives are not my real motives. Karl Marx (German economist and philosopher, 1818-1883) exposed the phenomenon of false consciousness, which leads the conscious minds of privileged people to screen out the exploitation upon which their privileges depend. Sigmund Freud (Viennese doctor, 1856-1939, founder of psychoanalysis) showed that what humans really want is often not what they think they want. Men who write, Freud suggested, may think they are contributing to culture or performing a public service when in fact what they want is money, honor, glory, and the love of women. More recently, feminists and others have developed the theory of standpoints, which holds that a persons capacity to see the truth about the world is limited by the standpoint, i.e., perspective, of the class, gender, race, or social group to which she or he belongs. I am white, male, straight, working-class (by origin), American, Catholic. I consciously believe that I want to help the world. However, a reader who is, for example, black, female, bisexual, upper-class, Brazilian, and unchurched might well think that because of the differences in our standpoints my views will be biased against her interests. She may also resent the idea that a person with my perspective should presume that he could help someone with her perspective. She might well say to me, if we should ever meet, If we are going to have a relationship in which one of us is going to be defined as a person-who-needs-to-be-helped, I would prefer that it be you. Now, concerning the difficulty that I have in believing in my own sincerity, I would like to tell a story about myself, which may at first seem irrelevant. An unusual habit of mine, in which I occasionally indulge, is to wash and dry dishes to the tune of

a tango, like Fernandos Hideaway, or Dont Cry for Me, Argentina. In my minds 21 LETTERS EROM QUBEC: Vol. I eye I emulate Charlie Chaplin, when he played the part of a barber who did haircuts to Liszts Hungarian rhapsodies in the film The Great Dictator, although my performances are not so polished. For nearly a decade I believed that my motive in washing the dishes was to be helpful to my family; I thought that applying the dish towel to a soup bowl during a medio corte and then deftly placing the dry plate on its shelf with a flare promenade and an Ol! was an innocent amusement which made the task lighter, although perhaps also somewhat longer. The truth did not occur to me until my seven year old niece Hallie suggested that I wash the dishes to Kiss of Eire, while my family was visiting my brothers family during the Christmas season of 1985, at their house among murmuring pines near Santa Fe, New Mexico. As I stood holding a wet glass in my hand, what had happened came back to me. In my early twenties I had taken dancing lessons at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, in Santa Barbara, California. My dancing teacher was tall, dark-eyed, and shapely. She was the kind of person of whom it is said, She can be described only with the hands. Of all the steps she taught me I liked the tango the best; she saved it until last, and when she exclaimed Tango! I knew that in order to do the dance properly I would be required, and therefore invited, to hold her very tightly. One day as we were dancing to Kiss of Fire, she asked me if I would be too busy to give her a ride home after my lesson. She had to go home then, and she had no means of transportation. I said that I could spare the time, and a few minutes later we were both in my car and I was driving her home. When we got to her house she opened the car door, let herself out, thanked me, and said good-bye. I had forgotten the incident until my niece Hallie accidentally reminded me in December of 1985. Then I knew: my real motive for dancing the tango while washing the dishes was lust. Worse: since I was married to someone else by then, it was illicit lust. As I said, this story about the tango may at first seem to be irrelevant. However, it does have a point. The point is: a persons unconscious motives dont necessarily have to be an issue. After all, I was getting the dishes done, having a good time, and amusing, among others, Hallie. My unconscious sexual fantasies were not doing anybody any harm. I was being too hard on myself when I called my unconscious sentiments illicit lust. The story about the tango also leads into one of the reasons why I want to defend rationality. Rationality, if we can get it to work properly, will save us from giving undue attention to possible bidden, impure motives. What I mean, in more detail, is this: If we are trying to live according to wisdom, and if wisdom is the rule of the rational, and if we can determine that a certain action is rational, then the action is right. It is the wise, and therefore also the good, thing to do. Even if it is done for strange motives, it is nonetheless what should be done. Similarly, if I want to write something helpful, and if I carry out my conscious desire successfully by writing something that really is helpful, then my bidden motives, if any, will not change the help to harm. Similarly, if starting out with all the limitations of the perspective on life of a person who is white, male, straight, working-class (by origin), American, and Catholic, I nevertheless succeed in saying something true, then, if it is true, it will remain true no matter who says it and therefore the fact that I said it does not make it false. The rational proof is like the dishes, washed and dried, rightly placed on their proper shelves. I have, then, more than one objective in continuing to investigate rationality. Reason holds out the promise of the moral unity of humanity. If there is a reasonable solution to a problem, then in its reasonableness it will deserve the assent of all humans, of

whatever color, gender, life-style, class, nation, religion, or ethnic background. The dusky depths of the human psyche, where there lurk so many questionable motives and repressed fantasies, could then be plumbed by whoever wishes to plumb them but the pursuit of a deep understanding of motives would not always lead to a paralysis of 22 Letter 4 analysis (to use Martin Luther King, Jr.s well-wrought phrase), because we would know that by acting rationally we were acting rightly. I want my method for investigating rationality to be as objective as possible. What I will do is simply notice what it is that the people around me call rational. I will also look at a few Influential books, particularly textbooks used in schools. Then I will organize my observations In a list of the definitions of rationality that I have discovered in my environment. This method has the advantage that you (the reader) can check the validity of my results by performing the same kind of investigation. You can then compare your list with mine. If several people independently arrive at a similar list of meanings for rationality then we will have objective grounds for concluding that we have accurately identified rationality in the society or societies studied. Here is my list. As you read it you may wish to ask yourself whether you behave rationally according to these definitions. 1. Rationality is the pursuit of known ends by means which are likely to achieve them. To be rational one must be clear about what objectives one is pursuing, and one must have good reasons for believing that what one is doing will lead to the achievement of the objectives. 2. Rationality is the scientific method. There is a great deal of dispute about what exactly the scientific method consists of, but most of our contemporaries would agree that important parts of it are testing hypotheses in the light of evidence and the use of control groups. 3. An action is irrational if the reason for the action is a belief for which there is no evidence, such as the unsubstantiated belief that an assassin lurks under ones bed. 4. Rationality is the agreement of ones principles with ones actions. If a person says one thing and does another, then the person is (if not dishonest) irrational. If principle and practice conflict, then to achieve rationality one or the other must change until the two agree. Nevertheless, even if principle and action are in harmony, one could still correctly call an action irrational if the principle it follows is irrational. 5. Believing that people will behave normally is rational. For example, if you count on people living up to obligations they have assumed, where you have no special reason to suppose that they will not, then you are considered rational in relying on your legitimate expectations, and they are considered at fault if they disappoint you. (Reasonable expectations are important in lawsuits where the judge or jury must determine whether what the defendant did was what a rational person would have done under the circumstances.) 6. Rationality is the ability to see a situation as it would be seen by an outsider. If you are in a dispute, you are able to be rational to the extent that you can see yourself as an impartial outsider would see you. 7. Rationality is the ability to take many points of view into consideration. If you see a situation only from your own point of view, your rationality is limited. The more you expand your viewpoint by taking into consideration different ways of seeing the situation, the more your judgment about it is rational. 8. Rationality is maximizing the payoffs. The problem of making a rational choice can be

represented in a diagram such as the following one: where: A1 = Action 1 A2 = Action 2 23 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I

the small ps beside the lines = the probability of the payoff indicated at the end of the line. the large Ps at the ends of the lines = size of payoff; for example, a number of dollars. In this case, the rational action is A2, since its probable payoff is 2 (a 50% chance to get a l, and a 50% chance to get a 3), while the probable payoff of A1 is 7/4. This definition of rationality can be expressed succinctly as follows: among several courses of action, the rational one is the one with the highest expected value. 9. The rational action is the safest course. Imagine the worst thing that can happen, and prepare for it. Such a criterion for rationality is sometimes called MAXIMIN because you maximize the minimum payoff, i.e. you choose the best result on the supposition that everything goes wrong. 10. Rationality is effectiveness. First you define your objective. Then you measure the costs of several alternative actions leading to the achievement of the objective. The rational action is the one which achieves the objective to the highest degree, assuming that all actions cost the same. Or else it is the one that achieves the objective at the least cost. 11. Rationality is normality. If a persons actions do not make sense to other people, they are irrational. 12. Rationality is the use of certain logical operations. According to the Piagetian school of psychology, people in Western cultures normally master these operations between the ages of 7 and 16. The operations have been catalogued and formally defined. An example is the transitivity of asymmetric relations, as in: a<b b<c Hence: a < c 13. Rationality is pursuing the natural purposes and exercising the natural functions of the kind of being we are. God or history or evolution has made us in such a way that some actions are natural and some actions are unnatural. It is irrational to be unnatural. For example, it is sometimes said that it is irrational not to seek sexual fulfillment, because humans naturally seek sexual fulfillment. 14. Rationality is restraint. It is moderation in all things. Nothing in excess. Irrationality is impulsive. 24 Letter 4 15. To be rational is to be realistic. It is irrational to engage in wishful thinking, mistaking what

you want to be true for what is true. 16. Rationality is maximizing long-term interests. This definition is not quite the same as maximizing the payoffs (number 8 above), because it explicitly calls for considering the effect of the proposed action on power to achieve future (perhaps unspecified) payoffs. For example, the owners of a company might offer the workers high wages on condition that they dissolve their union. The workers acceptance of the offer might be rational from the point of view of maximizing the payoffs, but irrational from the point of view of long-term interests. 17. Rationality is being consistent. When you contradict yourself you are being irrational. That is my list. You may check it against your own experience, and against definitions of rationality found in books. I hope that my list will be found to be a reasonably accurate report on what people count as rational action nowadays in America and in similar societies. I will use the list in the course of arguing that the defects of rationality as currently practiced are grave. However, the very fact that the list of definitions of rationality is so long creates an initial difficulty that we must confront before going on to expose the damage done by rationalitys grave flaws. The length of the list suggests that it is not worthwhile to pursue philosophical understanding exclusively by looking for the correct definitions of words, since to proceed in that way invites endless complications. We could, fanatically pursuing correct definitions, make a list of each of the words employed in each of my 17 definitions of rationality, and then look for definitions of all the words on that list. We could, but we wont. Until now the argument of this book has maintained a certain forward motion through all its twists and turns. The forward motion has been roughly as follows: First, philosophy was recommended as an activity which has a role to play in building peace and justice; then philosophy was defined as the love of wisdom; then wisdom was defined as the rule of the rational; now an attempt has been made to define the rational. At this point, however, the forward motion halts. The multiplicity of plausible definitions of rationality is sufficient to show that success will not be achieved by defining terms alone. Here is a further consideration which leads to the same conclusion: If one looks up the definition of a word in a dictionary, and then looks up the definitions of all the words used to define that first word, and so on successively, one will go in circles. The words used will repeat themselves so that eventually the dictionary search will lead back to the same words over and over again. I want to say, and hope to earn the right to say, that philosophy does not consist entirely of more or less successful efforts to define terms and concepts. Its truths may not depend on what people in America or anywhere else regard as the correct use of a word; there may be a way out of the circle of language; there may be philosophical truths that are not social conventions. In the following letter, we will make a fresh start by considering where we might go from here, now that our way forward has become impossible to follow, because it branches into seventeen ways, like seventeen sets of rabbit tracks in the snow leading off toward shadowy trees in seventeen snowy directions. 25 26 Letter 5 PLEASE DO NOT UNDERSTAND ME TOO QUICKLY This letter abandons an approach centered on questions like, What is philosophy? What II wisdom? and What is rationality? It turns to a focus on practical problems. The problem

selected to be examined first is hunger. I will not surrender to chaos, or to unreasoning anger. There are, as the previous letter says, many kinds of rationality, but this does not mean that there is no road to survival. It means only that we will not find the road to survival through seeking the one correct definition of rationality. But we will find it. Survival. To survive as a person I need something to hold onto. Let that something bring me sweet serenity; let it bring me self-confidence, trust, smiling days, true friends, somebody maybe God who appreciates my effort and my work. Perhaps I am writing too much about my personal feelings. I told you, or meant to tell you, that my mind wanders. I have melancholy dreams. I am just a soul whose intentions are good, struggling not to be misunderstood. There are so many of us these days. Let me try to say over (gain what I just said, in a way that is less about what I feel and more about all kinds of survival: personal, social, ecological. Here goes: We should accept or invent the forms of rationality that function effectively to serve life. Serve life. I hope you will find these two words to be appealing as a standard for telling the difference between healthy and pathological rationality. Appealing enough that you will bear with me while I flesh out the details of the point of view they represent. I will try to be coherent. I want to say that at this point we can and should shift away from questions about the definitions of terms. The definitions of words will fall into place when we know what functions we want the words to perform in solving problems. Life requires, if nothing else, food. I will take up the question, Why do the hungry have no food? (This is quite similar to the questions, Why do the homeless have no homes? and Why is there poverty?) Later I will come back to the theme of rationality, after I have established a context where it makes a practical difference which definition of rationality is chosen. I am taking the idea of shifting to a problem-centered approach, after writing the first few letters mainly on the meanings of words, from a book by H. L. A. Hart, called The Concept of Law). He centered the first pages of his book on certain recurrent issues which come together in the question, What is law? Such a question, Hart points out, is a request for a definition. Definitions help people to distinguish one kind of thing from another kind of thing which language marks off with a separate word. Definitions are not solely a matter of words, since they also provide instruction concerning the things to which the words apply; thus when a triangle is defined as a three-sided rectilinear figure, the definition teaches something about triangles. Nevertheless, providing definitions may do little to resolve the underlying difficulties and doubts which motivated a question like What is law? in the first place. The answer an expert 27 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I gives to the question What is law? is, so to speak, the tip of an iceberg; below the tip there lies a whole system of thought. For example, when a legal expert states, Law is what the courts will do, the deep underwater-lying berg of thought about law, of which this definition is the tip, remains for the most part unrevealed. Hart used a discussion of definitions of law as a first step in the argument of his book, but then shifted his focus to look at the general theories of law in which the theorists ways of using particular words were embedded. He began the second step of his argument by selecting one particular theory of law to examine first. I will select to examine first what may fairly be called the first problem for homo sapiens, or for any species. First: humans must eat. The bawling baby, fresh from its mothers womb, understands the need to eat very well, although it cannot speak, much less define rationality.

Rationality can eventually be understood as a way to get food and other necessities. But please do not understand me too quickly because, as will soon appear, the realistic approach on which I am now inviting you to embark with me leads to questions to which there are no short answers. 28 Letter 6 HUNGER Hunger is caused by human beings, not by nature. The reorganizing of human conduct which is needed to end hunger requires forms of rationality different from and supplementary to the methods of analysis now employed by the best and brightest students of the subject. In certain families and nations, it is a common practice to ingest substances containing digestible carbohydrates, proteins, and certain other nutritive elements. This activity is known as eating, and it is more frequently done by some people than by others. Those who do it less are not necessarily on diets. We who believe that human speech and practice, and all of the artifacts of culture, are and ought to be judged by nature, must recognize the wisdom of those social norms which prescribe caring. If eating is not done, then neither carbohydrate molecules, nor molecules of fatty and amino acids, nor essential liquids or fibers are available to build and operate the cells of which human bodies are composed. Such an absence of the right kinds of molecules at the right locations would be only a bit of cold information for a cosmic spectator charting the path through space and time of every molecule in the universe, but whoever loves human life must see shortages of the materials required for life as evils to be combatted with all our hearts, with all our minds, and with all our strength. For our species, homo sapiens, as well as for all other species, sustaining life by eating has always been a basic need. Thus Plato wrote, ...the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of invention. And, Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence. When you know how a given society solves, or fails to solve, the problem of getting enough food to eat, then you have an important clue to everything else the society does. The earliest humans are known as hunters and gatherers because hunting and gathering provided their food supply and therefore to a great extent ruled their lives. The agricultural revolution, which used irrigation and other techniques to grow crops, produced quantities of food sufficient to support classes of people who did not themselves hunt, gather, or farm, thus creating the possibility of civilization. The fact that anthropologists have found it convenient to classify cultures according to the sources of their food supplies gives additional weight to Platos assertion that food is the first and greatest of necessities. A review of anthropological studies done of 186 so-called primitive societies during the period 1800 through 1965 classified human groups according to their food sources as follows: 13 tribes lived primarily by gathering wild plant food, 14 lived primarily by hunting, 17 lived mainly by fishing, 15 lived by pastoralism (keeping domestic animals for meat, milk, or both), 51 lived by simple cultivation (slash and burn, shifting from site to site), 19 by horticulture (gardening or orcharding), 56 by advanced agriculture (using irrigation, fertilization, etc.) and 1 by exchange. In each case, knowing the cultures solution to the food problem provided basic insights into everything else the culture did. The last-mentioned case, the 1 of 186, the case of living by exchange, is similar to our own. What must have in former times been an exception, is the rule in our globally integrated economy. Most

people in most places now live by exchange, and by a peculiar kind of exchange: 29 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I the exchange of money. Money is the intermediary between the cells which need carbohydrates, fatty acids, amino acids, and essential liquids, and the environment which provides them or fails to provide them. If contemporary humans produce food directly at all, they usually exchange all or most of what they produce for money, and exchange money for the food they eat. Large numbers of the inhabitants of the planet Earth at the present time sell their services as employees, and buy food with wages. In modern society money talks, and the millions without money are voiceless at the dinner table, unable to say, pass the bread.The facts have been amply documented by Frances Moore Lapp and Joseph Collins in their excellent book Food First. My analysis of the hunger problem will follow theirs. I believe they are the best and brightest students of the subject, and they are also, it is important to note, not on the payroll of anybody in the food business. Their organization, the Institute for Food and Development Policy, in San Francisco, California, gets its money from private donors and some church groups, and from the sale of publications. The basic lesson Food First teaches is this: the world does not have to be the way it is. There is nothing inevitable about hunger; hunger has been created by humans; and a world where everyone has sufficient food to eat can be created by humans. It can be done now, with the resources presently available. Food First is devoted mainly to the refutation of what the authors call myths. The myths are the blinders which prevent many members of the public from seeing the real causes of hunger. As I will explain later, I have some reservations about their use of the word myth, because what they call myths are always destructive, while I think the word can be used in ways which emphasize the constructive roles myths have played and can still play. The myths the book refutes are: 1. There are too many people in the world. 2. Some countries, such as Bangladesh, cannot possibly feed themselves. 3. To make more food we need to poison the environment. 4. Poor people have too many children because they are ignorant. 5. Colonialism is a thing of the past. 6. Famines are inevitable. 7. Hunger is due to ignorance of modern production techniques. 8. New crop varieties can solve the problem. 9. The Third World needs American corporate know-how. 10. Small farmers are inefficient. 11. The more international trade there is, the better off everyone will be. 12. The export income of a country helps its hungry people. 13. The world needs American food exports. 14. Food power can save the U.S. economy. 15. The Third World needs American machinery. 16. The people of host countries benefit from American agribusiness abroad. 17. Americans benefit from American agribusiness abroad. 18. Traditional diets, such as beans and rice, are too starchy and less nutritious than modern diets. 19. Commercial infant formulas are better than mothers milk.

20. The United States has been the most generous country in the world. 21. Loans of foreign money are the poor countries only source of capital. The book is organized as a series of arguments, supported by facts, designed to prove the falsity of each of the statements above. If the reader is convinced by Lapp and Collins, then 30 Letter 6 she or he will come to believe more than the basic point that the obstacles to solving the hunger problem are found in the ways human cultures are organized, not in nature. Food First teaches, in addition to the basic lesson that culture is the cause of hunger, some lessons concerning what exactly is wrong with culture. However, readers may not be convinced by Lapp and Collins at all. Readers may judge their book generally unworthy of credence I know some people who have read and rejected part of it, and have then refused either to read on or to consider the possibility that the part they had already read might be true. One reason why some readers I know have summarily rejected the book is that they find it to be anti-business, anti-American, and anti-establishment to the point where the authors could not be trusted to state the facts impartially. An executive of an American agribusiness corporation working in Mexico was offended to find no mention of the fact that plants run by American multinationals often have wages and working conditions superior to those in locally-owned plants; nor of the contributions of agribusiness to scholarships, hospitals, scientific research, art, and music. It is true that Lapp and Collins do not go out of their way to list the contributions to human welfare made by American agribusiness abroad and the American government. However, their analysis of why hunger exists is compatible with the belief that business and government have in many cases done good things. It is also compatible with the belief that many people working in the business, government, and academic sectors of the agribusiness establishment sincerely regard themselves as in the front line of the struggle against hunger raising yield per acre, finding new ways to stop the ever-new varieties of wheat rust (which, like AIDS, mutates rapidly, so that the worlds wheat-producing technology must change constantly to keep ahead of the rust), and so on. All these things could be true, and it could also be true as Lapp and Collins claim that there are no natural or technical obstacles to adequate nutrition for all only social obstacles. Other people I know are reluctant to believe Lapp and Collins because they have always been taught the myths Lapp and Collins unmask. In particular, they have always been taught that there are too many people, and they cannot regard as credible authors who say there are not too many people. They feel that if everyone they have ever known, and everything they have ever read, asserts what Lapp and Collins deny, then Lapp and Collins are probably wrong, since everyone else, taken collectively, is more likely to be right than two strangers who have suddenly entered their lives via a book which makes unusual and disconcerting assertions. I must admit that I myself find it hard to believe that it is false that there are too many people in the world. However, a moments anthropological reflection is enough to convince me that it is quite possible for two outsiders to be telling the truth and for the establishment to be mistaken. Nobody is surprised when studying an exotic culture to find that the prevailing mythology helps the dominant group to continue to dominate. Everyone expects when studying a culture other than our own, that if a certain group controls the land, the water, the labor force, and the technology, the same group will control the stories. Our own culture is not likely to be an exception. Lapp and Collins note in their book that they themselves while growing up in America learned to believe the very myths they are now refuting. It is not at all unbelievable that two studious

individuals, with the assistance of several dozen others, should go beyond the common beliefs which everyone in the culture including themselves has learned, and find that the common beliefs are mistaken. Nevertheless, I have reservations about the claim that there are not too many people. My reservations have to do with the future as well as the present; I am convinced by the forecasters who find that even if the existing population of the earth could be fed, the rate of population increase is such that humans will, if they have not already, exceed the carrying capacity of the 31 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Earth. However, a careful reading of Lapp and Collins shows that even though the title of the first myth they dedicate themselves to is Standing Room Only? Too Many People? what they really want to say is better expressed in a line from the dust jacket of the book: The cause of hunger is NOT too many people. Two points in favor of the proposition The cause of hunger is NOT too many people should be granted at the outset: (1) Keeping people poor does not reduce the population; on the contrary, poor people usually choose to have more children because they need sons and daughters to take care of them when they are old. The evidence shows that as nations develop and become more prosperous there occurs what is called a demographic transition, consisting of falling birthrates. People may not recognize this truth because they are misled by a false analogy with other species: it is supposed that because the population of wolves, for example, will decrease when rabbits and other prey become scarce, human population also decreases when food is scarce. (2) Reducing population will not in itself solve the hunger problem. There are many examples of small, hungry populations; and many examples of large, dense, well-fed populations. The more difficult questions concern what the balance should be among measures which focus directly on population reduction while indirectly reducing poverty, such as penalizing families for having more than one child (as in China); measures which focus directly on poverty, such as shifting production from luxury exports to basic grains; and measures which focus equally on reducing population and on reducing poverty, such as raising the status of women so that they have more to say in whether they get pregnant or not. The problem of war is also tightly connected with the food problem and the population problem, since nations often promote fecundity in order to have large enough armies to defend themselves against feared attacks. In general I think we can say that the same measures often serve several good purposes, and I think we can agree in general with a point made by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer: If you believe that one of the main causes of hunger is too many people, then you should work on measures to reduce the number of children born. Your belief does not excuse you from your obligation to do what you reasonably can to solve the hunger problem; it only implies that your judgment concerning exactly what needs to be done to solve the problem will differ slightly from that of Lapp and Collins. Assuming now that Lapp and Collins have not generally disqualified themselves from being authors to be taken seriously, let us consider how they prove what I take to be their main point: there is nothing in the soil, nothing in the water supply, nothing in the weather, and nothing in the state of technology which makes hunger inevitable; hunger is a phenomenon firmly under human control. To prove this point, they rely to a considerable extent on the evidence presented in Diet For a Small Planet, an earlier book by one of the authors, Frances Moore Lapp. She pointed out there that the world could be fed if people ate more grains, instead of feeding the grains to livestock and eating the meat. Properly balanced grain diets such as those of traditional people who combine rice and beans, or corn and beans, or lentils and wheat provide proteins with the

right kinds of amino acids. It takes 21.4 pounds of protein in the form of grain to produce one pound of protein in the form of beef or veal. It takes 8.3 pounds of grain protein to make one pound of pork protein. Excluding the production of protein by dairy cows, the average protein conversion ratio by livestock in the United States is about 10 to l. Applying this figure to the 20 million tons of protein fed to livestock in the USA in 1968, Lapp drew the conclusion that Americans were consuming2 million tons of protein as meat, having produced 20 million and lost 18 million by running the protein through animals. This 18 million tons of protein lost in the United States alone was equivalent to the amount consumed directly by humans in the poor two-thirds of the world so a shift of grain from first-world animals to Third World people could double the grain available to people, thus 32 Letter 6 solving the hunger problem. Consequently, the reasons why the problem remains unsolved are social: they are the habit of eating meat instead of eating well-balanced grains, and the economy. One of the ways that Food First carries forward the argument begun in Diet For a Small Planet is by showing that so-called basket case countries could be self-sufficient in food. Not only does the world as a whole have enough basic grains, but many countries singled out as places where population has overwhelmed resources are technically capable of feeding themselves. The archetype of so-called basket cases is Bangladesh. Lapp and Collins researched Bangladesh in libraries and went there to see for themselves. They found that Bangladesh has twice the cultivated area per person of Taiwan, which is a relatively well-fed nation. It has an ideal climate and water supply for year-round cultivation, capable of yielding three harvests of rice annually. Its inland fishery resources are among the richest in the world. But: as much as one-third of the grain harvested in Bangladesh is hoarded and smuggled across the border to be sold in India, where grain prices are twice as high. The rich in Bangladesh consume twice the protein and 30% more calories than the poor. The poor do not eat no matter how much food there is: after the 1974 floods, many starved even though there were four million tons of rice put into storage, because the vast majority did not have the money to buy it. Lapp and Collins conclusions can be reinforced by citing a factor they do not mention: novel food technologies. One of the scientists who studied and developed such technologies was N. W. Bill Pirie, the head of the biochemistry department at Rothamstead Experimental Station in England. I mention Pirie only as an example; many others have done similar research. During World War II he was one of the scientists who studied how Great Britain might feed herself under blockade conditions. Approaching the problem rationally as a biochemist, he and others both during and after the war found many ways to convert what the environment offered into what human bodies need. Some examples: cultivation of the Wundunggul, a yam from New Guinea rich in protein; exploiting the protein possibilities of leafy vegetables; aquatic farming both in fresh water and in sea water; extraction and concentration of the protein found in the leaves of trees. After the war, however, interest in their ideas died in England, and only flickered in the Third World. The people who had money were not hungry; the hungry people had no money. Bill Pirie died a disappointed man. He had solved the problem of world hunger so he thought but his solution had been ignored. Of course, he had not really solved it, because hunger is not a problem in biochemistry. Since hunger is a cultural problem, let me say something about the significance of the word culture, of which I have been making so much use. In her dictionary of semiotics, Josette ReyDebove (a contemporary French scholar) defines culture as non-hereditary information which is

gathered, conserved, and transmitted by human societies. Culture is what makes it possible for humans to communicate with each other, hence to organize and to cooperate. It includes ideology, which Rey-Debove defines as the ensemble of ideas (judgments or beliefs) characterizing a society at a given moment in its history. Turning now to Gramsci, we can say that ...the task of the intellectuals is that of determining and organizing, moral and intellectual reform that is, of adjusting culture to the practical function... My vision of the task of philosophy is Gramscian: to facilitate the social construction of meanings for rationality and other key terms, as a contribution toward empowering culture to meet human needs. In other words, to adjust culture to the practical function. Empowering culture is empowering people, because culture is who we are. homo sapiens, as Clifford and Hilda Geertz (contemporary American anthropologists) say, is the animal which adapts to its ecological niche through culture. What then, exactly, is wrong with human culture, according to Lapp and Collins? They never pose the question in precisely the way I am posing it, but nonetheless from what they say about various aspects of the hunger problem an answer to my question can be deduced. What 33 LETTERS FROM QUBEC Vol. l is needed, say Lapp and Collins, is a redistribution of social power (p. 179). The poor must overcome their powerlessness (p. 33). We must come to grips with the inequalities in power at the root of the problem (p. 94). The obstacle to food for all in Bangladesh is the power of a few (p. 23). We must all gain a sense of personal power (p. 7). The real block to the solution of the hunger problem is the sense of powerlessness we are made to feel (p. 9). There must be redistribution of control of the land with participation by all in political and economic power (p. 463). Briefly stated, what is wrong is that the poor lack power. They lack food because they lack power. The solution is for everyone to share in the control of resources land, water, seeds... all kinds of resources. Democratic control will ensure democratic results. But this answer which is implicit on every page of Food First and explicit on many of them is not adequate. It would not be adequate even if it were fully elaborated. To define and to solve humanitys crucial problems, of which hunger is one, some types of thinking are needed the theme and focus of which is not power. I say this without disagreeing with Lapp and Collins and without expecting them to disagree with me my purpose is to add, not subtract. Let me tell a story in order to hint at what I have in mind without shouldering the responsibility of making definitive statements I am not yet in a position to defend. Imagine an extraterrestrial visitor, who has specialized in Earth studies at one of the reputable universities on her planet, but who is for the first time actually seeing us. The interplanetary visitors home planet, located in a distant galaxy, is physically similar to ours, hut so different culturally that the problem of hunger was solved long, long ago. It is not richer in resources that our planet; and it is actually more difficult to supply the humanoids there with nutrients than to supply us here, because each of them must regularly feed not only herself or himself but also a constantly flowering bush which each humanoid wears atop the head. The bushes are more demanding than African violets, yet they must be constantly nourished and tended, because if they die the humanoid host dies also. This unusual form of cooperation between a member of the plant kingdom and a member of the animal kingdom goes back to a time centuries ago when the planet lost its ozone layer through the careless use of fluorocarbons. The humanoids, a cancer-prone species, narrowly escaped extinction by learning to keep certain special flowers between themselves and the rays of the local star which is their sun. They have adapted so well that they cannot execute intricate movements without injuring the plants or stepping out of their shade.

These extraterrestrials have surmounted many technical obstacles, as this example shows; it is a credit to their culture that they have been able to face their technical problems together, with care to preserve each humanoids basic trust that she or he belongs on the planet and is loved there, but without losing respect for each ones precious uniqueness. Although their cultural forms are everchanging and many, two main patterns predominate. Most of the others are variations of them. One is the whiligo, in which everything is done to a rhythm similar to what we would call samba, and the other the dumamyama, in which kneading bread, weeding gardens, and cleaning floors is done to a beat more like what we would call polka. The brains of the humanoids on the interplanetary visitors home planet are located in the center of the body, rather than in the head as is the case with us, and as a result everything they do is musical. Even athletics is musical. They love change and constantly invent new recipes, songs, and sports; it is not unusual for a whole new sport, complete with coaches, uniforms, referees, and cheers, to spring up, attract players, draw spectators, fade away from lack of interest, and, disappearing, be replaced by a still newer sport, in a single season. And yet, while nearly everything about their ways of life varies, there are certain constants: everybody works, and everyone is cared for. Not a single infant ever goes to its flower-shaded bed without a warm bottle of milk and someone to rock it to sleep. Having just arrived from a planet where the practices just described are normal, the interplanetary visitor naturally finds the behavior of earthlings abnormal. She notices the many who do not regularly put food in the 34 Letter 6 mouth, chew it, and swallow it, and she understands that the rarity of their participation in meals is not due in most cases to anorexia, nor asceticism, nor passive aggressive neurosis, nor to suicide attempts, nor to the cult of the thin body, nor to eating being regarded by the elite as banal. She sees the involuntary separation of human bodies from the carbohydrate and amino acid molecules required to sustain metabolic processes; and she sees the movement of trillions of those molecules firstly into grain-fed beef cattle, secondly into red beef as steaks and burgers, thirdly into millions of openings in the heads of featherless two-legged animals wearing garments in the pockets of which there is money, and fourthly (in a modified form) across the blood-brain border to finally appear in the brain as millions of worries. The interplanetary visitor, who is able to see many things at once and to listen to thoughts, sees all the millions with money in their pockets and beef in their mouths and hears them worrying to themselves, But what if we had no money? What then? And she hears the ones without money in their pockets thinking What now? Her first explanation of the bizarre phenomena she observes is that all earthlings are sado-masochists, since not one of them really thinks its fun to live the way they do. Seeking a better explanation, the interplanetary visitor reads Food First. She learns that colonialism destroyed the traditional moral system, replacing traditional obligations with money-based ties (p. 114). The traditional earthly way strikes her as similar to the way the humanoids on her home planet feel obligations to one another; governing food production and distribution through money-based ties strikes her as immoral. She remembers a point emphasized by one of her professors in a graduate seminar in Earth studies: that when human economies expanded (as happened, for example, when most of the Third World was forced to join colonial empires), humans never learned how to expand their moral systems. Morals continued to function mainly in families, in small and medium-sized institutions, and in personal relationships, while economies without morals governed the planet as a whole. She wonders what to make of this thing

called power, which Lapp and Collins regard as so important. In one of its meanings, dictionaries and social scientists say, power is the ability to influence other people to do ones will something the hungry people of the world do not have. And they cannot easily get it, since by definition when there is a contest of wills between the powerful and the powerless, the powerful win. Surely Lapp and Collins do not mean that the poor should simply attempt to take control of resources, because if they were able to do that they would not be powerless. The principal difficulty lies in finding ways to nurture the strength of the weak, to create power where there is little or none. Hence the principal question must be how to empower? although some of the time the question may be, as the earthling Paulo Freire says, to find the untested feasibility. That is to say, to find something you have the power to do even though you have not yet tried it. The untested feasibility shows that you are not completely powerless. The issues are complicated because the specific kind of power in question is often economic power. Lapp and Collins indicate that the hungry lack food because they lack money, and also that they lack food because they lack power which suggests that having money, or, more generally, having economic resources, is a particular kind of power. Learning how to deal with the peculiarities of this specific kind of power will require special lessons. In another of its meanings a focus on power connotes the amoral contest of interests pitted against each other which is called power politics. Surely power politics is not what Lapp and Collins propose. Power politics always leads to war, as was stated several decades ago by the earthling physicist Albert Einstein, who was not very bright by intergalactic standards but nevertheless not so foolish as to believe that humanity could survive in the nuclear age by defining its problems in terms limited to power vs. power. 35 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I And what is the democratic control that Food First advocates? The dictionary says that the word control comes from the Old French contrerole, which meant an additional roll or register kept to check the figures submitted by tax collectors. Still today one of the meanings of control is to check or verify. Hence the word control by itself refers ambiguously to (l) checking to be sure the rules are followed, and (2) deciding what the rules will be. If one emphasizes the first, then one tends to see the control needed to put an end to hunger as democratic inspection of government officials, moneylenders, grain hoarders, and speculators to prevent them from cheating. If, on the other hand, like earthling social scientist Karl Marx, one emphasizes that under free market capitalism the poor remain poor even when the rules are scrupulously adhered to, then it is clearly not enough to set up a contrerole to catch cheaters; democratic control will solve the hunger problem only if it means making new rules which, if followed, will assure that everyone is cared for. The interplanetary visitor finds the atmosphere on Earth to be tense, and since she is not used to tension and does not like it, she prepares to depart not by means of rocket technology, which by her standards is as crude as the earthlings attempts to solve their problems by putting pressure on lawmakers, but with a simple hand-held location-switcher. Before leaving she makes one last remark: Lapp and Collins, she says, her eyes flowing with tears, have corrected the earthlings information, but not their programming. Lapp and Collins are trying to send solidarity messages in a code designed to communicate mistrust. The noise in the channel is deafening. Having said this, she tries to smile and types in a homing command which causes her to be

transported to her own galaxy and to her own planet, where the cultures are coded for glad cooperation and for sustainable relationships with the environment. This story about the interplanetary visitor vaguely sketched several aspects of the general idea that solving the hunger problem requires thinking the theme and focus of which is not power, at least not power as commonly understood. Her opinions hint that it is no ordinary power that makes it possible for rules strengthening the weak to come into existence and to be obeyed. Her hints and suggestions are previews of coming attractions, snippets of pictures to be shown at a later date. The next step is to demonstrate in detail a particular way in which Lapp and Collins analysis of hunger is, although true, incomplete. True because the world does not have to be the way it is. I deliberately state the lesson of Food First in these broad terms because neither hunger nor other forms of poverty, nor war, nor sexism, nor racism, nor the quiet desperation of the unloved, needs to be all for the same reason: because these evils are produced by people, not by nature; because the existing human cultures have in the course of time been constructed, and consequently they can be reconstructed. The analysis of hunger in Food First is incomplete in this particular way: the logic of Food First does not persuade everyone. It would not have persuaded, for example, Leon, who was my roommate in my first year at college. When I went to college I was not prepared for Leon. I was prepared for first year college calculus, but not for Leon. I need to speak of my upbringing in order to explain this unpreparedness. In telling about my upbringing, especially in telling about the influence on me of my grandmother Gertrude, I will continue to keep my promise to bring into the open my biases so that in their light you may examine my reasoning. 36 37 38 Letter 7 THE ABATEMENT OF THE LITTLE MOTHER My grandmother taught me love. My first year college roommate taught me that reason contradicted my grandmother, according to the prevailing standards of rationality. My grandmother Gertrude was slightly under five feet tall. She once described herself, in one of the few moments when she talked about herself, as a banty hen taking care of her banty baby chicks. The word banty is a diminutive form of bantam. If you have not previously had occasion to learn about the existence and nature of the bantam chicken, you may be surprised to know that there really is a race of small chickens called bantam. They are neatly tufted with feathers thicker than those of other chickens. The feathers are thicker partly because the bantam chickens behavioral repertoire does not include the disgusting habit common among other chickens of pecking each others behinds until they are bald and raw. Bantams are quiet, decorous, and polite. Bantam chickens do not cackle when they lay eggs, and bantam roosters crow only to announce the arrival of the sun; they do not mix up their lives and the lives of their audiences by crowing at 2 a.m. I know there are bantam chickens because when I was a child I saw them in my grandmothers yard and called them by name. When my grandmother told me she was a banty hen she spoke of creatures she and I knew. They had the run of the place, but they did not abuse their privileges. They roamed at will among the gardens of a small region of the earth enclosed by neighbors walls, garages, hedges, and the sidewalk, at my grandmothers house in Pasadena, where it never snows,

where flowers bloom at all seasons of the year; and the bantams never soiled the dark green ivy that girdled the palm trees, and they never ran out into the street. I lived with the bantam chicks, the boarders, the dog, the grandfather, the cats, and my grandmother from 7:30 in the morning until 5:30 in the evening when I was two, three, and four years old, and at sundry times thereafter. My mother typed letters at the Los Angeles office of Texaco, Inc., and my father drove trucks for a series of cement companies and pavement contractors. My soft-voiced grandmother never got mad at me, although she was cross and troubled the time, the only time, I pulled the tail of the dog. The dogs name was Dainty Dinty; she was a huge, lame, senescent mongrel, given to turning over in her sleep, sniffing repeatedly as if she could not believe what she smelled, and drinking lots of water in long, slow gulps. Far from repeating the offense of pulling the dogs tail, I generalized the lesson to the defense of flowers, so that once when my father started to pick a flower I objected, Leave it where it wants to grow. Among the boarders whom the Good Lord had entrusted to my grandmothers care was Mr. Worrell, who had a pension because he was over 65 and blind; sometimes he sat in his room and sometimes he sat in a wicker chair enjoying the sun or the shade of a spreading camphor tree, always elegantly dressed; my grandmother saw to it that he was well-dressed, with a clean suit, a matching necktie, and a gold-plated watch held by a chain and kept in a watch pocket. Another boarder was Sweet Little Alice, who lived in a separate cottage beside the garage, who could not work because she was feeble-minded, who was always frightened when anyone 39 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I appeared at her door, who was always reassured and thankful to learn that it was only us. In the room beside Mr. Worrels lived Nola Bartel, a retired cleaning lady from Boston, who chortled with glee as she read the Bible; she thought it was a wonderful book and she gave me several copies of it. I felt the texture of the black covers of copies of King James Authorized Version of the Bible, and treasured the volumes as the sources of Nolas mirth and as evidence of her affection for me long before I learned to read. My Swedish grandfather Harry loved my grandmother and did house painting when he could find work and when his arthritis permitted. In Pasadena as you walked on the sidewalks you sometimes found yourself walking briefly on iron gratings beside large buildings that needed air-flow space below ground, and into these gratings there sometimes fell quarters; my grandfather Harry taught me how to get the quarters out with a broomstick handle by attaching a piece of chewing gum to the end. We would have been happy to return the quarters to the people who had lost them, but since the owners could not be found we were happy to keep them. On New Years Days, when I was older, Harry and I went with bags to the Rose Bowl, where a major football game was played, every year on that day; we were allowed into the stadium at the beginning of the fourth quarter, when the gatekeepers allow admittance to those without tickets, and then after the game was over we walked in great circles around the stands gathering up the sandwiches which the football fans had purchased but in their excitement had forgotten. Stray cats accumulated at my grandmothers house. Some people said the cats came for food, but my grandmother said they came for something else. The something else was a spiritual communion that the cats and my grandmother shared, basking in each others presence as they basked in the sun together. In my memory, colored with love, my grandmother speaks the languages of the animals, she understands their thoughts and needs; the daisies are rose-scented, and the moss is golden around the roots of her flowering lemon tree. The bantam chickens were safe in the midst of three times as many cats because the cats knew my grandmother did not want any misbehavior at her house. When a fly would land on a chocolate

cake, my grandmother would open a window and say to the fly, If this were your house, I wouldnt come and land on your chocolate cake. The fly would go out the window ashamed. Good morning Charlotte, my grandmother would say as a gray cat spotted with black arrived to drink from one of several saucers of milk glistening white in the sunshine. Where is your friend Green Eyes today? Lorelei and Penny were sister cats; Raymond and Tiny were brothers. The biggest hen was Matilda and the smallest baby chick was Little Humphrey. It was the cats who were the cause of my grandmothers abatement. Abatement is a legal term, stemming from the old English chanceries where it first became the custom to speak of abating a nuisance. When some neighbors complained about the cats, the Pasadena City Health Department determined that my grandmothers hospitality was a nuisance which had to be abated. A pickup truck with a wire cage built onto the back came with two men who captured the cats with nets similar to those used to catch butterflies. They put the cats in the cage and drove them away. There was nothing to be said; it was all too undignified. Dainty Dinty had bad dreams for weeks afterward we knew why she was having bad dreams, but could not bring ourselves to discuss the cause of her problem. Even before the abatement, my grandmother had formed the belief that most people are too pushy and not nice enough. She really belonged in old Connecticut, but since old Connecticut no longer existed she did not belong anywhere. Her ancestors had lived there since the seventeenth century, but in recent years the pushy people had taken over Connecticut, and she and Harry had moved to Pasadena, hoping to find in California a sunnier New England where people would act more like the way people used to act, and since most of the people she came to know in Pasadena were, like herself, over 60 and from New England, she was not 40 Letter 7 entirely disappointed by her new environment. She preserved the old New England in her heart, and while the flowers bloomed outside her windows the walls inside were decorated with snow scenes of birch forests in whiter. Every week the postman brought the Sunday edition of the Litchfield County Leader, which enabled her to keep up with events in Winsted, so that she would be ready to move back when and if she could get out of debt and when and if the people who are not nice enough should decide to leave Connecticut, returning it to its rightful inhabitants. From my grandmother I learned unlimited kindness in a limited environment. And a certain stubbornness in sticking to my values whatever other people think or dont think. The lessons I learned from my mother and father were similar. My father, who never held a steady job, subscribed to and believed in a now defunct magazine called Country Gentleman, When I was still young he and my mother made a down payment on a half-acre in El Monte, now a suburb of Los Angeles, then country. There they built a house themselves and developed the land while my father tried to continue with truck-driving for a cash income; they wanted a lifestyle with the fun of farming but without the worries. For my little brother and me it was an educational environment: we learned from and about fruit trees; ducks; chickens; a goat; plantings of corn, tomatoes, green beans, onions, beets, squash, and Swiss chard. My role in life was to help. If there was nothing to do in the house or in the workshop, I would give greens to the chickens, tether the goat in a new place, lead a flock of ducks into the iris beds so they could eat the snails, string black twine around the branches of the plum tree to keep the birds away from the fruit, or pull weeds among the bean blossoms. Thus my parents brought me up to believe that I was supposed to be a useful person. They quietly communicated the message that it was a good thing to be useful, and the more useful the better. When Jesus came into my heart an

event which happened by total immersion at the First Baptist Church of Redlands, California (we had moved again) when I was 11 it was my definite impression that His views on the desirability of being useful were the same as those of my parents. When I was a teenager some of us used to talk about religion. I was in love with a girl whose lips I never kissed, although I did have fantasies concerning their deliciousness. When I saw her, the stars swirled, exploded, and fell in bright fragments; however, I usually managed to maintain my composure, feigning unawareness of the unusual behavior of the heavenly bodies. In retrospect, I am glad we never kissed, since she did not love me, and in any case we did not agree about religion. She used to say it was important to make a distinction between being saved and being the Savior. Jesus was the Savior and we were the saved. It followed that we should not be running around helping people who were having hard times, or working for peace and justice, or improving society since people who act like that think they are Saviors, confusing themselves with the Almighty, thereby falling into the sins of sacrilege and pride. We should remember who we are, and be grateful for what He has done for us. In reply to the girl I never kissed I used to quote the 25th chapter of Matthew, the epistle of James, Mark 10:42-45, Luke 10:30-37, Matthew 7:21, Luke 14:33, Matthew 22:37-39, Matthew 5:3-10, and Revelations 22:10. When I entered college I was prepared to debate with anybody who deduced conservative social and political conclusions from Christian premises. But I was not prepared for Leon. It is not easy to define Leons philosophy, partly because he applied it to many different subjects which seemed to have little in common. I, his first year college roommate, found refuting him even harder than defining him. I thought for a while that Leon was irrational because he contradicted himself, but as I came to know him I found that when I thought he was contradicting himself, he was only contradicting what I expected reasonable people to say. It often seemed to me that he had the facts wrong, and we had many fights about facts. The fights were not settled by looking them up in a standard reference work, such as the United Nations 41 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Statistical Yearbook, since after we found out what the book said we continued to argue about whether the people who wrote the book could be trusted. In any case, the problem was not that he had the facts wrong; it did not matter whether he had them right or wrong, since no facts would make him change his mind. When Leon considered unlikely something which I considered to be factual, it was extremely difficult to convince him with evidence. He had an enormous capacity for skepticism. On the rare occasions when he could be persuaded that an event he considered unlikely had happened, he treated the event in question as one unusual case of little importance compared to the millions of events which (according to him) had also happened. He thought he had millions of facts on his side, for his way of seeing the world was such that everything he saw in it confirmed what he believed about it. He thought of himself as realistic and rational. The arguments of Lapp and Collins in Food First would not convince Leon at all. Food First is an appeal to reason, but Leon also appealed to reason. The world as it is presently organized is irrational, from a scientific point of view, because the available food is not used to satisfy the nutritional needs of the worlds population say Lapp and Collins. The system is irrational (see Definition 10 of rationality in Letter Four) because at an enormous cost the degree of success in meeting the objective is low. Leon used to reply to such arguments by saying that they assume that the objective is to feed everybody in the world. He did not have that objective, and was opposed on principle to people

who did have it. Lapp and Collins are, on this view, irrational because they are trying to achieve a false objective. (See Definition 1 of rationality in Letter Four.) They are irrational, too, because they are unnatural (Definition 13). From a scientific point of view yes, Leon claimed to be scientific inequality is the natural outcome of competition. Biology teaches that living beings have always contended with each other for the control of scarce resources. The natural, and therefore rational, course of action is to do all you can to win in the competition. The true objectives of life are strength and control over resources (Definition 16). Leon did not take food for everyone as an objective, and, as I said, he did not approve of people who did. Since he saw the world in terms of competing forces, and saw himself as on the side of the successful competitors, he saw the people who identify with the poor as on the opposing side. Furthermore, since his interests were connected with those of his nation, he opposed whatever appeared to weaken his nation, and indeed he tended to describe many movements that describe themselves as having the good of the poor at heart as fundamentally disloyal, because they intentionally or unintentionally weakened the USA and strengthened the enemy. More likely intentionally since the professed motive, helping the poor, is unnatural and therefore not likely to be the real motive. Leon saw the world in terms of conflict between opposing forces. He considered his view to be realistic, not wishful thinking (Definition 15). One of his favorite phrases was Russian provocation. By this he meant a probe by the Russians with the dual purpose of increasing their power at our expense and testing us to see how much they could get away with. Many of the same things that Lapp and Collins call liberation, Leon called Russian provocation. For example, Leon and I might disagree on whether there are Cuban troops in Mozambique. The facts had only a secondary importance, because even if we could agree on whether there were Cuban soldiers there; when they came, if they came; how many they were, if any; and what if anything they were doing there, Leon would still say that what is happening in Mozambique is Russian provocation, and I would still agree with Lapp and Collins that what is happening in Mozambique is liberation. I have called Leons way of thinking a philosophy, and by recalling how Leon and I thought differently in the face of the same evidence I have been showing that philosophy matters. Comparing the human mind to a computer, one could say that software matters. Different 42 Letter 7 software: different results. Even with the same data. The importance of philosophy (software) is especially great when one tries to think globally, or to think about Mozambique or some other faraway place one knows little about. To the extent that the facts are unknown, or too numerous to assimilate, ones image of the world is drawn from ones thinking. Leon is not unusual. Everybody is programmed to believe some things more easily than others. I am myself, like Leon, easier to convince of some truths than of others for example, it would take much evidence to convince me of the truth, if it is a truth, that some criminals cannot be rehabilitated. Everybody has her or his approach to life, just as everybody has, or had, a grandmother. Everyone has responded to influences and events by developing a mind, and consequently everyone has a set of characteristic mental traits, a philosophy. In having a grandmother and in having a philosophy Leon and I are like everyone else. The particular philosophy Leon has although it is not universal is not uncommon. He was my introduction to a type of thinking I have seen a lot of since; I had no doubt encountered many people with minds more or less like Leons even before my first year of college, but since the structure of their minds had not forced itself on my attention I passed it by without recognizing it

or noticing it. I will not try now to define or summarize the type, but I will give it a label the power is reality approach to life. It has many versions: some blatant, others refined; some selfish, others generous as is the approach Lapp and Collins take, as they dedicate themselves to unmasking the realities of power which, according to their way of thinking, cause hunger. There have been power theorists more sophisticated than Leon, among whom one of the most famous was Thomas Hobbes (English philosopher, 1588-1679), whose ideas I will interpret in Letter 24. Hobbes was one of the first to analyze humans as if they were machines; he applied to psychology and politics the method of Galileo (Italian mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, 1564-1642). I dwell on Leon, obscure as he is compared to Hobbes, relatively unsophisticated as he is, because he represents something more important than fame and sophistication he is a sample of the mass mind, the mind that both reflects and supports modern culture. One reason why I think he is a representative sample is that most people I tell about Leon recognize him immediately. They find his personality and views familiar, as if they had been dealing with Leons all their lives as indeed they have. Leon displays recognizable (even though admittedly exaggerated, in the way a caricaturist makes a nose recognizable by exaggerating its size) features of the everyday thinking of ordinary people that immense unwritten book, on which all written books are parasitic, and on whose pages the influence of all written books is measured. To end hunger it is more important to understand Leon than to understand Hobbes. Leon himself never doubted that he was normal, and to a large extent he really was normal by the standards of our society. He almost convinced me that I was abnormal. From Leons point of view all the playing of social roles he observed around him represented the efforts of the individuals playing the roles to succeed in life. It was as if each person were a force in conflict and in competition with other persons. He regarded himself as normal because he saw himself as doing what he saw everyone else as doing. Leon had no frame of reference for the sort of roommate who believed that the true measure of success in life was whether the people closest to you felt that they were loved; who was likely to invite a hobo to lunch, or visit prisoners, or donate money to the Namibian Liberation Movement. He viewed such conduct as bizarre to say the least, and because bizarre, irrational (Definition 11). He did not mind saying that the roommate in question was neurotic; driven by irrational forces of guilt, fear, and repressed sexuality; lost in a strange world of fantasy where dreams were real and reality was evaded. My conversations with Leon made me feel defrauded. I learned that right and wrong, reason and unreason, were not generally recognized to be what I had been brought up to believe 43 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I they were. Leon held outrageous opinions, from my point of view, but society did not take my side against his. Societys accepted standards of rationality were at least as much on his side as on mine; if one of us was an oddball, it was 1.1 hope that you see now why I agree with Thomas Merton that the defects of rationality as currently practiced are severe. Peace and justice require the mending of reason. P.S. Now, in later life, I still sometimes return to Pasadena in my dreams; for, as Sigmund Freud has shown, in the subconscious depths of our minds which lose their inhibitions when we sleep, there is no time; so we are still every age we ever were. We are most especially 1,2, 3,4, and 5 years old. So often at night even now, when sleeping soundly in Qubec while the cold blast off the frozen St. Lawrence River beats against my window, I am a four-year-old wanderer among cats and chickens; nasturtiums, daisies, zinnias, petunias; camphor, lemon, eucalyptus, green walnut, sycamore, orange, and ivy-girdled palms, in a sunswept California garden. The fragrances of the

trees remind me that I have gone nowhere and am still home. 44 Letter 8 8 FRIEDMANS GUILLOTINE Friedman decapitated most of my proposals for helping the poor to help themselves, by proving rationally that the proposals would not work. But the conclusion I draw is not that poverty is inevitable; it is that structural change is needed. To indicate some of the complexities that make me wish I were a dog, and to introduce the next story, I will now pull together some main points: 1. The nature/culture distinction is fundamental. It marks a natural boundary: inherited traits and tendencies are natural, upbringing and learning are cultural. 2. The nature/culture distinction supports the basic lesson of Food Pint: the world does not have to be the way it is. Whatever is cultural can be changed. 3. Lapp and Collins have given us much data supporting a remarkably simple conclusion: one of the main changes needed is to replace the power of a few with the democratic control of resources. This conclusion states a worthy goal. It needs qualifications and additions. 4. A difficulty impeding the construction of an economically democratic global culture is that some people, including my first year college roommate, oppose the realization of any such goal, because they think it is nonsense and because they see it as inimical to their interests. 5. Following the principle explicit in 2, that whatever comes from learning and upbringing can be changed, we can respond to 4 by seeing better education and better parenting as ways to change the world by rearing fewer people similar to my first-year college roommate and more people who understand why cooperation and caring are needed. 6. Against 5 it can be argued that people cannot in general be taught to act against their interests, and can only to a limited extent be deceived concerning what their interests are. So if people like Leon are correct in seeing the empowerment of the needy as inimical to their interests, then education can change their attitudes very little. 7. It can also be objected against 5 that even if there were more love in the world, it would do little good. Worse: by encouraging a naivet that seeks solutions in personal charity instead of in structural change, it would do harm. The following letter relates to point 7.1 take the position that 7 is true if modified to read that bringing people up to be more cooperative and caring will do little good unless it is accompanied by structural change. Although consideration of point 6 will come in later letters, some arguments begun in this letter relate to it indirectly in the following way: Suppose it is true that the privileged cannot in general be taught to cooperate with the empowerment of the weak. Nevertheless, there is already a certain amount of goodwill in existence, at all levels of society. The abolition of poverty is often, if not usually, thought to be in the enlightened self-interest of the non-poor. But even the goodwill that exists, paltry as it may be, unlikely to increase as it may be, is frustrated by the inflexibility of modern social structures and this 45 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I frustration is to some extent unnecessary, because a better philosophy can show how to use the existing constructive attitudes to move toward structural change. Eventually beginning but not finishing in this coming letter I will have to explain what I mean by structure, and by modern social structures. I will have to say how structures can be

improved, and what, concretely, an individual can do to help. So, you see, you have a lot to look forward to. To talk of structure here I am already taking a first step toward explaining how I use the word is to speak of a pattern of tightly connected parts. You cannot move one without moving the others. Ferdinand de Saussure (Swiss linguist, 1857-1913) explained the concept of structure using the image of the planets in their orbits around the sun. If one planet should change its orbit, then all the other planets would have to change their orbits too. The planets and the sun (and, Saussure said, words related to each other in a linguistic structure) form a system, such that each part works in tandem with the other parts. This letter will take up a typically philosophic aspect of modern social structure, namely one of its typical forms of rationality; but rationality works in tandem with all the other parts of the structure (or, some say, with all the other parts of the formation): economics, politics, agriculture, sex roles, schools, churches.... One could begin an examination of a modern social structure anywhere, and by pursuing the relations of the point first studied to other elements of the system, lead into a study of those other elements, and thus carry on the inquiry until it encompassed all aspects. I do not mean to imply that the modern world is static and well-organized; I do mean to imply that in its very chaos its parts affect each other. I would like to call attention to a happy consequence of believing that a word like structure tells it like it is. Since the structure fits together, a change at one point will provoke adjustments everywhere else. It follows that if you have been persuaded that you cant fight the system so you may as well sit on your duff until you die, you have been misled. If an individual can find ways to identify and perform small structure-changing acts, her or his acts will cause the whole system to be touched by reverberations, even though most of the distant results may be unknown. Please notice that I am insisting on choosing which meanings of the word structure I want to develop. Usually I work with words as I find them instead of giving them my own definitions. In the case of structure, I am being selective in borrowing ideas from thinkers known as structuralists. I fear the attacks of the anti-structuralists and I prefer to be attacked for my own errors rather than for those of structuralism, post-structuralism, or structural this or that. I fear also the scorn of those who despise the very word, and cry for expunging structure from science and philosophy on the charge that it serves only to rename ideas that already have better names or to cloak fallacies in confusion. To advance my multifaceted program for showing the fly the way out of the bottle, I will now tell another story about my youth. It is a story with many merits: it is true, it will help save those who understand it from squandering their goodwill on foolishness, it sheds light on minimum wage laws arid other significant reforms, it makes fun of economists, it provides the company misery loves because it speaks to the condition of all who have studied economics and found it dismal, it reveals as in a mirror the pride of false reason, it begins to identify some peculiarities of economic power which distinguish it from power in general, it makes additional necessary amendments to the anti-hunger program of Food First, it explains part of the significance of calling certain changes structural. Friedman was the nickname some of us gave to our first year economics professor. He was not the famous professor at the University of Chicago; moreover, he thought of himself as one of the academic critics of that noted adviser to conservative governments. Our Friedman thought of himself as moderate, of Chicagos Milton Friedman as right wing. He used 46 Letter 8

essentially the same research methodology as the more famous Friedman but tried to make it produce conclusions a hair or two more to the left. Friedman, unlike my roommate Leon, accepted my objectives, but frustrated me anyway because he demonstrated that my objectives were unattainable. Friedman had a line of argument which devastated young dreamers full of kind sentiments: (1) First he asked them to specify what actions they proposed. Dont just cry about the problem, he said, Tell me what to do about it. (2) Then he stated his guillotine principle: to act responsibly, you must look at past experience to learn the probable consequences of the action you propose. (3) Then he showed, or we ourselves showed by doing library research under his supervision, that frequently, indeed usually, actions of the kinds proposed have done more harm than good. In particular, many actions intended to benefit the poor have hurt the poor. Not everybody called him Friedman. Some students referred to him as the Jolly Green Giant. Why they called him that I have no idea, since he was neither jolly, nor green, nor gigantic; but on the contrary dour, ruddy, and small. Calling him Friedman had a point, but calling him Jolly Green Giant was only one of those senseless quirks one sometimes encounters in life. Friedmans outstanding characteristic was to have a good reply to every question. He was reason incarnate. He never showed a bias for or against anybody; he had no prejudice against any race, class, gender, nation, or idea; and he had no favorites. He pursued the truth because he was convinced that by pursuing truth he would in the long run contribute to the greatest possible human happiness. His mind appeared to itself and to its audience to be, as the Victorian mind of nineteenth century England had appeared to itself and to its audience to be, the culmination of the mental evolution of the species, the long-pursued and finally attained synthesis of pure goodwill and pure reason. Friedman always had the best of intentions because his intention was always to find out what would work; he was always rational because his opinion was always, Lets look at the facts. And looking at the facts is by definition rational isnt it? That was what unhinged me. He was never wrong. I was perhaps not always wrong, but very nearly always wrong. I do not mind disagreeing with another person where each of us agrees to respect the others opinions. But it is a different sort of experience to interact with someone who wins all the arguments. It would have been easier to bear if Friedman had been a narrow-minded person with a domineering personality, who disparaged me while I knew in my secret heart that my opinion was the truth. Friedman was never narrow-minded, never domineering. He was, like Socrates, modest and obedient. He was obedient to logic. When Friedman was unable to give a direct yes or no answer, then he was open-minded, waiting for more evidence to come in. He used the scientific method generally accepted in our culture (Number 2 of the definitions of rationality in Letter 4) and not just generally accepted but accepted by me. He followed the steps for hypothesis testing that Miss Charlotte Taylor taught me in 8th grade general science, and which Mrs. Lucie Adams repeated to me in 11th grade chemistry. And Friedmans objectives (unlike Leons) were similar to my own: he wanted freedom and prosperity for everyone. Armed with the ideas of hypothesis testing and the use of control groups that I had learned from Miss Taylor and Mrs. Adams, Friedman ran an impeccable classroom. The hypotheses were usually quantified as propositions about the impact of some X on some Y, and therefore X and Y were constantly on the blackboard. If one were of a mind to cavil about minor inefficiency, one might complain that chalk and human energy were wasted every evening when the janitor erased the X axis and the Y axis, because shortly after 9a.m. the following morning the professor would invariably draw them again.

Students were free to propose any explanation of anything. The only requirement was that the factors (the Xs) that were proposed as explanations of the phenomena (the Ys) had to be 47 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I clearly defined. Then the student had to do her or his homework, by searching the literature for data that would confirm or deny the hypothesis. There was no penalty for coming up with an hypothesis that turned out to be flatly contradicted by the evidence because the class was designed to be a learning experience in the use of the scientific method, not the indoctrination of the students in a world view. Friedmans approach agreed with the real Milton Friedman of Chicago, who wrote in his book Essays in Positive Economics that the task of economic science ...is to provide a system of generalizations that can be used to make correct predictions about the consequences of any change.... Any policy conclusion necessarily rests on a prediction about the consequences of doing one thing rather than another, a prediction that must be based implicitly or explicitly on positive economics.... The ultimate goal of positive science is the development of a theory or hypothesis that yields valid and meaningful (i.e., not truistic) predictions about phenomena not yet observed... a hypothesis or theory consists of an assertion that certain forces are, and by implication others are not, important for a particular class of phenomena and a specification of the manner of action of the force it asserts to be important. The classroom proceedings were Friedmans public performances. In order to get a glimpse of Friedmans Friedman, in order to step backstage to gain access to Friedmans personal opinion of the significance of his performance, it was necessary to have a drink with Milton, as we used to say. He invited new students, in groups of five, in alphabetical order, for drinks at the Elizabethan Club at four in the afternoon, and he mentioned to each group in the course of the conversation that those who felt so inclined might drop in again some other day. Youll usually find me here in the afternoons, he would say. As a result, he was surrounded most afternoons by an amiable coterie of students, some beginning, some advanced; The latter were known as the experts, because Professor Friedman introduced them to newcomers as experts on the topics they had recently written term papers on. Over Bloody Marys and glasses of Spanish sherry we learned that Professor Friedmans mission in life was to save the world from nonsense. Among the buzzwords he used to designate nonsense were ideological, theological, metaphysical, and teutonic. Whenever he used one of those words, we knew he was referring to the enemy, to those who make science too easy by spinning great theories, which seemed to be, as he put it, important if true, but which, unfortunately, could not be called either true or false because they were so nebulous that no specific evidence could prove them either right or wrong. My professor included in the scientific method the rule that no hypothesis is legitimate unless it is testable. This rule served to separate the real scientists from ideologues, theologians, metaphysicians, and teutons, who did not state their propositions in hypothetical forms that enabled looks at facts to test them. In terms of his own beliefs, Friedman was not biased. He saw himself as in favor of truth and against both falsehood and mystification. When I tried to turn my progressive sentiments into testable hypotheses, accepting my professors apparently reasonable demand to state the justifications of my proposed actions in a form specific enough to be tested, I came up with statements like these: 1. Raising taxes to pay for better schools will not discourage industry from locating in the area taxed. 2. Income and wealth could be redistributed in favor of the poor without slowing down

economic activity. 3. Self-help housing projects do not take business away from the construction industry. 4. Organizing the homeless to occupy and renovate old, unused buildings is not bad for the building business. 5. Regulating toxic substances in foods will not reduce agribusiness profits, nor the food industrys incentive to make new investments. 48 Letter 8 6. Requiring corporations to cleanup rivers they pollute does not discourage investment. 7. Free medical care for the aged is not inflationary. 8. Minimum wage laws do not cause youth and minority unemployment. 9. Strong labor unions do not drive business to other countries. 10. Curbing violence on television would not reduce viewership, advertising, or sales of the products advertised. 11. Restricting luxury consumption would not mean fewer jobs for the poor. 12. High wages do not cause unemployment. 13. Government health and safety regulations, which reduce profits, do not drive business to invest in other states and countries, with fewer or less costly regulations. 14. The United States could let the nations of the Third World go their own ways, communist, socialist, aggressively nationalist, or whatever the case may be, without damaging its own economy. These are samples of the sorts of question we used to discuss in Friedmans class. As stated above they are not yet in the precise, testable form that he wanted; they are perhaps half-way between simply advocating that something be done to respond caringly to human needs, and putting the principle of an action into a form that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by data. Nevertheless, they show in outline how Friedman wanted us to learn to think, and in any case it is not the perfection of the technique that I want to stress but the tendency of the results. There was some variation in the results; there was usually some evidence one way and some evidence another, some to and some fro; there was always room for doubt because no study ever produced conclusive proof, and indeed most of the studies we read included implicit or explicit pleas for more funds for research in order to reach more definite conclusions. Nevertheless, in the data there was a marked tendency, like the tide which dominates the overall movement of the sea even though at any given moment one can see the waves both coming in and going out; it was that all the hypotheses listed above, and others like them, tended to be false. I wanted them to be true. I will examine in slightly greater detail hypothesis 8, that minimum wage laws do not cause youth and minority unemployment. The minimum wage law is intended to improve the standard of living of wage-earners by increasing their incomes. One can study the impact of such laws with a close approximation to an ideal scientific method: as test cases one can study jurisdictions where there are minimum wage laws (or where the minimum wage is increased), and as a control group one can consider jurisdictions where there are no such laws (or where the minimum wage is left low). Youth and minority unemployment can be measured both in the test and in the control areas using official statistics, and using supplemental additional statistics if necessary, The importance of the issue is a guarantee that there will be numerous studies, funded by different agencies with varying interests in getting results which prove either that minimum wages (or high minimum wages) are beneficial or that they are not. Nevertheless, there is a tendency in the results: young people and minorities are disadvantaged. Employers do tend to hire fewer people when they

have to pay them more; just as they tend to put people on part time when full-time employees cost more because of the fringe benefits they receive. Young people and minorities tend to bear the brunt of these effects, since they tend to be the last hired anyway. Most of the research is more concerned with how large these effects are, or under what circumstances they can be mitigated, than with denying that the effects exist. With the benefit of hindsight, and having had several decades to mull over my disconcerting experiences in first-year economics, I have drawn the conclusion that the falsity of the greater part of the hypotheses I wanted to be true reveals problems that are structural. 49 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I In calling them structural, I have several things in mind. First, I have in mind the inflexibility of the system; it tends to resist improvement. International development economists sometimes speak of the law of perversity, which, briefly summarized, is, nothing works. This putative law is an exaggeration, but as a description of the frustrations of economic planners in developing countries it is uncomfortably close to true. For example, if the government of India tries to lower the price of grain to consumers, very likely the supply of grain will diminish. Although I do not want to limit the meaning of structure to inflexible, I do consider structure to be an especially appropriate word when the speaker wants to point out that there is something about the system that has a resistance of its own; so it is especially appropriate to blame structure when plans go awry not so much because of any people who foiled them as because of the way a system works. I have had no end of trouble explaining the point I tried to make in the last paragraph. I have published a fair number of articles in respectable academic books and periodicals, but every time I have written a piece with some variant of the point above, it has been rejected by the editor with no explanation, or an explanation which convinced me that the editor or referee had not understood me. It seems to me that I sometimes make the point about structure and inflexibility 1,000 times during a term to a class of 3 0 students, and if I am lucky one of them understands it. It is a mystery to me why this particular thought should prove to be so hard to comprehend, but experience indicates that it is, and for that reason I will now explain it two more times with the help of examples. On the city bus the other day I happened to sit next to a long-haired young man dressed in jeans who was as obviously a manual worker as I was obviously an absentminded professor. He was wearing a black baseball-type cap, on which was written in red and yellow letters, Screaming for vengeance. He seemed to be on drugs because he talked on and on in the way some people do when they are high. Among the many topics he covered was the minimum wage law. Im afraid of whats happening in May, he said. They say the minimum wage is going up. His fear was that it would be harder to find work. The intellectuals think its a good thing, he said. They dont know. I tried to explain: The problem is not that when the minimum wage goes up it is harder to find work. The problem is that the structure of the system is such that when the minimum wage goes up it is harder to find work. I do not think he understood me, but at least the incident gave me an opportunity to express my feelings, as wearing his cap gave him an opportunity to express his. Here is example pertinent to hypothesis 9 above (Strong labor unions do not drive business to other countries): in the years 1963 through 1965 I spent a great deal of time working with Cesar Chavez and others to organize the workers who harvested tomatoes in California. Our organization did little good, because when the workers were organized the growers moved the greater part of their tomato production operations to Mexico. The problem was not that strong labor unions drive

business to other countries. It was that the structure of the system is such that strong labor unions drive business to other countries. Here is a statement by one of the few students who has understood the point I am trying to make: What you are saying, Howard, is that liberal policies subject the economy to stress. The economy is stressed by taxes and regulations and generally by doing anything that adds to the cost of doing business. When the economy is under stress, it does not perform well. Then along comes the conservative and looks at the evidence and proves that the economy is not performing well, and in some cases it is performing so badly that it is hurting the people the liberals are trying to help like the minority youths protected by minimum wages who end up unemployed. So what you want is that instead of doing nothing about the problems and instead of subjecting the economy to stress, we should develop a stress-resistant economy. But 50 Letter 8 this requires a change in our way of thinking. We are used to thinking, Should we vote for the minimum wage or against it? We need to think, How does the whole system work? Your philosophy is like holistic medicine. Instead of taking this or that pill for this or that disease, you develop a healthy body. I will come back to this point because I think it needs to be repeated regularly and ramified extensively, but now let me go on to a second reason for using the word structure. I use it to say that the problem is in the culture, not in individuals. I do not blame my mother for my problems; I do not blame my father; I do not blame either of my grandmothers or grandfathers; I do not blame the rich; I do not blame the politicians; I do not blame the money-dealers on Wall Street; I do not blame the chiefs of the Pentagon or the CIA agents; I do not blame the network news anchor people; I do not blame the publishers of comic books; I do not blame the executive officers of multinational agribusiness corporations; I do not blame the officer corps; I do not blame all white males except myself; I do not blame myself; I do not blame the Pope; I do not blame Elvis or Elviss ghost. I blame the system. The concept of structure implies that over and above the personal failings of each of us there is a system which needs improvement. Consequently a structural view implies that whenever Lapp and Collins criticize the power of a few, or something of the sort, we should read such statements as shorthand for something like, cultural structures which unduly privilege a few and make it too hard to satisfy the needs of the many. A third implication of a structural view is that the good comes with the bad and the bad with the good. Both are part of the same structure, as it is the same backbone that holds the human body erect and produces the human proneness to slipped discs and backaches: You cant solve the back pain problem by breeding a race of humans without backs. Lapp and Collins have justly asserted that in the modern world money ties have replaced moral ties, with the result that as a general rule those without money lack access to the necessities of life. Nevertheless, the pursuit of money is the key to the spirit of enterprise, and the spirit of enterprise inspires the production of immense quantities of goods, services, and courtesy. Business for profit is as motivating as athletics. It fires as much enthusiasm as basketball, baseball, and football, with the added advantage, compared to these sports, that business, like tennis and golf, is a competitive, activity suitable for players who are no longer young. How many people get up early, shave (if men), shine their shoes, put on clean clothes, march briskly out the door, stay upbeat and cheerful all day, are polite to people they hate, make wise use of their time, and strive to acquire a reputation for doing whatever they do well all for the sake of success in business? The score on the scoreboard is written in money, although one can, as in sports, sometimes be respected for being a good player independently of winning or losing. Take the institution of money away and people will sleep late; wear scruffy shoes; omit

shaving; let their hair tangle; dress sloppily; loiter on the way to work; tell customers what they really think; and sink into muddle, dawdle, and sloth. Fourthly, I use the word structure to say that there are more alternatives than two. If you think of an isolated part, then you can say, either it is or it isnt. An isolated statement can be true or false, like a bit of information on a floppy disk; that tiny spot is magnetically charged or not, as, in an earlier computer technology, the hole in the punch card was punched or not. But if you think of a structure, then you recognize that everything relates to everything else. The possible permutations are many, and it is misleading to say, for example, either you have high wages or you dont. The significance of any such remark depends on elements of the context, such as the price level, fringe benefits, whether housing is free, vacation time, job security, human relations.... I do not ask, Should I be for or against X? Instead I ask, How can this structure be restructured? One of the ideas that has been hovering in the background during this letter, which has 51 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I never quite flown into the foreground and gotten said, is that there is a complicity between Friedmans results and his rationality. On the one hand, it is a fact that if you examine one by one a number of liberal schemes for improving society, the data show that they work badly or not at all. On the other hand, Friedmans version of science tells us that the way to study society is to decompose social understanding into precise hypotheses and examine them one by one. It is, consequently, a form of rationality with a bias. A bias that stems from the very way it pretends to eschew bias. This idea will be explored more in the following letter, which will ask what, exactly, are the defects of Friedmans rationality. Before going on, however, I want to dwell for a moment on the importance of renovating progressive thought through engagement with contemporary conservative thought, which I am doing in a small way by treating Friedmans rationality as a sample and symbol of contemporary conservatism. I believe there is a great difference between the pre-Friedman progressive and the post-Friedman progressive. The first has not yet encountered Friedman; the second has encountered him, has worked through the difficulties posed by his ideology, and has come out on the other side. Both kinds of progressive want to achieve economic democracy. Both see some form or other of world government as necessary for world peace. Both oppose racism, sexism, and homophobia. Both recognize that if we human beings do not learn to live in harmony with the ecosystem, then neither we nor the greater life of which we are a part will survive. The difference is in the method. The pre-Friedman progressive tends to emphasize raising consciousness, building coalitions, and changing individual behavior. For example, making the non-poor aware of what it is like to be homeless. For example, negotiating agreements to coordinate peace, womens, Third World, ecology, minority, gay and lesbian, labor, and inner-city neighborhood organizations. For example, persuading individuals to boycott grapes produced in dictatorships that violate human rights. The post-Friedman progressive has grasped the full significance of Friedmans guillotine. She or he attributes much of the worldwide conservative trend to the failure of progressives to appreciate the merits of right-wing arguments, and to the failure to develop viable alternative programs. For her or him the aim is not so much to raise awareness of problems as it is to nurture the strength of the weak, to empower them. The aim is not so much to organize coalitions as it is to restructure consciousness. The aim is not so much to change individual behavior as to change cultural norms. For examples of the strength of the weak, of restructuring consciousness, and of changing cultural norms, read on.

52 Letter 9 9 IRRATIONAL RATIONALITY In order to make connections, we must learn to think connections. Our currently dominant rationality impedes making the connections we need because it is irrational in two ways: it is consciousness-lowering, and it is a logic of disunity. We live in times when major modifications of our institutions are necessary. Few people can sincerely say that they believe no major changes are needed. Let me put some questions to a hypothetical optimist who considers herself or himself perhaps capable of believing that the status quo is acceptable. Can you believe that the survival of the human species is possible without lasting peace? Remember that the hydrogen bomb is just one instance of a general principle the principle of scientific research continually applied to increasing the deadliness of weapons. Next, can you believe that lasting peace is possible without some kind of world government? Even if you hold your breath and hit your head, you will find it hard to force yourself to believe that lasting peace can come any other way. And is a world government possible without substantial agreement on what kind of legal system should be employed to resolve conflicts? Can you believe that an effective world legal system can be instituted without a sense of community and common interest among the greater part of the earths peoples? Are there ways to achieve community which bypass the requirements stated by Aristotle (Greek philosopher, 384322 BC): namely, friendship (filia) and agreement on principles of justice? Can we get the required friendship and agreement on principles while the worlds economic structure is fundamentally that of a marketplace where many have-nots meet a few haves? Now let us consider the need for structural change from an ecological viewpoint. Try to believe that no structural changes are needed because changes in attitude will be sufficient to save the environment. Imagine that all the attitude changes advocated by deep ecologists have taken place: humans now adore nature, we feel natures presence as that of a good mother, we never desire to rape her or to dominate her. But even with these changes in attitude, humans continue to farm in the usual way, applying the techniques developed by the agricultural sciences in order to achieve the objectives set by the economic sciences. They farm in the usual way because otherwise they do not eat. The structure of our modern world-system is such that most food is produced by agriculture-governed-by-economics or else not produced. As this set of questions and remarks suggests, I believe that most people who reflect on the situation of homo sapiens on the planet Earth as the year 2000 AD approaches will conclude that structural changes are necessary. Nevertheless, a question remains whether the needed major changes are possible. In principle, any social structure can change, because social structures are part of culture, not part of nature. Whatever is a cultural construction can be reconstructed. However, people are often inclined to despair of the feasibility of structural change because they are impressed by the cumulative weight of the obstacles impeding it, such as the ones on the following list: 1. Structural change is associated with radicalism, and radicalism with violence. 2. Local changes do not seem to sum to global changes. On the contrary, the modern 53 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I

world-system tends to stifle local change. How many times have I heard it said: We must do it this way (the old rational way, not the innovative ecologically sustainable human way) in order to maintain our competitive position in the global marketplace? 3. Public opinion polls and psychological studies show that most people are conventional and conservative. They do not want structural change. In particular, poor people, those who suffer most from the system, usually do not want structural change. What they want is successful integration into the existing system. 4. Those who protest against the status quo are often interested in changing one aspect of it, but not in justice for all members of the Earth community. For example, some blacks are interested in fighting racism but not in fighting homophobia, while some gays and lesbians are motivated to assert the rights of sexual minorities, but indifferent to the rights of trees. 5. A government which attempts to carry out structural change is likely to be voted out of office or ousted by a military coup. 6. Some governments succeed in carrying out structural change and remain in power, but become so repressive that they are plausibly accused of doing more harm than good. 7. Nationalized industries are often inefficient, producing goods and services of low quality at high cost. 8. The basic needs of the disadvantaged housing, food, employment, medical care are usually most successfully met in the short run by cooperating with whomever has power and with whatever system exists. 9. Subsidies and price controls (examples: subsidies to bakers, control of the price of bread) aid the poor at the cost of distorting market mechanisms, which leads to inefficiency and illegality (example: a black market on which bread is secretly sold above the control price). 10. Individuals usually reckon that they are more likely to succeed in life by cooperating with the existing power structure. They see little or no advantage to themselves in opposing the system. 11. Radicals are often perceived to be illogical, half-baked, sentimental, disrespectful, surly, delinquent, unwashed, and/or unfocussed. 12. It is alleged that concern with structural change is misguided because most of the worlds tyranny is the petty tyranny found in small-scale interpersonal relations. Peace activists are accused of promoting world order while forgetting the needs of their friends, lovers, work associates, and families. 13. Structural change is resisted because it is associated with imitating foreign models. 14. Restructuring human institutions is impeded by the tendency of human beings to think in terms of polar opposites: either we win or they win, either p or not-p, a statement is either true or false, an ideal right or wrong. The tendency to divide reality in two is found in all cultures; it may be rooted in the physiology of the brain. 15. The existing set of global institutions, people like Leon argue, is natural, because it is based mainly on competitive individualism, which is shown by biology to be normal for humans. A world-system with a different structure is alleged to be unnatural and therefore unworkable. Notice that the obstacles to change just listed do riot prove that structural changes are unnecessary. If the combined force of these obstacles were shown to be so strong that necessary changes could not happen, then the conclusion to be drawn would be that we are living on a doomed planet. But that is a conclusion I for one am not ready to accept. I have reluctantly resigned myself to my own death, but I am not resigned to the death of my species and my

54 Letter 9 habitat. I am not ready to stand by and watch while humans turn this lovely Earth into a cinder orbiting silently around the medium-sized star we call sun, but which would no longer be called sun if there were no people left to celebrate Spring by lying out in the sun, or to sing silly songs while walking on the sunny side of the street, or to shade their babies to keep them from getting too much sun, or to drink hot coffee at a wilderness campsite at sunrise, or to feel nostalgia while gazing at a sunset, or to wear sunglasses at a rock concert. I am committed to this sentimental foolishness called human life, and I am not prepared to believe that its extinction is inevitable. My contribution to avoiding extinction is to promote a philosophical method for social change: cultural action.. Cultural action consists, in briefest summary, of starting with the existing social institutions, whatever they may be, taking a thematic inventory of what exists, locating growth points which are tending toward a viable and beautiful future for humanity, nurturing the growth points, restructuring meanings, and rechanneling energy to empower reconstructed discourses and practices. This particular cultural action project called Letters from Qubec starts with my experiences in places I have been, and does an inventory centering on rationality. It is looking for growth points tending toward rational solidarity, and it will find them in womens voices, in Marxism, in the symbols of tribal peoples, in religion, in non-Western philosophies, in the survival strategies of ethnic minorities, in contemporary philosophy; and especially in the history of the Hebrew-Greek-Christian-European civilization which transformed itself and expanded to become the modern world-system. The study of history can discover half-forgotten seeds of wisdom, dormant but still viable. They are gifts offered by the past to the future. If ones purpose in life is to change the world, as mine is, working to change what humans count as rational and irrational is a good place to start, because the lands of rationality I want to encourage are keys that open doors. One key is to think in ways that rely less on mechanical metaphors, attuning oneself to understanding cultures in their ecological contexts; such thinking does not in itself dispel violence, but it does highlight the importance of cultural software in guiding human life, and therefore favors methods like Gandhis, which rely on software instead of hardware. A more rational rationality would focus on understanding wholes composed of interdependent parts, and for that reason it would help activists to evaluate local changes in the light of their capacity to contribute to global changes. Another feature of a more rational rationality is the acceptance of the fact that most people are conventional and conservative; therefore, we should concentrate on building a world with good conventions, so that the instinctive energies which impel humans toward conservatism would work to cement justice. The adoption of a holistic rationality would be a step toward ending the marginalization of the poor because people would think,of the poor as part of the whole, not as separate. If it became common to think in terms of cultural structures, this very habit of thought would lead people active on one issue to see their issues connections with other issues. A philosophy which sees rationality as one of the products humans make in their vocation as creators of culture would help to make it clear that popular education and popular culture can play crucial roles in keeping social change processes afloat and non-repressive. To the extent that rationality itself is reconceived so that it becomes part and parcel of social solidarity, rationality will become part of the solution instead of part of the problem in those times that try mens souls during a societys process of reconstruction when material incentives falter and moral incentives must supplement them. (Let us hear no talk of eliminating

material incentives and replacing them with moral. Let no one underestimate the power of competition to stimulate work. Speak rather of adding moral to material, augmenting the total motivation.) 55 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Structural thinking will make it seem unnatural to pose the stark alternatives: laissez-faire or nationalization or industry. It will form the habit of seeing problems in their full context, so that short-term goals and long-term goals mesh so that immediate needs are met in ways which contribute to empowerment, as we intended but did not accomplish with our soup kitchen at Third Street and Pearl. The game of beat-the-system played by black marketeers would be less fun and more shameful if people conceived themselves as contributing to the construction of a truly rational system, which by definition would be a caring system, since its rationality would be a tool for attending to and responding to the needs of each person. If a caring rationality were sufficiently well-established to be generally known, then people who choose private success over public service would at least find it harder to be complacent, because they would know that there are reasons for considering their choice irrational. Being radical would be logical because it would mean, in the original sense of the word radical (from the Latin radix, root), dealing with the roots of problems, not only with their fronds and branches. It would be obvious that personal problems require social solutions, and that the required social solutions need both to flow naturally from what is happening here and now in this local society, and to promote fairness in international transactions. Fairness is often best achieved, by the way, through what Johan Gaining (contemporary Norwegian peace researcher) calls decoupling good fences make good neighbors. A better rationality will seek due proportion in all things; it will not seek either to maximize or to minimize any function. It will not define rationality as a maximum of global interdependence. Much less will it assert that so-called economic reality, i.e., the status quo, is what nature intended. If the characteristics of a more adequate rationality can be called keys, some characteristics of a prevalent form of the now-current rationality can be called brakes. The irrational rationality represented by Friedman tends to bring structural change to a stop. It is a rationality designed to determine what works, given that the structure of society is as it is. It is not a rationality designed to change structures, and since we live in times when major modifications of our institutions are necessary, it is not a functional rationality. It does not function by doing what reason is for; it does not increase the probability of survival by guiding conduct in the light of accurate representations of reality. That is why the inadequacy of Friedmans rationality is so severe that one can correctly call it irrational rationality. It acts as a brake against the transformations which are needed to prevent the extinction of the species. One can summarize this prevalent form of rationality (combining definitions one, two, eight, nine, ten, and fifteen of Letter Four) by saying that it calls an action rational when: a) The objective pursued is clearly defined, and b) There is good evidence that the means selected to achieve the objective will in fact achieve it. One of the inadequacies of such a view of rationality, at least as it is commonly applied, is that it conceals the fact that whether the means achieves the end frequently depends on who has power. Let me illustrate this point by relating an incident which occurred when I was dean of an exclusive girls school in Santiago, Chile. The new director of the school, a Methodist pastor from Illinois, proposed to admit to study there

the daughters of the schools maids, porters, housekeepers, and gardeners. Most students and parents were adamantly against the new directors proposal. When a delegation of young ladies called on me as dean to express their opposition, one said, The poor children will not be happy here, because we will reject them. In a sense her statement implied that the director was not being rational. He had an objective, which included making some poor girls happy, but there was good evidence that the means he had selected to achieve his objective 56 Letter 9 would not achieve it. What this superficially rational argument concealed was that the probable failure of the means to achieve the objective was due to the social position the rich girls held, and their determination to use the power their position gave them. What is blatant in the case of the rich girls who predicted the unhappiness of the poor girls they planned to torment, manifests itself in other cases more subtly. Raising taxes to pay for better social services will, other things being equal, discourage industry from locating in the area taxed. Redistributing income and wealth in favor of the poor tends to slow down economic activity. Requiring corporations to clean up the rivers they pollute tends to increase the cost of doing business, and hence to discourage investment and job creation in the areas where those requirements are imposed. And so on. In each of these cases there is an element of structural constraint such that predicting what will happen rationally reflects the existence of social positions which give certain people power to make decisions where to locate a factory, whether to invest, whether to employ people.... The people with power to make such decisions are not, however, free to decide arbitrarily. They can locate factories, invest, hire people... only in a rational way. A firm cannot decide to put other values ahead of profits; it is compelled by the market to act rationally. No one is free. No one can do what conscience dictates. No consensus on values can be implemented. The subtlety is dual: it is true but not obvious that power provided by social position is among the causes of major economic phenomena like inflation; and it is true but not obvious that those who are powerful are not free because even they must do what must be done to make the system work. I call our irrational rationality consciousness-lowering because it confuses social facts with natural facts. One of the features of consciousness raising (in Portuguese concientizo), as Paulo Freire defines it, is improving the capacity to distinguish nature from culture. Nature sends the rain. Culture prints the dollars. A rationality which encourages people to think, for example, that the trade-off between job creation and environmental protection is a dilemma imposed on humans by nature is consciousness-lowering. (I said at the end of the last letter, and perhaps should repeat here, that I think consciousness raising, while not in general a bad idea, can be overdone if it is not connected with a restructuring of consciousness leading toward constructive solutions.) Another useful idea from Freire is focalismo. The focalista, i.e., the person who practices focalismo, focusses on one aspect of a problem, not on the complete context. But experience shows that attention to the complete context is frequently needed. For example, to improve life in a poor village in Brazil it is usually necessary to work on improving the self-images of the people, on strengthening community organizations, on fighting alcoholism, on vaccinating children, on raising the status of women, on nutrition, on literacy, on dances and entertainment, on drinking water, land tenancy, cooperative marketing, political and economic consciousness, baby care... and so on. Focalista development projects which try to work on one factor at a time are bound to fail. My

professor Friedman was a focalista, inasmuch as he defined all problems narrowly so that an hypothesis could be tested. He did not use the word focalista, and if he had used it he probably would have denied that this pejorative label applied to him, but in my view he not only was one but was proud of being one he considered anyone who was not a focalista to be unscientific and unclear. A revealing question to be asked about a doctrine which defines rationality in terms of selecting effective means for achieving objectives is, Whose objectives? The usual answer in modern Western societies is, ones own objectives. The glory of being called rational is awarded to people who effectively pursue their own personal advancement. Thus we practice a logic of disunity. 57 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I This is our condition: the thinking of the homeless, that of the unemployed, of the dopers, of the mental cases, of the welfare clients, of the lower classes of people generally, is, as Gramsci said, fragmented. The thinking of the middle classes and the managerial elite which I have represented by what I was taught in school, especially in first year economics in college is much more coherent and scientific. But it is irrational in the ways I have mentioned, and in other ways I have not mentioned yet but will mention later, and in some additional ways I do not plan to mention explicitly which have been pointed out by other writers, notably the critical theorists, the feminists, the ecologists, the theologians. I hope I have not given the impression that because developing a caring and holistic rationality provides keys to the change we want to see, and because the widespread prevalence of irrational rationality is a brake, that society can be changed simply by inventing a better rationality. Not so. In philosophy and ideology it is not true that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. Many a fair philosophy has been born to blush unseen, wasting its sweetness on the desert air. There is a reason why we practice a logic of disunity: it is that we are not united. There is a reason why economists study what works and doesnt work in the system we have: it is that since we have the system we have, what works in it is what works, and what does not work in it does not work. What in the USA and similar countries is called rational is in these and many other ways tightly connected with many other aspects of the overall way of life. Neither the rationality nor the other essential features of a social structure can change independently. I do not preach pessimism: every feature of the system is a potential lever for moving the whole system. Nor optimism: no essential part of the system moves easily, since the weight of the whole system keeps it in place. Let me borrow again Saussures image of the solar system, in order to depict how it is that each key element of a social formation can be a key and a lever, while being also a brake and a weight. If Saturn should change its orbit, Saussure pointed out, then Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto would have to change their orbits too. Let us say that Saturn is rationality and give to the other planets some names which suggest other key dimensions of the interrelated whole that constitutes our social life. Mercury is human rights; Venus is desire; Earth is what it means to be a person; Mars is duty and obligation; Jupiter is property; Uranus dignity and sense of self-worth; Neptune freedom; Pluto shame. One cannot change course without the others, but if one changes course, the others must. I will not go into more detail now about the irrationality of modern western cultures so-called rationality because I find the subject depressing. I no longer read books which chart the collision course humanity is on, so why should I write one? I would rather read a seed catalogue, full of

pictures of yellow squash, red cherries, and white-purple sweet alyssum to plant for borders. I would rather write a seed catalogue. The irrational rationality of the nuclear arms race is too obvious to require further comment, as are our rational but mindless prisons and schools. Without further diagnosis of the problems at this point, I will turn to solutions. I want to imagine a peaceful world, haystacks drooping in the western sun, corn fields, pastures, white cottages, and in the distance far clouds of feathery purple. To lay the foundation of a method for transforming this world into a better one, I will devote the following letter to explaining what is meant by the concept cultural structure. 58 Letter 10 10 THE NIGHT WALKER, THE BLUE LADY, THE FROG STONE, THE CHICKEN IN THE ROAD Social problems are always cultural problems, because they have to do with the worlds that we construct in living together.... Humberto Maturana The way to think connections is to think in terms of cultural structures. The global economy, an immense and cumbersome abstract machine, has no face, eyes, or hands; yet it does its work. Effectively, although indirectly, by means of minted levers governing many intermediary mechanisms, it grinds minds and bodies. In order to analyze its character, and to plan its reform, I need to use an abstract concept: cultural structure. The same abstract concept will, after I give here an elaboration of its meaning, permit me to return in Letter 12 to the issue of rationality better equipped to discuss how rationality has been socially constructed. Having dedicated the last three letters to general social problems, I shall now work on cultural structure with the aid of a focus on the problems of a particular representative individual, Jacques, who is known in our quartier as the night-walker. When the dusk settles on the roofs of the city, and the neon begins to outshine the sun, Jacques feels the emptiness in his heart and goes out to walk. He has confessed to me during our long conversations that he does not know what he is looking for. He walks the streets with nowhere to go. His sexual fantasies explore variations: with women, with men, with swingers, with animals, with children, oral, anal, normal, up, down, over, around, in, under; he yearns toward dimly felt unknown pleasures, which he cannot name, which draw him onward from unknown back rooms behind mysterious oriental and Swedish cocktail lounges on side streets he has not yet discovered. He watches the cars, half hoping to see them crash and burst into flames. He strains to discern in the dark shadows of buildings the forms of men and women he could encounter and embrace, laugh with, get drunk with. On the boulevards he goes from store to store, window to window, looking at merchandise he has no money to buy, imagining ninjas in combat. It is not unusual for the moon in the night sky to lead Jacques to my table at the Caf Krieghof where I am writing Letters from Qubec, especially on Fridays when Josee is waiting on the tables in the back room. She is a Laval University history student, for whom Jacques has developed a fascination; whether she feels herself to be in danger I do not know. He does not speak to her or stare at her, but once in half an hour he will look at her gravely for five seconds, absorbed, and then seized by fear of the tendency of his thoughts turn away. Jacques has been arrested for rape twice: once the charges were dropped; once he served time in prison and time on parole.

Besides Josee, he finds me at the Krieghof, always ready to buy him a cup of coffee and to engage him in conversation. He lands on the extra chair at my table as if it were a safe island in a stormy sea. 59 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I I tell Jacques, my always-willing interlocutor, that I am working on the concept of cultural structure, and that I would be grateful if he would listen to me and comment, in order to help me make my thoughts on the subject clear. Jacques tells me that he always enjoys our conversations, that he needs someone who will take time to talk to him, someone to turn to, someone to share his problems with, that I can count on him, that any time I need someone to help me with my philosophy he is available. Because we are friends, arent we? I say that first I will explain why I need a concept of cultural structure. Jacques says, Allez-y, mon cher, which, freely translated, means, Go for it, baby. Everybody needs food, I state as my first premise. Right on! says Jacques. Now youre talkin. Say, for example, a sandwich. Yes, a sandwich, or a pizza. Jose comes to ask us if we want something. Jacques flushes. Her presence heats his body. He orders a coffee and a sandwich and a slice of pizza and a slice of poppyseed cake later with a second coffee, at my expense of course or, to be more precise, at the expense of the profits of the Lilly Pharmaceutical Company, which is the principal source of the endowment income of Earlham College, a fund to which I have access through my salary. Continuing my chain of reasoning, I say, If you need food, then you need money. Therefore, everybody needs money. It could not be otherwise, professor, says Jacques, imitating the way Glaucon answers Socrates in Platos Republic (which Jacques read at school). If you do not have money, then they tell you to get a job. (We speak loosely of the actions and attitudes of an unknown they. The real subject is, as will appear below, the cultural structure.) They treat me terrible on the street, Jacques volunteers. People look at me like Im trash. Women see me coming and they cross the street to run away. He made a disgusted face, as if it were ridiculous for a woman to be afraid of him. Or if you have a job that does not pay enough, they tell you to get a better job. It comes to the same thing, Jacques agrees. In order to apply for the job you need an education, I go on. I already have an education, says Jacques. Twice as much school as my grandfather had. As time goes by, they require more and more qualifications for employment. Now Jacques asks me a question. Do you think Im stupid? No. They talk about balancing the government budget. But they cant balance the budget, because that would cause a depression. Am I stupid? No. And they say you need to know more today because technology is complex. False. My grandpappy on the farm knew a lot more than I will ever know, I mean for his work: how to make cheese and butter, how to build a barn, when to cut the hay, how to doctor a sick horse, which weeds are poison for cows.... The last time I had a job I was a fries cook at McDonalds. It was boring. Most jobs are boring. Am I stupid? Youre making my point, I say. Everyone needs money and respect. Therefore, we need to reorganize the economy. Im with you, says Jacques. How are we going to do it? They tell us that in order to answer your question, How? you need to go to the university and

take classes in economics and political science. Thats what they want us to believe, says Jacques. 60 Letter 10 And learn about rationality. The free market. Or socialist planning. Or some combination of the two. So what is your alternative to rationality? Before we can propose a reform of rationality, we have to learn how to think about it. We have to be able to say what kind of thing rationality is, to trace how it has evolved, to project how it might evolve. What kind of thing is rationality? It is a cultural structure. You need a concept of cultural structure, says Jacques. I am so pleased to hear him say, You need a concept of cultural structure, that I throw my hands in the air for whoopee and then grasp one of his dirty hands and kiss it. Hey, back off! Whats the game? says Jacques. I am your friend, but I am not gay. These people will laugh at us. Sorry. I got carried away. I was so glad you told me I needed a concept of cultural structure. Now I will give you some definitions. 1. Cultural structures are those mechanisms that guide human behavior that are not biological structures. Biological structures are inherited; cultural structures are learned. 2. Cultural structures are typically made of symbols, such as words, images, numbers, money, diagrams, colors, sounds; for this reason they are sometimes called symbolic structures. 3. Cultural structures are the main source of the strength of the weak. The strong, by definition, have physical force. The weak must rely on the authority of cultural symbols. (There are, however, some biological sources of the strength of the weak, such as the bonding of the parent with the baby.) 4. Cultural structures are rgulations hermneutiques, to use a phrase invented by my friend Jean-Marie Debunne, who works in the Ministry of Education of Qubec. That is to say, they are ways to regulate behavior with meanings. It may also help to provide some definitions of structure. 1. Structure is how the whole relates to the parts and the parts relate to the whole. 2. Structure is the organizing pattern. (Thus, to use a biological example, we sometimes say that the structure, the organizing pattern, of the human body, is given by the bones, which set the framework within which the flesh and blood function. Alternatively, we can also say that the structure of the human body is given by the DNA codes which prescribe the pattern the body will follow as it grows.) 3. This one is an experiment: take two identical empty milk cartons, and tear one of them apart. They are still the same substance (inked waxed cardboard), except for one difference: the structure. One has the organizing pattern of a milk carton; the other is a heap of scraps. I will not attempt to give definitions of culture. There are many good, often lengthy, discussions of the concept in anthropology textbooks and in social science reference works. I especially like the definitions which identify culture with the way of life of a people, as when we speak of the Hopi culture. And the ones which identify culture with upbringing, as when we say that a baby born in Japan will be brought up according to the norms of Japanese culture. Culture is similar to agriculture because culture pertains to the raising of human beings, agriculture to the raising of

crops. 61 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I There are other concepts which do work similar to the work I want cultural structure to do. Some of them are: way of life, civilization, social formation, ideology, mythology, world view, discourse-with-practice, society, frame of reference, paradigm, problematique, Weltanschauung, ethos, world, approach, mentality, mantra de ser, symbol system, language-game, discourse, text, story, social text, webs of meaning. I have chosen cultural structure instead of one of the other concepts for three reasons: (1) I find structure to be a healing idea for reasons partly given in Letter Eight, partly to be given later. (2) Cultural contrasts nicely with biological. What is learned is cultural, what is inherited without being learned is biological; cultural coding contrasts with genetic coding. (3) Since cultural structure says that humans are self-regulating through language and imagination, when I come to discuss an economic concept (such as what Immanuel Wallerstein [American social scientist 1930] calls the governing logic of the modern world-system) the analysis of the economic concept as a cultural structure will already suggest its humanistic reform. As I have already implied by my approach to definitions, I do not in general think that philosophy should compose sets of interlocked definitions of terms, as if it were mathematics. Philosophy should work with words as they are, blending its love of wisdom with the way words live in the life of a people, and only occasionally engage in redefinition. The important question about the phrase cultural structure is not How do I define it? but whether attractive features of its alreadyexisting meaning can be brought out. A philosopher should give a concept a facelift, not a complete makeover. Jacques says it would help if I gave an example. Let me tell you about the blue lady, I reply. The Blue Lady I first learned about the blue lady from Bishop Landa, the second bishop of Yucatan, who wrote a book about the culture of the Mayan peoples before the Spanish conquest. The Mayans built immense ceremonial centers, such as Chichen Itza and Uxmal, where they sacrificed people by throwing them off the tops of pyramids and by carving out their hearts. In one particularly gruesome type of sacrifice a virgin was isolated for several weeks to make her ritually pure, then injured in her sex organs by the high priest and painted blue. The holy men, the initiated ones who alone could participate in the sacred rite, prepared themselves with many rituals and by drinking pulque, which when it is made the old-fashioned way contains mescaline, a hallucinogenic drug. Then they danced with the blue lady to the rhythm of ceremonial drums in an area charged with incense. After dancing with her they tied her to a post and danced around her. At a certain point in the dance each man swayed up to her and aimed a dart at her heart. The precise location of the heart had been marked previously on her body by the high priest. How did she feel? It is said (and who am I to doubt it?) that among the Aztecs athletes competed strenuously to take first place in the sacred games, in order to win the honor of being sacrificed to the gods. Among the Mayans an incident is related of a victim who refused to cooperate, an old man who threatened to use his influence in the spirit world if he were sacrificed to send more drought instead of the desired rain. Due to his uncooperative attitude the ceremony had to be cancelled until a new victim was selected which suggests that normally victims were willing. I

might mention that when we visited Uxmal with a group of college students, a 19-year-old woman from New York City spent almost an hour lying face up on top of the pyramid, imagining she was a sacrificial victim, hypnotized by her fantasy. 62 Letter 10 On the other hand, the blue lady may have been simply terrified. There are a number of anthropological accounts from different places reporting ceremonies more or less intentionally designed to intimidate women, and the intimidation of women as a gender-class may have been the point and purpose, or part of the point and purpose, of the blue lady ceremony. As to the feelings of the men, any behavioral biologist should be able to make a good guess concerning which hormones were circulating in their blood, and at what levels, as they danced with the blue lady and killed her with darts. None of us should be surprised, rudimentary as our knowledge of adrenalin (C9H3NO3) and the male hormone testosterone (C19H28O2) may be, that archaic peoples could find as much pleasure in sadistic eroticism as our contemporaries do. Biological structures stay the same from age to age, changing very slowly as the gene pool changes; among the many possible biologically given potentials some will be brought out more than others by a given cultural structure, but it is in no way surprising to find that the ancient Mayans wove into their ceremonies underlying biological codings that are tapped by contemporary pornography. But why paint the sacrificial victim a particular color? The answer is that the world of the Mayans was color-coded. The primal energies their culture triggered and channeled took on social identities in a colored world of meanings. The following poem, which is carved on the wall at the Museum of Anthropology at Merida, Yucatan, shows how color-coding is interwoven with other aspects of Mayan cultural structure: The sacred red stone, his stone The red being hidden in the earth The red ceiba tree, primeval The principal attribute of the orient The red tree of the mountain His tree, The red beans His beans His red birds with yellow crests, The red toasted corn. The sacred white stone, his stone The stone of the north The white ceiba tree, primeval His principal attribute The white being hidden in the earth The white birds The white beans The white corn, his corn. The sacred black stone, his stone

The stone of the west The black ceiba tree, primeval His principal attribute The black corn, his corn The black yam, his yam The black birds, his birds His house, the dark night The black bean, his bean 63 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I The sacred yellow stone, his stone The yellow ceiba tree, primeval His principal attribute The yellow tree, on the mountain His tree. His yellow yam, The yellow birds, his birds, His yellow beans, his beans. This poem is tided Cosmovision of Chulam Bayal. Anthropologists sometimes say that all early cosmovisions are religious, in the sense that the way early peoples put their worlds together has elements typical of what we call religion. For example, in this poem power, ownership, and obedience are combined in a way that can be called religious: the god has power over the objects that belong to him, and presumably we, as mortals, act with respect toward the sacred objects and obey the god. Obedience is especially exaggerated in ritual, where it often seems to be an end in itself. Obedience to the minute details of ritual is practice in the habit of being obedient. The ritual fits the myth, the myth fits the ritual. Josette Rey-Debove in her semiotic dictionary suggests that language took on its early articulations through the repeating of myths, and a myth, Northrop Frye (Canadian literary critic 1912-1991) says, is a story about a God. The rituals and myths were not, however, or at least not only, arbitrary ceremonials and stories people made up for fun; on the contrary, they served to organize social roles and agricultural labor, as can be seen, for example, in the Works and Days of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod (thought to have lived about 700 or 800 BC), in which the rhythm of the peasants work year is marked by festivals whose cultural meaning is given by ritual and story. Myth. Language. The primal energies of the body. Ritual. Practice. Labor. Livelihood. Cosmovision. All these are woven together an a traditional cultural structure, such as that of the Mayans. Jacques said he found it hard to believe that color-coding was as important to the Mayans as money-coding is to us. I said maybe not, but that in any case the total pattern of their lives, which included among other things a system of color-symbols, governed the basic functions, including access to food. We can, I went on, distinguish the more important, or basic, cultural structures as the ones which govern the means of survival; so far in human history, I am sorry to say, basic structures have been exploitative. It is common among tribal peoples to find that the culture defines the women as the ones who gather, tend gardens, and care for children, and the men as hunters and warriors. This is an exploitative structure because the women do more work than the men and get

less benefit, especially when hunting is infrequent and brings in only a small part of the food, and especially because the adult males monopoly on violence is used not only to intimidate enemy tribes but also to intimidate the women and children in their own tribe, often with the help of ceremonies and belief-systems which reinforce symbolically the patterns imposed by physical violence. Patriarchy is in this way a basic cultural structure, as are staple despotism (the system where the ruling class controls the granaries and compels the rest of the population to starve in the winter or submit), hydraulic despotism (where the ruling class controls the irrigation system), capitalism, and socialism. You mean that basic cultural structures control access to resources and the division of labor, so far in history mostly in an exploitative way. Yes. Now, says Jacques, some people are going to be confused by asking themselves how many cultural structures there are, like are there three, or six, or six hundred? I am not confused, 64 Letter 10 but like you said Im not stupid, and like I said I do have an education. I look like a wild man; Im nervous; I feel left out. I will tell you the truth: when my marriage went bad I gave up on myself. But I am not confused by asking how many cultural structures there are. Why not? When I was in school, at the Ecole Anne Hebert, they gave us little plastic triangles, circles, squares, and rectangles. They were red, yellow, and blue. One structure, one way the parts related to the whole, was to group them by shape; then there were four kinds: triangles, circles, squares, rectangles. Am I right? Right! See, I remember this stuff. The other structure was color-coded: red, yellow, blue. Then we could make a third structure: columns by shape, rows by color. All the triangles in one column, all the reds in one row. I was good at that. The teacher said, See how many stories you can make up. So I, little genius that I was, said different pieces could belong to different people: these are Chantals, these are Rodrigues, Chantals triangles, Rodrigues yellow squares.... Get it? I get it, I say. Its like, How many stories are there? There is The Wizard of Oz, but inside the story there is the story of Dorothy, and the story of the Cowardly Lion, the story of the Scarecrow, the story of the Tin Woodman, the story of Toto, the story of the Flying Monkeys, the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, the story of Aunt Em, the story of the Good Witch of the North, and then in the story of the Tin Woodman the Tin Woodman tells a story, so there is a story in a story in a story; and I wrote a story about witches where I took one witch out of the Wizard of Oz and other witches from other books, making a new story out of pieces from stories. So how many stories are there? The same as the number of cultural structures. In other words, as many as people decide to say there are. Of course if you get the wrong answer on the test, its still wrong. If you say there are fifteen provinces in Canada, it is wrong, even though a province is a cultural structure, and if people had wanted to do it they could have made Canada into three, or six, or six hundred provinces. OK. So thats the kind of creature this homo sapiens is. It makes up cultural structures, it decides to code its world with colors, it decides to exchange goods with prices expressed in money, it decides to divide a territory into provinces.... Not everything works: many tribes are extinct, their cultures along with them; many attempts to organize communities along novel lines have failed.

But everything cultural, whether it works or not, bears the stamp of imagination; consequently, humans do not find out how many cultural structures there are by going out to look at physical objects produced by nature and counting them; we decide what to construct, and how to look at what we have constructed, and in deciding how to look we choose whether for our purposes at the moment it would be convenient to call them three, or six, or six hundred. The peculiar absurdity of human inhumanity is that humans destroy themselves and each other with creations of the imagination, in which they are trapped. As Cornell West (contemporary black American philosopher) has noted, the situation of a person trapped in poverty in inner-city Brooklyn is absurd. Poor in the richest country in the world. Hungry when there are enormous food surpluses. Lacking space when endless miles of Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada are empty. Unemployed or underemployed while able to work. Sleeping five to a room when thousands of buildings across the nation are vacant. The physical, tangible, world offers no obstacles to prosperity, and yet the social obstacles do not move; the trap is absurd but tenacious. It will be tenacious, offers Jacques, until enough people read your Letters from Qubec and learn from it how to reconstruct cultural structures. 65 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I The Frog Stone I decide that our conversation is making the problems involved in changing cultural structures seem too easy. We are talking as though human beings voluntarily decide which stories to tell. To bring out the true dimensions of our predicaments I need to insist that there is a sense in which our stories tell us. To see the power of culture, to see that we depend on it and not it on us, is to see that the task is hard, any one persons contribution small. To try to make this point visible I will give another example of cultural structure, one which illustrates how stories are needed in order to be human at all; if this next example works, it will serve to temper optimism with reverence, indignation with gratitude. My example is the frog stone. The source of the idea, although I have adapted it to fit my purpose, is the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), who wrote an essay on the very earliest, and therefore presumably in some sense very most basic, forms of human social organization, drawing his evidence mainly from accounts of the Australian bush people, who were reputed at the time to be the most primitive people to be found on the planet, although he also supported his arguments with evidence drawn from North American Indian tribes. Every culture, he argued, generalizing from those he was examining, sets some things apart and regards them as sacred. Edmund Leach (contemporary British anthropologist) has named some things cultures are particularly likely to regard as sacred in Durkheims sense: fire, royalty, the abnormal, the special, the otherworldly. Durkheim found that tribal peoples often selected a totem as their sacred object: the totem might be a bird or other animal, a tree or other plant, a cloud formation, or a river. The general consciousness of society (what Durkheim called the conscience collective) weaves its world view around the sacred objects. Let us suppose, to illustrate the concept, that we are the frog people. The frog is our totem. We say, We are frogs. The frog is our symbol of kinship. The frog is sacred to us; we are the members of a clan called frogs, the wigwam we live in is called frog house, we dance the frog dance, we wear frog ornaments. We are defenders of frogs. Of course we will not kill a frog, because a frog is kin. We are defended by frogs-when we are in trouble we call Frogs to the rescue! and the frogs come hopping. And if someone kills us, the vengeance our murderers should fear is frog-

vengeance. That is why when in frog territory I carry a frog-stone. It is a rock with an image of a frog chipped into it. Being an imaginative creature I may exaggerate its real power to protect me; and being a fearful creature I may need some imaginative exaggerations to give me courage. It has at least some powers that are not just imagination: it is an identification that when shown to a fellow frog proves that I am friend, not foe or prey, not to be killed in battle as an enemy or slaughtered to be eaten as meat. When shown to a non-frog it inspires a certain amount of respect: it says I have a gang. Conversely, it is unsafe to be outside the cultural structure. Kinship is society, as anthropologists sometimes say of early peoples, and to be out of the kin system is, in my example, to be outside frog protection. It is to be an animal that may be hunted down and killed like any other. Early cultural structures sometimes produce rules that we with our cultural structures find strange. Humans (i.e., what we call humans) sometimes count as so much dirt, while a beaver or a hawk (the sacred totem) is treated with great respect. A tree in the forest may be regarded as kin, as a member of the family. Rules about what to eat and what not to eat, about what is clean and what is unclean, seem to us to have no rhyme nor reason-but they are for other cultures the very essence of rhyme and reason. The dietary rules and the rules governing purity and impurity are perfectly logical. Everything has a reason within the complex set of symbols which organizes their lives. 66 Letter 10 So it is your opinion that everything has a reason? Jacques asks. Only in a cultural structure. Without a culture you and I are only sand blowing through space. The frog-stone illustrates what Durkheim found to be the elementary form of human life: no humanity without respect, no respect without a sense of the sacred. Did you hear about Claude-Antoine? Claude-Antoine Who? Claude-Antoine Duchesne. Its in the paper. He killed his parents for no reason. He came home from college with a knife, one oclock in the morning. He found his mother on the couch in the front room, where she had fallen asleep watching TV; stabbed her six times. Then he went to the bedroom where his father was sleeping, stabbed him eight times. He was a model child. No motive. When the detectives ask him about the crime all he says is, Yes, sir; No, sir; I dont know, sir; I did it for no reason, sir. I dont know whether Jacques actually knows Claude-Antoine personally, or just spoke of him on a first name basis as one might speak of Elizabeth Taylor as Liz, because she is a celebrity, without pretending to be a friend of hers. I have a knife too, says Jacques. He taps the handle under his belt and grins for what seems like a long time, maybe 60 seconds. I try to read the emotions in his baby blue eyes. I see Pride. Resentment. Lust for Thrills. Rage. Bitterness. Depression. I see Pride again, Pride more than anything, Pride that he too is dangerous, volatile. He too could suddenly kill somebody for no reason. I wont kill you, Jacques says reassuringly. You treat me like a person. There is a hint of a tear in his eye as he says I treat him like a person. I think would pick a stranger. A complete stranger. . We blame ourselves too much, I say, trying to reassure him. I think my father blamed himself too much. I didnt say I was blaming myself.

I didnt say you did. I was talking about my father. He could not keep a job, or a woman. They told him he was a mental case. He believed it. He was convinced there was something wrong with him. He gave up on himself, as you said you did. You, on the other hand, blame the cultural structures, Jacques deduces. Exactly. It was reflecting about my fathers problems which started me thinking along these lines. I saw the role models society offered him, what he admired and tried to imitate, the demands he could not meet, what he became. His case is far from unique; there are epidemics of psychological problems because there are social problems. The economy grinds people up; the psychologists try to pick up the pieces. You are certainly in the minority, says Jacques. Ninety-nine percent of the people believe that what happens to the individual is the individuals fault. They also believe that any change must start with the individual. In fact, they believe that only individuals exist. An abstract concept like cultural structure is warm air in the clouds. Now you are getting metaphysical, I comment. When the world view implicit in a cultural structure becomes explicit in a very general remark like, Only individuals exist, that is metaphysics, something philosophers have done a lot with over the centuries, Anyway, says Jacques, isnt it unlikely that you and the one percent who agree with you are getting the picture and telling it like it is, while everyone else isnt getting it and, is telling it like it isnt? How do you explain so many people being mistaken? Guess. Cultural structure. Ninety-nine percent of the people think the way they do, because everybodys thinking is influenced by the prevailing culture. 67 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Right. Since the mind of the modern age reflects the cultural structures of the modern age, it is natural that majority thinking accepts individualism, which is the modern pattern. Now I will give you another example of cultural structure, but instead of showing the mind of the ancient Mayans or the Australian bush people, it will show the mind of which we are a part. The Chicken In the Road My third example is about a chicken in the road in twentieth century California. I saw the chicken in the road on Interstate Highway 10 near Golton, California in December of 1980.1 was driving my mother and my daughter Laura, who was 4, to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. The chicken had fallen off the back of a truck full of chickens. It was lying on the cement roadway in the middle of the inside lane, with its feet tied so that it could not walk. I wanted to stop the car and move the chicken to safety. I dont know why I did not do it. Maybe I should have. Since I have a tendency to spend more time thinking of reasons why whatever I did was right than I spend thinking of reasons why what I did was wrong, and since as it turned out I drove on and left the chicken lying in the road, I have, in thinking about the problem, composed mainly reasons why leaving the chicken there lying in the roadway was the right thing to do. Since I am likely to confuse the justifications I compose after the fact with the motives I had at the time, in my memory it seems to me that a split second after I saw the chicken I realized that my four-year-old daughter had not seen the chicken, and I drove on so that she would not know. As Plato said, it is important for little children to believe that the world is good, so that in later life when they find out that the world is not as it should be, they will feel that reality is wrong and try to change it.

My memory is unreliable because in my imagination I compose stories to justify myself, and afterwards I have no way to distinguish my story from my memory. However, I am quite sure that the chicken was in the wrong place. And even if there was never really any chicken in the road at all, I know that if there had been a chicken there, it would have been in the wrong place. The chickens were on their way to be slaughtered anyway, probably destined to end up fried in secret-recipe batter in a plastic bucket at a fast-food restaurant. But chickens are not supposed to die in the wrong place in the wrong way at the wrong time. Similarly, even if you could prove to me by chemical tests that the water in a certain toilet bowl has fewer poisons than the water in a certain drinking glass, I would still drink the water in the glass, because a drinking glass is the right place for drinking water. A toilet bowl is the wrong place. It is a place for dirty things. It is a place to put dirty things in order to flush them down the drain and forget about them. To return to the chicken: a fried-in-batter drumstick in a plastic bucket and a bloody mess on the road are two forms of dead chicken; the first is clean, the second is dirty; the first is in the right place, the second is in the wrong place. But what upsets me most about the chicken, and what makes me feel that after all I should have stopped the car and taken it off the roadway, is not, after all, its death, or the place of its death, but the indignity of its death. I am haunted by the image of the eye of the chicken, the eye staring upward when the chicken is squashed by the wheels of a passenger car. At least I could have taken off its footbinders and turned it loose to run around in the wrecked auto dump beside the highway; if later it were attacked and killed by a stray dog it would die in a more dignified way. Being clean or dirty is rather like being pure or impure which is rather like being sacred (like the frog-stone) or being profane. Being in the right place or in the wrong place for a chicken is comparable to the organization of space according to colors and deities achieved by 68 Letter 10 the Mayans. In our own society, however, the sacred has to a large extent become identified with the ideal of respect for persons, so that whatever reminds us of a violation of the ideal of respect for the individual, such as, for example, a chicken lying helpless on the highway unable to move, we experience as disgusting. If instead of being a more or less normal member of our society I were a certain kind of sicko, I would take a special delight in flaunting the image of the helpless chicken I would deliberately torture animals in Satanic ceremonies because by symbolically violating our societys ideal of respect for individuals I could take symbolic revenge. Jacques drank both his cups of coffee, but he did not finish his slice of pizza or his poppyseed cake. He wrapped them in a napkin, put the package thus formed into a pocket of his jacket, walked out the door and away down the street, and disappeared into a sullen mist. To say that there are cultural structures is to say that culture structures, which is to say that culture organizes. Cultural structures are not the only organizations found on this and other planets: molecules form structures too; cells have structures organized by DNA. Crystals are organized, and the pattern of ecological succession from grassland to forest passes through a series of organized patterns of interaction. Dolphins use acoustic signals to structure their travelling formations (squares, circles, or single file) with dominant individuals in the lead and the young in the middle, where they are protected. It is typical of us humans that we make structures out of meanings; we make and follow rgulations hermneutiques. 69 70

Letter 11 11 A DIALOGUE ON METAPHYSICS WITH VERONICA When the person is in tune with the whole, the hands begin to move and the feet begin to dance. Mencius (Chinese philosopher, flourished 372-289 BC) In dealing with relationships I assume that the other persons involved and I are emotional basket cases. When we try to establish meaningful friendships we disappoint each other. The wounds life has inflicted on us are such that we want more from others than others can possibly give us. We have unmet needs too many and too deep whether we had happy childhoods or sad ones. Those who had happy childhoods never get used to the fact that the grown-up world does not love them as their parents did. Those who had sad childhoods never recover from the lack of love they never had. I realize that these rather pessimistic statements about human relationships in our society are not always true, but they are nevertheless my default assumptions about any particular relationship to be believed true until proven false. I have a fear that if I get to know people I will discover their basic insecurity and inadequacy, and they will discover mine, and we will fail each other. As a result I refrain from getting to know some of the people I most admire and most would like to know. Sometimes I admire people to the point that I adore them, but I do not say so. Whether they guess that they are being adored I do not know. My feeling is like a teenage emotional crush, but not necessarily erotic, and applicable to same sex or other sex, same age or any age. One of the people I have secretly admired is Veronica. She impressed me because she was good, not because she was a woman, even though the way in which she was good is sometimes considered typical of women. I have known men who were somewhat like her. Veronica and I and five others lived together in a two-storey white house with heavy brown hardwood floors and bannisters, a mile south of the Berkeley campus of the University of California. It was a solid house built by a prosperous family in the 1920s, which had been left behind by changing fashions, rented to students and allowed to run down. On the second storey of the house there was an old-fashioned bathtub standing on iron legs that ended in iron feet shaped like the claws of baby lions. The old bathtub had been recently modified by adding a shower nozzle, a yellow shower curtain, a pink elliptical plastic hoop to hang the yellow curtain from, and metal rods to attach the pink elliptical plastic hoop to the unreasonably high ceiling. There were, I am sorry to say, some among us who used this makeshift shower carelessly, wetting the floor. One morning if I remember rightly it was shortly after the people with 9a.m. classes had left Veronica padded into the upstairs bathroom in the fuzzy sky-blue slippers she used to wear, and found that the bottoms of her feet were cooler than usual. The lower quarter-inch of her slippers was no longer sky-blue and fuzzy. It was purple and sagging. I noticed what was happening because I was shaving and my feet were also wet, although bare. My attitude toward the situation was, obviously, nonchalant. 71 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I On the other hand, two of our housemates, Alice and Roy, hated it when people did not clean up after themselves. Wet bathrooms upset them, and when they were upset they expressed their feelings.

Veronicas response I am telling about it because it was typical of her was to take off her slippers, wipe her feet with a towel, go downstairs to get a bucket and mop, and dry the linoleum. Then she put the bucket and mop away, and pinned her slippers with clothespins on the pink elliptical plastic hoop to dry. To those who would consider Veronicas action inexcusably servile, she appears to be a victim. But she was happy. She carried the mop and bucket up the stairs eagerly, with quick short steps, as if she were rushing to catch her favorite TV program, her feet and leg muscles energized by anticipated pleasure. I admire Veronica because she is one of the people I have known, some women and some men, whose way of living seems to connect with a taproot of joy. She loved to cook and to help with dishes, to braid her girlfriends hair, to plant tomatoes and to make tomato sauce for winter, to refinish furniture, to paint houses, and to graft apricot branches onto quince tree trunks. My aim is not to praise her for doing more than her share of the work, and I should say that Veronica was capable of confronting people when they tried to take advantage of her. My aim is to locate the source of her energy. Some years later, during a period when I had lost touch with Veronica, I read the anthropologist Dorothy Lees account of the Tikopians, one of the peoples of the Trobriand Islands. Her account included a report about herself: she wrote that she feels great joy when sewing clothes for her children. It is as if an exciting pulse uniting their lives and hers flows through her fingers, through the needle, through the thread, and through the cloth. Nel Noddings, in her book Caring, reports finding a similar joy in domestic labor. Dorothy Lee hypothesizes that among the Tikopians the energy she feels while sewing flows frequently. That is why they are able to cook, fish, wash, sew, till, harvest, and celebrate together without ever doing what we would call work. In his book, The Rise of Economic Society, Robert Heilbroner contends that there are only three ways to organize the production and distribution of the necessities of life: by tradition, by command, and by market. Although history shows a pattern of change from ancient arrangements based mainly on tradition, to market economies, to command economies, to the convergence of the latter two (command economies becoming more market-oriented and market economies becoming more plan-oriented), a complex modern society organizes its work to some extent in all three ways: some tasks are done because they are traditional, some are done because the workers are obliged to obey commands, and some tasks are done because of market incentives. Veronica, Lee, Noddings, and the Tikopians convince me that something has been left out of Heilbroners trichotomy, although I dont know what the right name of it is. It is, I think, significant, that in our language we do not have a ready name for the kind of joy Veronica felt mopping the floor and Dorothy Lee felt sewing clothes. Let me give it the label, being in love. Because we are willing to accept the proposition that competition is necessary that without it people would be lazy and unproductive does not require us to accept the proposition that in a competitive world there is no room for love. We do not have to choose between selfish motives and higher motives, anymore than we must choose in our personal lives either to have a family or to have a job. We do not need to try to replace competition with love. Instead we can add love to competition; in this way we can get more motivation instead of less. Modifying Heilbroners trichotomy: the work of the world gets done partly because of tradition, partly because of people obeying commands, partly due to market incentives, and partly because people are in love. Lets hear it for a judicious alloy of all four! 72 Letter 11 Over the years Veronica has come to stand in my mind for the propositions: (1) Not everybody is

an emotional basket case, and (2) It is not necessary that those of us who are messed up be the way we are. We could have turned out differently; perhaps we can still change. As Frances Moore Lapp and Joseph Collins main message for me was, The world does not have to be the way it is, because they proved that hunger and poverty are not necessary, so Veronica proved to me that People dont have to be the way most people are. It is possible for people to enjoy one anothers company, to be supportive of each other, and to enjoy sharing the basic tasks that keep life going. For 27 years I have not seen Veronica. Whether she remembers me I do not know. I did not find out until two years after the event that she had married a graduate school classmate of mine, who was teaching philosophy at California State University, Fullerton campus. When I learned of her marriage my first thought was that he was not good enough for her. That is always my opinion when people I adore marry. But what do I want them to do? Stay single all their lives? Sometimes I have fantasies in which Veronica and I meet to discuss my philosophy of cultural action and the role she plays in it as the paradigm of being in love. We meet for lunch at Hardees in Fullerton, a 24-hour restaurant featuring a bottomless cup of coffee, hanging ivy and fern brass pots, and fries. (I like 24-hour restaurants even when it is midday, because they give me the feeling that there is always food.) Veronica is with her husband and four children, I with my wife Caroline and two daughters. The younger children have bacon cheeseburgers and Big Deluxes, except for Veronicas youngest, seven, who gets a Fun Meal. The grownups and older children order Mushroom n Swiss and garden salad because we are vegetarians. I begin by saying that philosophy is centrally and most importantly metaphysics. In order to explain my meaning I go into part of the history of the words philosophy and metaphysics. In early modern Europe there were three kinds of philosophy: Natural Philosophy, Civil Philosophy, and First Philosophy. The last was also called metaphysicks. Its leading characteristic was that it provided the fundamental categories which were common to and united natural and civil philosophy. The field called natural philosophy has been renamed, rethought, and reorganized, and is now what we call natural science. The field once called civil philosophy is given other names today, and has for the most part become what we call social science. That which is called philosophy in our times is what used to be called first philosophy, and its leading task continues to be to establish the unifying concepts which integrate the several spheres of culture. My view is compatible with those who see logic as the central activity of philosophy, since logic aspires to be a discipline of great generality, prescribing rules which apply to all statements. (And indeed the early moderns sometimes spoke of metaphysick and logick in the same breath, as if they had similar or overlapping functions.) My view of the nature of philosophy is also compatible with seeing fundamental ontology as central to philosophy, as Heidegger does in his early work. I call fundamental ontology a form of metaphysics, although it is hot a form of metaphysics I wholly recommend. Somewhat like Heidegger, I consider what he calls fundamental ontology and what I call metaphysics to have important influences on the answers people get when they ask questions in ethics, logic, scientific method, esthetics, political philosophy, epistemology, history of philosophy, and the other sub-disciplines which philosophy is frequently said to include. Is that what you really want to say? Veronica asks. I mean, after 27 years, I think you have chosen an unusual way to begin catching up. I am an unusual person, I admit. But I am trying as hard as I can to make myself understood. What I really want to say since you asked is, Shalom! Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen. But I cant say that at least, I cant say just that. It sounds divisive and anti-scientific. I want a language that brings humanity together to 73

LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I cooperate in solving common objective problems, like the problem posed by the physical fact that we are poised to destroy life. That is why we need metaphysics shared meanings that facilitate cooperation by facilitating communication. Veronica nods pensively, as if she appreciates the depth of my desire to communicate. I knew I could count on her. You will have to work hard to make yourself understood, she says. In the first place, in earlier letters from Qubec you have already defined philosophy several times. You said that philosophy constructs codes, you said that philosophy is the love of wisdom, you said that philosophy is cultural action, and lately you seem to be putting more emphasis on the idea of cultural structure than on the idea of code. I suppose you think you are developing the same ideas more and more adequately, but it is not easy to tell whether you are adding to what you have already said, or taking it back and saying something else. In the second place, many modern philosophers would agree with you that metaphysics is an attempt to say what cannot be said, but they would draw a different conclusion abandon metaphysics, root it out, destroy the sophistry and illusion that is the only possible result of trying to say the unsayable. You, on the other hand, take the limits of what can be said to hamper cooperation, and you want to do philosophy in a way that extends the possibilities of communication, and therefore those of collective problem-solving. In the third place, metaphysics has traditionally been, as you recognize, part of the ideological arsenal of elites who have used it to defend elite privileges, and for this reason more than one philosopher has associated the end of oppression with the end of metaphysics. And in the fourth place, you sometimes say that you do not aim to create the philosophy of the future, but only to contribute to the process through which the millions of people throughout the world who are trying to cope with the problems of life, and who are gradually realizing that the species can only cope through greater cooperation, will through the forges and winnows of struggle find the language that works. That will be the new philosophy. What do you mean? I suspect that you are not unacquainted with the wish to say things which seem to be unsayable, I replied. I remember quite well that when we lived in a house together at Berkeley, you were the one who talked the least, but I have come to think that you had the most to say if only what you had to say could be said. We had many heavy discussions in our student commune about how to live, sex, science, politics, drugs, religion, war, and money. You were thought of as a person who had little to contribute, and for that reason devoted herself mainly to listening. But you seemed to know more than anyone else about how each of us was feeling, and about our personal problems. If I was feeling disgruntled and was playing the martyr, hoping secretly that somebody would notice my discontent, it was invariably you who were aware of how I felt. I suspect that there was something in what you thought and felt that was hard to say in the existing language, which explains why you spoke little when we talked about how to live, even though of all of us you were the best person to share happiness with and the most supportive comforter in times of misery. Do you want to say, asked Veronica, that if philosophy could produce a Veronica-metaphysic, and if through whatever historical processes lead to the adoption of one metaphysic rather than another, society should adopt a Veronica-metaphysic, then what a person like myself feels could be more persuasively expressed, and would seem more relevant and be more relevant to the great issues of economics, politics, how to live, and how to die? If that is what you want to say, she added, then you will have two kinds of problems: you will have to respond to those who need reasons why they should adopt a Veronica-metaphysic, and you will need to respond to those who need reasons why there should be any metaphysic at all.

It is what I want to say, I replied. And instead of discussing these issues in the abstract, let me propose a sample metaphysical statement: it is natural for human beings to be in love. 74 Letter 11 I take this to be a succinct principle of Veronica metaphysics. This sample of metaphysics can then be examined by subjecting it to some of the typical criticisms that twentieth century philosophers might make, both those who are likely to object to love as a metaphysical principle, and those who take it to be a worthy aim to abolish metaphysics altogether. This will also give me a chance to reply to each of the four objections you raised a minute ago, namely (1) that it is hard to see how philosophy is centrally metaphysics is consistent with the other things I say about philosophy, (2) that good reasons are often advanced for concluding that metaphysics is nonsense, (3) that metaphysics is elitist, and (4) that I need to make up my mind what the role of the organic intellectual is in the social change process. Perhaps with this point (4) I put words in your mouth you did not intend but I will explain them. Roy, Veronicas husband, had been helping their youngest to blow up the balloon she had gotten with her Fun Meal, while listening to our conversation with one ear. I will be the twentieth century philosophers, he said. At least a few of them. There have been so many that I cant be all of them. He proceeded to make himself some toy hats out of napkins: one labelled logical positivist, one labelled ordinary language philosopher, one labelled dialectical materialist, and one labelled phenomenologist. I was beginning to like Roy better, and to take a more generous position on the question whether he was good enough for her. Roy put on his logical positivist hat first, but I made no special allowances for the doctrine he represented and continued talking as if he were an ordinary listener. First I will say something about my motives: why I choose to say, It is natural for humans to be in love. Then I will explain the problem: why some of the truths this statement tries to express tend to lack effective expression in the modern world. And then I will explain why the problem can be called metaphysical. The human species evolved, beginning perhaps two million years ago (the time when, it now seems, the members of our species first became efficient hunters) as hunters and gatherers living in tribes. During this time the human being developed the capacity for a range of emotions which under the usual circumstances of life must have been on the whole functional. On its positive, constructive, pleasant, cooperative side I call the fulfillment of this capacity, being in love. That with equal naturalness human emotions can take negative forms like fear and rage I do not doubt. Hate and love are both natural; which of them prevails depends on what we do with what we are. And think about this, please one constructive thing we can do with what we are is to tell ourselves that being in love is natural. During the past few centuries, modern European civilization has dominated the globe; its market economy, its forms of holding property, its science, its bureaucracy, have obliged humans to become more rational, partly by forcing them to subordinate passion to calculated interest or else lose lifes race. In this world that commodity exchange built, love appears to be unreal. Our dominant cultural structures program us to be inclined to say, Force is reality; love is nonfunctional. The opposite is true: our economies, our personal relationships, our global commerce, our efforts to resolve conflicts and live in peace together are nonfunctional for lack of capacity to tap the deep springs of human motivation. They collapse in vandalism, lethargy, apathy, embitterment, sado-masochistic hostility. The problem and its cure are in a certain respect metaphysical which is not to say that ideas alone change history, but rather to say that discourse and practice change together. We inhabitants

of the twentieth century, struggling to make our species viable, are constrained in our struggle to envision and create a caring global community partly because the legacy of capitalism is a mechanistic metaphysics. Be careful, said the logical positivist (who was really Roy), I fear that your talk is too loose and too fast. He then took a moment to inflate a second balloon which Lucie had found in her Fun Meal. Then he bogged down in trying to tie the balloon to a toy of the same 75 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I provenance without letting the air escape. A logical positivist is a person who practices a kind of philosophy called logical positivism. That kind of philosophy arose in Vienna, Austria, during the 1920s and 1930s. It had followers and sympathizers throughout Europe and North America, some of them hard-core, others agreeing with some key logical positivist doctrines while disagreeing with others. All agreed that they were trying to develop a Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, that is to say, in English, a scientific view of the world. Their characteristic doctrine concerning what a scientific world view consists of had been stated succinctly two centuries earlier, in the eighteenth century, by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, in these classic words: When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. These words from Hume, although written two hundred years before the logical positivists flourished in Vienna, are typical of logical positivism. Hume sets up certain standards which purport to distinguish the meaningful from the meaningless; talk that does not conform to those standards is not to be deemed admissible in a scientific view of the world. The distinctive feature of the logical positivist attack on metaphysics is that (on the basis of reasoning similar to Humes), it is said that metaphysics is contrary to what you might expect not false. It is not false because before a statement can be judged either true or false it must first be meaningful. Metaphysics is not meaningful; it is nonsense. The claim that metaphysics is nonsense can be illustrated by summarizing the analysis of the word God given by Rudolf Carnap, a leading logical positivist, in his 193 2 paper, The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language. Carnap distinguishes mythological, metaphysical, and theological uses of the word God. When the word God is used mythologically, it means that there are physical beings like the Greek gods enthroned on Mount Olympus, or at least one or more spiritual beings which manifest themselves in concrete effects which can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted. In its mythological use, the word God is used to make statements the falsity of which can be scientifically proven, and therefore the statements are meaningful (but false). In its metaphysical use, the word God does not refer to anything that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted; God is put beyond any possible scientific investigation. Hence metaphysical pseudo-statements containing the word God are not statements; they are meaningless. The theological use of the word waffles back and forth between the mythological and the metaphysical. Some theological talk about God is meaningful and false for this reason the theologian retreats to metaphysics, but loss of meaning is the price he or she pays to avoid falsity. The logical positivist (Roy) has succeeded in using a straw to attach Lucies second balloon to a tiny plastic rabbit on a tiny skateboard, and the rabbit is now skating up and down the table holding her balloon, with help from Lucie and Roy. I should say, Roy demurs while pushing the rabbit, that I am not a hard-core logical positivist.

Logical positivism has now been amended in response to criticism so much amended that in 1990 there are no hard-core logical positivists left, only sympathizers like me who still endorse some of the main aims of the movement. Your words, it is natural for humans to be in love, are the kind of unscientific overgeneralization that we positivists seek to eliminate. What conceivable scientific procedure could determine whether what you are saying is true or false? What basic facts that humans can see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and measure can you refer to for the purpose of verifying that what you are saying is either true or false but not meaningless? 76 Letter 11 Veronica suggests a compromise. It seems that Howard is in favor of metaphysics, while the logical positivist is against metaphysics. But you may be using the same word to stand for two different things. Im not so sure, I say. I want to say, It is natural for humans to be in love, not just because it is poetry designed to bring out the best in people, but also because it has a real basis in the structure of the human body. Nevertheless, it is a generalization above and beyond anything that could be specifically proven. So I think that on the whole the logical positivists and I mean the same thing by metaphysics. Further, if you look at Carnaps list of words he wants to eliminate because they are metaphysical, you will find, besides God, several others that I want to rehabilitate and understand in context, such as principle of being (Aristotles arch) and the being of being (Heideggers Sein des Seindes). Then what do you think? asks Veronica. How do you reply to the logical positivist? Do you want to know what I think or what I really think? What you really think. I really think that in history philosophies are more the effects than the causes of basic cultural structures, even though sometimes philosophy plays a creative role. Philosophies are, on the whole, ideologies. Logical positivism is a sophisticated scientistic ideology the immediate beneficiaries of which are the scientists themselves, and the broader political implications of which are on the whole centrist. Logical positivism extends certain cultural themes (notably the extension of the theme function from mathematics to logic) that are prominent in the Denkform (thought-form) characteristic of the core societies of the modern European world system. I find your remarks obscure, Veronica replies. Perhaps they will become less obscure when you fill in more historical background. For the moment it might be better if you would give up on trying to say what you really think, and just say what you think. I assume, I say, that the logical positivist who happens to be at Hardees in Fullerton on a Saturday afternoon, who perhaps just wants a straightforward logical answer and not a disquisition on the role of logic in history, agrees with Carnap, who wrote, Metaphysics does indeed have a context; only it is not a theoretical context. The (pseudo) statements of metaphysics do serve for the expression of the general attitude of a person toward life. Very well. Here I can answer the logical positivist by agreeing with him. It is natural for humans to be in love expresses my general attitude toward life. Its relationship to science is dual: (1) On the one hand it is a synthesis of much that I have learned from reading the works of anthropologists and other scientists. (2) On the other hand, it is too broad a generalization to be provable. It is chosen both for its beneficial effect as a slogan and for its correspondence with facts. The Ordinary Language Philosopher

Roy puts on the hat made of napkins which is labelled Ordinary Language Philosopher. I also, he says with the hat on, eliminate metaphysics. My hero, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once said: The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i. e. the propositions of natural science, i. e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy but it would be the only strictly correct method. Wittgenstein wrote this in his youth; when he grew older he tended to emphasize ordinary language more than natural science as the domain of what can be said. By straying out of the domain of what can be said we wander into the unsayable no-place called metaphysics. 77 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Ordinarily we would say, continued the ordinary language philosopher, that sex is more natural than love. Wouldnt we? Just as we would ordinarily say that tea with milk is jolly good stuff, unless we were American. Americans ordinarily say Coca-Cola is the real thing, dont they? Roys older daughter Millie obligingly went to fetch tea and milk for her father, since he was impersonating an English ordinary language philosopher. I very much doubt that any good will come of using the word natural oddly, Roy goes on. It is odd to say, love is natural, and therefore it is wrong. Its an abuse of the language, isnt it? Natural is jolly well what people ordinarily say is natural. Therefore, if a chap says love is natural, hes not talking English, is he? Love is a bloody miracle, thats what we ordinarily say, bloody unlikely. Supernatural, thats what it is. I am easily amused. I laugh so hard at Roys British bit that I choke on a gulp of water. Veronica puts me face down on the floor and beats on my neck until the water falls out of my windpipe. Caroline turns six shades of pink. I sit up and try to act respectable, hoping that the other people in the restaurant will stop looking at us, and that Caroline and Roy are not too embarrassed. I once said, I say, that philosophy makes codes. Philosophy is not as much concerned with sending messages in the existing codes as with establishing possibilities of communication. Later I stopped saying code so much and talked more about cultural structures. The cultural structure concept is more comprehensive than the code concept. It is true to say that philosophy makes codes, but the codes that facilitate social transformation are not just new signs for the old objects in the old context; instead, they function in new systems of meaning. Moral and intellectual reform was not at the top of the agenda of the philosophical movement centered at Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s, known as ordinary language philosophy. Nevertheless, OLP doctrines do allow a modest role for cultural action. One can try to set oneself up as a linguistic legislator, one who makes new rules, and if one has the good fortune to be generally followed, ones pretensions will not be false. What I combat, the ordinary language philosopher agrees, is not novelty but blundering. I oppose coining new words and changing the meanings of existing words without knowledge of the language as it is. And I oppose the empty talk that sometimes pretends to convey extraordinary messages. When a chap uses words outside the range of ordinarily accepted meanings, the message that chap communicates is nought. Zero, as you say in America. He is trying to talk a private language, but he fails because there is no such thing as a private language. Do not underestimate the importance of basing philosophy on ordinary language instead of basing

it on the artificial languages of computers, mathematics, and symbolic logic. It amounts to putting common sense above science. I reply, Some things worth saying fall outside the message-carrying capacity of ordinary English prose, such as: ...emotion deeper than the voices of all roses, or It is to be enough for us that we are together. But such efforts to extend the boundaries of the sayable are often for a good cause; frequently rock lyrics, for example, are where the bleeding heart, the artist, takes a stand for a good cause. If there is novelty in saving love is natural, it is not blundering; it is a good-faith attempt to contribute to building a better world. Saying it will do us no end of good. It is one of the best things we could possibly tell our children. Looked at in a long historical perspective, however, it is the opposite of novel as will appear in later letters about ancient and medieval philosophy. It is returning to our roots. 78 Letter 11 The Dialectical Materialist Dialectical materialism, which is sometimes called DIAMAT, has followers everywhere; it is the official philosophy of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. I have heard rumors that there are millions of schoolchildren there who are bored by it and wish they did not have to study it. Whether the rumors are true I do not know. If the Russians are really bored by DIAMAT and hate it, then they will renounce it at their first opportunity, and if their first opportunity comes soon, there will be one less reason for believing that the metaphysics of the future must be compatible with DIAMAT. Nevertheless, like logical positivism and like ordinary language philosophy, DIAMAT has intellectual merits which deserve to be considered independently of whether its number of adherents waxes or wanes. Lucie climbs onto her fathers shoulders, almost choking him with her fat legs around his neck, grasping his hair with fingers damp from ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise. She insists on riding across the room mounted on him, and on dropping her unfinished milk shake from above into a trash can. She misses. We clean up. Now she wants to ride on Roy while carrying a plastic tray, and to place the plastic tray, by herself, without anybodys help, on the top of a stack of used trays. Finally she and Roy go out the door for a walk around the block, tall horse, giggly rider, followed by most of the kids. Roys dialectical materialist hat remains unworn on the table among discarded sandwich wrappings and uneaten french-fried potatoes. Lacking a dialectical materialist to talk to, I continue my thoughts as a monologue. If you say everything is equally material, and that which is not material does not exist in any sense, then doesnt the word material lose all meaning? Material as opposed to what? To say everything is material is then no different than saying everything is everything. No information is conveyed. But what embarrasses me when I talk with dialectical materialists is that I cannot quite convince myself that they are sincere when they refrain from telling me that I am on the wrong side in the class struggle. I suspect them of just being polite. I suspect that they think my philosophy is idealism; that any philosophy which uses the word love is idealism, and therefore my philosophy must be idealism; that idealism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, that materialism is the philosophy of the working class, and therefore I am on the bourgeois side, which is the wrong side. It is sometimes said that a materialist viewpoint sees the main human motives to be acquiring the basic goods and services needed for survival, while idealists exaggerate the extent to which

peoples motives are religious, patriotic, maternal, sexual, ceremonial, principled.... If this is the difference between materialism and idealism then the idealists are by definition mistaken, because they exaggerate, and the materialists must be right because it follows from biology that humans, like any other species, must acquire the necessities of life; if they do not, then they cannot do anything else. Concerning class conflict, the metaphysical statement, It is natural for humans to be in love is more a proletarian slogan than a bourgeois slogan. Rephrased in Marxist language, when a human being lacks the loving relationships that are the natural desiderata of human life, the person is alienated; when they are not lacking, the person realizes the human species-being (in Marxs German, Gattungswesen). Of course, class conflict is not simple, but in a simple situation where the interests of those who work for a living are opposed to the interests of those who live by appropriating the fruits of other peoples labor, the idea of building a better tomorrow where people are not alienated from each other can be, if it is not misused, an idea that works for the workers. 79 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I The Phenomenologlst When Roy puffs back into Hardees still carrying Lucie, Veronica explains that I said my piece on dialectical materialism without him, and suggests that since the kids are restless, we could adjourn to a park and push them in swings while discussing phenomenology. Caroline leaves a five-dollar tip, explaining that the money will help the waitress to find her soul and to achieve cosmic consciousness. At the park we fill five swings with little bundles of vitality and joy-potential, assigning to push them into happiness the oldest child and the four adults, one of whom (Veronica) is the phenomenologist. Phenomenology is for the most part a continental European philosophical movement; it started at the end of the nineteenth century and it has not stopped yet. Its Founder with a capital F was Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who taught at several German universities and at Paris. The phenomenologist first makes a remark apropos of the word natural in the sentence, It is natural for human beings to be in love. For most people, she says, to call something natural is to call it good; nature is as highly thought of as motherhood, apple pie, Disneyland, and true love. But just as there are working women who are questioning whether they really want motherhood, and calorie counters who avoid apple pie, and snobs who despise theme parks, and playboys who prefer playmates to true love, there has to be somebody who would say that the natural point of view is the wrong point of view for philosophy. That somebody is me, the phenomenologist. (The phenomenologist had to do her duty by entering a formal objection to my use of the word natural because you cannot be a card-carrying phenomenologist if you do not bracket the natural standpoint. But what she really wanted to do and the reason why Veronica wanted to be the phenomenologist was mostly to point out ways phenomenology gives love encouragement. Unlike the other three, who mostly wanted to argue that the kind of thing I wanted to say was not, properly and/or scientifically, sayable.) From the natural standpoint, as our founder Husserl describes it, the world is made up of things that are for me, the subject, simply there. The things continue in time. They are located in space. Animal beings too are simply there, including humans. I lookup and see them, I hear them coming

towards me; in the case of humans, I shake hands with them. Speaking with them, I understand immediately what they are sensing and thinking, the feelings that stir them, what they wish and will. But this natural standpoint, comfortable and normal as it is, is not a suitable starting point of philosophy. Philosophy ought to stand back from everyday natural assumptions. Phenomenology begins with a special technique invented by Husserl called bracketing the natural standpoint. That means the philosopher deliberately disconnects from the natural standpoint; she or he stops making all the hidden assumptions it carries with it; she or he puts the natural way of experiencing things in parentheses. As phenomenologists, we neither affirm nor deny anything about it; instead we exercise our freedom to suspend judgment. One of the benefits of performing this mental operation called bracketing the natural standpoint is that we thus gain access to pure consciousness which we can then study systematically. Perhaps contrary to what one might expect, the technique of bracketing has led, not so much in Husserls own work as in that of his followers, to a closer examination of the ways people experience the world; i.e., to the world-as-lived, or lived-world, or life-world, or being-in-theworld. Bracketing helps philosophers to study the close-at-hand more exactly, because it helps them to reflect on things previously unnoticed because taken for granted. 80 Letter 11 Husserls student and teaching assistant, Martin Heidegger, became the most famous, but not the most faithful, of his followers. Heideggers version of phenomenology differs from his teachers, although it also rejects the natural standpoint. Two of Heideggers findings tend to support your statement that it is natural for humans to be in love. 1. A person (Dasein, in Heideggers technical language) is always in a mood: if not in one mood, then in some other mood. Before Heidegger, philosophy had ignored moods, but Heidegger pointed out that whatever else you may say about moods, you must grant that they are not nothing. I interrupt the phenomenologist to say that not only is a mood not nothing, it is an interpersonal attitude. If I walk around the streets grouchy, or happy, or bored, then there is something about my interpersonal relationships, conscious or unconscious, that in combination with my blood sugar level, hormone flow, and general health or sickness makes my mood what it is. That we have been formed by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to be social is shown by the phenomenon of mood. We are born to harmonize, and being in a good or bad mood is like being in or out of tune. The phenomenologist continues with her second point. 2. Besides mood, another key word in Heideggers philosophy is care (Sorge). In attempting to say what a person (Dasein, to be more exact) is, Heidegger finds no word more useful than Sorge, which means care, or concern, or even worry. He says Dasein ist Sorge, which you may wish to take as collateral evidence, arriving at a similar result using a different approach, supporting the proposition that to be a person is to care, and hence that it is natural to be in love. By which you do not mean, I assume, that everyone should get married and have children I know a nun who does not have even a cat or a rose bush, but I would call her in love in the sense I think you mean. Then she adds, I would also like to share with you this quotation from the Preface to The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. You may find it pertinent because love is a mystery. Phenomenology is... as Husserl says, a dialogue or an infinite meditation, and to the extent that it remains true to its intentions, it will never know where it is going. The unfinished and

unformed quality of phenomenology is not a sign of failure; it is inevitable because the task of phenomenology is to reveal the mystery of the world and the mystery of reason. I do not think it important to decide whether I agree or disagree with the assertions of the phenomenologists, even though I value them and find them helpful, partly because, rather like the logical positivist, I doubt that claims so general and so vague can be classified as true or false, and partly because my aims are more practical than academic. What matters is the survival and happiness of life, and that will be made possible if it is not already too late for it to be possible by the collective reconstruction of culture. For the purposes of cultural reconstruction, the themes of philosophy are not so much candidates for verification as candidates for building material. I thank Veronica for her kind thoughts and suggest to her, to Roy, and to Caroline, that on another day we continue to speak of Merleau-Ponty, of Husserl, and of Heidegger, at another restaurant or in another park. I would like to extend the fragment-of-metaphysic It is natural for humans to be in love to make it a true cultural structure and not just a sample sentence, some other day in some other restaurant or at some other park; in the meantime, I hope Veronica finds herself in my budding love metaphysic. She is a junction where nature and culture meet in a way different from the usual way, where the fuel and fire of nature 81 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I are transformed into the romance and ritual of culture according to a different pattern. People like her are inspirations for an alternative world view. I do not have the right to name the alternative world view, but I have a great desire to contribute to creating it. I have tentatively named it a love metaphysic, but I hope it is clear that this name is only a label that happens to make sense to one person; it is not necessarily what the alternative world view will be called in the future when it becomes generally accepted. I assume that some such alternative world view will be accepted in the future, under some name or other, because I am convinced that, if not, there will be no future. The new philosophy needs to be of the people, and it needs to be made by the people, and that is why anything I may say is only a suggestion. Although I do not like to criticize other peoples countries, especially when they have not invited me to do so, I cannot repress voicing a suspicion that one of the difficulties in Russia, which is undergoing a restructuring (in Russian, perestroika), is that people power cannot be built with elite-philosophy; it needs a philosophy the masses participate in making, which connects with their language and experience; people power needs to be a development from within, as Jose Marti (Cuban poet and revolutionary, 1853-1895) said. The structures of culture grow in ways science is beginning to understand; the new scientific understandings come mainly through advances in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and what might be called world-system history; but there is also, parallel to the efforts of science to understand the deep structures of human thought and institutions, a movement to promote mass participation in the building of cultural structures. This movement is sometimes called popular education (in Spanish, education popular), and it is associated especially with the names of Freire and Gramsci. It is this movement which takes up the tradition of metaphysics, standing it on its head (so to speak) because the great efforts to build comprehensive shared understandings have in the past been elite activities; popular education is making them into mass activities. That is why Veronica comes before Plato. I want to establish the principle that philosophizing begins with our own lives and only secondarily appropriates the resources we inherit from the past. There comes a time, nevertheless, for Plato, because the democratic continuation of the process of culture-building needs to expropriate and socialize the techniques developed by the great culture-makers of the past.

Plato is considered in the following letters. Note: The reader whose appetite has been whetted by the tiny doses of four schools of twentieth century philosophy provided in this letter may learn more by consulting, for example: A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism. Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn. Gustav Wetter, Dialectical Materialism. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement. 82 Letter 12 12 PLATO AS A CREATOR OF CULTURE Although I do not wish to create the impression that I am the sort of person who is in the habit of complaining that his irresponsible actions are caused by unfair circumstances of which he has been the victim, there is a major circumstance which has consistently prevented me from carrying out my good intentions and achieving my potential, which ought to be taken into consideration in judging my case as well as in passing judgment on other human beings, and also in forming an accurate opinion concerning what is to be expected from humans and human institutions. The circumstance is that I have a body with feelings. Since it is admittedly not your fault that my feelings prevent me from carrying out my plans and keeping my promises, you have no reason to feel guilty if I tell you that life has been unfair to me in the sense that it has given me feelings which I find myself unable to control or govern. For that matter you do not nave any obligation to talk to me at all if I happen to pick you as a person with whom I wish to converse about feelings. While having, as I admit, no obligation to talk to me, you might nevertheless listen and respond for pitys sake. But I would have certain regrets if you were to listen to me out of pity, and certain reservations about any relationship in which you would play the role of helper and I would play the role of person-who-needs-to-be-helped. If one of us is going to play the role of person-who-needsto-be-helped, I would prefer that it be you. In any case it would be more dignified, for me and for you, to engage in a philosophical dialogue of the kind practiced by Socrates and Plato, an earnest mutual consultation whose premise is that we become wiser and better by talking to each other about our feelings and our actions. Plato lists hunger, thirst, and sexual desire as three unruly feelings. Any contemporary biologist will tell us why these feelings well up within us; without a feeling driving us to eat our organisms would eventually cease to function; we would perish even sooner without the capacity to feel thirst. These feelings can be regarded as distant early warning systems, which impel the body to act before supplies of nutrients and water become so low that the body cannot move or replace dead cells; the hunger feeling, which is triggered by a fall in the percentage of sugar in the bloodstream, is a good example. Nevertheless, those of us who have tried to stick to diets can testify that hunger, albeit a necessary function, can be hard to control and govern. Similarly, hot, wild, rousing delight is an adaptive response to an ecological imperative which necessarily requires every chromosomic code to provide for the reproduction of its species; nevertheless, hot, wild, rousing delight With somebody who is married to someone else is unruly. Plato also discusses at considerable length somewhat different sets of feelings, which are also roughly functional from the bullheaded point of and view of a DNA molecule blindly bent on reproducing itself and also unruly from the point of view of a conscientious citizen. Crime and war,

Plato thinks, are caused by feelings run amok, mainly the corrupt desire to possess more objects than one needs or has a right to. The feeling of fear, he notes, is often a cause of military defeat, as, for instance, when a citys soldiers abandon their shields and spears and take flight; in such cases allowing behavior to be governed by limbic structures of the older, reptilian, part of the brain might lead to the extinction of the city or the tribe. 83 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Aggressiveness plays a special role in Platos philosophy; he recognizes that anger causes no end of trouble, but nonetheless thinks that the part of the soul capable of anger, properly guided by wisdom, can play a key role in the government of human conduct. I think Plato is telling me how to put some motive power behind my pride. If wisdom is allied with anger-reinforced pride, then my other emotions wont blow me away. Thanks for the advice, Plato. (Plato talks to me in my dreams. I wish I had a quarter for every bus Ive missed in my dreams. Please pardon this irrelevant remark it is neither here nor there. Sometimes my mind wanders.) Getting back to Plato, in his proposed laws for an ideal society he devotes many pages to alcohol abuse. He argues that it is not a good thing to grow up too innocent; if you know nothing of drunkenness, sexual excitement, or stupefying drugs, then if you suddenly get turned onto Big Pleasure, your previous moral training may suddenly become a Fat Zero. Plato proposes a supervised introduction to alcohol for young men. They are to attend drinking parties directed by a Master of the Feast, who will determine, among other things, when a person is at the point where it would be best to cease to imbibe, and when jovial horseplay ceases to be jovial and becomes disorderly conduct. While the biological function of our inbuilt capacity to turn off the cerebral cortex by the oral administration of ethyl alcohol is less self-evident than the biological function of the hungry feeling, a clue to its function may be found in the Japanese saying, Drinking makes everyone friends. (This saying does not apply, by the way, to my ex-roommate Leon, who, when he was drunk, would put his head between his knees and stare at the floor.) Humans in general are genetically coded to be culturally coded, as is evident from the brain structures that give us language. The traditional Japanese saki party, to take the argument a step further, might be regarded as a cultural code which weaves something beautiful from the chromosomic threads. Whether in general the chemically-induced turn-on is an accident of evolution, like our appendix which is a structure without a function or the crazy way some of our arteries meander around our bodies for no reason except that we happened to evolve that way, or whether the turn-on capacity is the biological side of a mixed biological-cultural adaptation, which gives human groups a competitive edge, as the Japanese auto industry now has a competitive edge partly because of its work-together-drink-together tightly knit very cooperative production teams, I dont know, but my offhand opinion is that the chemical turn-ons leading to drug and alcohol abuse are partly one and partly the other, partly a cosmic accident, partly a thrill-potential which strengthens any human group able to learn to employ it wisely. Plato provides a list of the means society can use to achieve the wise government of the feelings. They are: 1. Fear 2. Fear of God 3. Law 4. The Muses, by which he means music, dance, poetry, drama, and especially the kind of Homeric storytelling (suitably censored) which would foster a desire to emulate virtuous

heroes. 5. Athletics 6. Awarding of honors and distinctions 7. The development of a passion for spiritual beauty 8. True discourse The main contribution of philosophy to the solving of human problems is evidently item 8, true discourse, although it plays a supporting role to law and all the other items on the list. Plato would agree with Robert Redfield that there comes a certain point in the history of civilization when specialists in philosophy are-needed, a point where the somewhat more 84 Letter 12 spontaneous, somewhat less self-conscious Religionischestadtanstatungengefhlsregierung (cityorganization-and-government-of-the-feelings-by-religion) becomes inadequate. Plato poses the problem to be solved in a picturesque way, by telling the following pretty story. ...According to received tradition, in that age of bliss, all life needs was provided in abundance and unsought, and the reason, we are told, was this. Cronus was of course aware that, as we have explained, no human being is competent to wield an irresponsible control over mankind without becoming swollen with arrogance and selfish injustice. Being aware of this he gave our communities as their kings and magistrates not men but spirits, beings of a divine and superior kind, just as we still do the same with our flocks of sheep and herds of other domesticated animals: we do not set oxen to manage oxen, or goats to manage goats; we, their betters in kind, act as their masters ourselves. Well, the god, in his kindness to man, did the same; he set over us this superior race of spirits who took charge of us with ease to themselves and convenience to us, providing us with peace and mercy, sound law and justice, and endowing the families of mankind with internal concord and justice. So the story teaches us today, and teaches us truly, that when a community is not ruled by God but by man, its members have no refuge from evil and misery; we should do our utmost this is the moral to reproduce the life of the age of Cronus, and therefore should order our private households and our public societies alike in obedience to the immortal element within us, giving the name of law to the rule of reason. Plato also tells us why he personally devoted himself to philosophy. He had originally intended to be a political activist. However, he came to the sad conclusion that the people of his place and time, Athens in the 4th century B.C., were so fundamentally misguided and corrupt that political activism was useless. He devoted himself to philosophy because he saw it as the best way to further, indirectly and eventually, his political aims. The love of wisdom, the rule of the rational over the irrational, had to be pursued among small groups of philosophers until the day and the hour, the month and the year, when people with political power would cooperate in inaugurating the rule of reason. Philosophy came into existence, in the classical and many-sided form we owe to Socrates and Plato, as the search for a principle of legitimate authority at a time when such a principle was needed, or at least the philosophers thought it was needed, and indeed as the nomination of a candidate for the role of ruling principle, namely rationality, variously known as logos, nous, episteme. Rationality did not, however, exist; it had to be invented or, if you prefer, it had to be found, or, if you prefer, it had to be differentiated from religion. Those of us who agree with Emile Durkheim that...the fundamental categories of thought... have religious origins, need to explain how philosophy, or any department of human culture, detached itself from religion and became somewhat independent of the earth-mother-womb of all symbolic structures.

I explain it this way. Every society has, indeed must have, two distinguishable sets of symbolic structures, even though one can blur the distinction by calling both of them religious when speaking of early times. They are a command structure and a technostructure; the former, with which religion in a limited sense is mainly concerned, governs relations among persons (among persons both human and divine); the technostructure governs interaction with the earth, that is to say, with things, including the human body, insofar as it is regarded as a material system. If early peoples do not appear to make such a distinction, it is because for them the earth with its living forms, and the heavenly bodies above, are persons; we say their thought is entirely religious because it is entirely personal, everything is spirit. Sooner or later, however, a new kind of thinking takes shape within the womb of the old, as various crafts become established which require specialized technical knowledge. Plato invented our western concept of wisdom by working with the materials at hand, with the Greek language and the social practices in which language-using behavior was embedded, to try to solve the problem at hand. The problem was, as he tells us, government, the government of the feelings in the soul, the government of the masses in the city. The solution 85 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I was to bring technology to the rescue of religion. The technostructure reinforced the command structure by lending the prestige of craft-knowledge to Platos proposal to recognize social authority in experts in Platos proposed craft of government. Let me sketch an outline of how Plato did this. When Plato establishes the ideal of wisdom as a rational ideal distinct from religion, he appeals to the authority of craft-knowledge, i.e. to technology, i.e. to the technostructure. When Socrates embarrasses the citizens of Athens by asking them, Is it right because the gods say so, or do the gods say so because it is right? it seems that the latter is the more plausible answer, and in the crafts we have many examples of experts who are right because they know what they are doing, who are not obliged, like discredited gods or parents at their wits end, to fall back on the dubious assertion that it is right because they say so. We recognize the authority of the pilot of the ship in a storm at sea because the pilot has craft-knowledge (episteme) needed to avoid rocks and to position the ship to cope with shifting winds. The architect has authority over the carpenters and bricklayers because he knows how to design a building. The trainer has a certain sort of wisdom, which authorizes him to give rational instructions to the athlete concerning nutrition and exercise programs. The medical doctor is an expert on a certain sort of physical system, the human body, who for that reason is authorized to give commands which those who seek health should follow. Consequently, Plato argues, if we could educate people in the craft-knowledge of expert rulers, making them, so to speak, incarnations of reason, voices of wisdom, then they should be the rulers of the city. Platos ideal city is a city ruled by rationality. Plato works with meaningful themes in his culture to produce a symbolic structure which solves his problem, or at any rate in his opinion would solve his problem if somebody with power would take it as a guide to action and put it into effect. Platos symbolic structure is a set of words with interlocking meanings, taken from ordinary Greek and built into a system by Platos philosophic work. The main words are the following ones.* techne episteme craft, technique, art, technology. Platos greatest work, The Republic, is about the highest techne, the technique or art of government, of ruling, knowledge, originally the knowledge handed down from parent to child of various

agathon

dikaiosyne

polis

archon

crafts. The Republic is about the highest episteme, the special knowledge needed to be a good ruler. means good. Every techne uses an episteme and aims to achieve some agathon. The craft of shoemaking (a techne) uses the special knowledge possessed by shoemakers (their episteme) to produce shoes for people to wear (an agathon). means justice. The ruler (archon) aims at achieving dikaiosyne in the city (polis). dikaiosyne consists of each person playing his proper social role in a well-ordered whole. is the Greek city-state. The literal translation of the title of the book we call Platos Republic (peri politea) is About the polis. The meaning of polis for Plato is, I think, expressed in these translations of some thoughts of Platos pupil, Aristotle: A polis is a group of people who live under a common conception of dikaiosyne. Man is an animal whose characteristic it is to live in a polis. sometimes translated as philosopher-king, is the name Plato gives to the rulers of his ideal polis. Their techne is the art of government; their agathon is dikaiosyne.

* Of course Plato, like everyone else, developed and modified his ideas throughout his life. These notes represent a still snapshot of his thought taken when he was about halfway through writing The Republic. 86 Letter 12 although sometimes Plato sees dikaiosyne as a means to an end revealed in a vision of the greatest and best agathon, a vision sometimes described in English as revealing the Good with a capital G. And sometimes Plato refers to virtue (arete) as the agathon of the archons techne. (The word archon is related to arch, which means principle; hence archon is well chosen to suggest that the archons have authority because they are principle incarnate.) which means word, can also mean principle or reason. The rule of the archons in the polis is hence the rule of logos (or episteme, or nous, which means mind, understanding, reason.) means soul. Plato divides the human psuche into three parts: the feelings, the part which gets angry (or afraid), and the rational part (the part with logos). is wisdom. It is the special knowledge, the episteme, which produces the rule of the rational over the irrational. In the psuche (soul), sofia produces the government of the feelings by the logistiche psuche (the rational part of the soul), aided by the part capable of anger. is a general term including the four virtues, (i) sofia (ii) courage, which consists of the government of the fight-and-flight related part of the soul by the logistiche psuche (the rational part of the soul). I say fight-andflight related because Plato seems to consider the part which gets angry and fights to be also the part which when afraid takes flight, (iii) sophrosune (moderation or temperance), which is the virtue of harmonious feelings, which willingly cooperate with the wise government administered by the

logos

psuche sofia

arete

rational part of the soul. (iv) dikaiosune, which in a sense is the same thing as arete, because it is each part playing its proper role. A soul with dikaiosune is an ordered soul (kosmia psuche). arete in the polis is parallel to arete in the psuche In the polis (city-state) the archons (rulers) govern as the logistiche psuche governs the soul. In the polis the soldiers help the archons to govern. Most of the people are to be governed by the archons (for their own good of course, and for the good of the whole), as the feelings in the soul are to be governed by reason. It remains to assess this special episteme of the archons, Platos wisdom, this highest knowledge needed to enable the highest of all technes to pursue its agathon, this sofia, this ideal the love of which makes one a philosopher. Whatever it is, it had better be capable of performing miracles, because in the absence of miracles the archons (when they find themselves securely in possession of absolute power) will hearken to the cry of the hormones in the blood (which would lead, if J. J. Rousseau* and the lovers of all things natural were right, to happy people rising in love to tribal bliss), which will lead (since Plato and the sociobiologists are in this respect right) to hunger, thirst, sex, anger, and fear (not to mention sadistic thrills) throwing humans into conflict with one another. The archons would soon learn that there are two ways to get work done, (i) working, and (ii) making other people work, and since they would be in power they would (in the absence of a miracle) choose the second way. It is true that Platos book prescribes that the archons will live in voluntary poverty and work hard at their special tasks, but * Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) French essayist. 87 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I a miracle is still needed to prevent them from ignoring the book and doing what they want. Platos proposed education for archons culminates in the learning of an episteme which is supposed to perform the required miracle. The educational plan presupposes a myth, the myth of the metals, which makes Platos task easier; the myth says some children are born with souls of iron, some with souls of brass, some with souls of gold. The infants with golden souls, whether their homes be poor or rich, and regardless of the metal of the parents souls, have the precious potential to be faithful, well-behaved archons, If, like Lapp and Collins, the authors of Food First, you are inclined to want to save the world from nonsense by unmasking myths and telling everybody the true facts, you may think Plato is simply cheating by telling us a story that is not true. However, we should consider, among other things, how much children benefit from certain stories. Infants who are regarded by their parents as if they were persons from the moment they are born, turn out to be socially competent when they grow up; infants brought up to believe they are good are likely to turn out to be good. To what extent it is a fact that babies are persons, or a fact that children are good, is beside the point the point is that the belief produces the result. If I were approached by a myth-unmasker, who had come to question herself and was ready to listen to philosophical advice, and if she invited me to make a suggestion for improvement, I would suggest that she tell all children they have golden souls. Back to Plato, the golden children are to learn dancing and singing. Plato observed that while children like to run around and make noise, they also have a sense of rhythm, which can be trained

to bring order to their movements and sounds. They should learn stories about heroes they can admire and copy, do gymnastics, and later practice athletics and mathematics to discipline their bodies and their minds. Finally, after 30 years of preparation, the future archons are to learn the highest episteme, through dialectics, the highest form of philosophy. The aim of the episteme of the ruler is unity. Platos ideal polis is to be a true community, where the citizens act all for one and one for all, the voice of concord and harmony ever prevailing in their speech and their action. To supervise a community which is to be, as Plato says, most utterly one, rulers are needed who strive to see the one in the many and to take it as their guide, to see and emulate the one true beauty beyond the multiple appearances of beauty, the one true justice beyond the multiple opinions about justice. These lovers of unity Plato calls philosophers. The logic of unity. It is rational to do what serves the whole, under the guidance of logos, nous, episteme. Our bodies divide us; language unite us. The function of rationality in Platos ideal polis is to unite the community, to guarantee that its rulers, and everyone else, will take a social point of view and pursue the good of the whole. In this respect rationality at the beginning of our tradition, in its first many-sided and well-worked-out explicit form, is the opposite of contemporary irrational rationality. P.S. Think of a time when your feelings caused problems for you and of a time when they helped you. Are you usually grateful for your feelings (a strange question, perhaps, since gratitude itself may be an emotion), or do you usually wish they would leave you alone? How do you regulate them? P.P.S. In the last sentence of the above question, who is you? P.P.P.S. If, like Plato, you thought people were so corrupt that political activism wasnt going to do any good, and you decided instead to take the meaningful themes of todays American culture and to weave them into a symbolic structure which would solve our problems, what themes would you pick? The next letter continues the discussion of the founding of western philosophy and of western rationality by Plato. 88 Letter 13 13 PLATO AS ECOLOGIST The archons, says Plato, should not be the only ones taking a social point of view; the common good should be the end which all of us seek. But Plato has a problem. His problem is that not everyone agrees with him. In Gorgias and in The Republic, Plato is challenged by Callicles, who believes that pleasure is the aim of life, and by Thrasymachus, who thinks that we were all put on this earth for the purpose of making money. Plato responds to Callicles by arguing that we do not really seek pleasure, but virtue, and he tells Thrasymachus that our purpose is not to make money but to fill social roles. It turns out that these two ends (being virtuous and filling social roles) are really one and the same, for when we achieve virtue by allowing ourselves to be governed by our souls, we serve the needs of the polis, which consequently becomes capable of surviving in its ecological niche. An ecologist is a scientist who puts together the findings of physics, chemistry, biology and geology. She or he envisions the natural world as a system in which the parts interact upon one another. About any particular living species let us take homo sapiens as our example, since it is an endangered species which we wish to preserve (although after having been jilted by ones lover

one may feel strongly that the planet would be prettier if homo sapiens were extinct) the ecologist asks how it manages to occupy a niche in the ecosystem, acquiring enough energy to stoke the fires of its metabolic processes while fending off predators and parasites which compete for the same energy sources. homo sapiens must eat and avoid being eaten. Food and defense are two basic needs. Plato is a good ecologist inasmuch as he proposes a plan for cooperative human action suitable for achieving successful occupation of an environmental niche. He tells us that the real creators of his ideal polis (city-state) are human needs, and the first need is food. The second need, he implies, is to avoid being eaten, i.e. defense. The city is designed to survive among enemies, partly because it will not have wealth and therefore will not be worth conquering (Plato remarks that the motive for war is to acquire wealth); and partly because its soldiers will be strong, skilled, courageous, and perfectly disciplined. The cost of conquering Platos polis would be high and-the benefits low. A smart ecological strategy. The wild rose with its woody flesh and thorns, and the porcupine, a small morsel in a large mass of sharp quills, avoid being eaten in the same way. Plato is frequently concerned, too, to promote the physical health of the citizens (defense against parasites); he praises the technae of the physician and the trainer, gymnastics, and athletics, self-restraint at meals, a simple healthy diet, moderation in drinking Everything happens as if Plato had asked himself the question, How can creatures of this species most successfully occupy their ecological niche? and answered the question by saying, By perfect self-discipline and perfect social discipline, intelligently ordered toward that end. Although Plato says speaking to each individual that we should seek virtue rather than survival, his precepts admirably serve the goal of survival of the polis. There is, however, a major difficulty standing in the way of this interpretation of Plato. And there is also a major difficulty, assuming that Plato intended to design an efficient society of the 89 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I kind I have described, which stood in Platos way as he attempted to persuade people to live in the way he recommended. Against my interpretation, it is a strong argument that Plato sometimes denies the intention I claim he had, or at least acted as if he had. For example, the Athenian, who is Platos spokesperson in the dialogue called The Laws, criticizes his companions from Crete and Sparta for taking military success to be the aim of the polis and the purpose to be served in designing its institutions. The city-state must be designed for peace, not war, says Platos Athenian; the aim is virtue, not victory. Nevertheless, it seems to me that when Plato says, Seek virtue! it is equivalent to saying, Do those things which effect the survival of yourself and your community in your ecological niche, through assuring the food supply and defense against predators and parasites! Similarly in The Republic, where virtue is pursued under the slightly different name, justice, Plato remarks that every animal has a characteristic function and is excellent insofar as it performs its function well; the function of a horse is to run or to pull the plough and its excellence is to; run fast or to pull the plough efficiently; the good person is the just person; justice is the excellence of the functional human.? It remains to be explained, however, why Plato permits himself a certain degree of circumlocution, or, to put the question in more precise terms, why, in performing his philosophical labor upon the Greek words arete (virtue or excellence) and dike (justice), he developed them in a way which sought to persuade human beings to adopt as their conscious end-in-view virtue or justice, instead of directly telling them to do those things conducive to survival.

The answer can be found by considering the second of the two major difficulties mentioned above, Platos difficulty in persuading his interlocutors to follow his philosophy. There are characteristic differences between behavior guided by biological mechanisms and behavior guided by symbolic structures (culture), and further characteristic differences identifying philosophy as a specific form of culture. The philosopher engages his interlocutors in rational discourse, in the shared discipline of logos, the word; philosophys success, in the first place, depends on whether anybody believes it is true. The success of a genetic variation in the human behavioral repertoire is tested by whether the genes carrying it survive in the natural environment and in combat. A religion will survive if it becomes incorporated in the practices and heartfelt feelings of a group, and if the group survives. A philosophy must move the mind by argument. The decisive difficulty arises when the interests of self and community do not coincide. It is virtuous, Plato assumes, to risk ones life to defend the polis against enemy attack. It is just to abide by the norms, even when one might amass wealth and power by cunning trickery. What Plato needs to prove, in the terms in which he states the problem, is that it is rational to be just (or, more broadly, to be virtuous). He has his work cut out for him. On the face of it nothing is more dull and less fun than being rational, unless it be being both rational and just. Plato needs to prove that the two go together, and to make the argument so attractive that his readers will want to live that way, (Plato brilliantly succeeds in making his arguments attractive, even though he insists that only poets and rhetoricians try to charm readers, the philosophers concern being exclusively with truth.) In a dialogue called Phaedo Plato recounts the last hours of his hero Socrates. Socrates had been convicted by the Assembly of the Athenian people on charges of introducing new gods and corrupting the young. He was sentenced to drink a cup of hemlock, a deadly poison. Phaedo is the record of a philosophical discussion Socrates holds with his friends as he waits for the jailer 90 Letter 13 to prepare the poison and, later, after drinking the poison, waits for it to take effect. At the end, Phaedo, the narrator, for whom the dialogue is named, declares Socrates to have been the most just (dikaios), most impressive (kalos) and most wise (sophos) man he ever knew. It is easy to prove Socrates was just; he was so just that when his friend Crito made arrangements for Socrates to escape from jail, Socrates insisted on staying in jail and dying, because he believed a good citizen should respect the law. That he was impressive (kalos) is harder to prove; most people would not be impressed by an ugly little guy with an awkward gait I who blunders into trouble and then refuses to do anything to get himself out. To prove Socrates was wise, it is necessary to argue that self-sacrifice for the good of the community is rational. In the Phaedo, the dialogue set in Socrates death cell, the required proof is given, or, rather, the argument is recast and reorganized so that the required conclusion follows. Philosophy is not, after all, a matter of writing straightforward proofs of the kind composed by 10th grade geometry students; a philosopher is not, either, a middlewing extremist* who works within symbolic structures; he is, rather, a creative artist who remodels and refurbishes them. The Phaedo is in form mostly a series of arguments trying to prove the immortality of the soul; in substance it is an attempt to shift our frame of reference in order to mold our conduct. Near the beginning of the dialogue Plato congratulates himself on having a compelling dramatic setting for the presentation of his arguments by having Socrates say, ...no one who heard me now, even if he were a comic poet, would say that I am an idle talker about things which do not concern me. Plato also has his characters specify that the conversation is among philosophers, which

excludes people who care about the pleasures of eating, drinking, sexual passion, or fine clothes. If I had been there I would have lied. In truth I cannot resist chocolate cake, but I would have been so eager to hear the rest of the conversation that I would have pretended to be a philosopher. The proofs of the immortality of the soul consist mainly of statements about what the soul is and is like, which lead to the conclusion that a thing which is the sort of thing the soul is, is, by definition, always and necessarily living, hence untouched by bodily death. The soul is what is able to perceive the timeless truths of geometry. She is what sees perfect things, such as the perfect equality of the same number with itself, which humans conceive and talk about even though no two physical objects are ever perfectly equal. She sees absolute norms, good, beauty, justice, holiness. She is akin to whatever is pure, and to what naturally rules and has authority, as distinct from the mortal body which is by nature a slave. She is like a logical definition, which is unchangingly true (as a definition) even when the physical world changes she is unlike an empirical statement, which may change from true to false when the facts to which it refers become different. Plato thus constructs a concept of soul (not from scratch, for he draws on several soulbuilding traditions) with roots in several lands of social practice mathematics, norm-following, purification rituals, the exercise of authority, Greek science. Also, in two revealing passages, Plato has Socrates tell us what the soul means to him personally in his dramatic situation. His muscles and bones, Socrates says, would long ago have accepted Critos offer and escaped from prison, had I (i.e. Socrates soul) not thought it better and more honorable to accept the sentence imposed by the law. The soul is, then, that which commands the body, against the bodys inclinations, to do what is good and honorable. At the very end Socrates says to his friends that I (i.e. Socrates soul) am the Socrates who has been conversing and arranging his arguments in order, not the body which will soon be buried. The soul is, then, that which talks. It is, moreover, the true identity of the person. * Middlewing extremist: a phrase I use to refer to people whose form of revolt against society is to carry to an extreme the ideals of the society they are revolting against. 91 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Translating Plato into the terminology of contemporary linguistics, the soul belongs to the world of synchronic* meanings. It stands for cultural discipline and the symbolic structures through which it is organized, over against the brute body. The required conclusion follows. When Socrates is about to go to another room to bathe before taking the poison (to save the women the trouble ofwashing my dead body) Crito asks Socrates for his last instructions concerning what his friends can do for him. Take care of your own selves, answers Socrates, and you will serve me and mine. The answer is impeccable within the symbolic structure Plato has constructed, for the self is the soul, its good is to practice virtue; the body is for the sake of the soul, and material goods are for the sake of the health of the body. However, it appears that neither the Greeks nor Plato himself were fully satisfied by Platos arguments, for he returns to the problem again and again throughout his career, launching new arguments to prove what had supposedly already been proved. In a dialogue named Gorgias, Socrates (having been brought back to life to represent the voice of wisdom in Platos dialogues) confronts a doubter named Callicles and his friends Polus and Gorgias. They believe pleasure is the aim of life and that an impressive man is one who lets nothing stand in the way of getting as much pleasure as he can. Certainly he does not let justice stand in the way.

In answering Callicles, Socrates is concerned in the first place to prove that it is mistaken to say that pleasure is the aim of life. As he often does, Socrates compares pleasure unfavorably with health. Pleasure is one thing; health is another. He compares the beauty parlor operator; unfavorably with the gymnastics instructor. The beautician will fix you up with cosmetics and fancy clothes and an expensive hairdo, and then you will seem to be pretty. But to be really pretty you need to be healthy; in a sense the beautician is dishonest and she encourages you to be dishonest, while the gym teacher, the nutritionist, or whoever makes you healthy is giving you genuine beauty instead of an imitation. Furthermore, Socrates points out, the general public is not the best judge of health; it takes a specialist, someone who has the right episteme, to distinguish the healthy from the unhealthy. Similarly, even if the crowd worships success, the philosopher, who judges in the light of reason, may judge with a different standard, one based on the correct episteme. Socrates employs the example of a group of children who are asked to choose between the pastry cook who gives them cake and the doctor who gives them medicine. The children in their ignorance will say that the pastry cook is just, impressive, and wise,while the one who gives them awful-tasting medicine they will describe with the worst adjectives in their vocabularies. Platos distinction between pleasure and health illustrates the way rationality, which is to say the logos (the word), compensates for the inadequacy of our hormonal guidance system. Evolution has given us desires for food, drink, sex, highs, thrills, and turn-ons such that pleasure is often a poor pilot to guide us; it has also given us the cerebral cortex and society has given us norms, so that we have, as Pavlov says, a second signaling system, a mind, which compensates for some of the false signals we get from the glands and tie bloodstream. Health is the aim of a certain episteme, medical knowledge, and it is an example of the benefits of the rule of the rational part of the soul over the fight-flight responses and the feelings. The harmony of the whole, where reason rules, is, by Platos definition, justice. Justice is therefore associated with true, healthy happiness, in contrast with momentary pleasure. * Synchronic: existing at the same time. The linguist Saussure and his followers proposed to study the ensemble of words in a language outside time, so to speak, i.e. as the words relate to one another at a given moment in time, i.e. to study language synchronically. 92 Letter 13 Notice that Plato locates the question in a frame of reference different from the one behavioral biologists employ when they ask whether there are genetic codings conducive to altruism. (In one sense, of course, the answer to this question is clearly affirmative, because we are genetically coded to be culturally coded, in our brain structures, in our linguistic capabilities, in our capacity for many refinements and transformations of feeling, and philosophers like Plato are among those who create the cultural codings. But even given that in this broad sense we are biologically constituted so that we are culturally codable to a wide range of behaviors, one might, thinking in an ecological frame of reference, expect Plato simply to advocate altruism. Or to argue that happiness, which is a name for what people want, is found serving others.) Plato defines the question so that instead of asking whether being good will make you happy, he proves that being just will make you healthy. One of the reasons why he formulates the question in this way is that he can argue that being just is very similar to being healthy it is not so much that justice makes health, but rather justice is a kind of health. We moderns would call it mental health. Platos argument might be put in modern terms as follows: We assume that whoever is rational seeks what she or he really wants.

Everybody wants to be healthy. Mental health is a kind of health. A mentally healthy person will play some appropriate and constructive role in society. Consequently, anyone who is rational will seek to play some appropriate and constructive role in society (i.e., be just, as Plato would say). Plato does not neglect happiness, eudaimonia. The point is rather that since Plato holds that pleasure is not happiness, and that happiness is something which can be won only through selfdiscipline (i.e. through the wise government of the body by the soul), happiness itself begins to look very much like health, or a product of health. The argument can be represented as having two phases: first true happiness is distinguished from mere pleasure; second, true happiness is shown to be very much like what we would call mental health. (One of the definitions of neurosis is that it is inner conflict, a person divided against herself. That is precisely Platos definition of the unjust soul. Injustice in the individual soul will make the person incapable of accomplishing anything because of inner faction and lack of self-agreement, and thus an enemy to himself....) Now let us make still another examination of Platos attempt to resolve his core difficulty, as Plato himself does in The Republic, a dialogue written after Gorgias, in which another doubter, Thrasymachus, takes up the argument where Callicles left off. As the scene opens, we see Socrates performing his usual routine; he is arguing that every techne has its corresponding episteme and its corresponding agathon; every technology has its corresponding specialized knowledge and a good at which it aims. In particular, as a rational practitioner of the techne of ruling, the true ruler aims at the good of the polis, i.e. the good of all. (Similarly, the rational part of the individual soul does not simply squash the feelings in a fit of masochistic asceticism, but rather, guides the harmonious development of the whole person.) Thrasymachus, the doubter, throws this by-now-familiar scene into confusion by objecting that Socrates obviously does not know anything about real life. Does he suppose that a shepherd, who rules a flock of sheep, is interested in the good of the sheep? According to Thrasymachus, the shepherd considers his own good, not that of the sheep; sheep to him are just so much mutton or wool, which are worth so much money. The techniques of the ruler, like those of the shepherd, and any other craftsman, are designed to benefit the person who uses the techniques, not anyone else. In a sense there is, according to Thrasymachus, only one techne, that of making money, or of advancing ones interests, which the various crafts all serve. 93 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Socrates answers Thrasymachus as follows: To be a shepherd is, strictly speaking, to be someone who takes care of sheep, using the special knowledge through which the shepherd knows how to take care of sheep, as a pilot is one who knows how to save a ship from shipwreck, and a medical doctor one who knows how to care for the human body. It would not be correct to say that all the technai are simply parts of the art of money-making; rather, each techne has a function, which is to aim at some good different from money-making, and although the people who practice the techne do make money, they do it indirectly, by aiming at some good distinct from money. Similarly, a ruler, properly so-called, practices a techne whose aim is the good of the polis. Most people think that Thrasymachus wins this argument because Socrates is unable to show that a ruler, to be a ruler properly so called, is a just one, who practices the skills and uses the knowledge which will bring proper order to the city. I think Socrates wins, but that it is a little bit difficult to see why he wins. I think what Plato wants us to do is to shift our frame of reference so that we take a social point of view; after the shift we see that any technology and any body of knowledge are social creations and social property; they have been passed down to us by earlier generations, and

we will pass them on to future generations. Viewing society as a set of roles, which continue as individuals are born and die (similarly the genetic code persists through many individuals), then the techne and the episteme appear as structures which perform certain functions. Plato has strict logic on his side; it is true that a shepherd is one who takes care of sheep. That is what we mean and what the Greeks meant by shepherd. Plato is logically right because his account expresses the exact meaning of the word. But there is an underlying point of view which explains why the logical point is not trivial namely the vision of the words in a language acquiring their meanings over many generations, and tending to express the permanent concerns of the society. The science of medicine exists to serve, the social function of restoring the sick and injured to health that is what the word medicine means. The information that John Jones goes to medical school because he wants to make money tells us what Jones motive is, but it does not tell us what medicine is, or what it means to be a medical doctor. Socrates point is therefore both correct and important, but it is difficult to see because it requires us to shift our frame of reference, to change our identity, so to speak, so that we identify not with a biological individual, but with the timeless concerns of a society and its culture. Plato also appears to consider that Socrates refutation of Thrasymachus, although correct, is a little bit difficult to see, for farther on Plato writes: This investigation we are undertaking is not easy, I think, but requires keen eyesight. As we are not very clever, I said, I think we should adopt a method like this: if men who did not have keen eyesight were told to read small letters from a distance, and then someone noticed that these same letters were to be found somewhere else on a larger scale and on a larger object, it would, I think, be considered a piece of luck that they could read these first and then examine the smaller letters to see if they are the same. That is certainly true, said Adeimantus, but what relevance do you see in it to our present search for justice? I will tell you, I said. There is, we say, the justice of one man, and also the justice of a whole city? Certainly. And a city is larger than one man? It is. Perhaps there is more justice in the larger unit, and it may be easier to grasp. So, if you are willing, let us first investigate what justice is in cities, and afterwards let us look for it in the individual, observing the similarities of the larger to the smaller. 94 Letter 13 These words introduce Platos most elaborate attempt to show the rationality of justice, his construction of an ideal state, in which justice is writ large, in great letters, for all to see. In other words, Plato asks us to identify with the good of society. Instead of asking the question, Justice? Whats in it for me? he changes the question; instead you ask, Suppose I were setting up a society. How would I set it up? It should surprise no one that if that is the question you ask, the only rational answer you can give is that in an ideal society people would treat each other fairly. You and Plato might disagree on the plan for the polis and on what rules of justice should be adopted but one thing is sure because it is assumed: you are planning a polis. As long as you are engaged in that activity, you are taking a social point of view; you are identifying with the social good because your role as polis-planner requires it. You are thinking like an ecologist who asks how a human group can function successfully in its environment. The answer to the strong argument against my interpretation of Plato as an ecologist mentioned above, viz. that Plato denies he has material objectives, is that Plato serves them by denying them. By proposing virtue rather than survival as a conscious end-in-view Plato is able to move the

minds of his interlocutors by arguments which, if they are believed, will lead to conduct which will help the community to survive. In the Apology of Socrates, a short book written by Plato more or less according to what Plato remembered hearing Socrates say in his own defense when he was on trial, Plato has Socrates say that the road to the good of the community (polis) leads by way of asking each person to focus on virtue, the good of the soul. Thus Socrates says:... no greater good has ever happened in the polis than my service to the God. For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person. But if anyone says that this is not my teaching, he is speaking an untruth. P.S. Do you often find yourself adapting to new circumstances? What kind of changes do you make? Is an individual adapting to a society like a society adapting to its environment? P.P.S. According to Plato, what is the relationship between body and soul? Between health and virtue? Between the doctor and the archon? Do you find that there is a relationship between health and virtue in your life? P.P.P.S. Pretend that you are Socrates and your friend is Callicles (or vice versa). Callicles takes the position that pleasure is the aim of life, and Socrates tries to convince him that the is wrong. In your discussion use examples from your life, so that no one will be able to accuse you of being an idle talker about things which do not concern you. The next letter continues the discussion of Platos contributions to the construction of western civilization, and comments on some ways in which his contributions have been both helpful and harmful. 95 96 Letter 14 14 PLATO AS COLOGISTE Plato was concerned with building a polis which would fit into it ecological niche, but he did not like trees very much. He would never be able to understand why an Earlham student would want to spend a month on a wilderness program. Yet despite his lack of a sense of camaraderie with nature, he thought that the natural world should be respected; he argued that nature contains a soul. He realized that such things are rather hard to prove, but he considered the world-soul to be a most useful idea, since if people believe that the world contains a soul, participating in immortal and immutable natural laws, they can easily be persuaded that a rational human culture will be based on the same immortal and immutable laws. They will therefore respect their culture so much that the idea of questioning it would never even occur to them. Such an arrangement is good for Platos polis, but destructive of consciousness. An ecologist, if she were an cologiste, would, if she were planning a society, do more than fit the society to succeed in its niche. She would respect the interdependence of living forms, honor the natural limits, cherish the earth with its diversity of plants, fish, birds, insects, land-dwelling animals, and sea-dwelling plankton. The transition from the English word to the French word, from ecologist to cologiste, marks a shift of loyalties; the ecologist is a scientist who tells us what a species must do to survive in its environment; the cologiste aims to preserve the environment

itself. She does not merely aim to cope with the environment for the purpose of assuring the safety of a particular endangered species, such as the species homo sapiens on whom we have concentrated our attention. Respecting the earth, as distinct from using it, is a theme of ancient Chinese philosophy and the philosophies of the Sioux, Ojibway, and other American native peoples. They conceive and feel the earth as a great spirit, a great soul, a mother, a sacred place where sacred beings dwell. The cologiste may regard these ancient metaphors of ancient peoples as funny-talk; she may regard cologisme as a logical consequence of ecology, the facts as sufficient without poetic embellishment. Fact: there is no security for any species without a secure ecosystem. Consequence: if we are to be secure, respect for the security of the ecosystem must become our end-in-view. The point, nevertheless, is the same, whether one employs the old or the new metaphors, or suffers under the illusion that one can speak without metaphor, or does not speak at all but simply stands in front of an enlarged photograph of an ocean and feels a warm identification with immense waters, or feeds peanuts to the elephant at the zoo, or like Pope John Paul II stands at sunset on a mountain peak in Poland and says, woo, woo, woo. A spirit is something you respect, so is a soul, so is a mother, so is a sacred being. Respect unembellished trees if you wish, but do not on that account consider yourself to be a more careful reasoner than Lao Tse, Mencius, the Sioux, the Ojibway or John Paul II. However much spontaneous love of nature Plato may have had and we have reason to believe that he did not have much, for when Phaedrus in the dialogue called Phaedrus invites Socrates to sit down beside a cool brook in the shade of the plane trees, Socrates complains that he can learn nothing from trees and asks to be taken back to the city nevertheless in the end 97 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Plato maintains that the world has a soul. His reasoning is pragmatic. In The Laws, a rough draft written late in Platos life which he did not live to polish, where Plato gives a more detailed and slightly modified plan for the ideal polis which he had proposed in The Republic, a hypothetical objector makes almost the same objection raised against leading the philosophic life already discussed and answered in Phaedo. One might have thought that after all the labor he had devoted to replying to doubters, at the end of his life Plato would consider the doubters to be silenced, but in fact he considers yet another objection, similar to the ones previously entertained, and provides yet another reply. Your ideal city will not work, says the doubter, because it requires the citizens to live virtuously for the sake of their souls, but many people do not believe there are souls. They think soul is a social convention, not a fact of nature. No no says Plato. No no and no. I deny the question! I deny the concept! I deny the frame of reference! People who make such objections should be condemned for misuse of language. It is wrong to speak as if nature (phusis) existed first, and then soul were added on later; it is a misuse of the word nature. What we should say is that soul came first; as Plato phrases it, soul is elderborn. (The concept elder-born, like so much of early thought, uses categories drawn from kinship structures.) Body depends on soul for its existence, not the other way around. Plato makes up several stories in The Laws and in other dialogues, about the world-soul, the soul that came before nature and underlies it, and about the origins and characteristics of the great universe in which the Mediterranean world known to the Greeks, where they lived like frogs and ants around a marsh, was, Plato recognized, only a small part. He tells us with charming candor that he makes up the stories in order to draw the morals. Do not expect the details of my creation myths and my cosmologies to be true, he says; my point is that something of the sort must be true. The point of

the point is that soul is not added to nature as an afterthought, rather nature is soul-saturated from the beginning; and the point of the point of the point is that humans are souls, not soulless bodies. Contemporary anthropology tells us a creation story which provides a sense in which something of Platos sort is true. If the soul is human social being, if the body is human physical being, then contemporary anthropology tells us that it is true that the soul came before (or at least with) the body. Our social relations are not added on to our bodies as an afterthought; our being, even our physical being, became human in a social process; hominization did not indeed when you think about it you will realize that it could not first produce a human body and then add a soul to it. Many of our physical features (e.g. the language areas of the brain) only make sense, only provide an evolutionary edge, on the assumption that humans live in groups. Very long ago we gradually became we by speaking; by making child care longer and longer; by prolonging estrus (heat) so that the human is sexually attracted to other humans virtually all the time, instead of, as is the case with less social animals, only during short mating periods; by the division of labor. We became we by becoming unable to exist alone either physically or emotionally.* In this sense Plato was correct to say soul is elder-born, especially since he wisely granted posterity the right to amend his meanings by admitting that he himself had only a vague idea that he was somehow on the right track. In this sense, however, the story about the world-soul loses one of its functions, because the moral to be drawn from the contemporary story (that we are right to find our identity in our social relations) can be drawn without attributing any soul to the trees in the forests, the mists in the valleys, the fish in the seas, or the birds in the skies. The world-soul story has, anyway, other functions, which Plato, in spite of Socrates cranky remark about the plane trees, broadly supports. Plato had a passion for respecting; he says we should respect the gods, we are their property; we should respect the land, it is our mother. He * See for example the book On Becoming Human by the anthropologist Nancy Tanner. 98 Letter 14 had a passion for asserting the priority of the whole over the part. The cologiste wants nothing more and nothing other than respect for the whole. But Plato had yet another moral to draw from the world-soul, which it is necessary to discuss. He was, we must say, excessively confident that he had discovered the best laws for governing a city, and he desperately wanted the citizens to respect the laws he was drawing up. The philosopherkings, the incarnations of reason installed in the central fortress, were authorized to tell the citizenry outrageous stories, composed by Plato himself, to foster obedience. Even detailed regulations, such as that the number of citizens should be 5040, were to be declared rational, divine, immutable, eternal. Plato had constructed his word soul in such a way that it referred to human social nature in a special way, promoting an identification with the synchronic structures of meaning which organize cooperative action, in away that emphasized the unchanging, such as mathematical truth (the equal is always equal, odd numbers are never even), logical truth (the hot and the cold are forever different), and pure ideas (absolute beauty, justice, good). The citizenry were supposed to believe they were living in a city ruled by eternal ideas, as the feelings live in a body ruled by a soul. The world-soul made the very stones of the hills accomplices to the fraud. The distinction between culture and nature is obliterated in a way that awards to particular human laws the authority of natural law. According to one version of the story (in the Timaeus) the world is made of triangles (after all, solids are made of planes, planes can be divided into polygons, and all polygons can be

broken up into triangles) and hence students who learn the Pythagorean theorem are on their way to learning the eternal ideas which govern everything. A philosophy which installs its principles in the interstices of the world soul, in the veins of the earth and the depths of the waters, from where said principles emerge in eternal majestic processions to glorify the status quo, might never have done much damage if it had been confined to Plato, because it is hard to believe a doctrine which proclaims the validity everywhere and always of institutions which have never existed anywhere ever. However, people do believe easily, too easily, that whatever is familiar to them is natural; their inclination to consider whatever institutions they happen to have to be rational, divine, and immutable is like a constant force of gravity, which consciousness-raisers must continually struggle to overcome; when it is combined with arguments purporting to show that it is really true that the familiar is endorsed by nature, put forth by people who have a real status quo to defend instead of Platos imaginary one, social inertia can become hard and heavy like the Rock of Gibraltar. That is what happened. The arguments Plato gives to prove the soul to be elder-born were developed further by Aristotle and St. Thomas; they became in the course of the history of western civilization standard weapons in the arsenals of the heavy consciousness-lowerers. Plato is guilty on the charge Sir Karl Popper brings against him in The Open Society and Its Enemies. He is, as Popper says, the great source for the philosophic defense of the closed society, where reason comes to the aid of social norms not to improve them by constant reexamination and deliberate reform, but to preserve them by constant flattery. That he is also, on the contrary, the great source for the philosophic defense of untrammeled inquiry, and of much else we are inclined to praise, can be argued to mitigate the sentence but not to reverse the conviction. Platos rationality is different from contemporary irrational rationality because it is a logic of unity. It is the same as contemporary irrational rationality in the respect that it is consciousness-lowering. 99 100 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I P.S. How does the kind of consciousness-lowering inherent in Platos philosophy compare with the kind of consciousness-lowering discussed in Letter 9? P.P.S. Do you consider yourself an cologiste? Discuss whether or not adhering to cologisme because it is a logical consequence of ecology is essentially the same as doing so because one thinks the earth is her mother. P.P.P.S. Is soul a meaningless word? P.P.P.P.S. An exercise in cologisme: hug a tree. The next letter continues the study of philosophys contributions to the construction of the foundations of the western tradition by examining some of the work done by Platos pupil and successor, Aristotle. Letter 15 15 ARISTOTLE AND MATTHEW MILLER ON FRIENDSHIP

The moral of this chapter is that communication is to friendship as sunlight is to flowers. ...the wish to be friends grows quickly, but friendship does not. Aristotle I confess that I find Aristotle interesting. I have not yet decided whether I should also confess that I accept his model of rational human action and reject our modern homo economics assumptions. One should not confess too much without taking great precautions to ensure that one will be understood. Aristotle made an interesting remark about boring people when he wrote, You could not endure even the Absolute Good, if it bored you. This strikes me as a very interesting observation. I find it interesting because it explains why I have no friends. One of my habits is to fall silent and say nothing for a week while I meditate on some unforgivable insult I have suffered. People who might otherwise regard me as a friendLETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I candidate probably find this habit of mine boring and cross me off their lists of people to invite to parties. Another reason why I have no friends is that I am gloomy. Aristotle wrote, Gloomy and elderly people rarely make friends, as they are inclined to be hard to get along with, they do not seek each others society nor enjoy it, and enjoying each others company is the chief mark of friendship. Here Aristotle brings up another reason why I am not a good friend: I do not enjoy other peoples company. What would I do with a friend if I had one? Or what would the friend do with me? As Aristotle says, to be somebodys friend you have to have some lovable qualities, like being fun to be with. To be exact, Aristotle says three things are necessary for friendship: (1) to wish good things (tagatha) for one another; (2) to be aware of each others goodwill (it docs not count as friendship if you care about each other but neither of you knows it); and (3) the cause of the goodwill you have for each other must be some lovable quality you have. You need all three for friendship: goodwill, awareness of mutual goodwill, and lovable qualities that cause the goodwill. There are three kinds of lovable qualities: you can be useful, pleasant, or good. He identifies three kinds of friendship, according to what lovable quality each is based on. The first kind of friendship, friendship based on usefulness, occurs among people seeking profit and success. Friendship for mutual advantage, (here I quote Aristotle) seems to occur most frequently among the old, as in old age men do not pursue pleasure but profit...and between those young people whose object in life is success. Friends of this kind do not frequent each others company much, for in some cases they are not even pleasing to each other, and therefore they have no use for spending time together unless it is mutually profitable; since their pleasure in each other goes no further than their

expectations of advantage. The second type of friendship is based on pleasure and is commonly found among the young. With the young on the other hand the motive of friendship appears to be pleasure, since the young guide their lives by emotion...the young do desire to pass their time in their friends company, for that is how they get the enjoyment of their friendship. Aristotle mentions two ways to be pleasant you can be either beautiful or witty. I used to spend time looking at myself in a mirror trying to decide whether I was good looking, but I finally gave it up and decided to try to qualify as a pleasant person by being witty. Now, witty people, according to Aristotle, make friends best with other witty people, so if I am going to try to make it on wit I must find someone else who is also trying to make it on wit, so we can admire each other and confirm each others worth. In general, there needs to be what he calls equality in friendship, which means that the friends enjoy doing the same things, and admire each others strong points. If I were good at dancing, then I should be friends with a good dancer, because not only would we enjoy the same activity, but we would also be able to agree with each other that dancing is wondrous, and we could consider ourselves superior to people who are clumsy and have no sense of rhythm. You can hardly deny that Aristotle has an interesting point here. You must have noticed that people who are intelligent and read books all the time tend to rate other people according to how intelligent they are and how many books they read. People with beautiful bodies tend to rate other people on their bodies. Other people pride themselves on their ancestors, or their nice things, or their houses. Take my Uncle Alf for example. Alf is a born loser. But, remarkably enough, Alf has a friend, and just as Aristotle said, they enjoy each others company, Alf and Ralph, because they enjoy doing something together, and what they do is, they work on their cars. And what they talk about, just as Aristotle said, is other peoples cars. Alf says things like, Say, Ralph, do you remember ol whats his name, the one used to drive a 68 Olds? Ralph says, 68 Olds sure I remember him. With a big ol crack in the left rear window; some people aint got no pride or nothin, aint that right Alf? 102 Letter 15 Yeah Ralph, says Alf. Do you know what he did? He traded it in on a 81 Volare. Volare, says Ralph, thats ridiculous! Thats what I say, says Alf, thats ridiculous. Thats the most ridiculous thing ever come out of Detroit. The perfect form of friendship this is the third type of friendship, and Im quoting Aristotle again is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in excellence it is those who wish the good of their friends for their friends sake who are friends in the fullest sense, since they love each other for themselves and not accidentally. Part of the point here is that we can distinguish between the substance of a thing, what it is, and its accidents, its temporary qualities. For example, being a person is part of your substance, being located at the place where you are now is one of your accidents. The friendship of the good is based on substance, what you really are, while the friendships of utility and pleasure are based on accidents, on your temporary qualities. Furthermore, it takes a long time to become friends. I quote Aristotle again: People who enter into friendly relations quickly have the wish to be friends, but cannot really be friends without being worthy of friendship, and also knowing each other to be worthy of friendship; the wish to be friends grows quickly, but friendship does not.

It follows that a person cannot have very many true friends. Here is Aristotle again: It is not possible to have many friends in the full meaning of the word friendship, any more than it is possible to be in love with many people at once (love indeed seems to be an excessive state of emotion such as is naturally felt towards one person only); and it is not easy for the same person to be friends with a number of people at once, and it is perhaps impossible to find good people in large numbers. Also for perfect friendship you must get to know a person thoroughly, and become intimate with him, which is a very difficult thing to do. But it is possible to like a number of persons for their utility and pleasantness; for useful and pleasant people are easy to find, and the benefits they confer can be enjoyed immediately. This shows another reason why I dont have any friends. It is because of an excessive state of emotion or one person I love; we spend so much time with each other that we dont have time to get to know anyone else. Aristotle differs from Plato as a great student differs from a great teacher. He was Platos student for years, and when he philosophized on his own he stood on the shoulders of his mentor and predecessor, even though his attempts to put philosophy on a firm footing often led him to deny some of Platos fanciful doctrines, such as the doctrine that there is a Good. Plato expressed his fanciful doctrine of the Good in this passage, for example: And we also assert that there is a fair itself, a good itself, and so on for all the things that we set down as many. Now again, we refer them to one idea of each as though the idea were one; and we address it as that which really is. (The Republic, 507b) Aristotle, on the other hand, declined to engage in such flights of fancy and did not need them for his purposes. Platos writings focus, on the whole, on a single set of problems, namely how to achieve social discipline and personal self-discipline, together with the difficulties raised by the methods Plato proposes for achieving discipline. Aristotles works, on the other hand, are an attempt to produce an encyclopedic knowledge of everything. Plato had to argue for the rule of the rational over the irrational, and hence for the importance of knowledge, episteme, as a guide in the conduct of life. Aristotle, his pupil, could take the importance of knowledge for granted, and he set out to acquire knowledge of everything. Although many of Aristotles books have been lost, those which remain to us, which are mainly notes taken on his lectures by his students, include besides his theory of friendship, which is included in his books on ethics, four books on logic and scientific method, one on the meanings of words, a book on logical fallacies, a book on coming to be and passing away, eight books on physics, four on astronomy, four called 103 104 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I meteorology; three on the soul, where he discusses, among other things, memory, dreams, sleep, and respiration, twenty-one books on biology, including classifications of the plants and the animals; works on color, sound, mechanics, miracles, winds, how to give speeches, economics, metaphysics, nineteen books on ethics, a book on the Constitution of Athens, eight books on politics, and several commentaries on Greek drama and poetry. It is true that some of the books are short and some of the lecture notes are repetitious but it is also true that Aristotle expresses himself concisely, almost telegraphically. His work appears to be that of a person who was highly motivated to pursue intellectual achievement, and he tells us in one of his books on ethics that perfect happiness is an activity which exercises the mind. To use the mind is to participate in divinity, ...it is the activity of the intellect that constitutes complete human happiness... Such a life as this however will be higher than the human level: not in virtue

of his or her humanity will a person achieve it, but in virtue of something within oneself which is divine If then the intellect is something divine in comparison with man, so is the life of the intellect divine in comparison with human life... we ought so far as possible to achieve immortality, and to do all that a person may do to live in accordance with the highest thing in us. My friends, if I had any friends, would probably forgive me for finding Aristotle interesting; they would probably take the position that everyone is entitled to a hobby, such as collecting first editions of L. Frank Baums Wizard of Oz books, or becoming an expert on the private lives of Hollywood celebrities or the British royal family, or reading Aristotle. If I find a quotable line here and there which helps me to think about my personal problems as I read what Dorothy said to the witch or what Liz Taylor said to Richard Burton, or what Prince Charles said to Lady Di, or what Aristotle said to his students, that too is, within limits, permissible, as long as I do not forget that Aristotle belongs to a distant past which, thanks to God and science, we have put behind us. But if I were, heaven forbid, science forbid, to agree with Aristotelian principles, then I would quickly be reminded that the scientific study of humans and other animals has come a long way since Aristotle began biology by collecting specimens for the museums attached to his lyceum (that was the name of his school) and morally we have come a long way too because Aristotle and Plato also for that matter supported hierarchy, patriarchy, slavery, mind-body dualism, and (some say) an arid intellectualism, and, moreover, they were not above telling stories with the aim of arrogating divine attributes for themselves and their class, such as the story quoted at the end of the preceding paragraph. That is the sort of thing the sort of friends I would probably have, if I had any, would say to anybody suspected of admiring Aristotle. : Now a friend, according to an Earlham student named Matthew Miller, is a person who understands why you do what you do. This is an insightful comment on friendship because normally we expect friends to communicate in such a way that they understand each others motives. An outsider can observer what a person does, so that the outsider knows, for example, that Melvin dropped chemistry or that Karen broke up with her fianc, but a friend knows why Melvin dropped chemistry and why Karen and her fianc no longer send roses to each other. So, following Miller, if I were going to behave in a friendly way toward my friend, if I had one, I would have to explain why this philosophical treatise portrays Aristotle in a rather favorable light, even though it endorses the minimization of hierarchy, the abolition of patriarchy, the elimination of the new as well as the old forms of slavery and dualism, and even though it does not endorse either arid intellectualism or fraud. As I said at the beginning, I confess that I find Aristotle interesting, but I have not yet decided whether to confess that I admire his concept of rational human action. It depends on whether I can find a way to avoid being misunderstood. Now suppose that my friend, if I had one, were to say to me, Communicate to me just exactly why you are describing Aristotles philosophy in a somewhat favorable way. I want to 104 Letter 15 (know why you are doing what you are doing because understanding human action is part of what friends are for. If my friend (if I had a friend) were to make such a request, I would probably be intimidated. I am always intimidated when people say, Communicate to me just exactly why.... Unable to answer, I would probably stall for time by telling a story. That reminds me, I would say, of a beggar who approached me as I was enjoying a bowl of

cream of asparagus soup at a small caf in the city of San Jose, Costa Rica. The pordiosero (beggar) walked in the door and came up to my table carrying a branch cut from a tree. Who made this branch? he asked. God, I answered, seeking to establish communication by participating in symbolic structures meaningful in the great western tradition the two of us presumably shared. He smiled. What is this branch made of? Wood, I answered. Who made man? he asked. God, I answered again. What is a man made of? Muscle and blood, I said. A man, he said, is made of a little bread and a little soup. I invited him to sit down and bought him some bread and some soup. My friend (if I had one) would probably wonder why I told the story, and, not knowing that I told it to stall for time, she would probably suppose the story to have a deep meaning not apparent on the surface, and I, since I am pretentious and enjoy being thought profound, would probably not admit that the only reason I told the story was that I could not think of anything else to say, which would create a communication barrier between us, due to my failure to be open with her about my motives, which would not be good for our friendship. Eventually she would remind me that I had not answered her question. What question? I would ask, pretending to have forgotten. Why do you accept Aristotles model of rational human action and reject our modern homo economicus* assumptions? I would begin my approach to an answer by saying, Aristotle describes the institution of friendship as it was practiced in the Greek cities where he lived in the 4di century B.C. That much is obvious. His method of description is constructive. It changes the realities it describes. What do you mean? I mean his description is not like an image in a mirror. It is made of words and it is creative. Please tell me what you mean. lam trying to understand you, but I find what you are saying to be obscure. Suppose there were a mirror in the agora, reflecting the movements of the Athenians as they made friends. What the mirror would reflect would be a series of two-dimensional images of Athenian bodies. That is different from Aristotle because the product of Aristotles philosophizing is a series of words. Yes, I would say, you are understanding me. I would cross myself gratefully and say a Glory Be. The friend: The mirror does not decide what to reflect, but Aristotle does, so his verbal image is creative. * homo economicus: Latin for economic man. It refers to the modern assumption that human behavior is by nature economic, i.e. devoted to maximizing the satisfaction of an individuals preferences or desires. Rationality is maximizing the payoffs. (Def. 6) 105 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Myself: An infinite number of grammatically correct verbal descriptions are available for

constructing a verbal image of friendship. Aristotle generates and selects a valid description (by valid here I mean not contrary to the facts) from among infinitely many valid possibilities. The friend: His philosophical generalizations about friendship will change the conduct of the Athenians because after they listen to him, or read notes on his lectures, they will in their own minds talk to themselves about friendship, and in conversations talk to others about friendship, in slightly different ways. That is why you say his describing changes the realities it describes. Quite so, I say. Aristotle himself tells us that his ethics will be useful to those who live kata logon, according to the word, but useless for those who are alogon, those who do not live according to words but rather according to impulse. He also contrasts those who have a false idea of philosophy, who merely accumulate knowledge and go on living the same as before, with the true philosophers, whose conduct comes under the control of the logos. What does Aristotle mean by logos? At one point Aristotle says the appetites and desires in a sense participate in logos ...as being amenable and obedient to logos in the sense in which we speak of listening to logos when a person pays attention to the counsel of father and friends not in the sense of the term logos in mathematics. However, at another point, when speaking of virtue and justice, Aristotle does rely on the sense of the term logos in mathematics; that is to say, on the idea that virtue, like a rational number (a number which, as we moderns would say, can be expressed as a ratio of two integers p/q) is measurable and measured. Logos means ratio in mathematics, and it also means principle, rule, reason, definition, argument... You will find a lengthy discussion of the ways logos and its variations such as logoi, logon, are translated into English in W.K.C. Guthries History of Greek Philosophy. My friend (if I had one) would probably say, Aristotle apparently blurs and runs together some ideas we moderns are inclined to distinguish and to separate, and vice-versa. However, it is in any case reasonable to expect a product which consists of words to influence the conduct of people who live according to words, that is to say, people whose motor behavior is under social control through the mediation of the cerebral cortex. Myself: Some of us prefer to say cultural co-control instead of social control because by participating in cooperative action people create, change, and maintain culture we dont just submit to it. As we become more aware that we are all creators of culture, we respect each other more and we are empowered to change the logoi and the non-linguistic symbolic structures that guide us. The friend: You are finding in Aristotle an ancient root of some contemporary ideas. Myself: Aristotles model of rational human action, conduct guided by language, is supported by recent research in psycholinguistics and in a host of fields associated with semiotics, and by the philosophy of human action. Learned opinion is returning to views similar to Aristotles, and rejecting the homo economics assumptions made, for example, by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) when he wrote, In deliberation, the last appetite [i.e. force pulling toward HR] or aversion [i.e. force pushing away HR] immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is what we call the will...* What is the traditional (pre-economic society) definition of will? The classic medieval definition of will is a rational appetite, a phrase which derives from Aristotles phrase energeia kata logon, activity according to the word. Aristotle conceived of will as internalized command, one part of the soul commanding another within a single person. Thus the logos, the instrument used to effect rational human action (in Plato the logistiche psuche,

* Leviathan, Ch. 6 106 Letter 15 the rational part of the soul), gives form to a personal will coordinated with extra-personal authority. At its best, the extra-personal authority expresses the larger will of a beloved cosmic community. (Thus Dante felt himself lifted out of himself and his will governed by the will that moves the heavens and all the other stars.) The Friend: Thomas Hobbes definition of will as force and the Latin phrase homo economicus both remind me of Leon and of irrational rationality. No doubt you will say more about them when you discuss the philosophies of economic society. For the present, however, please stick to Aristotle. I will be able to form a clearer idea of why you are doing what you are doing if you discuss philosophy in chronological order: first Plato, then Aristotle, then Christian philosophy and the middle ages, then the rise of the symbolic structures of economic society, then contemporary attempts to build a posteconomic socialist culture. If dealing with philosophy somewhat in historical order is what my friend (if I had one) would advise, then I would not decline to follow her advice, even though it implies a further postponement of my decision whether or not to confess my admiration for Aristotle, since I am afraid to confess without taking great precautions to avoid being misunderstood, and at the moment I cannot make myself understood because I cannot make clear the difference between Aristotles model of rational human action (i.e. action guided by logos) and the homo economicus assumptions. One might, however, even at this early point in the argument, make the observation that there is a similarity which links Aristotles theory of friendship with Matthew Millers theory of friendship. According to Aristotle, friends (a) have good will for one another, (b) are aware of each others good will, and (c) have lovable qualities which each appreciates in the other. According to Matthew Miller, a friend is a person who knows why you do what you do. The similarity is that in both cases a harmony of wills depends on communication and mutual understanding. P.S. A criticism people from other cultures often make of the United States is that Americans have many superficial friendships instead of a few true friendships, ignoring Aristotles observation that it is not possible to have many friends in the full meaning of the word. Do you think this is true? P.P.S. Consider Jesus words No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you (John 15:15). P.P.P.S. A person might know why you do what you do but a) not have enough goodwill to care about your welfare, or b) not approve of your motives, and if either a or b is the case one might consider that there is an absence of harmony of will and therefore no friendship. On the whole, however, I think that these are not valid objections to the Miller thesis. Because a) Anybody who takes the trouble to listen to you with enough care to discern why you do what you do probably cares about you the listener has already contributed to your welfare by giving you the Basic Gift, the gift of being a person in someone elses eyes. And b) the reasons people give for doing what they do are usually reasons other people approve of, the reprehensible motive being usually not disclosed to ones friends or even to oneself. This is why Albert Camus is able to describe as a generous psychology that psychology which ascribes to a person the same motives she ascribes to herself. The next letter will provide more detail concerning a topic already mentioned several times, namely metaphysics, the construction of metaphysical statements, and Aristotles role in

constructing the classic version of what metaphysics is. 107 108 Letter 16 NOTE: Many readers get bogged down in this letter. If you find it too difficult, not interesting enough, or both, skip ahead to Letter 17. 16 THE BRONZE SHAPE STUDENT NAME: Aristotle DATE: 2600 years before I was born COURSE: Philosophy for Everyone GRADE: A+ A+ A+ and extra credit too COMMENTS: Friends may know the causes of each others actions, but Aristotle sought to know the aitai (explanation) and the arch (ruling principle) of everything. To be wise, according to Aristotle, is to know not only why Karen broke up with her boyfriend, but why a flower is a flower, and why a statue is a statue, and why a household is a household, and why an anything is an anything. He began with the assumption that there is being; there must be being, he said to the skeptics, because there is language, and if being didnt exist we would have nothing to talk about. Further investigation led him to the conclusion that amorphous, unorganized being becomes a what it is, a this-something, when it is shaped and unified by a particular form. His symbolic structure, which describes beings as products of matter and form, deserves three A+s and extra credit too since it implies that we, as human beings, should shape up; we should allow ourselves to be formed. It would be somewhat surprising to me if you were to remember what I have said about metaphysics since I am a poor listener with a poor memory. You may remember that I said some people consider the word metaphysics to be equivalent to nonsense, while I, on the other hand, believe metaphysics performs important social function even though it goes beyond the facts. There is no good reason for me to be surprised if you remember what I said; my surprise is due rather to a bad reason, which is that if you had said what I said and I had been the listener, I would think you had used the words fetamysics or physametics to refer to the germination of seeds in artificial fogs or to the measurement of muscle strength in small mammals, such as rabbits. You may find it hard to believe I am surprised when I find that other people are not like me, when what would really be more surprising would be to find a restaurant or a bus in which carbon copies of myself were seated in all the seats. Nevertheless, it is true, 109 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I The use of the word metaphysics has a long and eventful history, in which my speaking the word and your listening, if your mind was not wandering, and remembering, if you have a better memory than mine, constitute a small recent episode of local interest. As is rarely the case in the histories of the uses of words, scholars have been able to determine the approximate date when from the mouth of a person there first came forth the sound meta phphusika, a sound which became in the course of the regular procession of standard translations our English word metaphysics. It happened on a dark night in Rhodes in 70-60 B.C., some 260 years after the death of Aristotle. A

gentleman named Andronicus was poring over his collection of parchment manuscripts of Aristotles works by candle light. (I should admit that it is not known whether Andronicus used a candle or an oil lamp or whether he worked by daylight; I imagine the parts I don t know.) Andronicus was putting together a large tome, trying to unite many of Aristotles books into a single volume. The particular book he placed after the ten treatises on physical science and before the two treatises on political science had no name, and consequently whenever Andronicus or the readers of his collection wanted to discuss it they had no choice but to refer each other to ta meta ta phusika, the book which comes after Aristotles books on physics. As it turned out the collection edited by Andronicus became a standard edition of Aristotles works, and the word metaphysics became associated with the study of the subjects which Aristotle studies in the book which bears the name metaphysics. You may allow yourself a considerable latitude in choosing among the many meanings the word has enjoyed; you may, within limits, choose to mean by metaphysics whatever most helps you to say what you want to say with the help of the word. However, one choice you may not make is to choose to say that Aristotles book which received that name is not a book about metaphysics. It is the classic case, it is where the word began, it is metaphysics if anything is. Notice that it follows as a logical consequence that the logical positivist must say Aristotles book is nonsense, and I must say that Aristotles book performs important social functions even though it goes beyond the facts. The book begins by saying that all men by nature desire to acquire knowledge. If Aristotle had gone to my high school, the book would have begun differently. It would have begun by discussing Alice Leach, Conrad Miziumski, and two or three others who desired to acquire knowledge, and it would have inquired into the causes (that is to say, the aitai, or the arch) of their peculiar behavior. Aristotle would have paid particular attention to Conrad because Conrad seemed to want to know everything just for the sake of knowing; Conrad wanted to get to the bottom of everything, to know its aitai (its explanation) and its arch (its ruling principle) even when the knowledge he might acquire by his speculations and investigations brought him no benefit. Of all the students in our school Conrad was the most peculiar. He read books by himself in the library and stayed after school to do experiments in the laboratories. He had the complete string quartets of Beethoven on tape. Obviously a freak. Aristotle believed that the common opinion about people like Conrad is that they are wise. Aristotle would not lie to us; the explanation for his weird belief must be that among the people Aristotle knew it was the common opinion that people who pursue knowledge for its own sake are wise. Evidently we need to know what school Aristotle went to, and more about the one I went to, in order to understand the context of what he says and the context of what I say, since that seems weird to me seemed like common sense to him. At our school all boys by nature desired to fight. Although lam sure it is true that if Aristotle had gone to my high school he would have had an adjustment problem; there are reasons for saying that my school was more normal than his, because the tendency of young males to fight can be observed in dogs, cats, apes, monkeys, and other mammals, as well as in humans, and 110 Letter 16 because the male hormone testosterone, which the glands begin to secrete in large amounts at the beginning of adolescence, has a demonstrated tendency to produce aggressive behavior. Even Conrad Miziumski sometimes turned red and clenched his fists, and, furthermore, due to certain personal insights which I have achieved by introspection, I have come to suspect that when Conrad walked around the campus listening to Beethoven on his earphones, he felt a keen satisfaction in

enjoying a pleasure not accessible to the musically illiterate, who happened to be the same people as those who had a disagreeable tendency to attack Conrad whenever their attention was drawn in his direction; thus, I suspect, Conrad channeled his hostility; he sublimated it as Freud* would say; he made it sublime like sublimated sulfur, a delicate yellow powder which does not look at all like sulfur rock even though it is chemically identical to it; instead of being a creature without hostility, he was a refined creature, for it would in any case have been impossible for him to be a creature without hostility, since, as we know from behavioral biology, no human being lacks aggressive responses. The principal of our school was named R. Garn Haycock. R. Garn, as we used to call him, had methods for making 700 unruly boys and a slightly smaller number of somewhat less unruly girls respect legitimate authority, such as, for example, himself. In the first place R. Garn followed the precedent of the first Olympic Games, recounted by Homer in The Iliad; he transformed combat into ritual governed by rules, through sports programs. In sports you can be aggressive, but it is a point of honor to play fair and serious injuries are infrequent. Secondly and this was the special genius of R. Garn Haycock he ran a wrestling tournament in which every boy in the school was required to participate. R. Garn maintained that one way to stop bullies is to show them that someone is tougher than they are, so that if you go around starting fights sooner or later you will lose. The wrestling tournament takes the old mustard out of them, R. Garn used to say. Already in the first round 3 50 boys lost and dropped out. Then 175 more learned their lesson. In the end there was only one undefeated boy in the school; everyone thought it would be Mark OBrien because OBrien had the best physique; he spent his free periods in the art room posing so the art students could draw him. To everyones surprise, not OBrien but Jack Peck, who looked like a large avocado, proved to be numero uno. With the wrestling tournament R. Garn succeeded in intimidating most of the boys, indeed all except one. It was not possible for Aristotle to attend the same high school I attended because at the time when he lived, which was more than 2261 years before I was born, my high school did not exist. It was not possible and it did not happen; it is a general fact that what is impossible never happens, it is a particular fact that Aristotle did not go to my high school. His school was called The Academy; I will not mention the name of mine. The founder, director, and main teacher in Aristotles school was Plato. I do not believe it is relevant to mention that Plato was a wrestler. The reason why I mention it, even though it is my belief that it is irrelevant to mention it, is that I have a hard time keeping things straight in my mind, so that when I remember that Plato was a wrestler and that R. Garn ran a wrestling tournament I associate the two memories even though there is no logical connection between them. It may be, on the other hand, that there is a slight logical connection (that is to say, a logos which is also an aitai and an arch) because since the principal of Aristotles school was an athlete and a wrestler, it may have been easy for him to get the respect of the students, which may have helped Plato to move on to teaching them to live according to the dictates of wisdom. This speculation is, however, rather far-fetched, and I mention it only because although I believe it is irrelevant that Plato was a wrestler, it would be dishonest to say I am sure it is irrelevant. * Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis, author of The Interpretation of Dreams, etc. 111 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I

We must assume in any case that the chemical composition of the students in Aristotles school was similar to the chemical composition of human bodies wherever they are found, and consequently that testosterone flowed in their blood just as the same or similar fluids flow in the bloods of dogs, rats, cats, orangutans, and wild boars. From ecology we can deduce also that aggressive behavior serves in general some competitive function in the struggle for access to scarce resources, in order to achieve the survival of the genotype which a given phenotype represents. We know that the chemical similarity of my high school classmates to Aristotles is not an accident, but the product of 14 million years of mammalian evolution. It could not be otherwise. In spite of the physical similarity of the students at the two schools there were differences. Aristotle would have had an adjustment problem at our school, and some of us would have felt out of place at Platos Academy, Jack Peck, for example, would have felt out of place at the Academy because his family background was unlike that of most of the students there. His mother, in the early days of her marriage, made great efforts to be respectable, to have the things and to do the things that normal families have and do in America; when it became evident to her that it was impossible to be respectable because Mr. Peck was unemployed or underemployed most of the time, she shifted her still great effort to proving that the familys abnormality was not her fault; life had deceived her; life had told her it would be as advertised and instead it was as a nightmare; when Mrs. Pecks mind dwelled on lifes lies and deceptions it dwelled on Mr. Peck. Mr. Peck himself knew in his heart of hearts that she was right, it was his fault; so he complained loudly about trivia, a dirty dish, a misplaced toy, the woman late getting his breakfast... seeking by the loudness of his complaints to silence the fundamental accusation which he knew he could not refute. To assert his authority he hit people and took uncompromising stands on brand-name issues: he was passionately loyal to Chesterfield cigarettes and hostile to Camel smokers; he hated Chevrolets and regarded every Chevrolet on the road as a personal affront; he loved every Ford, every box of Cheerios sold, every Gulf service station. Aristotles classmates at the Academy came from families different from Jacks. They had no worries about being respectable or about working; what they did have occasion to worry about was the possibility that the slaves, the servants, or the urban mob might become unruly. They came to the Academy voluntarily to hear Platos message that reason should rule and to become wise themselves. There is no law higher than knowledge (episteme) said Plato. All men by nature desire to acquire knowledge (eidenai) said Aristotle. In its context Aristotles statement makes perfect sense. It amounts to saying that everybody wants to acquire legitimate authority; it is a general statement consistent with the observed facts and functional relationships in the milieu. Platos wisdom is the rule of the rational over the irrational; Aristotles wisdom is the possession of the supreme rationality, i.e. of the knowledge of fundamental aitai and arch, which, he adds, confers upon the possessor the right to rule. Among the facts Aristotle cites to support his statement is that people like to explore and to see new sights just for fun, even when they have no immediate practical use for the knowledge they thereby acquire. As the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget would say (following Karl Groos, a German student of animal behavior), we have a Funktionslust* in perception and in the symbolic functions; somewhat similarly Roland Barthes** says of language that its emergence is not motivated by any particular purpose, but simply is a natural human activity. Aristotles * Funktionslust: pleasure in exercising a natural function. Kittens enjoy funktionslust in play fighting with balls of yarn. ** Roland Barthes (1915-1980) French expert in semiotics. Semiotics is the general theory of

signs, languages, symbols. 112 Letter 16 statement has good evidence behind it, even though he would not have said it if he had gone to my high school, even though it is an element in a pattern of discourse which goes far beyond the facts, and even though its social functions go far beyond gathering interesting information. As a philosopher Aristotle deserved an A+. In later life Aristotle founded his own school, the Lyceum, where he became the director and main teacher. The Metaphysics as we have it as a compilation made from students notes on Aristotles lectures. After the discussion of the opening statement All men by nature want to know, there is an historical review of what prior thinkers thought the basic explanations and ruling principles were. Thales, Aristotle tells us, thought the basis of everything was water, while Empedocles thought two principles, love and conflict, governed everything. In telling the story of the history of the field in this way, Aristotle in effect puts us in the story. Thales, Empedocles, and the others were the pioneers who went before us, who advanced naive theories; we who come after carry on the same sort of enterprise, but we will do it right; we will really get to the bottom of things and discover the true basic causes and ruling principles. After these introductions, in Book Beta Aristotle gives a sort of outline of the course. It is an outline of a proposed science, the science now known as metaphysics. The proposed science serves the needs of people like Conrad Miziumski who want to know the aitai and arch of everything; it also serves a need of all of us, because all of us, we have been told, desire to know, Given that the student is motivated to join the quest for fundamental wisdom, Book Beta proposes studies which will deal with the main problems this ambitious intellectual effort encounters. Among them, there is a problem which Aristotle declares in Beta to be the most difficult in theory and most necessary in truth. It is the problem of being and unity. The average student at my high school would not lose any sleep over the problem of being and unity; certainly she would not term it the most difficult and the most necessary. She might lose sleep over her boyfriend, or over money, or because she was suspended from the cheerleading team for popping pills, or over whether dad would let her use his car, or because her enemy knocked her down in the lunch room and kicked her and tore her clothes, but not over being and unity. Suppose, on the other hand, that youand I were old school buddies of Aristotle at Platos Academy. Then we might very well lie awake at night worrying about being, because being (true being) is, according to Plato, just what we are learning about in the Academy, the knowledge of which will set us apart from the masses, who know only mere becoming or mere appearance, as contrasted with being. Reason rules, says Plato, and, assuming that we as his students are more normal and less sophisticated than our great teacher, we might translate his affirmation bluntly as we rule, where it is our possession of reason which gives us the right to rule, and its access to being which makes the reason we possess superior. Unity is, on my interpretation, the main point of Platos ideal city-state; the great ideas which alone are true being serve the social function of producing everywhere concord and harmony, so that the citizens will act one for all and all for one. Unfortunately for Plato and for us as his followers, inspired as we are supposing ourselves to be by his rather beautiful poetic vision (inspired and at the same time honored because the beautiful poetic vision assigns to us a noble place in the scheme of things), Platos doctrine that true being is found in disembodied abstract ideas is absurd, as Aristotle points out in the course of Books Alpha

and Beta. What is needed is a more sophisticated approach, which asks more subtle questions about being and unity and gives more defensible answers, which provides the same enchantment without exposing us to ridicule. The next book, Book Gamma, assures us thatthere is a science of being and unity; it is the very same science as the one which stems from our innate natural curiosity, the one which seeks fundamental aitai and arch, the one which confers upon its possessor the wisdom suitable for 113 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I rulers, the one which has come to bear the controversial title metaphysics. The last three sections of Gamma deal with the skeptic, the inevitable skeptic, the one who is sure to turn up to doubt whatever the philosopher is doing. Aristotle had to cope with skeptics as R. Garn at my school had to cope with hoodlums; in an environment where it is commonly agreed that reason should rule it is the skeptic who is the trouble-maker, the one who raises his hand in the back of the room and says, As you say, sir, we should listen to reason. If you want to be really rational, sir, then you must admit, sir, that you cannot, strictly speaking, prove anything, or else you can prove everything and also prove the opposite. So rationally speaking nobody knows anything. Isnt that right sir? Aristotles case against the skeptic is of the same general kind as Platos. Plato had used the knowledge (episteme) of the craft specialists to show the legitimacy of the rule of reason, as we are legitimately ruled by a medical doctor when we are ill or by a pilot when we are on a ship in a storm; then Plato used the knowledge (eidenai) of the mathematicians to show that some knowledge is indubitable, as theorems about congruence of triangles are indubitable. Aristotle answers the skeptic with indubitable logical verities, such as the logical truth that two statements, one of which is the denial of the other, cannot both be true. If the skeptic is thereby convinced that somebody knows something, she may be receptive to being convinced that Aristotle knows being. Notice that if Aristotle could give a crushing answer to the question, What is being? lie could trump all skeptics. A definition of being is not worth anythingas collateral for a bank loan, but if your business happens to be trumping skeptics, then a powerful category of subject, i.e. ousia, i.e. being, is worth more than gold. Being is trumps because whatever anybody says about anything, he necessarily makes some assumptions about being in the process of saying it. Every sentence has a subject, and whatever else you say of a subject you must say or imply that it has being, i.e. that it is, since to be and to have being are the same thing! You are in a position to refute your opponent because you are an expert on something your opponent necessarily assumes, namely being. (You may wish to quarrel with the claim that you cant speak without making assertions about being; you may wish to say that some sentences have no subjects, not even implied ones, or that some speech is not in sentences; or that it is possible to speak of nothing, or to say that some subject has no being, without making reference to being. Even so, you would have to admit that subjects of sentences are important in languages and that the practice of claiming that something is, i.e. has being, is commonly found in human speech.) If there is such a thing as a general theory of subjects and being, then it is a theory about everything. Whoever controls it controls the central platform, so to speak, from which sentences are launched. If Aristotle were to construct a symbolic structure where the basic knowledge we all crave is knowledge of the being which people necessarily refer to whenever they say anything is; and if this basic knowledge were to lead to the conclusion that we should all shape up and behave properly, then he would surely deserve another A+. And extra credit too. To show why I think Aristotle deserves two A plusses and extra credit I will quote at length several

longish passages from the middle and end of his Metaphysics and comment on their significance in their contexts. These chunks of Aristotelian discourse will serve as samples from which the composition of the whole can be assayed, or, if you would be so kind as to permit me to mix metaphors, as windows opening onto my interpretation of Aristotles mind. From Book Zeta, part 3. (Aristotle distinguishes several meanings of primary being (ousia) and concludes that among them the fourth, which says that being is a subject, deserves priority attention.) Now, a subject of discourse is that about which anything is said and which 114 Letter 16 is itself never said of anything else. Hence we should begin by making this fourth meaning clear (dioritsein) (1) for to be a subject seems really to be the first meaning of primary being. This principal way of being is attributed in one way to the material; in another way to the form; and in a third, to their product. By the material I mean, for example, bronze; by the form, the shape or figure; and by their product, the statue, their union as a single whole (2). Consequently, if the shape be prior to the material, and more strictly speaking a being, it will also for the same reason (logos) (3) be prior to the product of both (4). Comments: 1. When Aristotle wants to make a meaning clear what he does is dioritsein (in Greek) or determinare (in Latin). That is to say he determines the meaning, makes it definite, singles it out. Similarly in Spanish una cosa determinada is a definite, single, specific thing. 2. The form determines, makes definite, singles out, specifies something from out of the relatively undifferentiated, indeterminate, indefinite, amorphous material (hyle). Thus unity (union as a single whole) makes the formless into a particular being. (Here is the technical question Aristotle asks about unity and being, namely: How does an item achieve union as a single whole, and thus come to be a particular thing? Above I said (in a somewhat playful way) that for Aristotle being and unity are major social issues.) 3. Here as often logos (word) is rendered in English as reason. It is translated as ratio in Latin, making whence we derive our English words rational and rationality. The original meaning of rationality is word. 4. It should surprise no one that in the passages following the one here quoted Aristotle does indeed conclude that the shape is prior to the material. It was implicit in his method from the first that being is form, since when he set out to look for being he set out to look for that which determines, makes definite, singles out, specifies. I would not wish to make the assertions that everything Aristotle says about being is unambiguous, or that each of his statements on being is consistent with each of his other statements on being, of that his doctrine (or doctrines) on being is (or are) easily summarized, or to deny that the passages I am quoting from Zeta are mere prologues to the discussion of potency and act in Eta and Theta, or to make the assertion that Aristotle maintained the same doctrines on beiag during every period of his life, or during any given year, or month, or day, or hour thereof. On the other hand, I would wish to make the assertion that for Aristotle form is more truly being than is matter. That is a safe, timid, banal assertion, suitable for being made by a middle-aged person who likes to drink milk.

From Book Zeta, part 4. ...a definition indicates a particular kind of object. It defines anything that is a unity, not by continuity (like the Iliad) nor by connection (as some things are linked together) but in one of the principal ways in which a thing is one. What I have in mind is that one like being, implies primarily a this-something,... Comment: I think this rather obscure passage supports what I said in Comment (2) above about the link between being and unity. 115 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I From Book Zeta, part 6. It is clear then that in the case of being primarily and essentially the being is and the same with its what or intelligible constitution. Comment: This is one of many tidbits that can be found in the text to support the interpretation given in Comments (1) through (4) above. From Book Zeta, parts 7 and 9. (somewhat rearranged) Now the health of a patient comes to be in this way: health being a state of bodily equilibrium, it is necessary, if health is to be the patients that this condition must belong to him; and if this equilibrium is to be his, he must have warmth, and so forth. And so the physician continues to think until he arrives at something which he himself can produce... Hence it follows that in a way health comes to be out of health, and a house out of a house, that is the material being out of the immaterial; for in medical science is to be found the form of health, and in architecture the form of a house. And here by primary immaterial being I mean the what it is to be of anything. Natural growths (2) follow this same pattern. For the seed is productive in a manner analogous to art, since it has the form potentially; and that from which the seed comes is somehow like its offspring. Hence all things begin in their primary being, as syllogisms (i.e. logical arguments) begin by stating what a thing is; so from being come all becomings.(l) Comments: 1. By treating being in a way which emphasizes form, Aristotle rescues Platos distinction between being and becoming, assigning to the former honor, glory, rank. Since forms explain how plants, animals, and the products of human crafts are produced, they satisfy the need to know the aitai (causes) and the arch (ruling principles). I suppose the reason why I repeat these two Greek words incessantly is that Aristotle treats them together, sometimes interchangeably; and they are what he sets out to know whenhe sets out to seek wisdom; and when he finds wisdom he finds form, which is, to be sure ousia (being), but which is also aitai and arch. The pair aitai-arch seems to me to express the spirit of Aristotle because on the one hand it describes an earnest effort to get to the bottom of things, and on the other hand it describes a thoroughgoing confusion of what we in the 20th century could call scientific explanation with a pre-democratic obsession

with rank, with what rules, is prior, is first, most honorable, most divine, and so on. 2. The word translated as growths in natural growths is sunistasthai; the phrase might also be translated as natural unities, or natural order. There is something logical about the patterns followed in growing in this respect Aristotle anticipates the contemporary idea that we grow according to designs stored in the information transmitted by genetic codes. 116 Letter 16 From Book Lambda, part 10 We must also inquire in which way the nature of the whole enjoys its good or highest good: whether as something separate and by itself, or as its own order, or in both ways, as does an army. For an armys good lies both in its order and in its commander; more especially the latter, for he is not the result of the order, but it results from him. All things are somehow ordered together, but not all in the same way: fishes, birds, and plants are different orders. (3) The world is not such that a thing is unrelated to another, but it is always a definite something. (1) For all things are ordered together around a common center, as in a household, where the free men are the least free to do as they please, (2) but all or most of their activities are determined by the household; whereas the slaves and animals do only a little in view of the common good, but for the most part act as separate beings. This is the sort of principle that governs the nature of anything. (2)1 mean that all things must at least be resolved at last into their elements (1), and so there are others ways in which all participate and contribute to a whole. (3) Comments: 1. It may seem odd to connect being a definite something with being related. And it may seem odd to connect being an element with contributing to a whole. These connections make sense in the context of Aristotles discourse, because it is form that defines the element, and also form that creates an order in which each element plays a part in this respect Aristotle anticipates contemporary structuralism. 2. It is a paradox to say that the free men (i.e. those who are not slaves, servants, animals, children, or women) are the least free members of the household. It is a greater paradox to say the same principle governs everything. The explanation, to adopt a chemical metaphor, is that being is found in higher concentrations toward the top of the social hierarchy; those above are more formed, more shaped, gebildeter, more ordered more created, more rational, more socialized, more governed by the logos. Those below, like Sancho Panza* when compared to Don Quixote, are more material and less formal, more unformed bronze and less shape; their lives are to a lesser degree a function of the social order. 3. In St. Thomas Aquinas exposition of the Metaphysics of Aristotle, the comment on Lambda 10 says, ... omnia quae sunt in universo, sunt aliquo modo ordinate.,. (All things that are in the universe are in some way ordered.) It follows that our natural curiosity, the logic of the sentences anybody uses to say anything at all, respect for legitimate authority, and the way we understand the fishes, birds, plants and other natural forms who share the earth with us,are all united in a comprehensive symbolic structure, a cosmic harmony of words! A+ A+ A+. And extra credit too.

NOTE The quotations from Aristotle are from Richard Hopes translation. Aristotle, Metaphysics (tr. by Richard Hope), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. * Sancho Panza is the servant of the idealistic knight Quixote in Miguel de Cervantes novel Don Quixote. 117 118 Letter 17 17 HELLO ARISTOTLE Hello, Aristotle. We dearly miss you, both here in the North and in the Latin part of America. We miss the way you formed the world with words, because today the world is being deformed by force, and the M-16s built by the fathers in the North are killing the children in the South. I try to talk with the people in the North. Stop the war, I try to say, the just govern for the good of the whole. But I cant communicate anything I end up talking to walls. The language is too weak. The language is no longer about subjects with being, but about forces that impact each other. I need a way to say we should be guided by the word. Hello, Aristotle. Hello and bienvenido. It is two oclock in the morning and I am still awake, worrying about the terrible crimes my country is committing in Central America. Yesterday a letter came from a friend, a professor of philosophy in Honduras, saying the situation is desperate, a nightmare. He did not give details in the letter because he knows, and I know, that the mail is read by the secret police. My worrying is not going to help him; a human body composed of several trillion cells, sweating in a bed three thousand kilometers to the north of him will not do anything to stop the bullets, the bombs, the torture, the terror, the lies. He knows whose fault it is; I know whose fault it is. Since I am an American citizen I cannot help feeling it is my fault. I feel that I am up against a stone wall which will not speak or move or open; on it are painted faces of people laughing, but there is no sound; in front of me and hemming me in are voiceless beasts; they attacLeach other and eat each other, all the while smiling silently and insincerely. The stone wall and the beasts symbolize my inability to communicate what I know about Latin America; they are Chicago, Peoria, and Richmond, Indiana; they are the American establishment supported by the bulk of public opinion and public ignorance, they are the millions who do not know what American business and government are doing in Latin America, the millions who have a vague general idea of what is going on but like the Germans who were slightly aware that Hitler was solving the Jewish problem would rather not know the details, the millions who are concerned about what the Russians are doing in Eastern Europe who reason that the U.S. is probably doing only what is necessary to save Latin America from the Russians. The millions who, lacking a frame of reference for making sense of public events, choose to evade reality by ignoring as much of it as they can. At 2:30 a.m. I think I should do something to change American foreign policy. To do something I would have to say something which somebody else would pay attention to. By myself I would not have any effect; it takes more than one person to change a foreign policy, more than two or three. At times like this I remember something I have often learned, forgotten, relearned, and forgotten again: that I must communicate. Communicate, share the meaning, establish rapport. Yes, thats it. Tonight I will start by establishing communication with the wall. Wall, what would you like for

breakfast? Wall, how are things in Peoria? My spontaneous approach to walls has always been to engage them in pleasantries with the intention gradually to lead the conversation toward a critique of irrational rationality. However, my spontaneous approach to establishing communication with walls has never succeeded. 119 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I At 2:43 a.m. my mind drifts back twenty years to a white mansion with white pillars in a eucalyptus grove atop a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean just south of Santa Barbara. The white mansion on the hill by the sea was the national headquarters for Robert Hutchins and his friends. I was a junior member of the Hutchins group then, and I am sorry it no longer exists because the Hutchins people talked to walls better than anybody. That is to say (to interpret my symbolism), it is not just the attitude of the U.S. public toward Central America, toward Latin America, toward foreign policy, which keeps me awake at night; I cant sleep because the whole mentality of the nation, and of other nations, needs to be enriched and transformed. The radical Aristotelians around Hutchins, who were active in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s made a more systematic and successful effort to improve the mind of the nation than anyone else. I first became interested in the Hutchins group when I heard they liked Aristotle. I had been brought up to believe that the first principle of right and true thinking was to reject Aristotle. My chemistry text began with a chapter on the scientific method which said the scientific method rejects Aristotle. My biology and physics texts had similar chapters. In history we learned that the wonderful progress of the modern world began when humans stopped living according to what Aristotle had written and began to think for themselves. At church I learned that Greek is out and Hebrew is in; the Greeks, meaning Aristotle, were too intellectual, or so we were told by the earnest young minister who advised our B. Y.E (Baptist Youth Fellowship). I was brought up to believe the modern world was built on the rejection of Aristotle. Since I thought the modern world was the pits, I drew the conclusion that anyone who liked Aristotle must be smart. Hutchins vision was to reorganize our minds and therefore our national institutions through what he called great ideas. He organized a foundation which set up adult education courses throughout the USA where so-called great books containing the great ideas were taught. He persuaded his friend Bill Benton, the owner of the Encyclopedia Britannica, to publish a series of Great Books complete with an index which tells where to find each of 102 Great Ideas (and many more Great sub-ideas) in the Great Books. Salespeople knocked on every door in America selling Great Books. Then Hutchins persuaded Benton to have the encyclopedia itself rewritten, organizing it around great ideas. The great ideas were on the radio and on TV; university curricula were changed to teach a common core of great books to all students in what came to be known as humanities courses. When I worked for Hutchins from 1961 to 1965 we used to invite movie stars from Hollywood and other celebrities to come up to Santa Barbara to sit around a big table in the white house on the hill by the sea and talk about great ideas; then we made pamphlets from the transcripts of the discussions. The phrase great ideas is a piece of 20th century salesmanship. To understand the substance behind the slogan you have to know Aristotle and to know what Hutchins and his friends got out of Aristotle. A university, Hutchins used to say, is a great place because a university is a great idea. The students are terrible, the professors are terrible, the trustees are terrible, the laboratories and the libraries are terrible, but a university is a great place because a university is a great idea. In other words, form has more being than matter. All the terrible matter that composes the inputs of a university is redeemed because the organizing principle, the arch, the form, the guiding word is

a great one. Admittedly Aristotle went too far in claiming that the entire universe, with all its stars and seas, is organized like a language, that is to say, according to the form of human thought. But the moderns have gone too far in another direction; they think society is organized like a machine, that is to say, in the terms my ex-roommate Leon would use, according to variables that impact on other variables. The result, Hutchins used to say, is that the social sciences have little to offer to solve any of our major social problems. 120 Letter 17 It is the form of our institutions which needs to be studied, the guiding words which have shaped them over time, the new ideas which can shape them. A community (polis) Aristotle says, is a group of men who agree to be governed by common rules of justice, that is to say, in Hutchins terms, to be guided by certain great ideas. In this frame of reference it is perfecdy clear to me, as it would have been to Aristotle and was to Hutchins, how to achieve peace in Central America or anywhere else: to get peace you build community, and to build community you find common rules of justice which people can agree to be governed by. Benito Juarez, Mexicos greatest president, put it simply, Respect for the rights of others is peace. It is true, on the other hand, that in another place Aristotle says it is friendship which holds a community together, which might be taken as evidence that he never made up his mind, or as evidence that he saw a need for both justice (i.e. rules) and friendship (i.e. mutual good will). Justice is a great idea if anything is. The Aristotelian story is that people come together in communities to live according to justice; with justice life is worth living, without justice it is not. For this reason people say justice is more beautiful than the evening or the morning star. Aristotle produced a reasoned summary of the meanings of justice, based mainly on the common opinions which circulated in his milieu. He recognized two broad categories of it, which he called general justice and particular justice. General justice is simply another name for the habits of good behavior (virtue, arete); justice is a name which has the advantage of making it visible that good behavior is measured. The image of justice is the measure, the straight measuring stick held by Maat the ancient Egyptian goddess of justice, the scales held by blindfolded Dike the Greek goddess of justice. The goddesses are clues to the femininity of justice which Aristotle for some reason chose to overlook; today we can see that justice requires the pheronymes (the sex glands) which give the orderly female the power to tame the unruly male, bringing the aggressive macho into the orbit of home and family responsibilities. (I could tell you any number of stories of rough characters who shaped up and improved their behavior when they fell in love with a woman who made them toe the line.) In any case Aristotle was aware that the person on good behavior measures his conduct according to the word (logos), he listens to reason as we say, and he measures his conduct according to the customary norms of right conduct at his time and place (noTnos). Support for the Aristotelian view is found in contemporary psychological studies which show that the level of moral judgment of the majority of adults is conventional; we tend to call it just (or right or fair) when people discipline themselves according to the accepted standards. The unjust person is unmeasured and by the same token anti-social. (For the sake of brevity I omit Aristotles discussion of the vicious person, confirmed in bad habits and proud of it, who is possessed by a measured, conscious evil.) The connection between injustice as lack of measure or discipline, and injustice as anti-social behavior or selfishness is brought out in the Politics where Aristotle discusses the types of government. There are three possible lands of government, which are government by one person, government by a few people, and government by many people.

Each of the three lands is divided into two types, a just type and an unjust type. In the just type the ruler is self-disciplined; the same norms by which he imposes moderation on himself enjoin him to serve the community. In the unjust type the governor is controlled by his appetites and the whole polis is the victim of the governors greed. The just govern for the good of the whole. The unjust govern for their own selfish satisfaction. Just government by one person is called a monarchy; unjust government by one person is called a tyranny. Just government by a few is called aristocracy; unjust government by a few is called oligarchy. Just government by the many is constitutional government; unjust government by the many happens when the demos, the common people, rule for their own good instead of for the good of the whole. 121 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol.

Just by One by Few by Many Monarchy Aristocracy

Unjust Tyranny Oligarchy

Constitutional Selfish rule Government by the demos

Aristotles Types of Government Besides general justice, which is the same thing as virtue, the habit of good behavior, there is particular justice, which is justice strictly so-called. Particular justice is one virtue among others; it is the virtue of distributing goods correctly. Particular justice is itself divided into two categories, distributive and corrective. Distributive justice is the more fundamental of the two, since without right distribution in the first place corrective justice cannot correct. Corrective justice is supposed to restore a just social order after a crime has been committed against it. First we need to know what the just social order is, which corrective justice is supposed to restore. Distributive justice is the distribution of goods ta adzion, which is usually translated according to merit, but which might be translated according to measure, or according to proper measure. Aristotle noted a difficulty here: although people agree that justice distributes according to merit, there are different versions of what constitutes merit. I believe that the version favored by the American Aristotelians can be summarized conveniently in a formula used by Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister who ran for president on the socialist ticket every four years during the 1930s and 1940s. Thomas used to say that we distribute goods in America according to Deed, Need, Greed, and Breed. According to deed refers to the value of the work you do. According to need refers to basic human necessities, i.e. food, shelter, water, medical care. According to greed refers to how cleverly you can figure out how to get things you dont need for work you dont do. According to breed refers to the race or social class or gender you were born into. Distributive justice, on this account, means distribution according to deed and need, not according to greed and breed. The deed and need concept shows Thomas to be a pretty good Aristotelian, and both Thomas and Aristotle to be excellent ecologists, inasmuch as meeting basic human needs assures

the continuation of the metabolic processes of life, which can only be done in a living ecosystem, and inasmuch as rewards for deeds motivate people to do the work which enables the community to survive. Corrective justice has two lands depending on whether the victim of the injustice to be corrected was ripped off with her consent or without consent. Correction of voluntary injustice is called for when a business transaction is unjust. For example, if you sell something for more than it is worth you are unjust even though the buyer agreed to the sale; corrective justice requires you to compensate the buyer. Involuntary justice is robbery; one says that justice is done when the stolen goods are returned to the owner also perhaps when other measures are taken to correct the damage and prevent the reoccurrence of similar crimes. I will mention a few more concepts of justice in Aristotle and then I will go to sleep. What has come to be called social justice (more accurately translated as legal justice) is a guide to practice in given circumstances. It has a trivial meaning and an important meaning. The trivial 122 Letter 17 meaning is that an arbitrary rule, such as stop at red lights go at green lights, is a just rule which should be obeyed even though it would have been equally legitimate to say, for example, stop at green lights go at red lights. The important meaning is that in struggling for justice one it should not seek perfection, but only for some degree of amelioration of injustice which is unachievable under the circumstances. One more great idea: equity. Equity refers to the impossibility of writing universal rules justice to cover all cases. The judge (or whoever is distributing goods) uses equity when she breaks the rules to do what ought to be done in an unusual case. Good night. Now it is morning and I am sitting at a table in the kitchen, writing more notes, crossing them out, writing new ones. Outside the rain is falling. Last night I left some gaps in my account of Aristotles discussion of justice. Ill come back to the subject in later letters, in connection with what later philosophers and economists have had to say about Aristotelian themes. I went to sleep at 3 a.m. and dreamed of white houses on hills by the sea. The morning news says more than 200 U.S. marines were killed in Lebanon by a suicide bombing; a bomber drove a truck filled with explosives into the compound where the marines were living. Now I am sorry to be so critical of the United States. Whenever the vulnerability of my country becomes apparent, I want to mute my objections to its policies, lest excessive criticism undermine our sense of self-worth and our confidence in what we can do together as a nation. I remind myself that peace is not built by identifying any particular group of people as the chief perpetrators of injustice, but by strengthening justice itself; when injustice reigns even the strongest are vulnerable, they as well as the weak will be victims sooner or later when their turn comes. If I am depressed for months on end by the lawless conduct of my country/ it is not because I believe the United States national behavior is worse than the average ofthe worlds peoples most of the time. I stress American misconduct because when the/U.S. government and U.S. citizens commit atrocities I feel horrified and guilty. When another country commits an atrocity I feel horrified but not guilty. There is a reason which justifies my feeling of horror (and sometimes guilt) when I read the newspaper or watch the news on TV. I admit that the statement, Richards feels nauseous when he reads the newspaper is a statement about Richards, not about world events, but it is not simply a matter of me feeling a pain in my head, dizziness in my hands, and cramps in my legs.

The reason which justifies my sentiments is that what is going on in the world is senseless; the actions of human beings are not shaped and guided by any constructive philosophy. It may be hard to explain what I mean when I say the world is senseless, and harder still to determine whether it is true or false to say the world is senseless, but at least it is a statement about the world, not about my private feelings. What I mean is that this violence is not leading anywhere. There is no comprehensive vision which says, If we do this, and this, and this, then the result will be peace. (Although here we means the U.S. government and people, I believe the argument can be extended to apply to contemporary peoples generally. There do exist so called reasons for our actions; we send marines to Lebanon because X, we send marines to Grenada because Y, we send marines to El Salvador because Z, and so on, but the reasons are here today and gone tomorrow; today we have forgotten yesterdays reasons and it is therefore likely that tomorrow we will forget todays. There is no coherent pattern to the reasons given for actions; there is no feasible and desirable objective which we systematically pursue by credible means. I believe these points can be 123 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I verified by studying back issues of newspapers over the last 50 years, and by studying the specialized literature on foreign and military policy, such as the articles in Foreign Affairs and Air Force Review. Robert Hutchins and the American Aristotelians had a constructive philosophy. I believe we (I say we because I was one of them were the only significant group in America in recent years that has had a constructive philosophy. The peace movement does not; we (I say we again because in my own way I am part of the peace movement) protest every new weapons system, we terrify the public with gruesome movies of nuclear war, but in my judgment we have no credible constructive vision. Hutchins did. He believed peace is brought about by establishing legal institutions to settle disputes; law is possible where there is community; community is built by justice and friendship. Law, community, justice and friendship when regarded as words on a piece of paper these are powerless scribbles when compared, for example, to the power of the explosives which destroyed the U.S. marine compound in Beirut. When regarded from the vantage point of the intellectual heritage of our civilization they are powerful ideas. Form has more being than matter. Not all futures are possible. When we act as we do we are senseless because our actions, guided by an irrational rationality, have no coherence and lead to no future. Great organizing ideas are proposals for futures. Many years after the time when I worked for Robert Hutchins at the white mansion on Eucalyptus Hill near Santa Barbara, I had occasion to read an essay by a Bolivian intellectual named Luis Ramirez Beltran. The essay was named Farewell to Aristotle. The title struck me as inappropriate. Aristotle never arrived. You cant say farewell before you say hello. Associating Aristotle as I did with the American Aristotelians, I thought of him not as an ancient Greek philosopher but as the mentor of an unsuccessful rebellion. The attempt of the Aristotelians to reshape the American mind had failed. In their heyday when they were able to rewrite the encyclopedia and to challenge the established premises of education and government, the rightwing perceived them as socialists in disguise and attacked them mercilessly; in the 1930s for example when Hutchins was president of the University of Chicago the Chicago Tribune would attack him almost daily for weeks at a time. The leftwing perceived the Aristotelians as elitist corporation lawyers and did not support them. The solvency and coherence of the movement depended on the personal charm of Robert Maynard

Hutchins him self; although he was born in Brooklyn (a fact he found embarrassing) he looked like a Greek God and acted like Aristotles magnificent man; Aristotle says the magnificent man stands tall, speaks with a deep voice, walks with a long and even tread. He spends money in the right amount at the right time in the right way. Hutchins stood tall, spoke with a deep voice, walked with a long and even tread, and spent money as Aristotle recommended. In his presence one felt miraculously transported to Mount Olympus. When he was in his prime so was the movement; it waned as he waned and disintegrated at his death. When you grow up as a Catholic in Bolivia, your perspective on Aristotle is not the same as it would have been if, instead, you had happened to be a California Baptist sorting Robert Hutchins mail. Ramirez Beltran heard weekly homilies from priests whose minds were steeped in the thinking of the great Aristotelian, St. Thomas Aquinas, while we heard weekly echoes of Martin Luthers castigations of the iustitialistas, i.e. of people who read the Bible under the influence of Aristotles Ethics, i.e. against St. Thomas Aquinas. For Ramirez Beltran, Aristotle is the establishment; he represents vertical hierarchies, authority from the top down, the domination of women by men, the domination of Inca and Aymara and Quechua by Spaniard, the domination of everybody by money. Students do not express their opinions in traditional 124 Letter 17 (Schools in Bolivia; they just memorize what the teacher tells them, for it is written in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas that the lower angels cannot teach anything to the higher angels because the higher has more wisdom than the lower. Ramirez Beltran did not forget either that in the time of the Spanish Empire when the protector of the Indians Bartolom de las Casas, Bishop of Oaxaca, debated the theologian Seplveda at the royal court in Spain on the question whether Indians deserve to be treated as people, Seplveda relied on Aristotle, arguing that some people are naturally slaves; they are people in a sense, but with more unshaped matter and s less form, a dilute solution of being, not as fully human as the Spanish. When I compare Richards American Aristotle with Ramirez Bolivian Aristotle, I find it hard to believe both are related to the same ancient Greek philosopher. When I read Ramirez article Farewell to Aristotle I find to my surprise that I agree with what it says. It turns out to be an article about communication. Ramirez thesis is that true communication occurs among equals, where each party is transmitting messages as well as receiving messages. He calls it horizontal communication, grassroots to grassroots communication; the example that occurs to me is a small town radio talk show where anybody can call in and be on the air. What Ramirez himself particularly has in mind is the use of radio, puppetry, dance, local talent shows and inexpensive print media in Bo livia to enable the poor to communicate with each other, creating and extending their own symbolic structures instead of passively receiving messages beamed at them by commercial or state mass media. False communication, communication improperly so called, Ramirez calls vertical; a single transmitter sends messages to receivers who cannot respond. In the worst case the passive receivers are the impoverished masses silenced by lack of access to an appropriate communications technology, silenced also by traditionally submissive social roles, silenced by fear. Aristotle (I mean the ancient Greek) did not set out to create a class society where social relationships are predominantly of the kind Ramirez calls vertical. I am assuming here something lam sure is true that Ramirez wants horizontal relationships and opposes vertical relationships across the board, not just in the specific area of communications. It appears that classless (i.e. horizontal) societies prevailed only during the hunting and gathering epoch of human social history

 we suppose that they prevailed then mainly because extant hunting and gathering tribes, such as the IKung of southwest Africa, are pretty egalitarian. Ever since the agricultural revolution, long before Aristotle, and ever since the great civilizations of the Ni the Tigris-Euphrates, the Ganges, China, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Southeast Asia and other places the main human societies have been class societies; they have been hydraulic despotisms in the cases where the priests and warriors controlled the irrigation canals; staple despotisms where the upper classes ruled by exercising a monopolistic control of the storehouse where rice, wheat and other staples were kept; slave-based societies like ancient Greece; feudal societies with inherited military rank blending into societies dominated by an aristocratic landowning class; capitalist societies, bureaucratic socialist societies, and national security states, domi-. nated, respectively, by the owners of the means of production, technocratic managers, and military officers. All this could happen in 4,000 years a short period compared to hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering only through the explosive growth of symbolic structures, a series of quantum leaps of the rgulations hermneutiques. As far as behavioral biology is concerned the mechanisms governing human behavior were for the most part fixed in the hunting and gathering period and in the preceding millions of years of reptilian, mammalian, pre-hominid evolution; nobody thinks our strictly biological behavioral repertory has changed much in the past few thousand years although, of course, since we are biologically coded to be culturally coded, we can, if we wish, choose to regard cultural systems as subsystems of biological systems, which in turn are integral parts of ecosystems. 125 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Why the large human societies made possible by increased food supplies required the cultural equivalent of a mutation is not hard to see. If your food supply depends on hunting, hunger will motivate you to hunt when the body needs food (indeed before the body needs food, since the hunger mechanism functions as an early warning system to motivate eating before the metabolic processes actually require sustenance). If, on the other hand, you save seed from one year to plant the next, if you plant in the spring, irrigate in the summer, harvest in fall, thresh and store for winter, then you need a calendar and a timed series of rituals as, for example, even today in a remote part of Peru the peasants hold a festival in favor of their ancient although now somewhat Christianized goddess Dinea at just the time when the canal needs to be cleaned. The Priests begin the Festival with a ceremony which signals that the moment has come. Then all the men of the village dance all the way from the beginning of the aqueduct to the end, cleaning it as they go. When they arrive at the reservoir, the terminus of the aqueduct, they enjoy a feast prepared by the women and children; everyone sings, dances, and gets happily drunk in honor of their goddess. The festival occurs just before the annual rainy season begins, putting the canal in condition to carry water to the storage reservoir. In all large highly-organized early societies there were priestly castes directing the rituals which synchronized labor and seasons, works and days; the special craft of the priests was the construction of calendars together with the making of the astronomical observations and mathematical calculations needed to make the calenars accurate. When Aristotle remarks in the Metaphysics that of all the sciences astronomy and mathematics are closest to philosophy, he shows an awareness that the love of sofia, the goddess wisdom, is a transformation and continuation of the ancient priestly traditions. Hierarchy and reason began together when more complex forms of social organization arose, requiring more elaborate cultural complementation of biological behavioral tendencies. Hierarchy

and reason do not need to stay together. On the contrary. Ramirez Beltrans social program (which I support) has no chance unless they separate. To get their share of yummy beans and rice, the disinherited masses need to get their share of yummy logos, yummy wisdom, yummy justice, yummy information, communication, and organization. And they need to communicate directly with the soil and the cells, the inorganic and organic context of human life, instead of leaving the management of societys vital interaction with nature to elite intermediaries. (The elite intermediaries of our time are in any case incompetent, since with their irrational rationality they will destroy the ecosystem and us with it. Hutchins used to say, In a democracy every person must learn to govern. Being must descend. I agree with everything Ramirez Beltran says in his essay Farewell to Aristotle, except for the title, since I believe the disinherited would be better advised to claim their inheritance and make it their own than to reject it, I would add that the reasons for the senseless silence of the modern world are deeper than the ones to which he alludes. It is, of course, true that due to intimidation and lack of access to resources the weak have little or no voice in society. However, something more fundamental is also true: the language which speaks through us when and if we are allowed to speak (for language speaks through us at least as much as we speak through it) is itself weak. If you try to say to people, Justice is suffering in Central America, you will find that the words are not strong enough to communicate the idea. They fall short in pitiful silence; the war goes on, senselessly. If you say that our security is in the strength of the law, not in our arsenals, most people will not understand you. Their lack of understanding of justice and law is partly a blindness concerning how words work, concerning how they organize conduct. Most people today do not have a frame of reference for understanding that when Aristotle called humans the rational animals (zoon logon echon), he meant we are the animals who have the guiding word. 126 Letter 17 Aristotle constructed some great guiding words; he made a code suitable for guiding his civilization. His philosophy is in important ways unsuitable for guiding the 20th century world, but we can learn from the way he went about his work. He established communication by processing the existing meanings found in everyday speech and in the work of his predecessors, to produce metaphysical generalizations more intelligible and useful than the meanings that were there when he began his work. We can be builders too.

General Justice (i.e the habit of good behavior, i.e. virtue)

Particular Justice (i.e the particular virtue of distributing goods rightly)

Distributive Justice (distribution according to merit)

Corrective Justice

Correction of voluntary transactions Social Justice: a practical approximation of true justice. Equity: making exceptions to general rules for good reasons Aristotle on justice

Correction of involuntary transactions (i.e. theft)

The next letter considers generally the word and breath of the spirit, and it considers particularly how metaphysical statements have been blended with spirituality by philosophical laborers like Saint Augustine. Since this letter was about Aristotle, who lived before Christ, and the next letter will be about Saint Augustine, who lived after Christ, now is a good time to read (or to reread) something about Christ. The Gospel according to Saint John is especially relevant because in it themes from Greek philosophy are especially prominent. 127 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I

1 28 Letter 18 18 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE When my wife Caroline and I visit her relatives at Fort-Morgan-on-the-Prairie in northeastern Colorado, her cousin Audrey, who is rich, sometimes introduces us to local celebrities and takes us to supper at the Elks Club. As you may know, the Elks clubs have been criticized for having few members of races other than the Caucasian. Around the country Elks have taken steps to improve their images and the Gateway to Northeastern Colorado and Southwestern Nebraska Lodge has recently enrolled a black man, one Saint Augustine, who after many years in heaven has opted to participate in a special program through which selected eternally blessed persons may choose to

suffer a second incarnation, and who is currently employed as a maintenance man at the Great Western sugar beet refinery in Fort Morgan. We believe that our daughter Laura is a participant in the same program, but we have not yet discovered which saint she is. My cousin-in-law proudly introduces me to the clubs new member. I know who you are, I say. You were the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa from 396 A.D. Until your death in 430 AD. You were the first western theologian. You gave Christian doctrine a philosophical basis. You are an architect of the tradition in which even today we in western societies live and move and have our being. Nice to met you, says Saint Augustine. Audreys other guests include my sister-in-law Margaret, who teaches English at Fort Morgan High School; Evelyn Dorch, the town librarian, Alice Richards (no relation), a busy person who besides working as a loan officer at Farmers State Bank has at one time or another headed up the local Legion of Mary, the St. Helenas Church Altar Society, and the board of trustees of The Peace of the Evening, an interfaith convalescent home for seniors; Millard Smith, an accountant who is famous not only in Morgan County but also in adjoining Weld County because he says the Bible is not true; and my brother-in-law Jim, a photographer Ms. Dorch proposes that in honor of the distinguished new Elk we not have another discussion about the falling levels of underground water on the Great Plains, but instead share partial apprehensions of the agencies of the invisible world, by asking ourselves the question, Does God exist? My brother-in-law Jim says he has his doubts about the value of the question proposed; he once stayed up until 3 a.m. with two fraternity brothers in a bar in Omaha discussing whether God exists without coming to any definite conclusion. He suggests that we decide the question the American way, by voting. You cant be serious! I say. You cant decide whether God exists by voting. Maybe Im not serious, he replies. But voting would at least give us an answer. Let me make another suggestion, I say. People sometimes are unable to come to any conclusions because they have not decided what the words they are using mean. First we should define God. Then, if God means something that exists, then God exists. If God means something that does not exist, then God does not exist. Although my suggestion meets with general approval, we vote anyway. The result is seven to four, in favor of God. The losers are unmoved. The majority has been wrong before, one of them says. Another says that it is up to those of us who voted in favor of God to define the term. 129 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Alices Story I am about to take up the challenge for the believers by offering my definition of God when; Alice beats me to it. She says she will tell a story from her own experience which will show what? God means. As some of you know, Alice begins, I am a single parent, with just one child, my Judy, who is thirteen. There are mornings when Judy responds to the ring of her alarm clock by pressing the button marked Snooze, which gives her ten more minutes to sleep, and, then, after ten minutes have gone by, when the alarm rings again, she turns it off, rolls over, closes her eyes. I coax her half-awake to remind her that she is late, yesterday she was late, the last three mornings she was late. She will miss breakfast, she will miss the school bus. She mumbles justaminute, and rejects consciousness, pretending to be in a coma. When I come back upstairs after my morning coffee

another ten minutes later, Judy is still playing statue. I know she is awake enough to know what time of day it is, but not motivated enough to care. Should I fuss, fume, and nag? No, that would only make her parent-deaf. It would be better to let her oversleep, miss the school bus, and be late to school. Then she will be embarrassed I hope. That will teach her that paying attention to reality is not merely an unreasonable demand imposed by mothers. Running a little late myself, I step into the bathroom and start making myself presentable, meanwhile asking myself whose fault it will be if my Judy turns out to be an incompetent adult. Not mine. I am trying as hard as I can. Then, lo and behold, she appears, seventeen minutes and thirty-eight seconds before she needs to be on the school bus. She wanders silently into the bathroom, looks at herself in the mirror, brushes her hair. My only remark is that it is eight minutes after seven. I censor the rest. Im styling my own hair when my spray can of styling mousse goes empty, PFFFTTT, and I step outside the bathroom a second to look for a new can of mousse in a closet. Judy pushes the door shut, locking me out. At this point I feel like banging on the door and screaming. However, I dont, because a higher power melts my heart. That is God. I couldnt agree with you more, I tell Alice. I define God as the love-source who keeps the world going in spite of all the lovesinks where goodwill exhausts itself in bottomless pits of indifference, cruelty, pain, rage, and exasperation. I calculate that 16 billion times each day somebody somewhere becomes so upset that were it not for the soothing influence of the Holy Spirit, which is, as John Bunyan says in Pilgrims Progress, like water settling dust, there would be murder and mayhem. In addition, the world runs an annual deficit of 3 000 billion hugs; 85 72 billion kisses; 1253 billion backrubs; 13 billion birthday presents; 47,280 billion acts of kindness; and 125,753 billion acts of spiritual and corporal mercy. The world keeps going in spite of these deficits only because God creates the earth to hold us up, the wind to caress our faces, the sun to give us warmth, and the waters to wash us clean. She gives the love-energy that prevents social collapse, and without her the human species would long since have destroyed itself. When I finish speaking I am disappointed to find that Alice does not relish having me as an ally. She objects that my statistics on the love deficit are fictitious, which gives the impression that my whole theology is fictitious. She has, moreover, another objection, which is that God should not be defined. It is illogical to define God, says Alice, because the very idea of God implies that God is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. God defines us; He gives us our true identity; we do not define Him. As Mahatma Gandhi said, God is the richest word in human language, and a lifetime scarcely suffices to begin to plumb the depths of its meaning. A God who could be defined as love-source, or as anything, would be reduced to the dimensions of human understanding, and therefore would not be God. 130 Letter 18 I find you inconsistent, I say. You yourself defined God as the higher power who melts your anger. Its not the same, she answers. I gave a testimony from my own experience, witnessing one of the many ways God has acted and revealed Himself in my life. I used a name for God knowing that He has many names. The Bible uses several. It says that God is Love (I John 4:8). It also says that God is Spirit (John 4:24). God himself says in Exodus 3:14, I am that I am, which Saint Thomas took to mean that God is Being. When I gave God a name I spoke out of my religious experience, as the inspired writers of the Bible did. So did I, I reply. I am appalled by human misery, appalled too by the destruction of the other

forms of life who share the planet with us, and I am grateful for the miracle that there is still joy, still forgiveness, still selfless giving against all rationally1 calculated odds. I tried to express my wonder and gratitude in names of praise. I am sorry if it sounded as though I meant God to be a word like any other. From now on I will speak no more of definition, but only as you speak, of names. Alice is not convinced by my retraction. I still cannot believe, she says, that you have a personal relationship with a real God. When God helps me to get through a difficult day, or through a painful night when my lower back is giving me trouble again, I feel a great source of care and encouragement buoying me up. God says to everyone, You are a unique and precious individual. You will always be cared for. You will never be abandoned. I feel that I am never alone and I do believe that you feel the same in similar circumstances. However, I also believe that my strength comes from a spiritual being who is eternal, immaterial, and omnipotent and I do not believe that you believe that; so I do not believe that your God is the real one. Augustines Story Oh dear, says Saint Augustine, choosing to intervene in our conversation at this point. I am afraid that I am to blame for all this confusion, and I feel I must confess to thee my brothers and sisters, and to Thee, O Fountain of Life, that I have muddled egregiously thy names, Lord, Father of the fatherless, and therefore Thy existence. Augustine is speaking to God, as he does in his famous book, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, a book whose readers are put in the position of someone who overhears someone else at prayer. However, he turns back a moment to address a few words to Audrey and her guests. I will tell you, if you have time to listen, how the confusion started. It happened in my too-influential book, The Confessions of Saint Augustine; my confessions are, if I may say so myself, a key piece of the picture-puzzle which, when rightly put together, shows how the western mind, and therefore your minds in particular, my friends, came to identify God with eternal ideas. Directing his discourse once more heavenward, Augustine continues, Thou madest me, God of mercies, in the womb of Saint Monica, a chaste and sober woman, frequent in almsdeeds, full of duty and service to Thy saints, no day omitting to pray at Thine altar, morning and evening. But I, wretched as I was, crying for no reason even as I sucked the milk Thou hadst stored for me in my mothers breasts, foaming like a troubled sea, flinging about at random my little limbs and voice, when I was not instantly obeyed avenged myself on those who served me with wicked tears and rage. . My wifes cousin Roger interrupts to tell Saint Augustine that there is a town in California named Santa Monica after his mother, in case he didnt know. Roger once went there and roller-skated in a skating rink on a pier overlooking the sea. Augustine tells Roger hes glad he enjoyed roller-skating in a town named after his mother, and continues his public prayer. My babyhood, O Judge of my conscience, soon departed, but 131 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I my wickedness did not. Theft is punished by Thy law, O God of our fathers, who is to be praised and exalted above all for ever. Yet I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, no poverty, for I stole that of which I had enough, and much better. Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself. A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for color nor taste. To shake and rob this, some lewd young fellows of us went,

late one night, and took huge loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them. And only to do what we liked, only because it was forbidden. Behold my heart, AllExcellent and Inmost Physician, my heart which Thou hadst pity upon in the bottom of the bottomless pit. Now behold, let my heart tell Thee what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously evil, having no temptation to evil but evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved my own iniquity. Foul soul, falling from thy creation to utter destruction, seeking nothing through the shame but shame itself! What then did wretched I so love in my theft, my deed of darkness, in that sixteenth year of my age? Lovely it was not, because it was theft. Fair were the pears we stole, because they were Thy creation, Thou fairest of all, Beauty of all things beautiful, Creator of all, Sovereign Good and my true good. Fair were those pears but not them did my wretched soul desire; for I had store of better at home, and these I gathered only that I might steal, my only feast being my own sin, which it pleased me to enjoy. And now, O Lord my God, I enquire what in that theft delighted me; and behold it hath no loveliness; I mean not such loveliness as in justice and wisdom; nor such as in the mind and memory, and senses, and animal life of the body; nor yet as the stars are beautiful and glorious in their orbs; or the earth or the sea, full of growing life, replacing by birth that which decays. What then was this feeling? It was the sport, which tickled our hearts. Why then was my delight of this sort, that I did it not alone? Because nobody ordinarily laughs alone? Behold, Thou who art Righteousness and Innocence, behold, before Thee, the vivid remembrance of my soul; alone I would have never committed that theft. O friendship too unfriendly! Greediness to do mischief out of mirth and wantonness, thirst for others loss. When it is said, Lets go, lets do it, we are ashamed not to be shameless. But why do I will evil if God made me? That, Eternal Father, was the question that tormented by soul and mind, morning and evening, night and day, and, even more, another question, even more decisive for my fate: How can I cleanse myself? Thou, Physician, Thou Lord of Thy field my heart, answer me. How can the terrible diseases of the human will be cured? The question of evil, O Fountain of Life, and more especially my own evil, and more especially still the evil of my inmost essence, yea that of my very will itself, the evil of that very point where thought becomes action, the evil of that which I call I, that was the question that drove me from my 19th to my 36th year, from teacher to teacher, from doctrine to doctrine, from book to book. I learned from the reading of a book by Aristotle that for Thee, God, to be, thou hadst to be a substance, which is to say, a being, which in Greek is ousia. But what kind of substance? To suppose that Thou, O Life of Souls, art but a material substance leads only to perplexities and absurdities. But if only I could suppose, so I thought then, that Thou, O Inner Light of Healing, art a spiritual substance, spiritual as are the eternal ideas, then my doubts, my uncertainties, my; sleepless nights and restless days, could come to an end, for my questions about evil could be answered. Thou art not the creator of evil. Because evil is uncreated; evil is nothing but an absence of good. True being is in the eternal ideas, those perfect forms of things, and all that is fallen away here below has less being, because farther from the ideal; the good is, the evil is not. Thou, who most truly are Being, art on high with the eternal forms of things, thence downward stream the grades of temporal things, each with its due measure of being, each less 132 Letter 18 perfect, farther from thyself who art Essence and Life. The sin of man is to choose the lesser over

the greater good, for all created things are good, insofar as they are created and tend towards their true form; all sin leads downward into the deep dark abyss of uncreated chaos. Concerning that even more important question, the arbiter of my destiny, the cleansing of my foul soul, the soul of I who from the depths yearn for thy Mercy, I who need thy Strength, show me, O Teacher of my Heart, the way to break free from the chains of lust! And yet I so often found that my sin, my very lust itself, was disorganization. I procrastinated, Lord; I did not do my homework I wasted my days in dissipation, scattering myself, emptying myself into numberless nowheres; finding in no place my center, no solidity, no substance; I did not have that being that Aristotle the Greek called ousia. I interrupt Saint Augustine to say that because I have the same problem I can really get behind where his head is coming from. I could be saved, so I thought, continues Augustine, by a spiritual substance that is God because I am myself a spiritual substance that is my mind. What do I miss when I miss Thee, O Thou who art Beauty, so old and yet so fair? I miss my true self; to wander far from Thee is to wander lost from my own being, from my center, my soul, that solid spiritual substance, akin and like and made of the same stuff as eternal ideas. Like calls to like. Loosening the bonds of flesh, I fly to Thee who art my Home, Thou Mind of Minds, Soul of Souls. I become myself when I know Thee, who art the Joy of the Upright in Heart, who art the Spirit which lulls the frenzy of the wayward will. Having thus conceived the question of evil and its answer, years before entering Thy church by baptism, before knowing Jesus Christ as the Mediator between creature and Creator, I still had no answer but only questions, because I could not conceive a spiritual substance. No. Not yet. If I could convince myself of the reality of spiritual substance I could be saved. But if not, not. And all I saw, all I could convince myself of through the study of the books of the learned, and by questioning the teachers and those reputed wise, all, all I found in this world was matter; masses of matter, things and the void. I had not yet learned to see with the eye of the mind which sees number and measure, form and idea; nor Beauty itself, without which there can be no beautiful things; nor Wisdom itself. It was then that Thou didst guide me, Thou who art Truth, to some books by followers of Plato; Thou knowest, my Lord; Thou knowest that there I found the light of reason, not yet the divine Reason of the Word become Flesh, but the light of human reason, which showed me the eternal ideas, which are spiritual substance. And then, Lord, having read the Platonists I went back and read once more the Holy Scripture, above all the Epistles of Saint Paul the Apostle, and the Gospel according to Saint John, and there I found the selfsame eternal ideas, which I was now prepared to find because the Platonists had opened my eyes through wisdom, for with Thee is Wisdom, and the love of Wisdom is in Greek called philosophy, and so philosophy became the handmaiden of theology, in the fourth century after Christ, in my thirty-sixth year, very much as, nineteen centuries later, one V. I. Lenin, whom I had occasion to observe while gazing on the earth from the heavens, reread Capital by Karl Marx after studying the philosophy of Hegel, and found in it new meanings; and for some similar reasons, for as Marx had drunk deep of Hegel before composing Capital, so, in the earlier time when I first walked the earth, O Beauty of all things beautiful, Saint Paul and Saint John had absorbed platonic ideas before they wrote out the works that Thou, Who art the Word and with the Word, inspired in them. I was ready for Baptism. Thou knowest, God of the Poor, Thou whose only begotten divides the sheep from the goats, Thou Husband of the Widow, Mother of the Orphan, House of Welcome for the Stranger, Thou knowest that my doctrines have taken bread from the mouths of the hungry, forasmuch as some

have said, What profiteth it a man to eat when the soul is greater than the body? Thou knowest, Mother of God and God who art Mother, Star of the Sea, Lady of 133 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Sorrows, Androgynous Ideal, thou knowest that my doctrine has pressed down upon the brow of woman crowns of thorns, forasmuch as some have said, How can a woman be spiritual, when to be a woman is to be flesh, when to be a man is to be set above woman, as the spirit is above the flesh. Thou knowest, Creator, that the soil, the air, the water, the sunlight, the plants, and the animals, yea and also the ozone layer, have been violated by my followers; I confess unto Thee who art the Life of Nature, that by the doctrine that the human is above all creatures in the hierarchy of being because it has a mind with a metaphysical eye trained on the pure eternal ideas, by my fault, by my most grievous fault, the birds have lost the forests where they nest and the fish the waters where they swim. Thou knowest, Thou who art Innocence, that young lovers have been taught to be ashamed of sex because some readers of my books have taught that whatever is physical is low because the body is a material substance. And who knows anymore whether Thou Existeth, O Strength of the Weak, O Hope of the Faithful? If Thou art an eternal idea, omnipotent because not material because idea, then Thou canst only be a mathematical entity as is pi or the square root of two, for in the twentieth century science recognizes no other eternal ideas. And if Thou existeth not, because I in my foolishness have defined Thee as something that does not exist, then, O Great Comforter, how will the world be comforted? I would that I had never been born, or never written, or that my books had never been read; had I not lived, perhaps, then all could worship Thee, my Lord, who art Truth and True Joy, as do the American Indian tribes for whom healing and religion are not two things but one only, who never read Aristotle, nor Plato, who never ask the question, Does God exist? because it is a question they do not need, growing out of a tradition which they, fortunately for them, do not have. And with all due respect, my friends, you might better spend your time talking about the fall of the water levels on the Great Plains. Done with talking, Augustine takes a half-smoked cigarette out of his pocket, lights it, and smokes it slowly, staring out the window with the distant gaze of the defeated. Then my sister-in-law Margaret says she is not as smart anymore as she was when she was younger and she is going to go over the main points to be sure she understood them. Augustine helped to create a synthesis of Judeo-Christian and Greek elements in the western tradition. His central problem was to cure the human will of its love of evil. His solution was to reorganize the human personality around the love of God; which he associated with the regulation of life by eternal ideals, and which inspired enthusiasm because emotional energy was transferred from the lusts of the body to reinvestment in a personal relationship with divinity. The spiritual life purified the corrupt material human will, and brought it under the guidance of ideal spiritual divine Spirit. Unfortunately, western culture, designed and built by Augustine and Co., lends itself to ignoring the material needs of the poor, to the subjection of women, the rape of nature, the chilling of joy, and the breakdown of social order this last because the philosophy relied on to integrate the human personality with the cosmic context fails when, under the impact of science, it becomes unbelievable. As Margaret speaks, Augustine begins to cry. Besides being rich my cousin Audrey is one of those mentally healthy people who delight in flaunting their sanity for the purpose of exciting the envy of their neurotic friends. Now she expresses her unrepressed feelings by complaining (without mentioning either Augustine orMargaret by name) that the conversation is too gloomy. She wants somebody to think of,

something cheerful to say before the evening is ruined. This is the most expensive place to eat in Fort Morgan, and Audrey has no intention of spending several hundred dollars to take her friends out to dinner just to watch them cry in their beer. I take her words to be a threat that if we dont cheer up we will have to pay. Its up to Millard. It is agreed that in view of the lateness of the hour there should be just one more speech, with no rebuttal, and that the honor of giving it belongs to Millard Smith, the premier local exponent of the atheist cause. His assignment is to answer the question asked by proving that God does not exist. And to placate Audrey by cheering us up. Both at once. 134 Letter 18 Millards Story Millard begins by ordering a second beer. He explains that his great-grandfather always had two drinks while he was waiting for the elders. Then realizing that his explanation needs an explanation he explains further that great-grandfather Smith attended the University of Nebraska in its early days, where he studied Charles Darwins The Origin of Species, from which he learned that the earth is older than the Bible says, that the forms of animals and plants are hot eternal, that even the planet itself has changed in form over time. Therefore, the things we see around us are not manifestations of eternal ideas. As a consequence, Millards grandfather left his church. Darwin had deconstructed the cultural structure that Augustine and Co. had constructed. The churchs elders, unwilling to accept the loss of a good soul, used to call on Millards greatgrandfather regularly once a year to try to bring him back into the flock. Great-grandfather anticipated their visits with gusto. He treasured the little library in his little house on the prairie, his Darwin, his Marx, his Nietzsche, his Herbert Spencer, his John Stuart Mill, and the big concordance he used to find the Bibles contradictions. He reread his books and reviewed his notes in preparation for the elders coming; he always offered them drinks and cigars, which they always refused; and they always saddled up their horses and rode away early in the morning, after hours of heated argument, feeling that they had wrestled with the devil and lost. After downing half his second beer, Millard asks us to pardon him if he is dull and does not understand, but what he thinks he is hearing boils down to the following: There are ordinary people like Alice and like Augustines mother Monica who practice living a spiritual life. Ordinary spiritual people have certain ways of talking that are part of their relationship with god. They are likely to say, for example: a) I believe in a personal God who loves me. b) All is gift. c) The joy of the indwelling Spirit is our Strength. d) Praise the Lord! e) (to Mary) Pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death, Amen. It is not always easy to give a coherent account of religious ways of talking. Spiritual people are likely to contradict themselves, each other, and science. For this reason there is work to do for theologians and philosophers of religion, like our friend Gus here, who was the first great theologian in the Roman tradition of the Christian West. Now what Gus is telling us is that as a theologian he would make a good plumber. He bungled his work. He and others identified God with Platos eternal ideas, and western civilization has had no end of trouble ever since. Nevertheless, Gus continues to pray (in public at the Elks Club no less) and in general to act in every way like a believer, just as if his whole supporting philosophical

basis had not collapsed. Our new member would admit correct me if I am wrong that the traditional proofs for the existence of God are wrong. But he doesnt care. Because they were trying to prove the existence of a Supreme Being, who is eternal, omnipotent, and non-material, the sort of God associated with Platos philosophy, and with Aristotles. Sorry, my mistake, says Gus, we proved the existence of the wrong God; the proofs are invalid, but the real God goes on living just the same. It was just an unfortunate historical accident that for us in the western tradition the concept of God became defined by Greek philosophy. To put the point in language borrowed from biology: Augustine helped build a cultural structure in order to serve certain vital functions. But the structure does not serve the functions at one time it promoted the vital interests of white,* male, straight, upper-class *Even though Augustine himself was from Africa and quite likely black. 135 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Europeans, but now it has become unbelievable and does not serve anybodys vital interests. Nevertheless, Gus thinks there are still vital spiritual functions which need to be served so now there is more work for the theologians. Theology can start over again, this time using a philosophy better than Platos. The new theologians can speak for the victims of the old order; so we can have feminist theology, ecological theology, minority, third-world, gay and lesbian, native peoples theologies. Now as an atheist I could argue that if God as defined by Greek philosophy does not exist, then God does not exist. However, I will not make that argument because I do not consider it valid. There are good reasons for saying that it is not the God of the philosophers who is the real one, but the God who is alive in the experience of the believer. I should really make that plural; the Gods who are alive in the experiences of believing communities are the real Gods. Another argument I might make but will not make is that God-talk, as in the examples I gave [(a) to (e)] is just empty air. I wont say that. I am not a logical positivist, and I do not think it is useful to apply to a whole sector of human language the adjective meaningless. I do not think poetry is meaningless, and I do not fault God for being poetry. I do fault Him for being bad poetry. Repentant theologians, such as our friend here, confess that the cultural structures they have built are not functional, but they propose to build other cultural structures in order to give a rational account of religious practices, and thus to help religion to perform its legitimate functions. I hold that religion has no legitimate functions. I want to eliminate the religious practices of ordinary people, and therefore not only their traditional philosophical rationalizations, but also any new ones new theologians may cook up. The situation is complicated because the new theologians admit in fact they declare that the religiosity of ordinary people can be pathological for example in the mass adoration of fraudulent television evangelists. They find themselves in opposition to many people who are selfidentified as religious. My position is that religion is by nature pathological. All religion. That is to say, it is wrong and oppressive. I cannot prove that religion has no legitimate function at all, and is in every instance pathological, by reviewing every function religion conceivably might have. That would be an endless argument. So I shall choose a principal function, one that I trust everyone will agree is essential to religion. If there were such a thing as a function still remaining for religion, even now in modern post-

industrial society, it would be, I think we can agree, the one our friend Gus here dwelled on in his Confessions, the function of providing spiritual discipline. His main concern was the terrible diseases of the human will. The problem was will, the solution Spirit. Rebirth in the Spirit was conversion, the casting off of the old self which had to be saved from itself; the taking on of the reborn self, the true self God intended, which joys in being the good person that you in your heart of hearts always wanted to be, but could not be because your own will betrayed you. Guss ancient superstitions still exist among some people today: for example, if you are an alcoholic and join Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the first things you must do is admit that you have lost control of your life. Surrender. Your will-to-drink will be overcome by a Higher Power, not by your weak self. Let God run your life. It is an insult to human dignity and a violation of freedom that so many people refuse to take charge of their own lives. This is my second beer, and I am going to say no to a third because I know it is not good for me to drink three beers. Stopping at two is going to be my decision. Not Gods. Letting God run your life for you is not only undignified and unfree; it is also irresponsible. In many wars both sides claim to have God on their side. No one takes personal moral 136 Letter 18 responsibility for the atrocities because they say, God told us to do it. Another example: in American society many women do not have abortions because they will not take moral responsibility for choosing to end life. They would rather let God decide to bring an unwanted child into the world than make a choice themselves and be responsible for the consequences. There are other societies where newborn female infants are left on the ground to die; their Gods tell them that certain babies (and sometimes too old people) are to be abandoned. Either way is immoral. The basis of morality is freedom, and to renounce your freedom of choice by claiming that you are acting on instructions from God, whether God is supposedly telling you to keep the baby or supposedly telling you to abandon it, is to give up your autonomy as a responsible moral agent. Without autonomy morality is not even possible. The spiritual life is therefore wrong because it is undignified, unfree, and irresponsible. It is also oppressive, for a reason I will now give, adapting the terminology of some philosophers from the city of Frankfurt, West Germany. Oppression is surplus repression. The gist of the concept is that a certain amount of repression of natural impulses is necessary in any society. Certain work must be done to cope with reality whether it is fun or not. Only that amount of work (and, more generally, only that amount of stifling of natural impulse) is justified. The rest is surplus repression. The spiritual life is by nature oppressive because its premise is that the will is in principle in need of salvation. That is why religion usually glorifies sacrifice. Not the necessary sacrifice demanded by reality, but capricious sacrifice, apparently done for no particular reason, but in fact done to keep the oppressed down. I admit that religion is in principle separable from keeping down a particular class, but nonetheless its very essence is to oppress the believer by stifling the believers natural impulses. A theology of liberation is a contradiction in terms. Liberation is by definition the freeing of the natural impulses. Theology is by definition a rationale for spiritual discipline. Religion is therefore by nature pathological because it is wrong and oppressive. It is wrong for three reasons: it is an insult to human dignity, it is a violation of liberty, and it is morally irresponsible. It is oppressive because spiritual discipline is surplus repression. It follows that human beings should not engage in religious practices, and, for the same reasons, the characteristic

forms of speech used in religion should be deleted from language. My reasons constitute a justification for concluding God does not exist, or, if you prefer, never bringing up the question whether He exists or not. We should be happy about this conclusion, because to bring God back into existence would be to retreat to miseries from which in the last few centuries the majority of the human species has to its great good fortune escaped. In the modern world most decisions are made with no spiritual discipline whatever, and the modern world is surviving. As Millard finishes his speech people move their buttocks forward to the from edges of their chairs; they are poised to stand up. On the contrary, I shout, the modern world is collapsing all around us for lack of spiritual discipline! My voice can hardly be heard over the noise of chairs scraping against the floor as people get up from the table. As people bid each other farewell, I think to myself that Millard is being narrowminded. He is insisting on pushing to a logical extreme the ideal of personal independence, which is one of the ideals of modern western culture. It seems to me that at any time, anywhere, in any culture the I, the inmost sense of self, needs the support and guidance of higher powers. 137 138 Letter 19 19 DANCING WITH TEARS IN MY EYES I have been writing these letters in an attempt to facilitate the social construction of new realities. Let me retrace their steps. On the first page of the Introduction the story about Shelley and Eduardo introduced the context: the global economy, also known as the modern world-system. We live in it; it is the source of our food not just of our bananas, which obviously come from the world economy if we eat them in cold places, but also of our yogurt, which, although it is produced in the laiteries of the St. Lawrence Valley, is regulated in its quantity and quality and even in the details of its production process by the demands of the international market. The Introduction spoke too of paths with heart. Letter One began with a rare and precious passion, the passion to do good. It is a passion often frustrated. In Letter One, as frequently happens, it was frustrated by lack of communication. The remedy: reconstruction of communication. Letter 2 was on a particular part of reconstructing communication: the reconstruction of reason. Letter 3: how wisdom came to be defined as the rule of the rational. Letter 4: reason today. Letter 5: This whole series of human symbolic activities we have been discussing (building communication, reasoning, guiding action by the rational word...) ought to be related to meeting vital needs. Question: Does making sense make sense? Answer: Only if it helps to meet a vital need. Letter 6 looked at the roles of some prevailing ways of making sense in maintaining the unequal access to control of resources which produces hunger, which is one kind of unmet need. In Letter 71 tried to begin to explain my discontent with the thinking of todays best and brightest; I do not know whether I explained myself well; it had something to do with my grandmother; it was about something that reminded me of yellow roses and of fresh cinnamon rolls. In Letter 8 my discontent with rationality was expressed more precisely: minimum wage laws, environmental regulation, and other government actions aimed at worthy goals, tend to slow down investment in the place where the government sets standards, and to send investors to places where, for examples, the same quantity and quality of labor power can be purchased at a lower price, or nature can be raped less expensively. Fewer investments means fewer jobs, lower quantities of goods and services produced, a smaller tax base. Thus many well-intentioned actions are irrational because they do not achieve their goals, or

because they have unwanted side effects. This characteristic of our world-system shows, as Letter 9 further elaborates, a connection between rationality and cultural structure. What is rational is what works. What works is what works given the cultural structure that is in place. Letter 10 tries to portray how cultural structure emerges from biological structure, the two being in borderline cases indistinguishable from each other, as in the practices of baboons, ducks, and dolphins when they travel in formations whose structures stem from genetically-given inclination developed by group learning; each troop or flock or school creates its own distinctive order for ambling, waddling, or cruising. Letter 11 justified a practice called metaphysics which consciously produces or ratifies a cultures most basic and most general ways of using symbols; to do metaphysics is to make ideology coherent. Letters 12,13, and 14 returned to Plato. The rule of the rational. Then in Letters 15, 16, and 17 Aristotle. He advanced knowledge and crowned it with a metaphysical principle: form has more being than matter. Aristotle and Plato 139 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I laid the basis for a wonderful way to think of doing good: when you do good you strengthen great civilizing ideals. Martin Luther King, Jr. relied on Plato and Aristotles gifts to humanity when he said to his supporters after one of his nonviolent victories, this is not a victory for us, this is a victory for justice. For right form. The traditional ideological structure of European culture which transformed itself and expanded (later in centuries 15 through 19) become the global economy, was not, however, just Greek; it was Greek-Judeo-Christian; the story of its formation passes through an encounter with the person Jesus, who is not an idea: Jesus on the Cross: wood, iron, flesh, blood. It was people like Augustine (Letter 18) who put the two main founts of traditional western ideals together. Augustine taught that material goods exist for the sake of a healthy body. A healthy body should serve the mind. The mind and through it everything else, should be dedicated to God. Beauty. Harmony. Hierarchy. Order. Early theologians like Augustine deserve the credit and the blame for creating western culture by bringing together its rational and its religious elements. The augustinian foundations of the civilization which eventually produced the global economy are now hard to see; they are obscured by the newer constructions which have been built over them. Augustines work has become an almost forgotten deep level of the Wests collective mind. Nevertheless, we should make an effort to see them, because we need to unravel the tangle that produced global economic society, in order to be able to reweave the web of life. I want to claim for spirituality, which Augustine brightened and tarnished, a constructive role in the rebuilding of culture. We need it because it is one of the ways the human will converts to love and responsibility. Although we can know there are holes in the ozone layer, we can know deforestation raises the CO2 content of the atmosphere, we can know the poor are poorer, the weapons deadlier, we cannot effectively do anything to change our destructive cultural structures without the conversion of wills. We need to disentangle spiritualitys constructive roles from its long and frequent associations with the domination of nature, male supremacy, inter-ethnic violence, and racism. In this letter number 19, I want to bring out three encouraging perspectives provided by philosophy as we begin the 21st century. After this letter on the present moment, the letters will return to the past in numbers 20, 21, 22, and 23, searching through the medieval synthesis of reason and religion achieved by Saint Thomas Aquinas, looking for tools we can use to fix our broken world. Letter 24 will outline some of philosophys contributions to the great transformation which produced modern society; Letter 25 is another summary; Volume Two (Letters 26-50) is on methods for transforming the modern world.

1. Speech-as-action To explain the speech-as-action perspective, I want to use a drawing from the second part of the Philosophical Investigations of the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The drawing shows a form shift because if you look at it one way it has the form of a duck, while if you look at it another way it shifts and takes on the form of a rabbit. Psychologists usually say gestalt shift using the German word Gestalt, which means form.

What I want to say with the help of the drawing is that my way of perceiving language underwent a shift from one gestalt to another, from making-statements-of-fact to speech-as140 Letter 19 action, similar to the shift of the gestalt from duck to rabbit. I used to think speech consisted of making statements. Aristotle apparently thought so too because he believed that before you could say anything you had to have a subject, ousia, a being or substance, about which to make a statement. Being is an important idea in Aristotles philosophy partly because he thinks you need to refer to being in order to say anything about anything; his implicit assumption seems to be that what people do with language is mostly to say something about something, i.e. to make statements. Augustine seemed to have a similar thought in mind when he wrote that he learned how to speak by watching his parents point to things and say their names; his thought seems to be that once you can name a thing you can use the name as a subject in a sentence; you can then finish the sentence with verbs and adjectives, thus making a statement about the thing named. This is the duck: speech as making statements. My gestalt shift began when I read The Language of Morals by the Oxford philosopher R. M. Hare. I was interested in the book because I used to ask questions like What is good? What is bad? What is right? What is wrong? Hare suggests that part of peoples difficulty answering such questions is that we have a rigid mindset which perceives speech as making statements. We want our parents to point to the thing the word good is the name of. Or like Aristotle we think of speech as statements starting with a being, and then predicating something of the being such as that it is good; with such a rigid mindset we want to answer the question What is good? by specifying what quality we ascribe to a being when we call it good. In general, we think that what grammarians call a declarative sentence, the typical statement, is what language is all about, and we overlook imperatives. The language of morals, however, is actually more like imperatives than like declaratives; if we say, x is morally right, what we say is like the imperative, Do x! and

not like the statements right is the thing x is, or x has the quality of rightness. If we say, kindness is good, we mean Be kind! and if we say Torture is wrong we mean Do not torture! Hares theory which is much more subtle than my simple presentation of it moved me away from speech-as-making-statements-of-fact by emphasizing a whole class of sentences, imperatives, which are not statements at all, which have been neglected in our tradition because most grammarians and philosophers have devoted their attention to declaratives. I was budged another notch toward shifting my gestalt by the theory of performatives of another Oxford philosopher, John Austin. Performative speech does something with words; it is part of a socially defined ceremony which constitutes an act. For example, if you say, I do, in appropriate circumstances you perform an act; I do is not a comment on marriage, it is the act of getting married. When you say to the baker, two dozen blueberry muffins, you do not make a statement about muffins, you perform the act of buying muffins. A signature/on a paper can sell a controlling interest in United States Steel Corporation to an Arab investor; tomorrow at 5:30 in the coffee shop is sufficient to perform the act of promising to be in a certain place at a certain time. A promise is a performance, and according to John Maynard Keynes in his Treatise on Money money is a promise; if Keynes is right the study of money, the language of commerce, should follow the logic of performatives instead of the logic of statements. Austin expanded his theory by classifying ways locutions do things. The word locution just means a conventional set of words people may use. Austin designated two aspects of locutions: perlocutions and illocutions, also known as perlocutionary acts and illocutionary acts. The perlocution is what you do by speaking. For example, if you say Close the door please, what you accomplish if you succeed is getting the door closed. If you plead with your ex-boyfriend to take you back, then what you do, if you succeed, is reconciliation; if you fail it 141 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I is aggravation or humiliation the perlocution depends on the result, which is sometimes difficult to predict; it is what you get done by speaking. The illocution is more conventional; it is what you do in speaking. If you say Close the door please, then whatever else happens, whether the door gets closed or not, it cannot be denied that you performed the act of making a request. You did something in speaking, namely, requesting. One can also make threats, promises, offers, suggestions, jokes, and apologies all if of these are illocutions just because in speaking one does something, even though if one is like me the perlocutions are negligible because nobody fears my threats, trusts my promises, accepts my offers, takes my suggestions, laughs at my jokes, or forgives me when I apologize. The problem is that my illocutionary acts lack perlocutionary consequences. The gestalt shift which my encounter with Hare and Austin had initiated was brought to completion by my encounter with John Searle. John Searle wrote a book called Speech Acts which starts from the premise that every instance of speech is an act; speaking is always somebody doing something. Making statements is only one particular kind of speech act, among many. When I read Searle the duck shifted to a rabbit. The point of calling such a conversion from one viewpoint to another a gestalt shift is that I did not merely make a list of the items I had learned from Hare, Austin, and Searle. Instead my entire way of seeing speech and language shifted its form, so that whenever I read or hear anything the question I ask about it is What is it doing? I am pleased by my new way of seeing things. Not least among the sources of my new pleasures is

a greater access to the wisdom of traditional peoples, who almost invariably are found by anthropologists to enjoy communing with spirits, and to talk about them in terms reminiscent of our own Bible, where it is written, God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth. John 4:24, King James Version, first published 1611.) If I ask about a spirit, What does it do? I get satisfactory answers. Spirits comfort, bring joy, inspire, keep families together, win football games, carry patients through illnesses, move the hardhearted to forgiveness, unite friends, put charity fundraising campaigns over the top, give courage to the weak, bring life to parties, energy to concerts, success to business enterprises, and do a million and one other things, even though a spirit is not a thing, and if one were obliged to answer the question, What exactly is it? one would have to answer, in all honesty, Nothing. But having to answer, Nothing, no-thing, no longer bothers me. I am past the point where I expect every word to refer to a thing. In our western tradition, the ancient Hebrews and Greeks understood spirit as wind (ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek both meaning wind, breath, air, spirit). The word spirit itself comes from the Latin spiritus, a noun form of the verb spirare, which means to blow or to breathe; and indeed the wind is an excellent image, or rather non-image, of invisible power. The wind is not anything, but the vague sighings of the wind at evening melt our hearts; the keen frost-wind of November quickens our steps; soft and pausing winds awaken kindly passions and pure desires; the odorous winds of wakening spring renew our vitality; and when the night wind sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits, and then suddenly stops, then its very absence makes us one with the tender and growing stillness. So when I think of speech-as-action I think of the wind; it loves me, and I love it. 2. Natural Science as the Background for Philosophy A second encouraging perspective comes from the later work of the previously mentioned 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, although if Brother Ludwig were, to awaken from the dead and hear the conclusion I draw from reading his Philosophische Untersuchungen the latter might surprise him as much as the former. 142 Letter 19 The later Wittgensteins reputation in philosophy is that of a genius who said something important, although it has not yet been decided what it was he said. My opinion is that what Wittgenstein said was that all meaning depends on context, and, furthermore, on the social practices which customarily interpret the context. Consequently you cannot look at plain facts. There are no plain facts. Every so-called fact is a fact as seen by some person, as described in some language, as interpreted in some context according to some communitys system of interpretation. Wittgensteins work refutes those who think it is possible to make sure that our knowledge is correct by rebuilding it from the ground up, so to speak, starting with plain elementary facts. The elementary plain facts, if there were any, would be the data from simple observations. But Wittgenstein showed that we cannot use the data from simple observations to check whether our knowledge is correct, because the data do not mean anything without context, without a system of interpretation, and there is no way to guarantee that a system of interpretation is the right one, or the best one, or truest one, or the one that corresponds to reality. The conclusion Wittgenstein drew is that we must simply accept a form of life. This means we just accept that we live among people who say certain things are true, and count certain things as evidence which proves they are

true; we must simply accept their social practices and act appropriately. There is an appropriate time and place for saying this is true and this is false, and we must go ahead and say the appropriate thing at the appropriate time the same as everyone else does. This does not mean we accuse our culture of arbitrarily making up the facts of nature surely objects do not change their relative sizes suddenly and irregularly, or disappear every five minutes to reappear after a pause of 30 seconds such elementary physical facts must be accepted as part of the form of life too, although we are in no position to draw a neat line separating social practice from physical context. To ask about something people appropriately call true, But is it really true? in a serious tone of voice does not make any sense. (Here I must retract what I said before, for a reason which is one of the reasons why Wittgenstein is hard to interpret. I have to say Yes, there are plain facts. It is a plain fact, for example, that there is a chicken in the refrigerator. At least I have to say this if plain fact is accepted speech in the community in whose form of life I am participating, and there is a chicken in the refrigerator.) Although I think Wittgenstein is right it seems to me that if he had lived longer he would have recognized that the form of life we have in the 20th century is a scientific one. We do not really believe very much the truths of everyday common sense; the story we accept as true is the one told by the natural sciences. (One might fear that Wittgensteins conclusions would condemn us to accept irrational rationality because, after all, it is the strongest ideology in our culture; I do not think they do. Our deep faith in the natural sciences is even stronger; science gives us a capability for self-criticism.) 1 When chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, and geology are synthesized so that the results of the several natural sciences are combined and systematically viewed in interaction with each other, the resulting superscience has a name: ecology. To say that ecology provides the context for doing philosophy is equivalent to saying we must accept our form of life, I find ecology encouraging from a spiritual point of view because for the first time in history the conversion of wills can be set in the context of a cosmic story common to all humanity, a story taught in science classes everywhere, namely: the story of the earth. One mother. One family. One home. 143 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I 3. A Time for Joy As we enter the 21st century we have so much rage, depression, and despair that we do not need any more. We cannot forget that life is precarious and society a tissue of lies. Philosophy has already done enough to cleanse us of our tendency to be dishonest (inauthentic) by pretending life is wonderful when it is not. We should be grateful that philosophy has shown that honesty is still possible, but honesty is not enough. Now what is needed is a fun philosophy that will help us to laugh together and will give us energy to transform the world. One could make a short list of causes for despair in the 20th century with only one item: the bomb. To understand our despair and to understand the sources of transforming joy still available to us, it is helpful to make a longer list because the ultimate disaster will be a result of systemic breakdown to which many causes contribute, because they are destructive or because they fail to be constructive. You may wish to make your own list of causes for rage, depression, and despair at the end of the 20th century since each one of us experiences the times we live in differently; sexual abuse, family breakdown, poverty, war, or drug addiction may be part of your experience, or of an experience you identify with. Persistent unemployment is near the top of my list because my father was

unemployed most of his life. Multinational corporations are near the top of my list because after doing some farm labor as a student I participated as a lawyer in Cesar Chavezs movement to organize farm workers, and when our union achieved some success in raising wages the multinationals moved their tomato and vegetable growing operations to Mexico. At the top of my list, my number one cause for rage, depression and despair is the dictatorship in Chile. When you work seven years in education and social reform, and then barbarism triumphs by sheer force in one day, you do not forget it, nor do you forget the suffering of your friends and neighbors who are fired, blacklisted, arrested arbitrarily, beaten, tortured, killed, or who suddenly disappear. You do not forget seeing the air force attack the presidential palace, a helicopter gunship firing on workers in a factory, gunfire in the night, busloads of prisoners being taken who-knows-where, etc. etc. What I saw was not the revolution that was supposed to happen according to one of the writings of the philosophical mentor of Chiles socialist president. According to Capital, volume one, chapter 3 2, the workers were going to become the overwhelming majority of the population; the working class would be well organized because the workers would be concentrated in factories where they would see each other every day; they would have strengthened their organizations in previous decades through their struggles to improve wages and working conditions. Small businesses were going to fail and their ex-owners would join the proletariat, while the magnates in whose hands wealth would be concentrated would be more and more useless, since the factories would be able to run perfectly well without them. What I saw was different; instead of the mass of organized workers taking power from a few useless rich people, I saw a legally elected president, supported by unarmed workers and by an unarmed marginal class poorer than the workers, attacked by a well-equipped modern army. The best organized workers (the ones who had achieved the best wages and working conditions) were on the wrong side; they (the copper miners) had joined the bourgeoisie in inviting the armed forces to oust the president. The bourgeoisie was also supported by the American CIA; by a large middle class including many owners of tracks, buses, and taxis; by newspapers and TV stations which interpreted the news in a way designed to divide the workers among themselves and to cement their separation from the middle class. According to volume one, chapter 32, the strength of the weak is not a great problem; the strength of justice is not a problem at all. The workers will be strong enough to take power; their cause is just; society through the revolutionary action of the workers will cast off its old cultural structure as a snake sheds a skin it has outgrown. Consciousness-raising on this view 144 Letter 19 is mainly a matter of making the oppressed aware of their true situation when they become aware that the system of property rights puts the means of production under someone elses control, forcing them to work for wages if they are lucky enough to get jobs at all, they realize that they can and must take control of the means of production. When you watch the strong beat the weak on the head with the butts of their rifles, when they shoot them and throw their bodies in rivers, when they do it over and over again, day after day, year after year, then you see the need for a less simple conception of the wellsprings of human behavior. The new philosophy is constructive. It finds the sources of joy and nurtures them. It draws from sources of joy the solidarity and strength we need in our times. Nel Noddings, in her recent book Caring, expressed the point I want to make beautifully when she wrote, The philosopher who begins with a supremely free consciousness an aloneness and emptiness at the heart of existence identifies anguish as the basic human affect.* But our view, rooted as it is in relation, identifies Joy as a basic human affect. When I look at my child even one of my grown children and

recognize the fundamental relation in which we are each defined, I often experience a deep and overwhelming joy. It is the recognition of and longing for relatedness that form the foundation of our ethic, and the joy that accompanies fulfillment of our caring enhances our commitment to the ethical ideal that sustains us as one-caring.** The next letters consider some of the philosophical constructions which contributed to the great medieval synthesis of religion, thought, and practice, best expressed in the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas. * Heidegger, Martin, Kant and das Problem der Metaphysik, p. 214. ** Noddings, Nel, Caring. Berkeley, CA.: Univ. of California Press, 1984, p. 6. A similar point is made by Gabriel Marcel in several of his works. 145 146 Letter 20 20 THE HEAVENLY INTERPRETATION OF DESIRE If I were to wake up tomorrow morning the discover that I had suddenly returned to the Middle Ages, I would walk to the nearest church and slip inside the door of a large wooden box. Into the darkness I would whisper, Bless me Father, for I have sinned; its been five chapters since my last confession. I would go on to explain that 60 pages ago I had confessed to admiring Aristotle, and that now I must confess to admiring Thomas Aquinas. This can be regarded as an error because it can result in ones being interpreted as a supporter of the class structures that currently stratify society. I do not approve of these class structures, and I think the hierarchical principles contained in Thomistic philosophy are a fatal flaw. But we should not let this flaw blind us to the fact that Thomas is the classical summary of the symbolic structures which developed in the Middle Ages to build a viable culture under difficult conditions. The priest who would patiently listen to my confession would assume that I had realized that I had been misinterpreting my emotions and was now ready to let grace fill me with the divine will. He would forgive my past errors, and tell me to recite 10 Our Fathers and pray 5 rosaries, which I would obediently do. The fall of the Roman Empire seems small when compared with the calamities we expect now, but in its time it was considered a great disaster. Although the Romans had participated in their own downfall by practicing extensive commercial agriculture without the recycling of organic material to such an extent that the soils of the Mediterranean region have never since been as fertile as they were in pre-Roman times, they did not drench the earth with poisons. The climate and the atmosphere were not affected by the collapse of the Empire, since neither the barbaric invaders nor the decadent defenders possessed industrial systems or advanced weapons technologies capable of changing the physical parameters of the habitat; they were unable to create an environment unsuitable for mammals and birds, an environment hospitable only to fast-breeding radiation-resistant species, such as cockroaches and gnats. Small as the incident was by our standards, the educated people of the time lamented the destruction of the only social organization they knew; they suffered the usual consequences of chaos hunger, slaughter, rape, plunder, beatings. In the eyes of people with a Graeco-Roman education, Europe had come under the misrule of unreason. They asked themselves what had gone

wrong to make such a disaster possible. They answered by pointing to the inroads of a new religion called Christianity, or on the other hand to the errors of the ancient/pagan religions that Christianity and other new religions were displacing, to the decline of morals, the degeneracy of the unemployed masses, disorderly popular entertainment, the political ambitions of generals, the irresponsibility of the rich, the misery of the poor, the division of society into haves and have-nots, lack of respect for tradition. St. Augustine was born before the Fall of Rome and he died after it. He spent his youth in a relatively peaceful, fairly well-administered Roman province in North Africa, and he lived to see the plundering of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 A.D. Late in his life he wrote De Civitate Dei (The City of God), which for centuries was even more widely read than his Confessions. The message of this 22-book treatise, succinctly stated, was that the new religion from Palestine 147 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I (which had become the official religion of all the empire under Constantine in 325) was not after all to blame for the disaster; on the contrary, the new symbolism had demonstrated a remarkable capacity for improving the behavior of the barbarian conquerors. Its doctrines offered an antidote to the major cause of the disaster, namely the insatiable desire for worldly power and wealth. The Christian God was the sure refuge of those who sought to live with peace of mind amid the ruins, and also the firm foundation for the reconstruction of a sober, decent social organization. St. Augustines skillful rhetoric deftly balanced withdrawal from the world to find sources of spiritual strength and action in the world to make it better; his doctrines carefully elude outright selfcontradiction, while they provide quite different mottos, suitable for quite different occasions Augustines way is similar to the creative back-and-forth between other-worldliness and thisworldliness in the Bhagavad Gita and the sayings of Lao Tse in the Hindu and Chinese traditions respectively, and also similar to the periodic withdrawal of the shamans to speak to the spirits in the wilderness, held in balance with the shamans social role as prophet. The withdrawal and return of the shaman* other-worldliness successfully coupled with this-worldliness, has been noted by anthropologists among many tribal peoples. St. Augustines philosophical work was a great success. One of the new religions from the East became the cultural code which guided the long slow process of the reconstruction of civilization. It was a remarkably comprehensive cultural code, as elaborate as the sophisticated symbolic structures of the classic Hindu and Chinese civilizations; it embraced most of the means by which culture supplements the biologically given behavioral repertory; it was law, it was economics, it was psychology, morality, and social science; it was the guiding spirit of art, music, architecture, and most of storytelling. In the medieval world religion made hierarchy legitimate. Although it did not completely dominate the feudal definition of the rights and duties of emperors, kings, earls, dukes, barons, lords, yeomen, thanes, sokemen, villeins, cotters, and serfs, the language of feudalism and the language of theology were complementary in their common premise that the higher persons command and the lower persons obey. What I want to give you is a summary of the most important text by the most important medieval philosopher, the Summa Theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote seven centuries after Augustine; Thomas gives us an encyclopedic and systematic account of the thinking of his time in the form of answers to questions. He begins each article of his Summa by stating a question of the sort debated by the learned people of his time, the 13th century A.D., giving arguments on several aspects of the question supported by quotations from texts which were respected as sources of authority, such as the Bible, the works of Aristotle, and the writings of St. Augustine. Then St.

Thomas gives his own answer to the question posed. For example Thomas asks whether giving aid to the poor is a duty of justice, i.e. obligatory, or a duty of charity, i.e. voluntary. After canvassing various arguments for regarding aid to the poor as voluntary, he answers that it is obligatory. My perspective on Thomas, my focus, so to speak, my way of seeing a gestalt in the welter of detail, is to see his work as the culmination of the process Augustine advocated seven centuries earlier. By the 13th century Europe has recovered from the barbarian invasions, a new culture has been built, and it guides a new civilization. St. Thomas is the author of its synoptic text; the text displays the mechanisms through which the culture was reconstructed arid was reproduced to some extent still is reproduced generation after generation. My interest in portraying a process of social reconstruction by means of a commentary on a text exposes me to some dangerous misunderstandings, especially since St. Thomas is a highly controversial philosopher and the medieval period a highly controversial part of European history. By way of an example to illustrate how controversial my subject is, let me reminisce briefly about a conversation with one of my tutors at Oxford. We were discussing Hares theory of ethical language when without warning as if he were suddenly overcome by an impulse to speak frankly, my tutor said, I suppose it doesnt really matter what you think about ethical language, as long as youre not a Marxist or a Thomist. For a second example, consider The 148 Letter 20 Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, a book full of heated debates about the medieval period of European history conducted on mountain trails in swirling snow by patients at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland. There are two main contenders. One is Settembrini, an Italian professor who is the alter ego of Thomas Mann himself. He personifies modern European liberalism. Settembrini is a lover of rational improvements, modest, well-mannered, judicious, hesitant to generalize, Settembrini is the prolongation into the capitalist epoch of the best traditions of classical antiquity. His opponent is the Jesuit Naptha, who personifies Thomas Manns favorite opinion, which is that socialists are reactionaries who yearn for a return to medieval collectivism. Settembrini and Naptha haggle for 300 pages about what really happened in the middle ages and what it really meant; in the end Naptha challenges Settembrini to a duel with pistols. Settembrini, a gentleman to the end, deliberately misses Naptha and offers himself as a target for Naptha to shoot if he wishes. Instead of shooting Settembrini, Naptha commits suicide. It is not clear why Naptha commits suicide. My personal opinion is that either Mann wanted to get rid of one of his characters so it would be easier to bring an already overly long novel to an end, or else Mann wanted to leave the reader with the impression that Naptha had a twisted mind. Or both. Since nobody who expresses an opinion about St. Thomas escapes unscathed, I will try to give my enemies the pleasure of pillorying me for what I mean instead of for what I do not mean by trying to mention two of the main things I do not mean. I need not mention everything I do not mean for example I need not mention that I do not mean to deny that the so-called barbarians had cultures of their own, that in respect of equality and the rights of women they were superior to the Romans and to St. Thomas, etc. One need not mention everything, however, I must say that I do not mean to claim that St. Thomas accurately describes medieval practice, much less that other people in the middle ages read the books the philosophers wrote and then followed the instructions contained therein. It would be dangerous for me to allow; people to think either (1) I am indiscriminately praising the middle ages, or (2) I am confusing the ideal pattern of life found in its classic texts with the real life of the serfs. The Summa of St. Thomas is an educational project; it is also a comprehensive account of the

medieval educational project. At first glance you may regard the preceding statements as someones personal opinion, namely mine, which I state without any proof because I am hoping you will assume that I am confiding to you the generally accepted opinion of experts, or else because I am hoping to catch you in a moment when you are so sleepy that you are making it a policy to believe everything you hear, to avoid the effort of thinking critically. A moments reflection will show that the trick which is being played on you is more subtle. According to the premises I have laid down, my assertions are necessary truths. The Summa of St. Thomas could not be anything but an educational project. Given that human behavior is governed in the first instance by biologic mechanisms. Given that the human adaptation, the ecological niche of homo sapiens, is culture, in other words the guidance of behavior by symbolic structures. Given that culture is created, and recreated in every generation, by educational (as distinct from genetic) processes. Given that the Summa of St. Thomas is an encyclopedic and systematic account of the cultural code of his times. Then what I said has to be true; it cannot be false. This is philosophy. It is what Plato does; it is what St. Thomas does. It produces self-evident truths, i.e. truths which are self-evident as long as you are willing to see the world through the glasses the philosopher is asking you to put on. It goes beyond the evidence to make generalizations which while they are obscure enough, especially for people not accustomed to philosophy, are simplifications when compared to the infinite complication of listing all the particular facts. Through simplifying, philosophy is able to construct organizing principles. Nobody could organize anything on the basis of total complication, which is what sticking to the facts amounts to. 149 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I My next step toward trying to convince you that the 20th century pair of glasses I am peddling is realistic, comprehensive, beneficial, beautifying, generally meritorious, will be to use them to take a closer look at St. Thomas educational project, to show in it the mechanisms through which the new culture was constructed and reproduced. However, before using a commentary on the text itself to show some of the mechanisms of social reconstruction, I need to put into place a basic concept which is one of the keys to understanding the process, and also one of the reasons for believing that the empowerment of the weak is not an inherently hopeless task. I believe that the medieval ideology made the weak stronger in the process of building organizations that were more stable and more militarily defensible than the competing social systems which lacked the benefit of the ideology. For example, a bit before the time of St. Thomas, during the Merovingian period in what is now France, the bishops adopted the practice of bestowing the title Defender of the Faith on certain of the constantly warring princes who competed for power in the area; over time it turned out that the princes so blessed tended to win more battles than they lost until the entire area now known as France came to be governed by princes with Christian commitments and I think the widow, the stranger, the orphan, all those whom Yahweh makes it his special mission to protect (see Deuteronomy 24: 17-71) derived some benefit from this priestly collaboration with the warriors, through the dear might of Him who walked the waves, through the dear might. Those who take a jaundiced view of the middle ages may claim that as a matter of fact the religion of love never did anything to make the powerful less antisocial, but they may nevertheless take an interest in the method of cultural reinterpretation of physiological arousal states which is according to me one of the principles which explains the success of the cultural code St. Thomas Summa gives us a glimpse of. They might consider cultural reinterpretation to be a promising means for empowering the disinherited even though according to them I view medieval Christianity through

rose-tinted lenses. I of course consider the fact that our charitable institutions, such as hospitals, began during the historical period in question to be irrefutable proof that the doctrines favoring the weak, evident enough in the texts, were to some extent actually practiced. If they reply that the hospitals wore a grudging concession to the poor, a sop to keep them from getting so angry that they would rebel, then I reply that it was not necessary to invent hospitals to prevent revolts by the sick and the crippled, because infirm rebels could have been easily and cheaply subdued. Every culture, every individual, must do something with physiological arousal states, such as acceleration of the heartbeat, high adrenaline concentrations, body heat, the release of behaviorgoverning hormones, erections, cramps in the stomach, sweat, shivering, chattering of the teeth, tears in the eyes, tightness of the muscles at the back of the neck, and so on. I will again postpone looking directly at the text of St. Thomas Summa in order to present the idea of reinterpretation of such states, which, as I said, is one of the general principles of his success, and in any case an interesting idea. For example, I have airplane phobia. When I board an airplane my heart beats faster, the concentration of adrenaline in my blood goes up, the muscles in my stomach tighten, the back of my neck becomes stiff. I interpret my physiological arousal states as fear and my mind fills with unpleasant speculations about whether the pilot is drunk, whether a wing might come off in midair, or what happens if the pilot forgets to put the wheels down before bringing the plane in for a landing. Since I have to fly sometimes anyway, I have invested in a cassette tape recording by Captain T. W. Cummins, a retired airline pilot who helps people to overcome their fears of flying. Captain Cummins reinterprets my physiological arousal state by telling me what fun it is to fly: my heart beats faster, how exciting, flying is like your first date. The muscles tighten, its the challenge of flight, flying is like trying to do one more chin-up when you work out in the gym. What I need to do is re-name my feelings; now I name them excitement, and then I fill my mind with the new world of meanings the new name unlocks as a key opens a door; I loose the surly bonds of earth and soar above the clouds to new adventures. 150 Letter 20 The conclusions I draw from my experience with Captain T. W. Cummins (i.e. that our actions are partly determined by how we interpret our physiological states) are supported by Schachters famous study* which showed that overweight people interpret contractions in their stomachs as hunger, while other people might interpret the same little pangs differently lets say as an itch to get out and jog, sleepiness, a nicotine fit, or the urge to get on the phone and have a nice long talk with some understanding person. Similarly, the physiological similarity of sexual attraction and anger has often been noted, not only in humans but in other species as well, not only by scientists but by my ex-roommate Leons ex-girlfriend who used to tell him, I want you or hate you but I cant tell which. Here again the name one assigns to the emotion, the meaning-context in which it is interpreted, interpersonal agreement about what to call it and what it is, help to determine what action the emotion will produce. Now let us imagine, if you will allow me to draw a caricature for you, in the way that caricaturists make sketches with only a few lines, calling attention to a larger than average nose by drawing an enormous nose, making small ears tiny and thin people pencil-thin, that you are face down on the floor of a burning building in some recently pillaged part of the ex-Roman Empire; a person whom you regard as a barbarian has broken your skull with a club and left you for dead, but you are remarkably resilient and manage to remain conscious for seven centuries. Having a graeco-roman education you are accustomed to thinking of the logos as playing an important role in human life. The logos rules the mind and the mind rules the body rat least when all goes well, you mutter

to yourself with your mouth full of smoke and ashes. Then, I suggest, even though you do not know about Captain Cummins or Schachters study of overweight people, you would be likely, in the course of seven centuries, to come up with an educational project suitable for reprogramming the physiological arousal states of the person who clubbed you on the head, which might well be similar, in its general outlines, to the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, an immense labor of the lamp as St. Thomas himself called it, using the image of the lamp not to refer to divine illumination but simply to call attention to the many nights he stayed up late working by lamplight in order to give the world the benefit of his thoughts, an immense work which in its standard English translation, with the Latin original on facing pages, runs to 60 volumes, which I shall now finally attempt to summarize for you. The Summa begins by calling on divine revelation to assist reason in leading humans to salvation (what salvation is will be made clear later). In the following articles, the ones on God, Thomas weaves scripture and philosophy together in a way which continues throughout the three parts of the Summa. Here we meet Being again Being the source of rational higher authority in Plato and in Aristotle in the form of the infinitely perfect being who is also, of course, Father. Being completes the union of three languages, the languages of religion, kinship relations, and rational philosophy, since God is also Father, is also Being. The son (another kinship term), as we learn in the part on the Most Holy Trinity, is the Word (logos, verbum), while the Holy Spirit is the divine will. Within every human there is the image of the Trinity since every human is a being, possesses the gift of language, and has a will (indeed if salvation works a loving will). Following the Hebrew tradition in contrast to the religions of the tribes surrounding the Hebrews, who told creation stories where humans were created out of water, mud, the wrecked carcass of a monster goddess, or some other sort of material, St. Thomas insists that God created everything from nothing by pure command; the first principle of beings is consequently wholly, uncompromisingly, spiritual. Nor was creation distinguished (St. Thomas tends to run together creating, naming, and distinguishing things from one another) by contrasting good with bad thus from the first, in his elaboration of the creation myths of Genesis, St. Thomas rejects the Manichean dualism, the partition of the universe into good and bad principles, which ensnared St. Augustine in his youth and which ensnares us still today * S. Schachter in Advances in Experimental Psychology (L. Berkowitz, ed.), New York: Academic Press, 1967, pp. 49ff. 151 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I whenever the structure of our perceptions is us against them, Gods will against the devils disciples, good Americans against evil Russians, or good Russians against evil Americans, the City of Gandor vs. the Black Lord, Asian against the white witch. St. Thomas structures creation differently, not as good and bad, but as angels, the spiritual beings, and the work of the six days, the material beings; and then, at their junction, the human beings a little lower than the angels, a little higher than the work of the first six days of creation, creatures who are at the same time spiritual and physical, of whom Thomas treats in the section called Of man, especially the soul. This is not the same as a good v. bad creation story; it is an onward and upward leadership style, where there are no bads, only less good and more good, the former the less created and the latter the more created, where the entelechy and the telos (Aristotles terms for guiding tendency and purpose) are pointed in the direction of bringing into action the potential of the human to be like an angel; humans are made with a supernatural purpose, their desire is aimed toward heaven. The

supernatural destiny of the human implies an inbuilt sensitivity to the call of the divine, which has consequences for the divine government of creation, which is treated in the next article of the Summa.. God rules his creation not only through laws, but also through the ministerings of angels; the movements of physical bodies speak with Gods voice, human action is itself a part of the overall pattern of divine movement toward glory. Those electrons changing energy levels in the movement of muscle tissue do not move aimlessly as they dance they sing in tune with angelic choirs. The divine government concludes the first part of the Summa. The second part begins by specifying that God, who is the beginning (the arch and aitai) of human existence, is also the goal. My soul will find no rest until it rest in Thee, Augustine had said, and Thomas, not content to allow the movement of the soul toward God to proceed by poetic inspiration, fashions a rational system by which creatures made in the image of the divine, endowed with intellect and will, can systematically achieve their final goal. It is here that Aristotles Ethics becomes a great resource, and in the process of being used as a resource becomes transformed into a Christian psychology. Aristotle had written that the test of a good education is whether the person enjoys being good: he recognized that we do what we enjoy and avoid what we dislike, and advocated taking pleasure in virtue. The human act, Aristotle had said, is the voluntary act, hence the good human actor is the one who voluntarily chooses to do good. St. Thomas, the angelic doctor, knew more about passion than Aristotle, and he interprets our physiological arousal states in such a way that our natural passions, when not distorted, are leading us toward our glorious heavenly destiny. Our natural reason, of course, must guide the passions of our soul. The word guides the energy (in harmony, as Plato would say). However the point I wish to underline is that whenever I want some base sensual gratification such as, for example, a hot night in bed with a prostitute, the true interpretation of my arousal state, according to St. Thomas, is not that what I want differs from Gods opinion about what I should want; it is that I am mistaken about my truest and deepest desires. The true rationality is Gods rationality, it is using humans only according to the makers instructions, so that when God reaches my heart, instead of conquering my will he is showing me what my will is. God is teacher and guide because the form of any thing is first in Gods mind, then in the thing itself, then in the intellect of the person who adequately conceives it (ante rem, in rem, post rem). Apart from the interpretation of the passions, the key to the educational project, again in good Aristotelian fashion, is to form good habits. People form habits by making choices; every time I choose virtue and reject vice my good habit becomes stronger. Although the devil is not coequal with God as in the Manichean vision, he is clever enough to use our pride as a handle for turning us around toward vice. The devils devilish labors are offset by the work of grace, which in exciting us to virtue turns us back around toward the Father who always loves us. The second part of the second part tells about the virtues in more detail. Virtues are the good habits which we form through making wise choices, through listening to the voice of God 152 Letter 20 and his laws, and through divine help which makes us more virtuous than we could ever be relying on our own unaided efforts. There are seven cardinal virtues; three of them are called infinite or theological because they pass all human understanding; they are the three listed by St. Paul faith, hope, and love. The other four come from Plato: wisdom, justice, courage, moderation. Justice is especially important, so much so that St. Thomas includes religion as a subheading under justice. There are also certain so-called states of perfection. These are more than virtue, a participation in the divine will so complete that the ordinary rules do not

apply. The third part of the Summa is about Jesus Christ. It begins with a long treatise on the incarnation, which explains that God, wishing to facilitate our salvation, that is to say, our movement toward God described in the second part, has opened for us an easy way to Himself by giving us Christ, who is the incarnate Lord. Christ in turn, in order to unite us to Himself, has established the seven sacraments, so that through Christ and the sacraments we may arrive at our true heavenly goal, which is to be united with the Father in eternal glory. The remainder of Part Three gives some details concerning the eternal life of the saved and concerning each of the seven sacraments, namely the baptism of the child at birth, confirmation of baptism when the child has reached the age of reason, holy communion, confession and forgiveness of sins, ordination into the religious communities, marriage, and the last rites administered to the faithful just before death. St. Thomas is more patriarchal than the mainstream of medieval symbolism when he limits himself to the Father and the Son. The most powerful medieval images were often feminine. Many of the medieval cathedrals were built in adoration of Mary the Queen of Heaven. To judge by the works of art they left behind them, the medieval people also spent a good deal of time adoring motherand-child figures portraying Mary the Mother of God holding baby Jesus in her arms. The most widely read medieval poem is The Divine Comedy, a long account of Dante Alighieris visit to heaven, purgatory, and hell, where he witnessed the condition of the just and the unjust after death, each enjoying an appropriate reward for virtue or an appropriate punishment for vice. Dante wrote to a friend that his poem was an allegory of distributive justice: it illustrates at length Aristotles principle of reward according to merit. But the power that moved the soul of Dante as he traveled through the underworld was the vision of the face of Beatrice it is, of course, no index of cultural achievement that a man should admire a womans face (a tendency to do so is probably genetically coded), but it is significant to find a cultural landmark one of the central texts we use to try to enter into the spirit of the time and place wherein a man looks at a womans face and encounters therein the divine. The heavenly interpretation of desire whose most systematic statement is provided by St. Thomas Aquinas is, I think, a description of very many social practices, of which those included in the Summa Theologiae, immense as it is, are only a small sample; in the larger world for which St. Thomas is serving as our recording secretary, in the world of knights and ladies as well as in the world of monasteries and cloisters existing at the same place at the same time, the feelings of women and the feelings of men about women must have played a much greater role than they play in St. Thomas philosophy. I suspect that the masculine vocabulary of St. Thomas conceals a cultural code to which in its day-to-day operation women contributed more than men. The stars move for love of God, according to medieval philosophy, and God inspires in us by love the desire to spend eternity with Him. It seems unlikely to me that anybody would have thought of attributing such behavior to the cosmos and to the deity if women had not loved first.* The story does not have a happy ending. During a good part of the eight centuries since its authors death, Thomas in fact has been the philosophy of orthodox and conservative Catholicism and the doctrine associated with inquisitions and other forms of repression. One might argue that it is not St. Thomas fault that many of his followers have been intolerant and * See in this connection the study of feminine religious imagery in the middle ages by Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982). 153 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I

violent although it is true that he explicitly authorizes the persecution of heretics, one might argue that this particular doctrine could have been excised from the text with a pair of scissors, leaving St. Thomas constructive contributions intact, if only St. Thomas had had the good luck to have had more discriminating interpreters. One might even argue that dangerous fanatics who think they can ignore ordinary human decency because they are inspired by Gods will would be sobered by reading the 60 volumes of rather careful reasoning contained in the Summa Theologiae. Unfortunately, there is a structural reason why medieval philosophy is reactionary. That is to say, the basic pattern of the code lends itself to right-wing authoritarianism, because of the functions it served at the time when it was constructed. The basic pattern is unity with hierarchy. Jesus might have saved western philosophy, in the medieval stage of its development, from fusion with feudal respect for social rank, for Jesus was, after all, Being descended to live among us as a common man. He was Being born in a barn among the farm animals, the Word doing manual labor at a carpenters bench. He answered to simple physical needs with loaves of bread, fishes, and cures for ailments, and died like a thief. In medieval philosophy, however, the Lord rose to become the overlord of the feudal system; a society based on inherited military rank enthroned the cosmos in its own image, as a great vertical chain of command, a great hierarchy starting with the uncreated void at the very bottom, followed by formless matter, then working continuously upward from rocks to plants to animals, then to the serfs, the yeomen, the knights, the princes, then to his highest highness on earth who was either the Emperor or the Pope (leading philosophers spilled much ink disputing the precise relation between the two highest earthly highnesses); then the chain continued upward among the various ranks of angels, culminating in the seraphim whose high office was to spend eternity adoring Gods essence then another disputed philosophical issue, the precise status of Mary Mother of God, Star of the Sea, Queen of the Heaven and then finally at the very top Jesus, the carpenter, incongruously garbed in royal purple with gold braid. Whether Jesus himself was outranked by God the Father or by the Holy Spirit was a question answered by the mystery of the Holy Trinity which made the three mysteriously indistinguishable from each other, three persons in one substance. As a cultural construction suitable for contributing to bringing order out o chaos, medieval philosophy was a great series of inventions. Philosophy was the handmaiden of theology, and theology interpreted the physiological arousal states, defined identity and social role, told people what they should do. The instructions for what to do are excellent. According to St. Thomas, the seven corporal duties of the Christian are the following: 1. Feed the hungry 2. Give drink to the thirsty 3. Clothe the naked 4. Provide hospitality for the homeless 5. Attend to the sick 6. Ransom the captives 7. Bury the dead A fatal flaw in this beautiful and loving system, and it is a structural flaw, one which cannot be corrected without transforming the entire symbolic structure, is that inequality is the principle of order. The great achievements of the system carried this fatal flaw from birth. In several Christian countries today the doctrines of St. Thomas and his followers form part of the ideology of armed elites who impose inequality while talking about preserving the core values of occidental Christian civilization. The labors of a medieval monk who worked alone by lamplight late into the night cast long shadows over eight centuries, reaching as far as the torture chambers of

the 20th Century, passing on their way the cells of many prisoners. 154 Letter 21 21 PERPETUA ET CONSTANS Imagine what the world would be like if the genetic codes of all the plants and animals, and the molecular structures of all the solids, liquids, and gases, changed every Thursday. Come, grow on my bank, the pond would say to the violets. I will nourish you with my sweet, clear water. No, thank you, the violets would reply. Tomorrow you might turn into a desert. We dont have to imagine very long to realize that nature would not exist if it were not held together by lasting and constant biological, physical, and chemical structures. Constancy is needed in culturally governed systems, too. Harmony and beauty require stability in relationships. If a culture permits, encourages, or prescribes too much instability, or prescribes it as do the symbolic structures of irrational rationality, then it will not be beautiful or viable. The word of the Lord is peace Psalm 85 Thomas Aquinas definition of justice is perpetua et constans voluntas jus suum unicuique tribuendi. The lasting and constant will to respect the moral and legal rights of everyone. Justice is more beautiful than Hesperus, the star of the morning; it is preeminent among the moral virtues. Justice is a lasting and constant will, perpetua et constans voluntas. This first part of Aquinas definition, the lasting and constant will, is the key to peace. Let me explain why I say perpetua et constans is the key to peace in terms of nuclear war. In discussions of nuclear strategy (for example in the book Strategy and Conscience by the mathematician Anatol Rapoport) it becomes clear that the basic problem of nuclear war is that nations do not trust each other. The problem of lack of trust is not new; it is not confined to relationships clouded by nuclear threats. Building trust among creatures aggressive by nature, who are always vulnerable to each others attacks (whatever the state of weapons technology may be) is one of the prerequisites to achieving any kind of human social organization. We make a mistake when we consider establishing trust or confidence-building measures in part 18, paragraph b, section (vii) of our peace plans, when in fact trust is the whole essence of peace. It would have been funny if it were not so sad, when Anwar Sadat, the former president of Egypt, explained that the dispute between the Arabs and the Israelis is a psychological problem, namely that the two sides do not trust each other. The reason why it would be funny if it were not sad is that Sadats remark made it sound as though there were a new kind of problem, a problem no older than the young science called psychology, which could easily be solved by applying techniques provided by that young science. But the problem of building trust is neither new nor easily solved. The gospel says that whoever trusts Jesus will have eternal life, which one might interpret as meaning whoever lives as Jesus recommends identifies with undying rgulations hermneutiques. This passage, John 3:16, is often poorly translated, pisteuo being rendered as believeth in when the better meaning is trusts. The earliest use of pisteuo (trust or believe) of which I am 155 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I aware occurs in Xenophons history of the Greek wars with Persia at a point where the Greeks and the Persians call a truce in the war to allow both sides to bury their dead. The problem is lack of trust; there is no pisteuo neither side trusts the other to refrain from making a surprise attack

during the truce. The solution is to make sacrifices to the gods, using the ceremonies of sacrifice to persuade the gods to police the truce as independent neutrals. The ceremonies give form to the unstable human will; they give it substance, being. The ceremonies identify will with divinities and with formal structures, which are perpetua and constans. Aristotle long ago recognized that the building of trust is difficult and time consuming when he said that true friendships are not formed quickly; the friend-candidates need time to form a grounded belief that each wishes the good of the other. They need to find out whether the good will of the potential friend is perpetua and constans or temporary and unreliable. Reflection on the ancient and necessary need to build pisteuo, when applied to nuclear strategy, shows that ancient wisdom is a better guide to survival (or would be if it were available to us today) than our irrational rationality. Such reflection shows that trust is needed unfortunately, however, people are not ready to hear that trust is needed. The Hawks are not ready to hear it, and for the most part the Doves are not ready to hear It either. You cant trust the Russians! the Hawks declare. We agree! the Doves reply, and then they add, We have found a clever way to build peace without trust; we call it GRIT, we call it bargaining skill, we call it institution-building, we call it mutual, gradual, inspected, verifiable arms control. The Hawks win the argument initially because the Doves concede their point; the Hawks win finally because the Dove plans for building peace without trust are not rationally defensible. The Hawks are on firm ground in making their initial claim because it follows from rationality itself that you cannot trust anybody because any rational actor will violate an agreement or cease to comply with just norms whenever the benefits of violation exceed the benefits of compliance (Definitions 6 and 7). Since, given irrational rationality, it is a necessary truth that you cant trust anybody, it follows a fortiori that you cant trust the Russians. Realizing that they cannot win on the trust issue, the Doves concede defeat, and then counterattack with any number of schemes for making it to the interest of both sides to disarm, win-win scenarios where both sides gain from peace, arguing that rational actors will (Definition 14) choose peace because it is to their long-run best interest. The counterattack of the Doves is ineffective and the Hawks win as long as the rules of irrational rationality govern the debate. The fatal flaw in the Doves middle-wing extremism (i.e. their effort to solve a social problem without challenging fundamental norms) can be illustrated, as the mathematician Anatol Rapoport does in Strategy and Conscience, by telling a story about a prisoner trying to make a rational decision (Definition 7) whether to turn states evidence by testifying against another prisoner, who was her accomplice. The accomplice was arrested at the same time and both prisoners are held incommunicado in separate cells. It would be to the interest of both prisoners to cooperate, but rationally they cannot cooperate because rationally they cannot trust each other. (The analogy with nuclear war is that it would be to the interest of the USA and the USSR to cooperate, but they cannot because they do not trust each other.) The situation can be represented as in the diagram below. The diagram is drawn showing the payoffs to Prisoner One. A similar diagram could be drawn showing the payoffs to Prisoner Two. One tries to make a rational choice on the assumption that Two is also going to make a rational choice. 156 Letter 21 Prisoners Twos Choices

Prisoner Ones Choices Turn States Evidence Refuse to Testify Against Accomplice

Turn States Evidence

Refuse to Testify Against Accomplice

Ones Payoff: 15-year sentence

Ones Payoff: Goes Free

Ones Payoff: Life Imprisonment

Ones Payoff: 1-year sentence

In this situation Prisoner One, being a rational actor and assuming that Prisoner Two is also a rational actor, will turn states evidence. Similarly, Rapoport shows, the USA and the USSR will pursue policies of deterrence instead of policies of disarmament because each assumes that the other, being rational, will not run the risk of being caught disarmed when the enemy is armed. Each side believes that the other side will sooner or later more likely sooner than later come to a point in time when the payoffs of cheating will exceed the payoffs of abiding by an agreement or an ideal. Since deterrence is inherently unstable Power politics sooner or later leads to war, said Albert Einstein our irrational rationality programs our civilization to self-destruct. Irrational rationality. The logic of disunity. St. Thomas Aquinas was among those who have perceived that social organization requires a trustworthy will, perpetua et constans voluntas. A lasting and constant will. A rationality which implies that rational actors honor agreements and obey norms. The human will is notoriously unlasting and inconstant even when the culture does not conspire to make infidelity a precept of reason but there is a way to make it reliable. perpetua et constans. In a good education the will is shaped, character is formed, through deliberate actions leading to good habits. perpetua et constans. In a good education the restless passions are interpreted as a deep yearning for the divine, which finds rest only in Thee. The habits and the interpreted passions are the dwelling places of right reason, ratio recta (in Greek orthon logon). What you learn in a good education is to accept the guidance of right reason; for this reason, J. S. Bach wrote that he composed music for only one purpose, to prepare the soul for the entrance of right reason. To be guided by right reason means, Thomas says, to act according to the ratio praeexistende by the word found in the soul, the word that was already there, is always there. Today we say: according to a pattern of meanings, a symbolic order, a structure, according to language in its synchronic aspect. St. Thomas writes: ...acts are good inasmuch as they reach the measure of reason (regulam rationis) which is the norm of their Rightness. And: The shaping principle or form of a moral virtue consists in observing a mean determined by reason (secundem rationem). That is to say, kata logon; which is to say, according to the word. The voluntas is perpetua et constans because it is under the guidance because an educational project has brought it under the guidance of cultural forms which are syntactically, as a matter of grammar so to speak, outside of time. When right reason guides human conduct trust is in principle rational because people are in principle trustworthy. Rationality then means to follow a certain predictable pattern in ones actions, the pattern prescribed by the eternal word. This may seem a small gain since, of course,

157 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I people may not act in practice as they should in principle, but compared to our 20th century principled self-destruction it is a major improvement. Even though the previous discussion is written for the most part in terms of persons instead of in terms of those mythic personalities we call nation-states, it applies perfectly well to the elites who direct nations. It is not an insuperable problem to make the cadres who conduct the high-level business of a society conform to norms. Usually the people who rise to the top in organizations are the ones whose minds and hearts are most thoroughly imbued with the organizations culture. They are more reliable, not less reliable, than the average person as extensive psychological testing has shown. The problem at the present time is that they reliably follow bad norms. World War HI will be conducted, both in Washington and in Moscow, mainly by boy-scout types, who would, if they had a chance, reliably follow the norms of a functional culture. Ay Perpetua! Ay Constans! How we miss you today! You have been gone so long. You were the eternal principles who stabilized the wills of humans trained to adore you. P.S.I hope your will has not been too warped by our culture. Do you find that it is generally stable, constant, and predictable, or does it tend to wander all over the place on you? What lands of things contribute to its stability or instability? 158 Letter 22 22 TO EACH HER OWN Some writers think that perpetua et constans means constant and everlasting conservatism. They want to keep the economic structures as they are, and transform the souls of the elite. If only the wills of the powerful were loving and pure, they seem to think, our problems would be over. Unfortunately, a world where elites had the best of intentions while property and market institutions were the same as now, would be only slightly better than the one we presently live in. Where there is competition among capitals, it is the requirements of competition, not ethics, which determine what people must do to survive in business. And they will do it, or else drop out of the elite. When you understand what St. Thomas meant by the second part of his definition of justice, jus suum unicuique tribuendi,* you sense a whiff of chaos in the air, the brow farrows, an awkward clump of ideological knots presents itself for disentanglement, for it appears that the conservatives who admire the Middle Ages have made a great error, which ladies and gentlemen of their acumen and sensibility would not make, could not make. It seems that it cannot be true that they admire the classic Christian ideals of the mainstream of our tradition as much as they profess to admire them, while it is also hard to believe that persons gifted with insight in so many ways could be naive or insincere. The persons of whom I speak include Fredrich Leopold von Hardenberg, a poet known by his pen name Novalis, famous for his hymns to the night of death and for the image of the blue flower; he was by day an aristocratic young manager in German salt mines. Novalis dreamed of a holy restoration after Napoleons defeat; his essay Christenheit oder Europa** proposed a future which would recover and enrich the original Christian values of the early Middle Ages, the values of Belief and Love, values in his time (1799) sadly lost in a world which had devoted itself to Knowledge and Possession. C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), a British professor of medieval literature, author of The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, etc. et al., used the Summa of St.

Thomas as a sort of dictionary of medieval belief, while he turned out books for adults and children at an astonishing rate, filling the minds of the former with orthodox theology and the hearts of the latter with medieval fantasies. Paul Claudel was a French Ambassador to Japan and to the United States, a diplomat specializing in economic and financial questions; he acquired a literary reputation through the poems and plays which he doggedly worked on for one hour each day in the midst of his official duties. In his youth it is said, he read the Summa all the way through; in his old age, elected to the Academie Franaise (1946), living in retirement at his chateau in the French countryside, he acquired a political reputation as one of the most reactionary of right wing French Catholics. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), an American who became a British subject in 1927, conceived of himself as living in a time of social and literary disorder, in a wasteland of rocks with no water. * Usually translated justice is to give to each his own. ** Christendom or Europe 159 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I In one of his books he argues that part of the cure for the disorder of our times is to respect hereditary rank, because culture itself, he suggests, cannot exist without a leisure class which inherits wealth and power. Another great poet, Eliots friend Ezra Pound (1885-1972), shared Eliots admiration for order and for Dante. Pound admired order, holiness, and heroism so much that when Duce Benito Mussolini II became dictator of Italy, promising to restore them to a nation threatened by revolution, the American poet (who was then residing in Italy) wrote propaganda for the Italian dictator. All of the writers mentioned above are widely and rightly regarded as conservatives, defenders of established authority and private property; yet they are professed lovers of things medieval, they are aware that St. Thomas is among the writers of the period the most established of the authorities, aware too that justice occupies the bulk of the part of the Summa on moral virtue; they must be aware that injustice is a mortal sin, because, says the angelic doctor, a mortal sin is one which kills the soul, injustice violates the rights of others, intentionally to violate the rights of others kills our love for them, love is the life of the soul, ergo* injustice kills love, ergo injustice is a mortal sin. Injustice is wanting more than our share of goods, or shouldering less than our share of burdens. The condemnation of possessions beyond ones needs kept for ones private use could not be more peremptory. St. Thomas quotes several times with approval Augustines great teacher, St. Ambrose the Bishop of Milan, who once said, You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his. For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself. The world is given to all, and not only to the rich. The brow furrows. St. Thomas construction of justice follows Aristotle and transforms Aristotle. A superficial reading of the Summa on justice reveals nothing but Aristotle translated into Latin; a careful reading reveals that Aristotle has been transformed by immersion. For Aquinas justice is, as for Aristotle, that particular virtue which distributes property and other goods, but while Aristotle did not make clear the size of the pie to be divided by distributive justice, saying only that distributive justice applies to koinonia (community owned goods), for Aquinas it is clear that all Gods gifts are to be proportionally shared. For this reason it is not a sin to steal bread when in need, for although the jus positivus (the human made law) defines property rights for purposes of convenience, the jus naturaliter (the God-made law) allots to each person a share of the earths

resources sufficient to meet her needs. The transformation of koinonia makes the community the steward of One Owner, it makes each person a beneficiary of One Owners Love. When Aquinas changes the name of Aristotles corrective justice to commutative justice (justitia commutativa) he copies the substance of the doctrine, which is equality in exchange, and then transforms its meaning completely by observing that since God has given us everything and we can give nothing equal in exchange, we should give our very lives, our all we have and are and ever hope to be, to God and His purposes. It is for this reason that religion comes under the heading of Justice in the Summa; religion is our lasting and constant will to give God his own. To give to each, his own is a common translation of jus suum unicuique tribuendi. I translated it previously as to respect the moral and legal rights of every person because I think the ancient Latin term jus is a three letter giant, rich in meaning, which embraces everything we now mean by moral and legal rights, and because I think tribuendi implies more respect than is expressed by the English verb to give. The precise choice of English words for translating a Latin phrase does not, however, determine whether the reader enters the cosmic context of St. Thomas. The phrase suum unicuique shifts its meaning, however it is translated, when the stars change their meaning; when the stars change meaning community and personal identity change meaning. St. Thomas draws on the relationship between cosmic * ergo: Latin for therefore 160 Letter 22 context and identity when he explains why distributive justice gives a person her own, Everything depends on who the person is. Regarded as a member of a community, St. Thomas says, each person is a part owner of the communitys goods. Human identity is found primarily and essentially in community relationships, and goods primarily and essentially belong to all the human family. If we ask why, then we are led back to cosmic context. St. Thomas is not, of course, the first or the only interpreter of sacred stories to draw practical conclusions from the cosmic context provided by the stories. It is characteristic of human cultures generally, in every tribe and nation, to conceive of themselves in contexts provided by their creation myths. In St. Thomas interpretation of our Judeo-Christian heritage, we are stewards in a world which belongs to God. This is all very mysterious. It seems that St. Thomas literary admirers completely ignore what St. Thomas says. Perhaps the solution to the mystery is this: they want to defend property by defending the right of property others to possess property, which St. Thomas endorses. They are willing, according to this solution of the mystery, to go along with St. Thomas doctrine that one must use ones property to serve others, but the part of St. Thomas that really interests them is the angelic doctors defense of the wisdom of arrangements for private possession. But Novalis, Lewis, Claudel, Eliot, Pound etc. et al. cannot have had as their primary intentions the defense of the possession of property by property owners, because if that had been their intention they could have served it better by choosing a more modern creation story, such as the one advanced by John Locke (1632-1704), etc. et al. which runs as follows: In the beginning was the individual, complete with the right to acquire property, which he proceeded to do in a state of nature; thereafter he entered with other individuals into a social contract for the purpose, mainly, of defending property, and that accomplished, he turned his attention to nature, which he studied scientifically in his own image, beginning with individual bits of information, known as sense impressions or data, gradually verifying hypotheses and constructing theories. In this more modern cosmic context the erstwhile lovers of things medieval could much more easily have drawn (as

Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, and others did draw) the conclusion that to give to each her own means primarily and essentially the defense of private property. It may be that a sociologist or a psychoanalyst could show that literary and theological medievalism function objectively to divide and confuse the proletariat, even though the conscious intentions of the medievalists are toward unity and order and even though, as the preceding paragraph points out, they overlook, in fact they deliberately reject, the social contract theories which would be the usual and obvious way to carry out an anti-proletarian intention if they had one, and even though the social doctrine of St. Thomas is closer to socialism than to capitalism. Philosophy, however, is not sociology or psychoanalysis, and one of its traditional ideals is to take everybodys arguments seriously at their face value as if everyone were sincere and as if there were an important connection between human actions and the self-conscious choices taking place in human minds. The philosopher is by vocation committed to human dignity. A naive vocation. A vocation which represents a deep human aspiration, which even the great unmaskers or our pretensions to autonomy and of our self-deception Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Mannheim, Pareto, the sociobiologists implicitly respect because they want their unmasking to lead to more and better self-conscious choices the proletariat must become the subject instead of the object of history, said Marx. Where id is, let ego be, said Freud. Thus even the unmaskers aspire to augment, not destroy, the philosophical vocation. We need to consider, therefore, the possibility that the medievalists objective is what they say it is, a world of love and caring. We need to consider whether it might 161 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I be true that it is feasible to advance the ideal of justice set forth by St. Thomas Aquinas by writing poetry, childrens stories, and Christian apologetics. The argument that just stewardship of the earths resources might be performed by the people who now for the most part own and control them must be it can only be an argument from noblesse oblige.* As C. S. Lewis once wrote, of the capitalist exploiter: ...since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. Another puzzle for the furrowed brow: ordinarily we identify as conservative a person who takes a dim view of human nature, a person who would rather decapitate the hardened criminal than attempt to rehabilitate her or him at public expense, a person more prone to notice the welfare cheat who makes a down payment on a Mercedes Benz with the proceeds of the illegal sale of fraudulently obtained food stamps than to notice the beleaguered sister with four hungry children who regularly runs out of food stamps before the end of each month, more aware of the lazy employed than of the eager-to-work unemployed. But when we climb the culture ladder from the plain conservative-chatting-on-the-street to the elegant voices of sophisticated conservatism we find their position coherent only on the assumption that members of the human species are capable of diligent generosity. They say, in effect, that under 20th century capitalism the medieval ideal can be realized. The Christian conservatives want to do in our world what St. Thomas did in his, namely to civilize the powerful, indeed to civilize everybody. Their ideal is ultimately Gandhis. If owners were Gandhians, they would, like Gandhis disciples among the industrialists of India, declare themselves trustees of their wealth, then the wealthy would live in voluntary poverty, or at least in decent modesty; they would direct the use of their possessions to feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, providing hospitality to the homeless, attending the sick, ransoming the captives, and burying the dead. The apparent paradox is deepened because people who advocate changing hearts without changing structures presumably know that there already are people with vast wealth who have changed their

hearts. In the United States there are many businesses which deliberately practice principles of business ethics, and which make ethical conduct part of the operating philosophy of the business. In India many of the wealthy people are Gandhians, and they have declared themselves trustees of their wealth for the benefit of the poor. And yet the poor stay poor. The sister does not get her own. Mother Earth does not get her own either. How can the literary conservatives be optimists about achieving justice through the good will of the owners of property, when optimism is contradicted both by their own view of human nature and by experience? And yet the paradox is only apparent because Eliot and Company are consistent pessimists, as the guarded language of C. S. Lewis quoted above suggests. They appear to be optimists only because their dim view of the wealthy and powerful is relatively brighter than the somber shadows of their even more pessimistic views of the meritocracy, the academics, the scientific planners, the revolutionary cadres, the successors to the revolutionary cadres who manage established socialism, the middle classes, the clerks and shopkeepers, the lower middle classes, the workers, the peasantry, and the disinherited, unemployed, broken family, poorly educated, TV-watching, rockmusic listening, street-wise heroin addicts. Any change at all (as the conservative British philosopher Edmund Burke [1729-1797] taught) tampers dangerously with uncharted details of custom which are constantly staving off an unbridled violence that is, human nature being what it is, a constant threat. Any change taking power out of the hands of those who by tradition and upbringing expect to wield power is a change for the worse because, as another member of Eliots Company, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) wrote, Where * noblesse oblige: French expression meaning nobility obliges, or with rank goes the responsibility to serve. 162 Letter 22 but in custom and in ceremony/are innocence and beauty born? Rule by those whose family traditions make it possible for them to understand innocence and beauty is the best possible rule, i.e. the least evil among an array of evils. Ours is not the best of conceivable worlds worse still, sober assessments of the prognosis for mother and children show that it is not for long even a possible world but, nonetheless, according to the counsel of the classical literary conservatives, all of the alternatives are worse. To construct better alternatives is the task of cultural action. That there is a decisive flaw in the position of the neo-medievalists decisive as distinct from the puzzling but not decisive apparent paradoxes which it has been the task of this letter to unravel has already been demonstrated by a 19th century philosopher-economist whom the literary elite has chosen to ignore, as if the ideas of Karl Marx were simply an extreme form of 18th and 19th century optimism, as if Marxism could be refuted by refuting materialism in general, as if it were not necessary to mention socialism because socialism is only an extreme case within a class of social philosophies all of which are demonstrably false, as if socialism were a terminal illness which attacks societies already debilitated by chronic liberalism and rationalism. The decisive flaw is that even if poetry and spiritual exercise were to succeed in converting the owners of property to an ethical way of life, still, owners of the means of production acting alone, cannot give her own either to sister or to mother. The system has a logic of its own, and even a person who inherits great wealth and power can do little to change it by purifying his own heart. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, inherited great wealth, and he gave it away, using some of it to subsidize poetry and other worthy causes but his personal ethical purity

caused not a ripple in the structure of European capitalism. The poor stayed poor. Letters 34, 35, 36, and 37, on Marx, will give more details on the way the system has a logic of its own, which resists being changed by the purification of individual hearts. However, one of the main reasons love and caring are not enough can be stated briefly here: the rules of the economic game prescribe that capitalists compete with other capitalists, nations compete commercially with other nations, workers compete with other workers. In this competition, those who put religious justice ahead of economic rationality when the two clash lose. At least they lose now. If the rules of the game were changed to reward cooperation, then we would all win. We would have, as Paulo Freire says, a world where it would be easier to love. Although Marx is the most important of the critics and analysts of capitalism, he was not its founder, and not among the philosophers who articulated the typical world-views which organize and justify capitalist society. Long before Marx, at the time when the modern world first assumed its form (i.e. when the main cultural structures which guide human conduct in it were put into place), the features which make the modern social formation one which has a logic of its own which individual ethical action cannot change were established. Some contributions of philosophy to the construction of this modern world of ours will be considered in the next two letters. In the next letter we begin to consider the rise of the modern social formation, also known as capitalism, more broadly known as economic society. We also take time to wonder whether perhaps we are going too far in our admiration of the ethics of love, and we speculate a bit on what sort of synthesis might enable us to enjoy both love and freedom, both community solidarity and authentic individuality. 163 164 Letter 23 23 RAY ORTEGAS PHILOSOPHY Dear Howard, I have been staying up late at night, reading your book. I like it very much; it has given me a new and refreshing perspective on philosophy, language, and the problems of our culture. But I have a few questions, especially with regard to letter 22. Quite frankly, I cant understand why you took the time to write it. You didnt need to prove that the medieval version of the love ethic will not solve our problems; nobody really believes that it will. Nobody talks about love anymore today everybody is concerned with controlling, dominating, and manipulating everybody else. The reason I am writing to you is that I have a vacation coming up, and I was wondering if I could possibly come to visit you so that we could discuss these issues in greater depth. But please dont go out of your way to accommodate me; I dont want to be an imposition on you and your family. Sincerely yours, The Kind Reader Dear Kind Reader, Thank you for your kind note. You are always welcome here. If you come tomorrow, you will find me in my past, in one of the Smiley Estate olive groves, to be exact, talking about philosophy with five of my friends whom I think you will like very much. Maybe you can help us clarify the point that in our society the primary locus of control and domination is not the individual who seeks to manipulate others, but the structures of our economy. Our economy has been disembedded from social relations, and it governs us rather than vice versa. We have made freedom our central

value and often consider social obligations, responsibilities, and norms to be violations of our autonomy. We would have been wiser had we put economics back into social relations, such that it once again would become possible to govern our lives with ecologically viable rgulations hermneutiques, with Ray Ortegas philosophy. Oh, I forgot. You dont know who Ray Ortega is. That settles it you must come to visit us tomorrow. We shall be waiting for you in the olive grove. Yours truly, H. When we were high school students we used to discuss philosophy in an olive grove on the crest of the ridge that overlooks San Timoteo Canyon. It was a land of oranges and snow; orange groves a thousand feet below us on the narrow floor of the canyon, orange trees behind us on the broad floor of the San Bernardino Valley, snow on the heights of the distant mountains, Mt. San Gregorio and Mt. San Antonio behind us, Mt. San Jacinto far away across 165 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I several lines of hills which lay beyond the canyon. We sat on old-fashioned curbs made of pieces of stone held together by hand-mixed cement, some of it now decayed and crumbling, along the road which followed the top of the ridge to the mansion built by A. K. Smiley, one of several Chicago millionaires who had established winter homes in California in the early 20th century, shortly after the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe railway had been completed, allowing a comfortable journey from Chicago to California every November and from California to Chicago every April. Nobody minded that technically speaking we were trespassers, sitting on the stone curb under an olive tree on the grounds of the Smiley Estate, discussing philosophy next door to the precious orange grove that produced the Smiley familys prize-winning navel oranges; we lived, so to speak, in the shadow of the Smileys, enjoying their indulgent generosity. We did our homework in the A. K. Smiley Public Library, pausing sometimes between algebra problems to browse in the oriental religion and art collection which Mr. Smiley senior had bequeathed at his death to the library he had donated to the city during his life. The Spanish saints surrounding us Timoteo, Bernardino, Antonio, Gregorio, Jacinto reminded us that this land of oranges and snow where we lived in the Smileys shadow had been Spanish earth for 300 years, before that Indian earth; scarcely 100 years separated us from its conquest by English-speaking people in the war of 1848. The laborers who built the curbstones we sat on had spoken Chinese; after the completion of the railways the coolie laborers brought over from China to lay track had scattered and formed the areas first general labor force; they were followed by Japanese, Filipinos, Hindus, Armenians, Jamaicans, Germans from Wisconsin, Slavs from Eastern Europe, Hillbillies, Okies, Arkies, Blacks, the unemployed from the South, the Middle West, the Northeast my own family came from New England in the 1930s and more recently by Mexican Wetbacks, Cubans, Vietnamese, Salvadoran refugees. Every time another labor force was required and every time another people was uprooted more people moved to California. So there we were Conrad Miziumski, Ray Ortega, Willie Legate, Arthur Eric Gregory III, the girl I never kissed and I, sitting on a stone curb on San Timoteo ridge. I want to imagine that the six of us have agreed on almost the same philosophy some sort of wish fulfillment of mine no doubt and that while we are celebrating our consensus on all but a few unimportant points, the Kind Reader appears sauntering down the road that winds along the ridge, carrying a camera held by a thin leather strap around her neck, and wearing comfortable walking shoes. After taking our picture so she can show her people back home what a typical

group of California high school students looks like, she engages us in conversation in order to prepare herself to give her people a report on the structures of our symbolisms. After questioning us for several hours, and sharing with us several kinds of liquid refreshments as well as some of the produce of the region, she inquires how we can possibly mean to say that the reason why medieval ideals cannot be practiced in the modern world is that the modern world cannot be governed by an ethic. Fortunately, she said, my dear husband insisted that I take a vacation by myself and volunteered to take care of the children alone, so now I have a bit of free time to visit California and to engage in philosophical conversations with new friends. Ordinarily, however, Im going going going all day between taking care of two children and a full time job. Besides I need to relax now and then I think I owe it to myself. It is not possible for me to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, provide hospitality for the homeless, attend to the sick, free the captives, and bury the dead. Moreover, I very much doubt that even in the Middle Ages anybody but a cloistered monk or nun could live according to the ethic which you suppose governed society then. The love ethic is unworkable, it was then and it is now. You do not need a philosophical analysis to explain why it did govern then and does not govern now, because for obvious reasons it never governed anywhere at any time. St. Thomas anticipated your objection, says Conrad Miziumski, opening the A.K. Smiley Public Librarys copy of volume II of the Summa and reading from it. Love binds us, 166 Letter 23 although not actually doing good to someone, to be prepared in mind to do good to anyone if we have time to spare. He must mean, Conrad glosses, that since one person cannot do everything, being occupied attending to some needs of some people is a sufficient excuse for not helping a particular person who is in need. Love binds us, broke in Ray Ortega. It is sweet music to my ears. I need no other philosophy. He reads the Latin, ...caritas requirit... At home my mother taught me to love my brothers and sisters, to share. No seas egoista she always said. (Dont be an egoist.) At school they made us to work by ourselves and to compete. I remember the first day of kindergarten, the teacher always saying, keep your hands to yourselves, keep your hands to yourselves. At home we learned to hug and kiss. Why cant all human beings be one big loving family? I dont see why the Anglos need a more complicated philosophy. Memories of her previous vacation in Mexico flicker through the Kind Readers mind. All things considered, she decides, she prefers to live in the United States, Canada, or Western Europe. You misunderstand us, says Willy Legate, speaking as if he had read her mind, if you think we believe people in industrial democracies are on the whole less generous or less happy than tribal peoples, or than people who live in cultures where families and clans are stronger than they are here. We do believe that human emotional needs were importantly shaped by many thousands of years of hunting and gathering in small face-to-face groups; we do believe that there is much to learn from other cultures and much to recover from the Hebrew, Greek and medieval past of the West. However it is also true that right in the heart of an industrial city you can find people who do not need tribes because they have strong families, support groups, networks, base communities, political cells, therapy, music, churches, clubs, fantasies. (The Kind Reader wonders whether Hells Angels do not need a tribe because they are one.) If we seem to be nostalgic for less modern ways of life it is not because they are better; it is because they are simpler. How so simpler? asks the Kind Reader. No doubt you mean to say they are simpler because

they can be governed by an ethic. And if the ethic is not powerful enough, then at least there is a simple judgment to make the person deviated from the norm, was bad. No doubt you are going to argue that there is something peculiar about the modern social formation, something that sets it apart from all other human societies, something which makes our societies ungovernable; unmanageable, complicated, in a way that is unique in the history of human societies. A normal human group, said Arthur Eric Gregory III, one that is typical of the societies known to history and to anthropology, hence normal in a way that we are abnormal, is highly conformist. The cultural governance of behavior which overlays the biological governance of behavior prescribes what a person should do; a bad person is one who does not conform, as for example among the people of Kabylia in Algeria described by Pierre Bourdieu: Doing ones duty as a man means conforming to the social order, and this is fundamentally a question of respecting rhythms, keeping pace, not falling out of line. Dont we all eat the same wheatcake (or the same barley)? Dont we all get up at the same time? These various ways of reasserting solidarity contain an implicit definition -, of the fundamental virtue of conformity, the opposite of which is the desire to stand apart from others. Working while the others are resting, staying in the house while the others are working in the fields, traveling on deserted roads, wandering round the streets of the village while the others are asleep or at the market these are all suspicious forms of behavior. The eccentric who does everything differently from 167 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I other people is called amkhalef (from khalef, to stand out, to transgress) and there is often a play on words to the effect that amkhalef is also the man who arrives late (from khellef, to leave behind). Thus, as we have seen, a worthy man, conscious of his responsibilities, must get up early. The man who does not settle his business early in the morning will never settle it. Its the morning that gives the hunters their game; bad luck for late sleepers! and again, The suq is in the morning; The man who sleeps until the middle of azal will find the market empty (sebah, to be present in the morning, also means to be fitting, becoming). But getting up early is not a virtue in itself; if they are ill-used, wasted, the first hours are no more than time taken from the night, an offense against the principle that there is a time for everything, and that everything should be done in its time (kul waqth salwaqth-is everything in its time). What is the use of a mans getting up at the muezzins call if he is not going to say the morning prayer? There is only mockery for the man who, despite getting up under the stars or when dawn has not taken shape (alam) has achieved little. Respect for collective rhythm implies respect for the rhythm that is appropriate to each action, neither excessive haste nor sluggishness. It is simply a question of being in the proper place at the proper time. A man must walk with a measured pace (ikthal uqudmis) neither lagging behind nor running like a dancer, a shallow, frivolous way to behave, unworthy of a man of honor. So there is mockery too for the man who hurries without thinking, who runs to catch up with someone else, who works so hastily that he is likely to maltreat the earth, forgetting the teachings of wisdom: It is useless to pursue the world, No one will ever overtake it. You who rush along, Stay and be rebuked; Daily bread comes from God,

It is not for you to concern yourself. The over-eager peasant moves ahead of the collective rhythms which assign each act its particular moment in the space of the day, the year, or human life; his race with time threatens to drag the whole group into the escalation of diabolic ambition, thahraymith, and thus to turn circular time into linear time, simple reproduction into indefinite accumulation. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Thomas could function reasonably well in a normal society, like the Kabylia Bourdieu describes. Their philosophical work consists mainly of prescribing norms for people to follow, mainly indeed of buttressing the norms their societies already have. At this point the Kind Reader remarks, But a modern philosopher could not endure it. What you are saying is that modernity is peculiar because its central value is freedom. Aristotle said in the Ethics that the law commands every virtue and forbids every vice hence in principle the law (nomos, sometimes also translated custom, custom being also sometimes a synonym for ethics) tells everyone what to do and what not to do. The 18th century French philosophes, on the contrary, when they define their cardinal value, la libert, define it as the principle that whatever the law does not explicitly forbid is permitted. Laissez faire, laissez passer. The protestant reformer Zwingli contradicted Aristotle in almost exactly the same words as those the philosophes used to define freedom. 168 Letter 23 It is odd, says the girl I never kissed, to speak of freedom as a value or a norm. It should be called an anti-value or an anti-norm, a drgulation hermneutique, a cultural unstructuring. A value or norm is some sort of standard; it is a pattern of ideal conduct with which to compare real conduct to see if it measures up. Freedom is the opposite; it allows you to set your own standards, it exempts you from conformity to the pattern, it denies that anyone is authorized to measure your conduct and to judge it by comparing it to an ideal. At this point the Kind Reader feels that she needs ask us to forgive her for having read so many books. With ordinary modern people, she points out, she could take it for granted that she is within her rights in choosing to spend her free time however she wishes; however, one does not know what to expect from young philosophers who profess to admire the customs of ancient peoples. She wishes to know whether we consider it morally permissible to lie in bed at night after the children are asleep reading just for fun. You are making fun of us, says the girl I never kissed. If we live life as a prayer in constant communion with each other and the cosmos, she went on, you are not for that reason authorized to deduce from our devotion that we will censure you because you read in bed. I do not mean to make fun of you, says the Kind Reader. My fear is that you are silently disapproving of me. I am not a cruel person, and I do not believe you consider me cruel, but I do, on the other hand, allow myself a bit of laughter and leisure, I am a shallow, frivolous dancer. Your love ethic is too serious; it is a threat to my autonomy no matter how vehemently you deny that you intend to criticize me. You find it odd, she went on, to regard freedom as a value; perhaps you have a logical point, since ordinarily a value prescribes a norm for conduct, while freedom exempts conduct from norms. But I find your point, logical though it may be, to be dangerous. And I find it quite odd, very odd, that the tendency of your thought is so out of step with contemporary advanced thinking. Lately I have been reading I have already confessed that I have been reading and what I am learning is that the troubles of contemporary life began when humans started thinking they could control everything. Control. Govern. Manipulate. Technology. Science. Patriarchy. A maniacal

urge to dominate that is our illness. It is the Meaning of the Modern World. When it began is disputed some say it began with Sir Francis Bacons Novum Organum* (1620). Martin Heidegger** thinks it began before Plato; some feminists think it is as old as the domination of the male. You people are out of step, continues the kind Reader. You think the problem of the modern social formation is that it is ungovernable. Everyone else thinks it is governed too much. You think it is unmanageable. Everyone else thinks we have too much management, too little poetry. I can see where your philosophy is going. I can see already what you are going to say about the role of modern philosophy in modern society. First you will tell us a simple story about the rise of modern society it has to be a simple story because it will be an account of the activities of millions of people all over the globe in the 400 years from 1450 to 1850, plus an interpretation of certain preparatory events prior to 1450. Obviously you will simplify there is no way to record everything that happened and the way you choose to simplify will reflect your prejudices and purposes. If your bias were that of Sir Henry Maine, author of Ancient Law, you would describe the rise of the modern world as progress from status to contract, from an old-fashioned statuscentered society, to a society where individuals choose their employment, choose what to buy and what to sell, governing their relations with one another through * Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Lord Chancellor of England, philosopher, early advocate of scientific research ** Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) German existentialist philosopher 169 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I contracts freely agreed to by both sides. Maines story is a paean of praise to the autonomous modern person, governed only by her own decisions. Or else instead you could tell the story of the beginning of the modern world as Louis Dumont does in his book Gense et Epanouissement de lIdologie conomique; you could describe the same events as a regress from person to thing, you could relate how a world defined by networks of personal relationships became transformed into a world defined by the impact of things on things a nostalgic story about the loss of warmth and meaning. Or you could tell a prosaic, factual tale like Maurice Dobb in Studies in the Development of Capitalism a story about how much land was taken from yeomen in which year to be used to produce wool for export, where and when the first factories were built, how many yards of cloth were shipped from Flanders to Austria in what year and at what price. Like Lynn White Jr. you could minimize the differences between medieval and modern culture, treating human progress mainly as a story of technical improvements, a constant homo economicus using variable and always improving tools. Or like Jakob Burckhardt in Der Kultur der Renaissance in Italien you could depict the birth of modern times as a reawakening of great creative humanism manifested in a many-faceted genius like Leonardo da Vinci, following upon the long medieval night of mediocre mystical collectivism tinged, however, with pessimism, since Burckhardt, like his Basel colleague Friedrich Nietzsche, feared that in the end it would not be the creative individual who would dominate modern times but rather the faceless masses, the nonentities, das Man, the herd. Modern times conceived as a brief surge of greatness to be followed by the triumph of the herd was carried farther by Oswald Spengler in Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Or you could follow G. de Lagarde in La Naissance de IEsprit Laique by seeing the modern world as the lay world, in contrast to the previous religiously-dominated world, which would not be very different from the account of history given by G.W.F. Hegel in various works, where the modern period is

characterized as that of civil society (i.e. economic society) where, as Adam Smith (to whom Hegel refers) said, civil life functions autonomously, under the guidance of an invisible hand, and is conceived as a lay and private order, which does not ordinarily need to be directed either by religion or by government. Or else you could write a synopsis of the dawn of the age we live in with a military emphasis like Leopold von Ranke or R. R. Palmer you could describe the beginning of our age as the creation of the great European nation-states, able to mobilize resources on a scale never before seen, and therefore capable of conquering the rest of the world, Europeanizing the planet. The Latin American dependency theorists tell the same story in terms of metropolis and periphery; the rise of the modern world consisted of the construction of the global economy, dominated by metropolitan countries at the center, who systematically pauperised and exploited the peripheral regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Or you could follow Gibson Winter and Jeremy Rifkin, who see the transition from feudalism to capitalism as a shift of root metaphors human understanding became less organic and more mechanical; here the great figure in the transition to modernity is Sir Isaac Newton, whose discoveries in physics and astronomy explained everything on earth and in heaven mechanically Newton was followed by Adam Smith, who developed the application of mechanical metaphors to political economy. On the other hand, you could tell a story like that of Marcelino Menendez Pelayo, whose book Historia de las Ideas Estticas en Espaa describes the transition to modernity as secularization, the fall of God, the rise of man. For Max Weber, on the other hand, modernity began with the protestant reformation, and continued with the triumph of rational, bureaucratic thinking, Zweckrationalitat (goal-oriented thinking, def. 1), instrumental rationality. Science, industry, the military, the civilian civil service converge in working an Entzauberung (demystification), which makes us instrumentally rational, hence modern. Herbert Butterfield and others focus on the rise of scientific theories, which affect everything else through the application of science in all fields of human endeavor; hence their stories focus on Galileo and Copernicus, on the 170 Letter 23 gradual extension of pre-scientific concepts already present in the Middle Ages. I believe, the Kind Reader continued, that you will offer a brief account of the work of a few of the main philosophers of the modern period, Ren Descartes (1596-1650), Thomas Hobbes (15881679), John Locke (1632-1704), David Hume (1711-76), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Karl Marx (1818-83). Later you will discuss 20th century philosophy. To set the stage for your account you will tell some sort of story about the historical context of their philosophical labors. I know what kind of story you are going to tell. I know because I have already heard what you think of prehistoric times, tribal religions, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. Your whole purpose, after all, is peace and justice in the late 20th century. Since I know your purpose and I know how you have pursued it so far, I can predict how it will continue. You will be tempted, she says, to follow Robert Heilbroners story in The Making of Economic Society, since you do characterize the modern period as, above all, the period of economics. And you think economic society was made, not born. You will also be tempted to use Claude LeviStrauss distinction between hot and cold societies, since you want to contrast the modern restless, rootless, fast-moving, ever-changing hot society with the normal, conformist, ordinary type of human society exemplified in Bourdieus description of Kabylia. However, you will resist these temptations. The account of early modern history you will choose to employ will be Karl Polanyis. According to Polanyi, what makes our hot economic societies different from the rest is that Instead of

economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in an economic system. In a typical human society seedtime and harvest, distribution and consumption, take place in a culturally governed context. The social mutation that began in Europe in about the 15th century, which was celebrated as the triumph of freedom, which later expanded to cover the globe, was a society where the economy became disembedded from its cultural context; the market came to govern instead of being governed. The economy became a power which cannot be governed by ethics. You will choose Polanyi as the historian who will provide the context for understanding modern philosophy because in the end you will endorse a double re-embedding first the re-embedding of the economy in culture, and second the re-embedding of culture in the ecosystem. You will discuss the construction of the ideological defenses of modernity by modern philosophers namely Hobbes, the rationalists, the empiricists, the positivists indeed you will claim it was they who invented irrational rationality. Then you will discuss the pivotal role of Karl Marx in showing how and why economic society is necessarily led into disastrous contradictions. Last you will show the contributions of recent phenomenologists, existentialists, Marxists, and ordinary language philosophers to the recovery of a full range of meanings for reason, to the destruction of the ideological defenses of the modern social formation, and consequently to re-embedding the economy in culture and culture in nature. You think re-embedding is the only way to build peace and justice you could not think anything else, since you conceive of peace and justice as the wise and harmonious government of human conduct by ecologically viable rgulations hermneutiques. We sit quietly for several minutes after the Kind Reader finishes speaking, rejoicing in the soft wind from the West, the sunshine, and each others company. Finally it is Arthur Eric Gregory III who speaks for all of us to express our gratitude for her insightful participation in our conversation. A dizzying performance, says Arthur Eric. In a few hours a tourist understood our position better than we understand it ourselves, and then extrapolated, drawing a trend line, so to speak, extending the line in the direction where our philosophy is going far beyond the point we ourselves have reached, leading us rapidly from the 13th to the 22nd century. You have an admirable capacity for speed learning and instant trend projection, and 171 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I I am eager to see whether we ourselves, when we consider the philosophical texts more slowly and in more detail, will reach results resembling your forecast. You walk in the footsteps of the greatest philosophers, Arthur Eric continued, following the logos even when it refuses to follow you, examining arguments contrary to your preconceptions and inclinations. You summarized our position accurately even though you find it distasteful. Like Reinhold Niebuhr you fear the demonic potential of solidarity. Your inclinations impel you to flee from whatever threatens to send you on a guilt trip. In the face of any suggestion that someone may be authorized to interfere with your personal autonomy you bristle and cringe. Nevertheless, you respect the tradition which holds that philosophy is not a matter of feelings; your distaste, your fear, your flight from guilt, your bristling and cringing, may in the light of eco-philosophical examination, prove to be non-functional feelings. It might have been better for all concerned if your feelings had been educated to respond differently. All of us tend in the beginning, when we first become aware of ourselves, to be middle-wing extremists. If the principles of our society promise rights for all and equality for all, then we initially respond to muckraking with outrage; we think something should be done to enforce the

existing ethics. You have moved beyond middle-wing extremists because you are aware that outrage is useless without a working understanding of the historical processes which make ethics ineffective. And also because you are willing to consider a philosophical position which argues that survival dictates an ethic you dont have and dont like, one less centered on rights and autonomy, more centered on solidarity and service. I would like to be able to reassure you that your fears are groundless when you suspect that the quest of people like us for a functional ethics will fuel a maniacal compulsion to dominate. I confess that I seek control. I am appalled by an arms race of control, by a global economy out of control, an assault on the environment out of control, crime and violence out of control, torture and arbitrary repression out of control. And the six of us had just agreed before you arrived on principles from which you deduced, with your uncanny ability to see the final conclusion when supplied only with the first premises, that it will be necessary to modify 18th century ideals of liberty and property rights in order to bring to human conduct a tolerable degree of order and harmony. Nevertheless, I cannot believe that the final solution is total control. An image from Immanuel Kants Tugendlehre appeals to me: as the planets are kept in their orbits by centripetal forces pulling them toward the sun and centrifugal forces pulling them away from the sun, so human relationships will be harmonious when we are pulled toward each other by love and kept a proper distance apart by respect. I want to believe that respect for each persons individuality will flourish when we live in sisterhood and brotherhood. I want to believe freedom will grow when conflicts are less desperate because basic needs are met. I want to believe that better cultural software will diminish the use of military hardware and diminish all despotic and violent forms of human interaction. There is some empirical evidence which tends to show, in a small way, that our hopes are more likely to be realized than your fears. We hope solidarity and freedom are compatible; you fear they are not. Studies of human moral development by Jean Piaget and others show quite convincingly that when children reach what Piaget calls the stage of mutual respect they are both more concerned with the welfare of others and more respectful of the uniqueness of each individual. Hence serving others and respect for others freedom go together. Insofar as Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Spengler, Kierkegaard, Ortega y Gassett, Heidegger, Orwell, Niebuhr, Huxley, etc., et al. fear that a love ethic will degenerate into a herd ethic, there is good evidence that they are unduly alarmed. However, this is not the sum total of their fears; nor does it represent the sum total of our hopes we hope not only to change hearts and minds, but to change social structures so that ethics will have more influence on what really happens. 172 Letter 23 Speaking more generally, I really cannot say whether our hopes are better grounded than your fears. When I try to predict whether what I want to believe will come true I lose confidence in my mind and am reminded of its limitations. My mind is like everyone elses mind, clouded by passions I do not understand, disciplined, it at all, by logics and methods with historically determined biases, liable to confuse the opinions of the people I listen to with the mood of all the humans on the planet, warped by idiosyncratic, not to say traumatic, experiences, occasionally short-circuited when a synapse misfires in one of its neural circuits, constantly losing its grasp of what it used to know as millions of brain cells die every day, then learning something new which reorients my attitude toward life and refocuses what I used to believe. Our minds are a process within a process within a process, a conversation in a culturally given code in a surrounding environment; we are talking animals sitting on a minor ridge of a small planet in the solar system

of a medium-sized star in an out-of-the-way galaxy. In front of us across the canyon we are looking at some brown hills. In December a little rain will come in short, hard showers during the night. Then for a few weeks grass will grow on both sides of San Timoteo Canyon and on the surrounding hills. We are like the grass that grows for a while until the water runs out. The hills are the land, where the peoples come and go, talking of their philosophies. Unable to reassure you, I still want we all want to thank you for your company and your conversation, and also to thank your husband for minding the children so you could come visit us. Give all your people our greetings, and say the land sends it greetings too, and the dry grass and flower seeds in the ground, waiting for the rain. The next letter considers some main features of early modern philosophy, noticing some contributions of philosophers to articulating the symbolic structures of modern society, i.e. of economic society. 173 174 Letter 24 24 SOME CONTRIBUTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE METAPHYSICS OF ECONOMIC SOCIETY Once upon a time (or upon three times, to be more exact) there was a tribal society, polis society, and medieval society. We existed in the tribal consciousness, in the polis, or in a world ordered by and for God. To be was to be in relationship. We were frogs in frog clans, shepherds filling social roles in a polis, or servants in the Kingdom of God. But today, to be is to be independent. Our myths tell us we are individuals who enter into relationships only when it is in our rational selfinterest to do so; individuals trade, they make deals, they sign contracts. This is economic society. If you come with me back to the mists of origin we will visit some of the philosophers whose metaphysics contributed to its construction. We will study the symbolic structures they created, symbolic structures that discredited some of the webs of meaning that tried to hold us together (not always successfully or benignly, of course) in the past and established individuals as the only beings which really exist. If we wander backwards in time, into the mists of origins, seeking to find the beginnings of the modern mind, when we reach the first part of the 14th century our search will lead us to the medieval University of Oxford, where (in an academic cloister on a low gravel ridge between the foggy courses of the Thames and its tributary the Cherwell, two streams which flow in the vicinity of the university along meandering courses with many branches and backwaters, among flat meadows and well-wooded hills which rise sometimes rather abruptly, though the hills are of only slight elevation) we will meet a philosopher already renowned for his erudition, although he is only in his mid-thirties. His name is William of Ockham. Nunquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitates, says William. The remark with which William greets us is the most celebrated line in his famous lectures on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard. It is variously translated: we should never employ a plurality of entities without necessity, or it is needless to recur to many entities when we can get along with fewer ones. Known in the 20th century as Ockhams law of parsimony, Ockhams principle is now widely considered to be one of the foundations of the scientific method. Today scientists in all fields when they find the work of a colleague defective because it erects too large a theory on a base of too few facts, criticize the work of a colleague as

unparsimonious, invoking the authority of the ghost of the 14th century Magister Theologiae* The unfortunate colleague is expected to be duly ashamed of himself for violating the timehonored and universally approved precept of scientific method which says, Eliminate all concepts not necessary to describe the facts. In other words, Apply Ockhams razor. 175 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Of course William knows nothing of the 20th century. He lives before the disembedding, as Karl Polanyi calls it, that created economic society, and for that reason he does not know about our most characteristic ideas and institutions: science, capitalism, socialism, modern legal codes, democracy, our declarations of human rights, the freedom of the individual, romantic love, the equal dignity of every human being, nation-states, and Protestantism are all beyond the horizon for Ockham, nonexistent and inconceivable, and Ockham is quite surprised to learn for we travelers in time are the first to tell him that his razor is now the first principle of orthodoxy in the scientific establishment. He is surprised because he did not get on well with the 14th century establishment, and to be cast as he is now in the role of intellectual champion of orthodoxy is an unexpected role for him. Although Ockham was an eminent Magister Theologiae he never became a Magister actu regens, a professor occupying an official chair of theology. His enemy Lutterell was for a time Chancellor of Oxford, and when the majority of the members of the university succeeded in persuading the Bishop to remove Lutterell from the chancellorship, Lutterell carried his fight against Ockham to the pope, to whom he presented 56 articles accusing Ockham of teaching heresy. Ockham spent most of the rest of his life in intellectual combat with (or at) the papacy defending himself against Lutterells charges before a papal commission, defending the peculiar traditions of his own order (the Franciscans) against the pretensions of the papacy to exercise a plenitudo potestatis (full power) which could dictate to the Franciscans their internal rules; and defending the Holy Roman Emperor, Ludwig of Bavaria, against the popes pretension to hold worldly as well as spiritual authority. William of Ockham was a forerunner of all those who would in later centuries challenge popes, emperors, monarchs, and dictators; of those who challenge those who claim authority to rule absolutely (with plenitudo potestatis); and although, as noted above, he knew nothing of the fully developed modern ideas of the 20th century, we find scattered in his various writings a veritable arsenal of primitive versions of the ideological weapons the rising bourgeoisie was later to employ in its struggle to limit the powers of governments and those of established churches, including early versions of the doctrine of checks and balances, the identification of Gods law with freedom, the separation of church and state, the legitimation of government by the consent of the governed, individual liberty, recognition of the legal rights of infidels, property rights coming directly from God without human mediation, the priesthood of all believers, justification by faith, and the social contract. Williams doctrine Nunquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate was made to order to help him win his many arguments because it banished the traditional metaphysics with one fell stroke, as Alexander cut the Gordian knot with one fell stroke** The traditional metaphysics was, as we have seen, a support of the traditional social order, and it consisted of generalizations going beyond the facts, which besides their descriptive functions told a story about the human place in the cosmos, guided conduct, and authorized authority. Dont generalize; just describe individual facts as simply as possible! said Ockham, in effect, and with a single logical trump card he defeated the apologists of the establishment or, to be more precise, he defeated (in the eyes of those who could see the ultimate consequences of Ockhams razor) all of those who are willing (or could be

persuaded, or obliged) to play the game by Ockhams rules, namely rule (1) only individual facts exist, and rule (2) it is the business of the scholar to describe them as 1 simply as possible. William says, Every science begins with individuals. From sensation, which gives only singular things, arises memory, from memory experience, and through experience we obtain the universal which is the basis of art and science. As all our knowledge derives from the senses, every science, too, originates from individual objects....* * Gordian knot: a famous knot in antiquity, which nobody could untie. The emperor Alexander solved the problem by slashing it with his sword. 176 Letter 24 Wait a minute! you say as we stand in the mud and mist in the courtyard of Magdalen College, Oxford. You turn away for the moment from our medieval interlocutor and address your words to me, your fellow time-traveler. You have been telling me that philosophers are among the people who build cultural structures, and in particular they are the ones who construct metaphysical generalizations. But here we stand before a philosopher whose genius is skepticism, demolition, conceptual austerity. The mist slightly augments its intensity, threatening to become a drizzle; we repair to the common room to continue our conversation, where we find a place to talk; not too far from the fire and not too crowded. I worry that I will not adequately bring into focus the issues you have just raised, which I consider to be of the highest importance since they bear on the origin and nature of irrational rationality, and consequently on the method to be employed to overcome it and consequently they bear on our species survival. The adverse circumstances, the noise and the chill, the haste, the difficulty of philosophizing in a century to which one is not accustomed, are not the explanation of my incapacity, because even if I could work at a leisurely pace in a warm dry quiet modern library, I still would be unable to muster all the clarity and coherence an adequate answer to your question demands. I am simply not able, even under the best of circumstances, to answer as well as I should. Ockham creates a metaphysic, I hesitantly begin. It is the metaphysics of individualism. To say every science begins with individuals is to construct a metaphysical generalization, far beyond the facts in its universal scope, fraught with social implications for humans tend to conceive society and nature as mirrors of each other, so that they see nature in terms of their social categories, and society in terms of their natural categories; a mere principle of logic, such as only individuals are real is potent because it purports to apply to all categories whatever. I pause for breath and continue. The rise of the modern metaphysic has its demolition phase, and its reconstruction phase although in modern times philosophers often declare Begone all metaphysics! and would have us believe that their constructions are not metaphysics, or that they do not construct anything. It is important to see through this pretense, because then we will see that our own basic cultural code, our irrational rationality, like the codes of the Trobriand Islanders, the Inuit, the Navajos, the Greeks, and the medievals, has been constructed and can be reconstructed, which means although it will take some time to spell out why and how it means it that reembedding is feasible. Culture need not be subordinate to economics; we can build a human economy, where humans run the economy instead of the other way around. Immediately I regret not having stuck closer to the question asked, which was how a man like Ockham whose main contribution is negative can be called a philosopher if philosophy is defined as a construction of cultural structures. I was carried away by a desire to announce the immense

significance of an apparently technical point, and I tried to say too much too quickly. William, meanwhile, lost interest in our conversation and drifted off to discuss the holy eucharist with a group of students in another corner of the common room, which was only to be expected, since William of Ockham is quite naturally little concerned with the problems of people who, from his point of view, will not be born, for 600 years. His silent departure saves us the trouble of bidding him adieu as we continue our magic time travel, disappearing and moving instantly to the Parisian bedroom of Ren Descartes, who is sound asleep although it is 11 oclock in the morning. The year is 1637. Out of deference to the sleeper we refrain from materializing, assuming a ghostly form which permits us to see without being seen. There lies before us on top of a pillow underneath a stocking cap and a skull, a remarkable brain. The invention of analytic geometry happened in its neural circuits. *Ockham, William, Exposaurea Praedicab De specie. Translated by Stephen Tornay in Ockham: Studies and Selections, La Salle, Illinois, Open Court Publishing Co., 1938, p. 119. 177 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Rene Descartes analytic geometry proved to be an immensely influential cultural coding It meant that spatial figures could be represented in numbers, and vice-versa. For example the following is the graph (i.e. drawing) of a simple spatial figure, to wit: a straight line

This straight line is tilted rather steeply. In numbers it is expressed as the function y = 2x In general we can draw a spatial figure to represent a function, and for a spatial figure we can write a function (composed of numbers, signs such as =, and letters like x and y which are variables holding places for numbers). Similarly we can represent 3 dimensional objects (adding a z axis perpendicular to x and y) and n-dimensional objects (with linear algebra). My first year economics professor would have been lost without Ren Descartes invention. Every morning at 9 a.m. he began his class by turning his blackboard into a Cartesian plane, a magical transformation which he accomplished by drawing one vertical line from top to bottom to represent the dependent variable y, and one horizontal line from side to side to represent the independent variable x.

A Cartesian Plane (so named after Ren Descartes, 1596-1650) Thus equipped, Milton Friedman (as we called him) was ready to talk about the impact of wages on prices, of investment on wages, of prices on investment, of budget deficits on interest rates, and, in general, the impact of any x on any y. 178 Letter 24 Bertrand Russell struck the keynote of the beginning of an exciting century (the 20th) in the philosophy of science, by claiming that the goal of all science was to describe phenomena in the language of mathematics, that is to say as functions, which is to say, in its simplest form y = f(x) Evidently Lord Russell would also have been lost without Descartes work 3 centuries earlier since the claim that all science is about functions would lose much of its appeal without Descartes method for drawing pictures (graphs) of functions. (Descartes generalized the work of Galileo, who had shown that the distance a freely falling body has fallen [let the distance fallen be y] is a function of time [let time be x] and a gravitational constant [let it be g] as follows: y = 1/2 gx 2. In order to regard Galileos discovery as an instance of the general principle y = f (x) we can view as standing for whatever is to be done to x [in this case square it and multiply it by 1/2 g]. In Descartes times the advance of mathematical functions and formulae was considered (in general) to be a retreat of souls and spirits. Thus, for example, the astronomer Johannes Kepler sought to give a quantitative definition of force that would replace St. Thomas conception of force as a soul animating the celestial bodies and directing their proper motions. To show that a mathematical function describes something was taken to be equivalent to showing it to be physical, not spiritual, as is evident in the following lines from Keplers Mysterium Cosmographicum of 1621: Formerly I believed that the cause of the planetary motion is a soul... But when I realized that these motive causes attenuate with the distance from the sun, I came to the conclusion that this force is something physical... * Using Ockhams razor, if the divine spirit was not needed for description, it was to be eliminated. The relation between destruction and construction, which is clear enough in the case of William of Ockham, is even clearer in the case of Ren Descartes. Descartes set out systematically to destroy all previous philosophy and to reconstruct all knowledge (Note that it was knowledge and not [i.e.

not mainly] authority which he wanted to reconstruct.) Descartes is the first of all the philosophers we have considered who was not a schoolteacher (he was an independent scientist and writer). Hence he was a person who could sleep past 1 1 a.m. instead of spending the last hour of the morning, as schoolteachers often do, fending off chaos until the spirits of the students are soothed by lunch, a fact which partly explains his relative indifference to the problem of maintaining social discipline. Descartes systematic destruction consists of withering doubt. In his celebrated Metaphysical Meditations he depicts himself as comfortably seated before a fireplace in his study, resolved that the time has come to make an inventory of everything he believes and to stop believing everything he can possibly doubt. He decides to consider all his beliefs that might possibly be false, just as if he knew they were false, in an effort to discover what, if anything, he knows to be true. Although the doubting bout by the fireside is a private activity it becomes public because Descartes publishes a book about it. In effect he invites all Europe to doubt everything it has previously believed, and to accept only what it knows. * Cited by Max Jammer in Concepts of Force. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1957. p. 90, n.26. See Jammers account for further information about the shift away from mystical physics. . 179 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Descartes does not really know, it turns out, that he is seated comfortably beside the fireplace making an inventory of his beliefs, because after all he might be dreaming. His habit of sleeping until noon probably helped him to think of this particular argument. It turns out, too, that the sequence of the doubts determines the subsequent reconstruction of knowledge because although in the end Descartes succeeds in doubting, almost everything (everything except the solitary existence of his own mind, which is doing the doubting and therefore must exist if the doubting exists) some things are harder to doubt than others. The beliefs hardest to doubt are doubted last, and when the tide turns and the reconstruction of knowledge commences (this time supposedly on firm foundations) the items hardest to doubt tend to be believed first, and with the greatest certainty. An accountant would say Descartes method resembles a LOFI System, last out first in. The most certain knowledge of all is the certain existence of the solitary individual, abstracted from the material and social conditions of existence, without class, gender, or ethnicity. Descartes knows that. Next in Descartes reconstruction of knowledge comes a proof for the existence of God. It should be no surprise that Descartes proved Gods existence, since in the 17th Century any philosopher with a normal instinct for self-preservation would; what is interesting to us denizens of the 20th Century, as we seek among the mists of origins the foundations of the metaphysics of economic society, is to notice what kind of God Descartes proved the existence of. His God is the kind who guarantees the certainty of knowledge, in particular the certainty of those ideas Descartes found it hardest to doubt (LOFI at work), the ones he called clear and distinct ideas, which turn out to be just the ones which make analytic geometry a privileged method for grasping the essence of reality. Enter being. Being turns out to be matter. It is matter of a peculiar kind matter conceived as pure figure in space, pure measurable extension, pure the-sort-of-things-which-cari-be-representedas-a-graph-on-a-Cartesian-plane, pure data for the (then) new science of mechanics. Being is also mind, which according to Descartes exists alongside matter, related to it in a way neither Descartes nor his followers ever succeeded in explaining. Gilbert Ryle** has aptly expressed Descartes image of human nature as a ghost in a machine, the ghost being the mind and the machine the

body. Disregarding the ghost (which perhaps we should, since the whole point of being a ghost is to be inconspicuous) we can agree with Martin Heideggers account of Descartes construction of being: What is in general (i.e. according to Descartes) a Substance as such, which makes its Substantiality conceivable?... Substances are knowable through their attributes, and each substance has its outstanding attribute, which shows the essence of its Substantiality as a definite Substance. What is the outstanding attribute of physical matter (res corporea)? Precisely extensio in length, width and depth constitutes the physical substance of nature. Extension in space, namely length, breadth, and depth, makes the essential Being of the physical Substance, which we call the world.* We linger at Descartes bedside without disturbing him, since it is, after all, the 20th century we want to awaken, not the 17th, and we speed quickly through time to the year 1660, back to England, the country destined to be the principal seedbed of capitalism and its ideologies, where we enter the closet of King Charles II at Buckingham Palace, and find his * Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979, p. 99. Part of my quote from Heidegger is actually Heidegger quoting Descartes. I kept the capitals for Substance and Being to call attention to the terms. * Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) 20th century British philosopher. See his book The Concept of Mind. 180 Letter. 24 majesty admiring a picture hung on the closet wall, a portrait of his favorite philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1586-1679). When Charles was a young prince, Hobbes was for a time his tutor, and Hobbes was a philosophical partisan of royal (as opposed to parliamentary) supremacy. The stated aim of Hobbes philosophy was to find the secret of peace. He had this to say about philosophy: ...The utility of moral and civil philosophy is to be estimated, not so much by the commodities we have by knowing these sciences, as by the calamities we receive from not knowing them. Now, all such calamities arise chiefly from civil war; for from this proceed slaughter, solitude, and the want of all things. The means for achieving peace is to apply the scientific method to the study of human conduct. He borrows his method quite consciously from physics, applying to the study of humans the resolutocompositive method of Galileo. You analyze the thing you are trying to understand into its individual parts that is resolute and then you show how the parts interact that is compositive. Hobbes discovered by this method that a human being is a kind of machine. He could not make any other discovery, since if you assume that a human is made of individual parts in interaction with each other, you have assumed that a human is a machine, and if you first look for the simple individual parts, and then for the interactions, you should not be surprised to find that what you find is a machine. Hobbes supposed the human machine to have the characteristic of wanting to persist in being somewhat as Newtons first law of motion, the law of inertia, would later state that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. In order to control the resources they need to persist in being, all humans in a state of nature seek power. A state of nature is a hypothetical time when there was no society a state of nature prior to society was posited not only by Hobbes but by the other main social contract theorists, John Locke, Benedict Spinoza, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Everyone in a Hobbesian state of nature seeks power to protect oneself from everyone else. Some people might be inclined to be peaceful

Hobbes calls such people the moderates; but the moderates have to seek power too, for otherwise they will be invaded and conquered by those who want to live more comfortably by enslaving others or taking their property. Life in a state of nature is, therefore, in Hobbes famous words, ...solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. There is only one solution: the people must agree to be governed by a king. The only way to keep independent forces from invading each other, is to make them subordinate to one great force, namely the kings army, Which will overawe them all. Once the true science of human nature is understood, and Hobbes thought it was his mission to teach the world the true science of human nature, then rational self-interest would be enough to persuade people to turn over their weapons to a king and to promise to obey him. However, rational selfinterest was not enough to guarantee that people would keep their promise to obey the king rational self-interest might indeed lead people to revolt, as it had done in the English civil war, of which Hobbes wrote a history. Therefore, the king had to rely on force to keep the peace. Hobbes was not, of course, the first to make the observation that humans can make life impossible for each other. He was the first to develop a philosophy designed to prove that the only solution is force. For Hobbes force had to be the answer, because the other answers which had been proposed were not answers acceptable to Hobbes. First why not religion? In traditional societies people obey mysterious symbols, and in some cases rarely resort to force to settle interpersonal conflicts. But for Hobbes this was no answer he had resolved to base his answer on the methods of 17th century physics, and to 181 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I avoid relying on the superstitious ideas which he associated with religion. Second why not friendship or love, the filia which Aristotle once said was the bond of men in states, or the caritas of St. Thomas? Well, for starters, the commandment Love-one-another-as-I-have-loved-you is a divine command, and therefore it is not science. But there is another, deeper reason why it was useless for Hobbes to try to bring about peace through love. Hobbes lived at a time when England was already a competitive, market society, a capitalist society. There is a reason why it would have been useless for Hobbes to preach love to a 17th century capitalist, while it was not useless for St. Thomas to preach love to a 13th century baron or duke. The reason is that the baron is somebody who, so to speak, has it made; he is the landlord of a giant self-sufficient farm. The baron can keep enough food for himself, and share all the rest of the food with his knights, vassals, and serfs, and with wandering beggars; he does not lose his land that way; his crops will grow again next year just as they did last year. The average businessman, on the other hand, does not have it made. He may look secure to an outsider, but he knows that he needs to keep running to keep ahead of the competition. If he tried to give away profits on the scale that people who have it made can afford to give things away, he would find that his more selfish competitors were accumulating capital faster, and therefore were able in the long run to build bigger factories, use newer production techniques, and therefore to make a better mousetrap cheaper. (Hobbes understood something that Gandhi did not understand: namely that people who are competing with each other in a market economy cannot be expected to love each other. Gandhi proposes a love ethic according to which property owners should consider themselves trustees of wealth for the benefit of the poor. Gandhis proposal is exactly that of St. Thomas, and it is perhaps suitable for a feudal society. What has happened in India is that the rich have accepted Gandhis theory of trusteeship but then have pointed out that it is economically impossible to do anything much different from what they are already doing. Hobbes, although he was not religious, spoke warmly of the new religions which did not expect the rich to make unrealistic sacrifices. Hobbes wrote in his history of the civil war

that one of the new religions, the Presbyterian, was well received because it did not inveigh against the lucrative vices of men of trade... which was a great ease to the generality of citizens and the inhabitants of market towns.) Hobbes had a view of human nature such that love was not likely to bring about peace, and although he probably underestimated the human capacity for love, he was probably right about humans in the situations he observed. What about justice? Aristotle had also declared justice to be the bond of man in states. Hobbes held that the views of Aristotle and Aquinas on justice were simply wrong, and he based his argument on the practices of his own 17th century capitalist society. Who would complain, he asked, about getting more than his share? Therefore, getting more than ones share is not unjust. Justice means, for Hobbes, sale and purchase at whatever price seller and purchaser agree on there is no other standard. Hobbes wrote of a society where people obey the law because they are forced to obey, and of a society where the only way to tell whether a bargain is fair is to ask whether the parties agreed to it. He redefines law: for Aquinas law was an ordering principle for the common good of the community, for Hobbes the commands ...of all the powerful in respect of them who cannot resist, may be termed their laws.* He redefines justice: for Hobbes justice is doing what you have contracted to do, and injustice is breaking a contract. He does not expect people to be just, in this sense, voluntarily, and he considers the enforcement of contracts to be one of the chief functions of the sovereign. Hobbes worldview rules out the usual alternatives to force as a means of bringing about peace namely rational self-interest, religion, friendship, love, morally sanctioned law, and * Hobbes, Thomas, De Cive or The Citizen. N.Y.: Appleton-century-Crofts, 1949, Ch. XIV; p. 155 (first published 1651). 182 Letter 24 justice. Hobbes has used Galileos method of resolution and composition to analyze humans as power-seeking machines, and when he composes the single elements to form a whole society, he finds that only power can stop power. (It should be noted that there must be something wrong with Hobbes arguments. If Hobbes were right, then the only peaceful human societies would be absolute monarchies. But history and anthropology show that there are some peaceful societies that are not absolute monarchies. Furthermore, if Hobbes were right, absolute monarchies would rule by force. But in fact monarchies usually sustain themselves with religion, legal systems, concepts of justice, pomp and ceremony; ...among our rude forefathers the ideas of divinity and royalty coalesced. ** However, whether or not Hobbes is right, his conclusions follow from his assumptions. Furthermore, certain assumptions his method implies or presupposed, namely that power is reality and that competitive capitalist society is natural, are assumptions which are typical of the modern mind.) The philosopher whose portrait Charles II admires is the progenitor of some of our contemporary republican principles. Minds accustomed to thinking of social power as preeminently political will be puzzled when they find in the works of an ardent royalist the source of principles often called democratic, but those who call our civilization economic society, recognizing a common underlying pattern in its royal, republican, and repressive political manifestations, will not be puzzled or surprised. One such principle is that all people are free. Hobbes means that everyone was free in the state of nature. Everybody had a right to everything until there was a contract to form society. This means simply that before there was a social

contract, everybody was free to take whatever he could manage to hold on to. It follows, on Hobbes reasoning, that we are still free and still have rights, except for those rights and freedoms that were given up in the social contract: ...where no covenant has preceded there has no right been transferred, and every man has right to everything. Americans owe to Hobbes the proposition that all men are created equal, which is found in our Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, who got the words from Locke who got them from Hobbes, perhaps meant something profound when he said that all men are created equal, but for Hobbes it was a simple fact. In a state of nature as Hobbes conceived it we would all be equal because anybody could murder anybody. Charles H is surprised when his rapt admiration of his portrait of Thomas Hobbes is interrupted by two oddly dressed visitors who materialize in his closet. We (the visitors) bow respectfully and proceed briskly to measure the portrait, meanwhile addressing gracious words to his majesty, declaring by our behavior that our arrival was expected, thus obliging him to assume that if he were to interrupt us he would thereby breach decorum, which the parliamentary party would cite as evidence that during his exile Charles n had forgotten how to play the role of Ring. Presenting to his highness two small line drawings, as if we were tailors presenting two bolts of cloth for his consideration, we deferentially suggest carving on the lower panel of the frame of Hobbes portrait a design like this:

* Frazer, Sir James G., The Golden Bough. N.Y.: Macmillan, 1958, abridged edition, p. 112. 183 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Letter 24 The diagram represents a medieval view of how things are and should be. The dots represent people, and the sun represents God in His capacity as final cause, that is to say, in His capacity as end and aim of our existence. The arrows represent the proper direction of our lives that is to say, the feet that we are ordered to an end. We are ordered to an end in the sense that we are created with the purpose of loving and serving God. Everything in heaven or on earth is ordered to some end or ends, the ends being the purposes for which the thing was created. Love is the force that moves us, and everything else. The line connecting the dots represents the real relations among people, or it could just as well represent the real relations among a things. The line signifies that we truly exist only in relationship, as members of a community, or as members of that spiritual body which is His church. The diagram as a whole shows a pre-Hobbesian world. For the top panel of the frame of Hobbes portrait, our other small line drawing outlines a carving with this design:

This second design shows the new worldview Hobbes did so much to formulate and to promote. The dots in the second design can be interpreted in several ways. In terms of scientific method, the dots can be thought of as factors, variables, or bodies in motion. In other words, they are individual things, subject to what Aristotle would call efficient causality. The dotted arrows represent the fact that the things may be going in any direction we need observation to tell us what directions they are going. And they may have any magnitude again we need observation to tell us what magnitude they have. In other words, the world consists of things with force. Power is reality. The lack of a line connecting the individual things indicates that nothing has any necessary relation to anything else. Our purpose is well, every person is free to find a purpose for herself, if she can. The diagram may also be interpreted in terms of ethics and politics. It is not surprising that in our culture similar ideas should appear in different places, since anthropologists find this to be the case with other cultures.. A society tends to project its image of itself outward onto nature, and to project its image of nature inward onto itself. The diagram may be taken to represent individuals, each of whom is free and independent. The dotted arrows indicate that a person has a right to do whatever he wishes, as long as he does not interfere with the equal right of others. The fact that all the dots are on the same level, rather than some higher and others lower as in the medieval diagram, indicates that all persons are equal. Thus the diagram represents a society of free, equal, and independent individuals. A person is free to do what she or he wants. The same diagram can be used to represent another modern institution the nation-state. A nation-state, as Kant observed, is a kind of artificial person. International law of the modern kind holds that each nation is, in principle, free, equal, and independent. The dots represent sovereign nations, each independent of the other, and the dotted arrows represent the right of each nation to do what it chooses to do within its own territory. His majesty comments that our designs throw into relief the significance of Hobbes philosophy as an early synthesis of some basic structures of the modern mind in a manner that is too explicit. Hobbes is not a popular philosopher. England is after all a Christian nation, and people still flatter themselves that they are not machines. People still think monarchs rule by right, not by force, that England is governed by rational laws and by legitimate magistrates. Hobbes philosophy is logical, but it is not popular. Consequently, if one is going to be a 184 Hobbesian at all in the 17th (or even the 20th) century, it is best to be one circumspectly avoiding excesses of clarity, to admire the portrait of the revered philosopher alone in a private closet rather than in a public hall, or, like Edward Gibbon in the 18th century to adopt a split-level writing style which retains the courtesies of civilization on a surface level while revealing to the discerning reader the Hobbesian motives of the persons whose actions are portrayed on a second, slightly camouflaged, level. Charles II therefore rejects our proposed adornment of Hobbes portrait on the ground that its meaning is insufficiently obscure. At this point the Lord Chamberlain and his retinue appear at the closet door. We bid farewell to his

majesty, step behind a rack of royal robes, and to materialize; swiftly returning to the smogshrouded 20th. century, carrying with us more understanding of the contribution of philosophy to the construction of the metaphysics of economic society than we had when we began our journey into the mists of origins. What we are beginning to understand is that our culture has been constructed, which implies that it can be reconstructed. We are beginning to see that the turn-ofthe-century German sociologist Max Weber misled us when he described the transition from traditional to modern society in such terms as Entzauberung, i.e. removal of magic (from Ent, a prefix indicating removal, and Zaubert magic). Of course Weber realized that traditional societies, closer than we are to tribal forms, possess additional characteristic attributes besides a belief in magic. And of course we realize more than Weber did because of the evidence that has accumulated since his death that what is remarkable about traditional society is not so much the typical pattern (belief in magic, ritual, animism, extended kinship systems....) as it is the bewildering variety of patterns, a variety which gives us hope that there are infinitely many cultural forms which have not been created yet, among which very many are more functional and more beautiful than the rather drab economic society into which it has been our lot to have been born. The main point of saying Webers Entzauberung is misleading is not that Zauber is too small a word to name traditional human cultural structures; it is that Ent is too small a word to name the construction of the metaphysics of economic society. Weber and his ilk (he has a lot of ilk) probably do mean this is why I criticize them that when you take away the magic etc. of close-to-tribal humanity, you are left with plain, dull, prosaic, thing-like facts. (An austere ontology, Willard Van Orman Quine would say.) No no no. Modernitys individual is magic. Capitalism has its spirituality it is Einsamkeit (aloneness, loneliness). Analytic geometry is an enchantress; minds she has bewitched do not easily break her spell. Property and person are myths, composed by processes not essentially different from the composition processes of stories more ancient and more profound. Rights, variables, and mechanical metaphors belong to cultural codings with historical beginnings, and as we build our culture better they will have historical Aufhebungen. (Aufhebung plural Aufhebungen is a German word used by G. W. F. Hegel to express a surpassing of a partial truth by a more adequate truth.) P.S. Consider whether the river Thames, or the river Cherwell, is an individual; or, better yet, consider these words of an old widow: Yo no soy nadie. Tengo mas de noventa aos y mis amigos todos se han muerto ya hace tiempo. Sin ser persona para mas amigos no soy persona. Existo como existen las piedras, no como existen los seres humanos. I do not exist. I am more than 90 years old and all my friends died a long time ago. When I am not a person in their eyes, I am not a person at all. I am like the rocks, not like a human being. 185 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I

186 Letter 25 25 THE MYSTICAL KERNEL IN THE RATIONAL SHELL One of the characteristics of economic society is that people who have little money often have to meet with people who have lots of money to request a portion of their fortunes. Poor farmers in the third world go to banks asking for loans, and often get caught in circles of debt; poor intellectuals in the first world go-to foundations asking for grants and often get turned down. I hope I dont get turned down. I really need to finish this book; there are still 25 more letters to go. I have very much enjoyed our imaginary friendship, and I hope that it can continue. There are more ideas I think you should think about, and more people I think you should meet. The truth, my friends, is that I love you very much, although I love you more in small hotels than in big hotels, for a reason I shall immediately explain. In big hotels one encounters the frequent goose-in-a-suit, the occasional Miss America, either or both of them strutting the carpeted corridors trying to prove an answer to the question, Quien es el primer limn? Who? Who? Who is the number one sourpuss? I shall translate the foreign expression for you, in order to make the meaning clear, Who is the first lemon? Here is a better translation: Who is the number one lemon? That is the question they ask in big hotels, Good morning sir! Yes of course sir! Are you the number one lemon? Thank you, Mr. Lemon! You are of course the number one lemon, arent you? Arent you? It is all very demanding and it gets on ones nerves.

Now the small hotel I am speaking of a nice small hotel is a cozy place, a peach of a place, a sweet peach in summer, a warm peach cider by the fireside in winter. That is the kind of place it is. Now you understand why I love my friends more in small hotels. In big hotels I am false to myself, I get sucked into games I do not want to play, I fear discovery and betrayal; really I never wanted to be a lemon, I never trusted a goose-in-a-suit or a Miss America. Take me to a small hotel, put me in an easy chair, take my hand, tell me a story, serve me a drink. Do not threaten me, I am susceptible to fits of anxiety. The truth my friends is that because you are my comforters you are my friends, that is what I mean by friends and I am past the point where I ask for more than comfort. I must tell you more of the truth, I have a lizard-level mind, it is at the top of my spine; I would not lie to you, not to you my dear comforters, my paracletes, my fresh cotton sheets, my jars of marmalade, my rose curtains staining the morning light, dear mirror, dear ferns, dear potted begonias living here beside me. Now you will understand how glad I was to be informed that my interview was to be at the Windsor Arms, a small hotel as comfortable as an old shoe. I love it. I sauntered into the foyer in a good mood, anticipating the scent of butter and coffee, the shell-like lampshades, the amber shadows, brown wood, creamy polished surfaces. Then I met my competitors, a half-dozen 187 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I run-down intellectuals, deep in sofas. I loved that too. It is good to be among ones own kind... among the kind who write halves of books and mail the unfinished manuscripts in brown paper envelopes from suburban post offices of middle-sized cities, addressing the envelopes to charitable foundations, enclosing in them requests for monies; we are the kind of charming middle-aged orphans who sit deep in sofas, who brim with fascinating thoughts, who hope the mother fund will adopt us, who seek the bubble reputation with its cash emoluments; we persuade ourselves of our infinite tenderness on Mondays and Thursdays, hang it up on Tuesdays and Fridays, repent on Wednesdays and Saturdays, rest on Sundays. It is Monday and we are persuaded. Kindness was shown to me by the lady at the desk, la matresse de lhtel, a black lady, 45 if a day, a true comforter wearing large clear glasses, a green comb in her frizzy black hair. She did not take offense at my odd remark, No thanks I prefer to smell, which was what I said when my lizard mind was fascinated by her white sweater and green-and-white jacket with a clean collar, and she said to me, Coffee while youre waiting? and I inhaled the divine fragrance. She did not take offense. She brought me a glass of water with ice in it. I fell in love with her at once. It was the clean collar that got me, green and white, like white waves on a green tropical sea; we could enjoy the tropical storms together, the swift rising of the wind, the sudden power of warm green water, skies falling in thunderous layers of water, water on water, she drenched me with her clean collar. La matresse approached the sofa area with measured steps and spoke. Listening to her voice was like eating a honeydew melon. She did not speak to me. Mr. ORourke will see you now, she said, not to me but to another. I found her statement exquisite; it was precisely the appropriate thing to say on the occasion, and moreover it was delivered in precisely the right tone of voice, not too loud or too quiet, inviting yet respectful. The timing, the rhythm, the pitch, were perfect; no one could have done it better. I wondered whether she could tell that I was in love with her. As she approached now one, now another, of my competitors, always with the same appropriate message carried by the same delicious voice, I sent her silent lovegrams by heart telepathy, Can you see that I alone, among all the men in this room, adore you truly? The others may love you for a day, but I will love you eternally and forever, I will run your green comb through your frizzy hair until

the stars fall from the sky. She said ORourke six times, until I was the only sailor sunk in a sofa, alone in my sea of green tropical waters adoring a chocolate-hued goddess who disappeared from view and then appeared again as the waves sent me plunging into their green depths and then slowly let me rise again to the surface where I floated comfortably on a green-and-white life buoy, the shape and color of her clean collar. The name ORourke was familiar to me, for I had known several ORourkes in life. When it came to be my turn to receive from the melon voice its impeccable message, and to enter the presence of the gentleman who had received my application for a foundation grant, who would now interview me, I left the matresse de lhtel with the resignation of a condemned prisoner on the way to his hanging who regards himself already as a-living corpse. I sent the matresse one last telepathic message as she picked up my empty water glass with plump, apparently boneless, fingers, The feeling I had for you was purer and deeper than any feeling mortals have ever had, or ever will. Howie! Good to see you again! said Leon ORourke, rising from his chair. What a surprise to find my old roomies name on an application, and to read your... er... interesting manuscript. Dont sit down. I deliberately scheduled you last so we could step over to the dining room for lunch and talk about philosophy. My body sort of turned itself around, it sort of did, it sort of ambled off with Leon to a sort of delightful little table in a corner, and it sort of fed itself a bowl of clam chowder. It ate a cracker. That is where it was and what it was doing when Leon began to talk at it. 188 Letter 25 Leon sampled a sprig of celery with cream cheese and told me I was a reductionist. You reduce philosophy to historical explanations of why one or the other philosopher maintained one or the other doctrine. The philosopher is treated as a functioning part of a cultural process, which itself is an adaptation of a particular species, homo sapiens, to an ecological niche. It was clever of Leon to call me a reductionist, turning the tables on me, so to speak. I had been regarding him as a reductionist, inasmuch as his leitmotif, force is reality, reduces everything to mechanical metaphors even when he talks about freedom and rights; he follows in the footsteps of John Lockes modifications of Thomas Hobbes, which were analyzed by C. B. MacPherson, from whom I have learned a great deal. Even freedom and rights are expressed by Locke and Leon in mechanical terms, inasmuch as they are just the opposite of being governed by force. I tried to think of a helpful reply, one that would make Leon see my point of view. I am a participationist, not a reductionist, I said. I facilitate peoples participation in the construction of meanings. You do not understand, said Leon, as he tasted a spoonful of vichyssoise. You say, for example, that William of Ockham constructed a frame of reference such that only individuals exist, because it suited the interest groups he represented to declare that only individuals exist. What you are doing is historical explanation, or sociology, perhaps anthropology. Not philosophy. The philosophical question, which a philosopher, insofar as he is a philosopher and not some other thing, ought to ask, is Is it true that only individuals exist? I assumed, I said, that the statement only individuals exist is so patently absurd that nowadays nobody would regard it as true. Consider, for example, the word Thames, a proper noun which undoubtedly refers to something which exists: I quoted from my letter 24: ...the Thames and its tributary the Cherwell, two streams which flow in the vicinity of the university along meandering courses with many branches and backwaters, among flat meadows

and well-wooded hills... The Thames flows into the English Channel, which merges with the Atlantic and thereby with all seas. As it is with rivers, so it is with radio waves, historical periods, gravitational fields, soils, and many other things. Often things exist as elements of structures or systems; the designation of one or another item as an individual is to some extent arbitrary. As it is with only individuals exist, so it is with other metaphysical generalizations. They are not true in the straightforward sense of describing facts although some of them are obviously contrary to facts as only individuals exist is. Their social functions are not those of statements of fact. The helpful question for the lover of wisdom to ask about them is What do they do? Leon tried a bit of gefilte fish with some smoked oyster and herring. I am puzzled by your attitude toward metaphysical generalizations, he began. You accept the logical positivists claim that they are cognitively meaningless, and nevertheless go on studying metaphysics and doing metaphysics as if it were an art form. You seem to have learned something from the post-positivist analytic philosophers and the phenomenologists, although you have not made it clear what you have learned, or where you stand in terms of the contemporary state of the art. My own view, he went on, is that whatever school of philosophy may be in vogue at the moment, it is important to keep philosophy going. We need to continue to support philosophical work of high quality, and I am confident that the core values of our open society, freedom, voluntary association, a belief in human perfectibility, will be enhanced by the disinterested search for truth that philosophy stands for. The recent literature on ethics, for example, shows a trend toward a deontological paradigm and away from utilitarianism, but the core values are intact. Its just a little different way of looking at them. Am I right? Now what worried me about your er approach is that there seems to be no place for values. Whatever else philosophy 189 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I does, it ought to justify our values, but you extrapolate the natural sciences into some rather questionable views on anthropology and sociology without ever really justifying values. On your approach philosophy as such is impossible because as David Hume said you cant deduce an ought from an is. Your approach is about what exists, but it is a rule of logic that from premises about what exists you cannot draw conclusions about what ought to exist. Apparently Leon had mellowed since his college years, and he had read a lot of books. He had come to realize that social structures whose rgulations hermneutiques were closely associated with mechanical metaphors in the 17th and 18th centuries could now be supported by rhetoric drawn from a variety of sources. A sophomoric objection, I heard myself saying. The pride and hostility expressed in my remark surprised me since (it being Monday) I was persuaded of my infinite tenderness. Logical rules about what can and cannot be deduced (and there are plenty of rules in our culture and others which authorize the deduction of oughts from iss, for example, from Xs blood pressure is 190/120, it follows that X ought to have medical advice) are themselves judged by physical facts. A nonfunctional culture becomes extinct, and its logic dies with it. Our luncheon was accompanied by soft piano music. Chopin, Liszt... a black-tied waiter served Leon artichoke hearts with hearts of palm. I couldnt remember which was which, Leon explained, so I ordered both. He continued: You were never able to refute me when we used to argue in college, because I was right according to the logic I and many others use. So now, since you cannot refute me logically, you call down the wrath of ecology upon my logic. You claim that a culture of people trained to think and feel as I do, will destroy its environment, either slowly through chemical pollution, or

rapidly through nuclear holocaust. O.K., I said. But I claim more. Your metaphysics is neither consistent with the facts nor helpful. The cultural codings for the ecological age, which I am trying to help construct, will be both. How can you say that? Leon demanded as he put curls of butter on his bread sticks with a fork instead of a knife. In the first place I have no metaphysics. My worldview is scientific, scientific and rational. Just name one fact that I deny. Well, I said, you used to say force is reality, a metaphysical generalization with which you supported such disparate hoaxes as Friedmans specious measuring of economic variables (market forces) and the geopolitics (power) of national security doctrine, and you used to chortle when you learned about predator-prey relationships in nature because you thought they confirmed your metaphysic. A closer look at how hominids secured their place in the food chain shows, on the contrary, that cooperation learned through acculturation is the chief human form of adaptation; it is social cooperation which has permitted us to survive so far; it is our principal human reality. As Leon dipped a fresh shrimp in aoli sauce he counterattacked by saying that my effort to overthrow the characteristic philosophies of economic society with the aid of ecology was doomed to failure because ecology itself is nothing but economic theory applied to nature. The techniques of ecological research are forms of economic analysis genetic strains survive by adopting competitive strategies just as firms do; cells are little factories with inputs and outputs; costeffectiveness is efficiency in ecology as in economics, and so on and on. A strategy can be effective or efficient, I said, either from an individual point of view or from a social point of view. If you are a philosopher, you will take a social point of view and try to do what is effective for the good of the wider community, the community of living beings who share your habitat. What Plato and I advocate is a solidary and functional view in an ecological context, functional virtue. Leon ate a small Italian sausage. I do not have a social point of view, he said. Your philosophy amounts to instructing me to have feelings I do not have. When he used the word 190 Letter 25 feelings I knew he had chosen to disregard my allusion to the traditional interpretations of physiological arousal states, to disregard classical logos and sophia and to put his case in contemporary lingo. O.K., I said to myself, Ill try to relate to getting behind where your head is at The pianist was playing Schubert. I remained quiet and tilted my head as if I were trying to sort out the melody from the hum of conversations; in reality I was imagining different music. I heard the Cuban song Guantanamera con los pobres de la tierra, mi suerte la quiero echar and the Spanish Civil War refrain, Si me quieres escribir, ya sabes mi paradero/En el frente de Teruel. primera lnea de fuego.** I was wondering what it would be like to listen to those songs with Leon. It would be a lonely experience, a lack of communication, a code not shared. Life would be better, I said, if some of us had feelings that some of us dont have. While putting a strawberry in his mouth, Leon asked me please not to tell him about my feelings. Having been requested to spare my luncheon partner the pain of insight into my inner states, I spent a moment thinking about what I would have told him about my feelings if he had not warned me that he did not want to hear about them. My feelings, I would have said, are on the whole unstable and pathetic, mostly anxieties and ineffectual surges of teary joy. Part of the explanation of their unfortunate state is that my body is inhabited by crowds of my simian and reptilian ancestors, the flow of whose vital juices has been turned on and off somewhat haphazardly by

8,676,432,114 thirty second spot announcements, each of them deliberately designed to motivate me to buy something. The fiber of their nerves has been burned by 271,466,511,198 lies. Be that as it may, I thought, continuing my private meditation, it is nevertheless true that whenever my feelings move me to action which serves the good of the wider community, then the good of the wider community is served by my feelings. I would venture to make this modest assertion not because I understand myself, which I do not, and not because I know with apodictic certainty which actions do and which do not serve the wider community, which I do not either, but because the assertion is a tautology which must be true in the same way that A = A or bachelors are unmarried males must be true, and moreover it is in many ways an illuminating and helpful tautology; it is a constructive tautology, which a person who wants to be constructive might safely invite to stay for tea in the innermost parlor of her cerebral cortex. As I thought these thoughts I imagined vast reeling rainbow ribbons of DNA molecules, vast northland pine forests, myriad creatures of the layered jungles of the wet tropics and I remembered how much all of these are threatened now by what is going on in the cerebral cortexes of certain relatives of the monkey family, and by the consequences of our shattered feelings. Then Leon broke the silence by resuming our conversation where it had left off. It depends whose life you want to make better, said Leon as he selected some brie, some portsalut, and some Roquefort from a plate of assorted cheeses. Your ecological imperative will not justify your love ethic because it is quite possible for societies to survive for centuries while practicing exploitation and cruelty. Your position is an historical wager, a bet on the survivability of a society with solidary structures; you wager that a culture which honors the strength of the weak internally will itself be strong externally. Since human cultures are fast becoming a global mosaic, your bet amounts to saying that the global society which can live * Translation: with the poor people of the world, I wish to join my fate. ** Translation: If you want to write me a letter, you know my address./On the Teruel front, first line of fire. 191 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I without destroying itself or the environment will possess rational structures allied with compassion. Wishful thinking thats what it is. You are believing what you want to be true. The ecological imperative, I said, is not simply survival. By ecology I mean what Ernst Haeckel,* one of the people who first used the word, meant by it, simply the sum total of the findings of the natural sciences. We know, for example, as natural facts that we humans need food and companionship, that we avoid stress; we need beauty natural scientists dont often use that word, but the discoveries of behavioral biology and brain physiology, among others, imply that our need for what the word names is fundamental. However, I went on, let us not spoil our lunch by quibbling about the meaning of ecology. What you say about my historical wager expresses my meaning accurately, although I would have used a more traditional vocabulary. I would have said, By death and resurrection, the Cross has set us free, or something of the sort. I might have put on my saffron robe and chanted the Diamond Sutra for you. I might remind you of ways we can appropriate our Greek and medieval inheritances for the people. Philosophy affirms unity as the professor of the history of philosophy at the Sorbonne said in another context. Leon ate one leaf of a spinach salad and pushed the rest away. Sentiment is a poor foundation for social order and morality, he said. As Immanuel Kant writes in his Foundations of the

Metaphysics Of Morals, those who cannot think expect help from feeling. I claim, contrary to your assertion that human survival prospects would be enhanced by bringing up young people to be sentimental, that what we need is plain duty, responsibility. Since Kant is quoted by idealists more often than he is quoted by cynics, I was mildly surprised to find that Kant had become part of Leons repertoire. Immediately I understood why. It is because Kants insistence on plain duty decreed by pure reason, when coupled with a short list of plain duties like respecting property rights and paying debts, can be used to protect the interests of the Leons. Morality and reasoning should not be separated from love, I said. As Makarenko** says, we need rational solidarity. But even if you could build a morality on pure reason, much depends on what rational duties you consider rationally plain. Some middle-wing extremists focalize on irresponsible neglect of so-called plain duties because they believe that if people would live up to plain duties as defined by the ideals of our society, then our problems would be solved. The cultural activist, on the other hand, sees that the recognized duties are themselves inadequate. For example, the duty to live in harmony with the natural processes of the ecosystem which sustains us is not even an ideal of the dominant elites of contemporary societies yet it is the only possible future. What you mean to say, said Leon as he ate half a hard-boiled egg with garlic mayonnaise, is that the middle-wing extremist sees nothing wrong with irrational rationality. She thinks we need to be true to our values, and to pursue them by choosing means that are likely to succeed in making our values effective. My own position is the same, except that my values are fewer and more realistic than those of middle-wing extremists. You attack us by claiming that rationality (using means likely to achieve the ends) is itself irrational. You say our rationality is nonfunctional, and therefore should be changed, and you say it is the product of an historical process, and therefore can be changed by further historical processes. You say that when we overcome focalism and think globally we see that our so-called rationality serves neither the old ideals, nor the new ones we need. But, Leon continued, rejecting and setting aside a dish of taco chips with jalapeo bean dip, the two parts of your argument do not fit together. In Letter 9 you say that what is * Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) German biologist and philosopher. ** Makarenko, A.S. (1888-1939) Soviet educator. 192 Letter 25 irrational about our rationality is (a) it is a logic of disunity, and (b) it is consciousness-lowering. Then in Letter 24 you omit (a) and (b) when you depict the construction of economic society. I sighed and breathed deeply, staring at the rejected taco chips. A Salvadoran peasant appeared on one of the chips as if it were a TV screen. Es tan poco la que queremos! she said, Cantidades suficientes de arroz y frijol, asistencia medica caso de necesidad, fiestas de vez en cuando, vivir tranquilo rodeado de los seres queridos, querer la tierra, los vientos, las aguas puras, morir en la paz de la amistad divina. Por que nos trahan a cada paso?* I said I didnt know everything about the cultural structures which had been utilized by homo sapiens in Europe from the 14th to the 17th centuries, but that I was sufficiently acquainted with their variety and complexity to know that to interpret the process is to make a creative philosophical construction. In Letter 9, I continued, I tried to make some helpful generalizations about the dominant

managerial rationality of the 20th century, stressing its selfishness and its lack of anthropological imagination, while mentioning also in the 9th and other letters some of its other characteristic features such as the root metaphor of force. In the 24th letter I discussed some philosophical aspects of the early development of the kind of society economic society where irrational rationality reigns, but I got only as far as 1660. In any case, I went on, the tendency toward a low level of consciousness, in the sense of viewing local institutions as natural and universal, probably exists everywhere. It does not in itself require an historical explanation of its origins, although we do have a peculiar way of manifesting this tendency, calling ourselves rational, and scientific. Leon decided not to try the couscous royale, and requested instead a few large black Greek olives and a small slice of feta cheese. Since you yourself admit that creative philosophical constructions go beyond the facts, why do you make them? he asked. Why not be like the British empiricists John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776) who contented themselves with being underlaborers for the sciences, clearing away the metaphysical brambles instead of making more brambles, clearing the ground for the discoveries of the geniuses who really advanced human knowledge, such as Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in the natural sciences and David Humes friend Adam Smith (1725-1790) in the social sciences? England was the first economic society, I replied. Its leading 17th and 18th century philosophers devoted themselves to attacking the metaphysics of other societies while defending their own (soi-disant** anti-metaphysical) metaphysics. Their doctrines were skeptical, in the sense, among others, that they provided few criteria for making decisions. Precisely because they were skeptical they encouraged leaving private decisions to individual choices and public decisions to markets. They created a metaphysics of individuality, but to put the point differently, they created a series of philosophies which reinforced the pattern of their culture. Their philosophies were an effect of their times. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.*** Leon looked at the menu again and chose a dish of marinated lamb. You do not achieve what you set out to achieve, he said. You claim to have told us the story of the contribution of philosophy to the construction of the metaphysics of economic society. What you actually did was to write a few sentences each on Ockham, Descartes, and Hobbes, each of whom wrote many volumes. You wrote nothing at all about Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, Roger Bacon, or Francis Bacon, and almost nothing about the social context in which philosophy was practiced * What we want is so little! Enough rice and beans, medical attention when necessary, fiestas every once in a while, to live quietly with our loved ones, to love the earth, the winds, the pure waters, to die in the peace of divine friendship. Why do they put obstacles in our way at every step? ** Soi-disant: French expression meaning so-called or self-styled. *** George Orwell, Politics and the English Language. 193 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I in Europe in the 14th through 17th centuries. You make rash generalizations from arbitrarily selected and fragmentary evidence. If Leon had conceived thinking more as an adaptive function and less as the production of verified knowledge, he would have criticized my 24th letter less self-righteously. However, since he was a link above me in the food chain, he could hardly be expected to contemplate epistemology from a

rabbits point of view. He was the hound. I, the rabbit, took refuge in a basket of bread, hoping the hound would not be attracted by plain bread among so many tasty dishes, and that my white fur would be a camouflage among the white slices. When Leon unexpectedly reached for the bread, I quickly grabbed the rabbit and put it in my pocket. Why are you putting a piece of bread in your pocket? Leon asked as he used his bread to make a neat mousaka sandwich. Mousaka is an eggplant casserole with a creamy custard top. Excuse me, I said, Ill be right back. I went to the mens washroom, where I managed to pry open an outside window and to thrust the piece of bread out through the grating. Run away little rabbit, I said, Ill talk to the hound about philosophy while you make your escape. Keeping my promise to the rabbit, I asked Leon to make a distinction. I do not claim to have told the story of the contribution of philosophy to the construction of the metaphysics of economic society. I do claim to have illustrated what kind of story it is. It is a story of talking a world into existence.* The existence of any society, including ours, hangs by the breath of human conversation; it is a socially constructed reality, a shared project. The so-called disembedding of economics from society is actually the construction on of the basic symbolic patterns of a particular kind of society. The so-called re-embedding looks a whole lot easier in this light, because we see that economics never freed itself from culture ever. Leon asked me how I could claim to be an orthodox Marxist while attributing social change to human creativity, and he recommended the fetuccini alfredo, which he said was excellent because at the Windsor Arms they use real spinach noodles. Say rather, I replied, that I appreciate the role of behavior guided by symbolic structures in social change, as well as the role of competition for the control of scarce resources. The supposed contradiction between creativity and science only worries people whose worldview is limited by a mechanical root metaphor which makes a sharp distinction between law-governed behavior and free behavior a point to be developed in Letters 29-33 (on Kant). Leon ordered eggs florentine and tasted a spoonful of it. He told me I am an elitist because my philosophy is Eurocentric, unlike his foundation which has in the past year made grants to African art, to native American philosophy, to Chinese music, and to Inca religion. I told him military repression and world commerce destroy more cultural diversity in a day than his foundation can support in a century, that our highest priority must be to stop the industrial-military processes which took shape in Europe, began in Europe, dominated the world starting from Europe, and now threaten the destruction of all traditional ideals everywhere. I added, however, that it was right decent of Leon to make grants. Leon pronounced himself satisfied with his Swiss enchilada. Its hard to get a good Swiss enchilada in Canada, he said, You need to use cream not more than a day old. He was not satisfied with my philosophy, which he said was bad poetry, poetry because it is confessedly fictitious, and bad because it stirs up ressentiment [which translated into English means jealousy], particularly the envy the embittered masses feel toward the educated classes. Leons low opinion of my poetry reminded me of a true story, which I told him while he ate fresh salmon with dill sauce. Once I had a student from the educated classes her father was * See John D. Groppe, Reality as Enchantment a Theory of Repetition, Rhetoric Review, vol. 2 no. 2, January 1984, pp. 165-174. 194 Letter 25

Ivy League and her mother FFV (First Families of Virginia), two status symbols without importance outside the U.S.A. but important inside the U.S.A. Due to personal tragedies best not mentioned, she felt a call to help the chronically poor in her hometown. You see this is not a story about the envious class rising up in bitter hatred; it is a story about the property-owning class reaching down in sweet loving kindness. She helped by running a pedagogically sophisticated preschool she called it The Evening Club for toddlers from homes where the parents were chronically unemployed or chronically underpaid. One day she had a crisis of conscience. She realized that if her preschool were to raise the ability of the toddlers enough, then the result would be that they, unlike their parents, would get good jobs. Consequently, someone else would lose the jobs they would have had if The Evening School had not existed. Some new people would become downwardly mobile, becoming chronically unemployed or underpaid, replacing the people made upwardly mobile by The Evening School. She was caught in a structural trap. When she became aware of the structural trap, she realized that where 7 to 12% unemployment is a permanent feature of a system, the system needs to be transformed. She was frustrated because although she knew how to help her toddler friends, she did not know how to help transform the society. The happy ending to the story is that she read my philosophy, and it helped her to see what she could do to transform the system. Which made me feel that my poetry is not so bad after all. Leon said, although he may not have been sincere, that he was glad I had a good feeling about my bad poetry, but he for his part felt yucky because even though he was trying to lose weight and for that reason had taken only a few bites from each dish he had ordered, still the cumulative effect of the luncheon had been to convince him that philosophy was not good for his digestion, for which reason he would have only a tiny piece of baklava for dessert, and would not inquire what my student had found in my philosophy which helped her see what she could do to transform economic society, since in any case the practical advice the student had found helpful would probably be provided for the reader in subsequent letters and in any case he, Leon, did not want to know how to nurture the strength of the weak, which was presumably what I had in mind, but rather how to preserve the strength of the strong since he considered himself to be among the strong, and among the rational, and among the righteous, although not, as he had implied before, among the sentimental, but still he, Leon, could not help wondering why I think the system can and will be transformed, and why I see my philosophy as a contribution to its transformation, since as far as he can see the system is, fortunately, well entrenched and heavily fortified, and will not change, and my philosophy is just a lot of dithering about words. I tried to explain to Leon, since he had asked why society will improve and how my philosophy will contribute to its improvement, that the mystical kernel will burst its rational shell, which was not easy to explain because in the proposition whose grounds I attempted to make plain the meanings of mystical kernel and rational shell must be made clear because they are not on first appearance at all clear to the average reader, or for that matter to any reader, for which reason one might inquire, as Leon did inquire while eating a piece of chocolate mousse cake, disregarding his previously expressed intention to have just a tiny piece of baklava, apparently because he now felt less yucky, why one chooses to use the phrases mystical kernel and rational shell whose meanings are not clear if ones purpose is to make oneself understood, to which inquiry one might respond, as I did respond to Leon while daydreaming about sunsets in the Rocky Mountains, that the image of the kernel and the shell is striking, so that even though it may cost the reader some pains to understand the point at first, and the writer no less pains to explain it, still, due to the novelty of the image, the point expressed by

195 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I the image, once understood, is likely to be remembered, and furthermore the phrase parallels two remarks by Karl Marx, with the first of which it can helpfully be contrasted and with the second of which it can helpfully be compared, the first being Marxs remark in the preface to Capital where he says he has extracted the rational kernel from the mystical shell of the dialectic philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, and the second being in appearance only a small parallel, since the similarity of language is found only in the one word bursts, although the similarity of meaning is great, where in the 32nd chapter of Capital Marx says production will burst its integument (cf. Letter 19 of this work, not Marxs), by which he (Marx) means that use values will burst the bonds imposed by exchange values a meaning which is admittedly extremely obscure here, whose clarification I shall, with your kind permission I trust, defer to subsequent letters on Marx, because the pressing task at this moment is to explain what mystical kernel and rational shell meant when I answered Leon by saying, The mystical kernel will burst the rational shell! The kernel is the heart of the matter, the essential part. In many fields today, people are expressing what is essential in terms like interconnectedness, building wholeness and community, being guided by the spirit as opposed to self-assertion. In management, company culture, including the companys stories and ideals, is perceived as essential, as is closeness to the customers. (See for example Peters and Waterman, In Search of Excellence.) In therapy, the reintegration of the isolated individual into a caring community is essential. (See for example, Jerome Frank, Persuasion and Healing.) In teaching, the successful methods are the ones that provide greater rapport with the mind of the child. (See for example David Weikart, The Cognitive Curriculum.) In agriculture the leading scientists recognize that a sustainable future requires a sense of community with the biosphere. (See for example the reports of the Rodale Cornucopia Project.) In physics and the natural sciences generally, wholistic approaches prove fruitful. In sociology, anthropology, and social work the successful approaches establish rapport with human subjects, or see the human group in its ecological context, or both. In conflict resolution trust, credibility, legitimacy, and community building are in the kernel of successful negotiation. (See for example the reports of the Harvard negotiation studies.) ...One could mention almost any field. The kernel is called mystical because not many years ago the new ideas which are now accepted by the leading minds (because they work) were scoffed at as mystical; and because the traditional mysteries, the water of baptism, the bread and wine of communion, express interconnectedness and wholeness; and because community requires what Paul Ricoeur* calls a deuxime naivet,** a second tribal consciousness recovered at many levels by post-tribal peoples; and because there is mystery in creative lizardry. The rational shell is irrational rationality. It still governs the economic, legal, and military frameworks of life, which form the hard shell of the social structure. Increasingly the incompetence of the shell is becoming evident to everybody, because anybody who can really do anything or understand anything is using the new ideas (which are, of course, in many cases ancient). The new consciousness reaches a critical mass; the mystical kernel bursts the rational shell. Whoopee! said Leon as he ate a gteau Louis XV. The gteau is a marbled chocolate and orange cake with strawberry jam between layers. You overlook the most essential part, he

* Paul Ricoeur (1913-): French philosopher. ** deuxime naivet: French expression meaning second innocence. 196 Letter 25 went on. The kernel of the matter is that we have the power, and we will keep it. Bring on your new ideas, shift paradigms, change root metaphors, surpass the old consciousness, hob the metaphysics of economic society auf... write whatever philosophy you wish. We are not dumb. We keep up with the latest intellectual trends, we ransack the past for ancient wisdom... and we use it all to exploit you. Now you understand the significance of the conversation with Roger in Letter One, I said. The new ideas must be the peoples ideas; they must grow from their consciousness and their organization. Or, if I achieve my highest aspiration to facilitate the appropriation of science and tradition by the people without ceasing to be one of them we may say our consciousness and our organization. Du bist auch ein gewhnlicher Mensch! exclaimed Leon. (You are also an ordinary man.) You are a power-seeker like the others. An Irish coffee now will be just the thing to settle the old tum. And a glass of port with almonds and raisins. You believe power is reality, dont you? Dont you? The proof is that the final aim of your philosophy is to organize the masses to take power. You threaten us. We threaten you. Thats Realpolitik. Yesterday, today, and forever. It would be constructive, I suggested, to distinguish Realpolitik from empowerment. Realpolitik is the brute power of mechanical force. It is when one factor impacts another. It is when a subject acts on an object. It is when the person who knows everything crams it into the head of the person who knows nothing. It is when the machine stamps shapes out of raw material. It is noise. It is what the free market does to the price of bananas in Costa Rica. It is when the eastern and western hemispheres become so polarized that the straining earth cracks down the middle. Empowerment is the growth of the strength of the weak; it is organization, communication. It is better codes, equipped to carry more functional messages. It is when we have one will; it is spirit. It is when we affirm our relationships and love binds us; it is form. It is when our culture is in harmony with the environment. It is when reason distributes goods rightly. It is when our horizons merge and we realize we are all one people. It is the rule of the (truly) rational over the irrational. Hagia sophia! I concluded. (That means holy wisdom, in Greek.) When I got the check for the clam chowder, I wrote Hagia sophia on it. Look me up next time youre in New York, said Leon. We must continue this conversation. Evidently my account of empowerment had not moved him. I slinked out of the small hotel less happy than I had been when I sauntered into it. I left feeling like an intruder at my own funeral. Who invited you? the crowd demanded to know. Who invited you to the funeral? I tried to explain that since my body was the corpse of the deceased, my presence was permissible at a social gathering of this nature, but in spite of my explanation which seemed to me so convincing that I did not understand why the crowd did not accept it, I was forcibly removed from the chapel amid boos and hisses and sternly reminded that federal law prohibits breathing. As I walked away I suddenly realized with horror that I was breathing. My first thought was to conceal the evidence by turning my body inside out, so that the interior of my lungs would be indistinguishable from the surrounding atmosphere. While attempting to carry out this difficult feat, I hurried down the street as inconspicuously as possible, pretending to be water vapour carried

by the wind. My disguise evidently did not work, for at the very first corner a young lady accused me of staring at her. I must tell this one to the police, I said to myself, they wont believe it. I dialed the police from a pay telephone. Say listen to this, I said. You wont believe this one. My friends are rejecting me and I suffer from lack of money. I am crying in a telephone booth. 197 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. I Apart from the incidents just mentioned my journey from the Windsor Arms to Queens Park was uneventful. I traveled on foot and kept my right hand in my pocket, tightly clutching my passport for fear that among the rush of automobiles, trucks, buses, delivery vans, and other vehicles I could lose my identity. Among the entities I have cathected when depressed and dejected are animals and plan) especially plants. On this occasion, when I arrived at the park I sat upon a bench facing a bowl of gardenias, columbines, trilliums, and Iceland poppies. Tell me, dear ones, I said, You who are so young, so fresh, with petals so soft, and breath. so sweet, do you understand why our culture fails us? Do you know why this modern culture of ours fails over and over again, generation after generation, to bring out the good potential, available in the genes and bodies of animals of our species? Why are human institutions not designed to make us cooperative and affectionate? Why not? Why not? No, said the flowers. We do not understand. We do not understand at all. And why, I continued, is irrational rationality so proud of itself? Why is it so confident that is has an answer to every question? When will the mystical kernel finally burst the rational shell? We do not know, said the gardenias, the columbines, the trilliums, and the Iceland poppies. We do not know why and we do not know when. Do you understand why the hungry have no food? That we do understand, said the flowers, and so do you. We wish the story were prettier. Do you understand why the homeless have no homes? We understand that too, said the flowers, sighing in the wind. And do you understand, I went on, why the police take fathers and mothers away from their children in the middle of the night, and torture them until they are dead, and throw their bodies into rivers? And why snipers with guns shoot people at random for no reason? And why men rape women? And why it goes on and on, year after year, century after century? No, you do not understand, I said, and dont tell me that you do. It is past understanding; it is unreal, my dear ones, incomprehensible, unacceptable, unbearable... Then it was their turn to speak to me. Listen to the wind as it blows, said the flowers. The wind speaks in the branches of brother tree as the waves speak from the sea. It is the heartbeat of our ancient mother earth. She is all of life, the skies and every sea. Speak to us flowers, we are her messengers, we the gardenias, the columbines, the trilliums, the Iceland poppies, we bring you kisses from your mother. Oh thank you, thank you, I said to the flowers. That was just what I needed to hear. Sometimes I have trouble pulling myself together that is why I am grateful when my friends are kind to me. 198 VOLUME TWO:

Methods for Transforming the Structures of the Modern World All, all of a piece throughout: Thy chase had a beast in view; Thy wars brought nothing about; Thy lovers were all untrue. Tis well an old age is out, And time to begin a new. Dryden, from Secular Masque CONTENTS Introduction to Volume II: Social Being...................................... xix Letter 26 Lets Pretend Were Real......................................... 199 Letter 27 Kants Context................................................. 211 Letter 28 The Murmuring Pines .......................................... 221 Letter 29 Mach Dich Mein Herze Rein (Make Thee My Heart Pure)............... 233 Letter 30 The Intimate Dinosaur .......................................... 241 Letter 31 Certain Difficulties of One of Many Anonymous Persons Concerning the Payment of His Rent, Together With Sundry Other Matters Which May Be Regarded Partly As Causes, Partly As Consequences, of Difficulties With Rents .............................................. 245 Letter 32 Womanpower ................................................. 251 Letter 33 A Feasible Peace Plan or The Servant of the Word At the Discotheque or A Mothers Kiss.................................................... 261 Letter 34 Charlies Angels Were Henrietta And Heinrich....................... 271 Letter 35 Love Believes All Things......................................... 277 Letter 36 The Making of a Counter Culture ................................. 285 Letter 37 The Forest Creatures Hear a Confession............................ 293 Letter 38 Leaves From Grandfather Lunas Notebook ......................... 307 Letter 39 And Now: Your Instructor In The Magical Arts Will Be The Prince of Darkness ............................................... 315 Letter 40 Phenomenology and Community.................................. 323 Letter 41 The Road To Emmaus .......................................... 335 Letter 42 Heideggers Way ............................................... 345 Letter 43 The Same Subject Continued or The View From The Back Seat......... 353 Letter 44 The General Form of the Problem of Peace (and How We Can Work for Peace) ...................................... 361 Letter 45 Messages or a Morning Walk ..................................... 371 Letter 46 The Great Mirror in the Inner, Inner, Inner Circle .................... 383 Letter 47 Ginetta and Angeletti ........................................... 397 Letter 48 Who Will Be the Last Metaphysician? .............................. 407 Letter 49 The Beloved Community ........................................ 415 Letter 50 Nameless ..................................................... 423 Introduction to Volume II INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II: Social Being

Rom Harr says in his book called Social Being that if women come to interpret marriage as a form of slavery, instead of interpreting it as a haven from loneliness and as an ideal way to live, then marriage will change. Harrs point is that marriage itself will change, not that the attitude of women will change. Marriage will be different because, since it will be differently regarded, it will have different consequences. The example Harr gives illustrates a general principle. If men come to interpret marriage as the enslavement of men, then again a change in interpretation will produce a change in the institution, although in a different way and with different results. If freedom (that is to say, the permissions to do as we choose commonly regarded as freedom), were interpreted as a vile form of corruption, then freedom would change. Freedom, like marriage would change if it were seen differently, because (in Harrs terminology) its causal powers would change. The institutions in question (in these examples marriage and freedom) would do different things, and since they would do different things they would be different things. Social institutions are similar to natural entities such as trees and molecules in the respect that what they do determines what they are, if not wholly then at least partly. Trees photosynthesize, and if a putative tree does not, then it is not a tree. If an acid molecule combines with copper to form copper sulfate, while simultaneously releasing hydrogen gas, then it is a molecule of sulfuric acid. Similarly, schools educate, and a putative school which teaches nothing is not a school. The causal powers of schools, however, or of monies, or of parliaments, are unlike those of natural entities in the respect that they change when people see them differently. When it is understood that re-interpretation can change causal powers, an important dimension of the last of Karl Marxs Theses on Feuerbach is thrown into relief. Marx wrote, The philosophers have only differently interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it. A different interpretation, which, although it may begin among a few people, spreads, gains adherents, mobilizes energy, and organizes action is a change. Re-interpreting our symbolic structures is the way philosophers change the world, particularly with respect to the typical concerns of philosophy such as the establishment of criteria for regarding judgments as rational or irrational, and the re-interpretation of key words (or, it you prefer, great ideas) like truth, beauty, freedom, justice, scientific, rights, law, love, life, cause and effect, I, thou, person, revolution, peace, development, God, democracy, experience, security, health, cost/effective, data, meaning, structure, system, responsibility, probable... That philosophy is a way to change the world is good news, especially when it is coupled with the news that philosophy can become a mass activity, directed toward the co-operative reinterpretation of the ides-forces which move us. then philosophy is seen as part of the reinterpretation of words and actions (one should also mention images) at every level, grassroots to elite; when it-is not sharply distinguishable from community organizing, political activism, teaching, consciousness-raising, art, counselling, and therapy, then we can call it cultural action. It is action which changes the culture, by interpreting it. xix LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Marx knew, and so do we, that a mere interpretation is not enough. Anew message without a new power is like a turn of the rudder when there is no wind in the sails. Marx contrasted the interpretations of philosophers with his own scientific and literary work because he, unlike the philosophers to whom he referred, had in mind a source of energy for change namely the proletariat, the motive power of history.

History has, however, more motive powers than one. History is the sum of all human action, and human action draws, in the last analysis, on the energy provided by the oxidation of simple sugars in muscle cells, triggered by nerves and hormones. Actions are guided (in the cases of typical human action, as distinct from automatic responses) by symbolic structures, and therefore the names of motives refer to their interpretations in their cultural settings, not to their chemistry. We say, for example, that a person acted from jealousy; not that she or he acted from adrenalin. To make a re-interpretation issue in action, cultural action requires energy. This concept is wider than Marxian theory. Marxian theories, in all their bewildering variety, are parts of cultural action, but they are not the whole of it. Cultural action is a broad concept which includes all methods of reconstructing social reality. The concept provides a focus for studying how societies have transformed themselves in the past, and it provides a useful perspective on the methods now used by those of us who call ourselves activists. An advantage of cultural action as a concept is that it is so broad that it does not exclude from consideration any change in the symbolic structures (also known as forms of life, practices with their discourses, traditions, frames of meaning, hermeneutic regulations of action)* with which we humans organize ourselves to function in the niches we inhabit in social systems and ecosystems. Changes in language, gestures, property rights, money, kinship structures, visions of the cosmos, gender roles, technologies, fashions, schools... are all included. Nothing human is excluded. Another advantage of using such an inclusive concept is that its inclusiveness facilitates seeing the patterns which link one aspect of a culture with another. Since a culture, like an organism, is an open system whose parts cohere with the whole (although the coherence is clumsy, constantly being renegotiated, and conflict-pervaded) a change in one part is likely to require changes in all the others. The ripple effect of change is a reason why activists should try to understand the patterns in cultures. It is also a good reason for being suspicious of anyone who has a plan for replacing war with peace (for example) while leaving everything else the same. The concept of cultural action also has the advantage of compatibility with any source of energy. The motive force for moving from one social practice to another can be anger, calculated selfinterest, pride, fear, love, shame... etc. Here the etc. refers to continuing the list of simple names of motives, but we need not exclude (for example) the complex process through which, according to Jean-Paul Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason, people become committed revolutionaries. On the other hand, neither need we consider Sartres account (or Fanons, or Audre Lordes, or Ted Robert Gurrs, or Freires, or anyone elses) to be the only true story about how the energy needed to effect social change gets mobilized. The phrase symbolic structure is also used by Habermas. The phrase with overlapping meaning form of life comes from Wittgenstein; practices with their discourses comes from the Foucault school and the praxis schools; traditions comes from Gadamer; frames of meaning is a phrase used by Anthony Giddens; hermeneutic regulations of action is adopted from Piaget, as is discussed in Letter 10. A distinction between meaning explanations and energy explanations is found in Anthony Wildens System, and Structure. xx Introduction to Volume II The advantage of conceiving the reconstruction of social reality so generally is, in summary, that nothing is excluded, so that in principle one works for every desirable change and uses every available source of motivation. The corresponding disadvantage is that such a general concept provides no direction; it does not identify the main problems and the main obstacles to solving

them; it provides no way to distinguish the mere amelioration of a local problem from a step toward restructuring the global system; nor does it even for that matter distinguish progress from reaction. By itself, without further elaboration, it condemns people of goodwill to a role in life consisting of an endless series of directionless acts of kindness, which would not be the worst or the most despicable role to play in life, which would be perhaps a source of comfort for those who are pained by the impurity of their hearts and even an antidote to the dangers inherent in the brutal service of an overarching grand design, but which is less than the survival of the human species requires. A source of direction can be provided, and will be provided in the following letters, by a concept of basic structure. If you know which structure is basic, then you know that the main problem is to change it; its defenses are the main obstacles; ameliorating a local problem is simultaneously a step toward global transformation when it contributes to a viable and lovable transformation of the systems basic structure. A change is not progressive if its result is to cement the worst features of the basic structure into place. A concept of basic structure, which will necessarily have to be shown and elaborated before it can be helpfully named and defined, gives meaning to the proposition that although the concept of cultural action, change by re-Interpretation, is comprehensively catholic, not every change is equally valuable. Some changes strike at the roots of our problems; others at the branches, or the leaves. I do not believe, either, that all sources of human energy are equally eligible to be mobilized as power for good, even though in its comprehensive catholicity the general concept of cultural action considers all motives. I continue to believe in the twentieth century, especially because of what has happened in the twentieth century, that la douceur est la seul vraie force. (Softness is the only true force.) The reconstruction of social reality is the reconstruction of software, and there are reasons why it can best be done softly. The following letters begin with a complex and quite essential series of conversations in which the main speakers are, apart from my slightly fictionalized self, Jrgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Kant, and a fictitious feminist named Maria Luna. The topics discussed are power, capitalism, love, how to live, science, morals, and how to build world peace. The general theme is the philosophy of Kant, since although by the end of Volume One I had introduced some key structures of modern philosophy and society, I had not yet set out the classic synthesis of modernity, the work of Kant. Kants work shows us our basic structure, and its basic-ness is confirmed as we encounter again and again the same structure in our discussions of power, capitalism, love, how to live, science, morals, and how to build world peace. Kant is the horizon of Habermas and Luna; that is to say, Kants philosophy (slightly modified) is the line of hills beyond which they cannot see. In the course of the Kant conversations, which occupy letters 26 through 33, the basic structure of our global society becomes visible, and it becomes clear at the same time that Kant is as much its product as its producer. Given that the structures were in place, even though they had not yet in the late 18th century become fully global, it was almost inevitable that someone would integrate their principal symbolisms into a coherent system. As it turned out, Kant is preeminent among those who were called to perform that philosophical labor. xxi LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II The subsequent letters, 34 through 38, deal with Karl Marx, who formulated the classic critique of the modern social formation. In an important sense it makes no difference whether we take Kant or

Marx as our cantus firmus. Both show the sane basic symbolic structure. For Kant the structure is immutable and right (indeed in provides the standard of lightness, as well as the eternal form of any possible human experience). For Marx it is one of several social structures which for a time come to occupy the center of historys stage, have their day, and then pass away and are forgotten by all except lovers of ancient lore. Our basic structure is, for Marx, at the same time good inasmuch as it has raised technology and the appreciation of the human personality to unprecedented levels, which need to be preserved in the next and higher stage of civilization, and also bad inasmuch as it alienates us from our true social being. But the most important lessons to be learned from reflecting on Marxs work are not those about what is wrong with capitalism a topic on which most people are already well-informed by personal experience but the lessons about how to change it. The remaining letters, 3 9 through 50, deal with some of post-Marxian western philosophys main contributions to transforming our social reality. If these fairly diverse commentaries have a general thesis, it is that several landmark texts of twentieth century philosophy have in common the questioning of modern western cultures rationality. They question it from standpoints which although different have some overlapping themes, these being mainly a shift from mechanical to linguistic models, and an appreciation of everyday truths as distinct from scientific laws. PostMarxian philosophers have had a variety of motives for engaging in critiques of one or another aspect of our cultures basic symbolic structures, but in spite of the variety of their motivations each of those to be discussed provides tools for constructing a transformed and improved civilization. One can derive from recent philosophy even some fairly detailed practical suggestions for community organizing and economic planning. Moreover, by becoming aware of some central and seminal texts (the classic statements of ideas which have had countless copies and echoes) we put activism in touch with the main currents of thought in our western-dominated global system. We will turn often to sources outside the western intellectual establishment to build alternatives to Asia, to Africa, to indigenous peoples, to the thinking of oppressed groups, to the discourses that arise from transformative practices but we need to know also the resources for transformation which grow from the self-criticism of the high culture of the modern west. The movements and philosophers whose relationships to our global societys basic structure are discussed in letters 39 through 50 are romantic existentialism (i.e. Heidegger), cultural Marxism (i.e. Gramsci), fascism, liberal positivist philosophys critique of itself (i.e. Wittgenstein), fascism, evangelical liberalism (i.e. Martin Luther King, Jr.), some versions of feminism which praise inclusive caring relationships and both/and solutions to problems (i.e. Gilligan and Noddings; one could have chosen others), and deconstruction as a step toward reconstruction (i.e. Derrida). xxii Letter 26 26 LETS PRETEND WERE REAL Consider, dear God, that we do not understand ourselves, that we do not know what we want, and that we distance ourselves infinitely from what we desire. St. Teresa of Avila Even now, even during this late epoch of the modern structure, when the plague and the pestilence of its chronic loneliness have sapped the strength of its images; when its words are not bread; when its dreams of romance wilt, wither, and shrivel like plants without water; even now there lives in Germany, in the smog-shrouded city of Frankfurt, a wonderful professor of philosophy who, when

he speaks English, pronounces world as if it were whirl. I cannot imagine, under the circumstances, a more endearing characteristic, and I recommend that everyone think of the world as a whirl, that is to say, as an unstable process. Whirl! Whirl! I shall try to give this whirl the appearance of stability for a moment by adjusting my lens to focus on the title of this letter. About my title, Lets Pretend Were Real, one might say, if one were motivated to comment on a title, that it is self-contradictory. One might argue that to be real is something we cannot pretend. We are real. To be is to be real. So one might say. Hence, one might continue, from the moment that the premise is granted that we are, it follows necessarily that we are real. And if we are real so one might continue the argument then we cannot pretend to be real. A person can only pretend one might claim something that is not true, and since it is true that we are real we cannot pretend it. What I will try to show, nevertheless, in this and the succeeding letters, is that Jrgen Habermas has pretended to be real, and has done so in a most disastrous way, a way which when considered together with the millions of similar errors made by less sophisticated persons can be regarded as the undoing of the New Left, of many feminists, and of many other middlewing extremists who are struggling enthusiastically but incompetently to change the world or should I say whirl? No, lets leave world in this context, since one of my aims is to show how to see beyond the limitations of the world as seen by the New Left, so that you will be empowered to change the whirl with more flexibility and imagination than they have been able to muster. The New Left is failing to transform the whirl with its critical theories, and with its rather harsh and strident practical discourse, just because its conception of the world is rigid. In order to find an opening to express and to make clear some of the limitations of the thinking of the wonderful professor Habermas, who, unfortunately, is not wonderful enough, I want to pursue the implications of a misunderstanding concerning the concept of power between him and his late friend Hannah Arendt. The pursuit of these implications will eventually show how it is possible to pretend to be real and be dangerously mistaken. However, I want even more even more than that to tell you something about prayer, and in order to satisfy this more vehement desire to communicate which I am feeling I will first lead you on a detour concerning pain and pleasure, which will lead back to the conversation between Habermas and Arendt about power in ten minutes (or fewer if you are a fast reader). 199 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II I suppose that one reason I need to write about prayer first is that I pray to survive, and even though I want to transform the structures of the modern world, I really do, I need to pull together the will to survive before I can contribute to the cause of global structural transformation or be of any use to anyone. As the scene opens, I am lying in bed. So here I am lying in bed with my body. Or, I should say, being my body, since a person is not so much with her or his own body as in the body or as the body. Anyway, here I am. My body is pain and tension. There are words running through my head. I think of my skull as a word-box. Under the skull the outer part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, continuously flashes sounds of words and traces of images, like a little theater in a box. A box of little dramas. My objective as I lie here is to relax. That relaxation is my aim in life at this point in time can be explained by the Pleasure Principle theory of Sigmund Freud. The logical form of the explanation

is the bringing of a particular case, me now as a body in a bed, under a general law, which can be stated: everybody always wants to relax. The concept behind this general law is that evolution has provided for the survival of the human species by endowing us with a sympathetic nervous system; the function of this nervous system is to be irritated by needs and alarms; it sends insistent jangling messages until it is quieted. So the best message to the brain from the nerves is: all clear, nothing to report. Total relaxation, total bliss. The Pleasure Principle explains why people enjoy orgasms, beer, lying in the sun, narcotics, steam baths, mild poisons such as tobacco, the satiation of hunger, vacations, escapist fantasies, defecation, and the quenching of thirst. An obvious objection to the theory is that people also enjoy excitement; as in skiing, basketball games, scary movies, rock concerts, and being turned on sexually or with drugs. This objection can be answered without abandoning the Pleasure Principle by postulating that strong emotions surge over and drown out the nagging irritations and alarms of everyday life, giving us relaxation by flooding the channels. Thus one can say, I felt so good when I hit the S.O.B. Or, I cried and cried it was a wonderful movie. Freud knew, of course, that more than two thousand years earlier Aristotle had spoken, in reference to Greek drama, of strong emotions as having a cleansing, purgative effect. One can, I conclude, be cleansed of lifes boring and bothersome tensions, one can wash them out of ones nerves, by a good cry, a passionate lust, a hot rage, an exciting ball game, or a war. So here I am inhabiting my uncomfortable body while Freuds theory of the Pleasure Principle is running through the theater of my mind, and I am saying to myself that it is a fine theory not (as Freud himself recognized) a complete and adequate theory, but, nevertheless, illuminating. My current purpose in life, which is to relax, becomes, in the light of the theory, natures purpose. My nerves were made to bother me, and I to quiet them. Nevertheless reciting the words of the theory to myself does not do anything to ease my pain. Even the reflection that my aim coincides with natures brings no relief. Freuds and other scientific theories can guide my steps toward health, insofar as I consciously make decisions in the light of knowledge of how my body works, but they cannot bathe me in light, clothe me in comfort, take me in their arms, sing me a lullaby, and put me to sleep. So I turn to prayer. First I recite the Anima Christi (Soul of Christ). Soul of Christ, sanctify me. Body of Christ, save me; Blood of Christ, inebriate me; Water from the side of Christ, wash me; Passion of Christ, strengthen me: O good Jesus, hear me; within they sacred sounds, hide me; Permit me not to be separated from thee; from the malignant enemy, defend me; In the hour of my death call me; And bid me come to thee, that with the saints I may praise thee. Forever and ever. Amen. Then a Hail Mary! Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blest is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary. Mother of God. Pray for 200 Letter 26 us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. I close with two lines from my favorite movie, Stop Making Sense, by The Talking Heads: Take me to the river/Drop me in the water. It is, unfortunately, the prevailing opinion in the modern world that it is irrational for a person to cultivate a personal relationship with Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, Mother of God, Star of the Sea, Queen of Heaven; or to want to be dropped in the water, drenched with love, as Thomas Kelley used to say. I hope you do not agree with the prevailing opinion. I hope you are one of those who remembers that rational comes from the Latin root ratio, which translates the Greek logos, which means word. Platos rational part of the soul is the part that has the word. And what word could

be more rational, more word-al, than the comforting voice of Our Blessed Lady? Well, I admit that the words of the Diamond Sutra would do it better for a Buddhist, and that the soft and tender call of Jesus would be sweeter for a Protestant, but these admissions do not damage my argument, because I am seeking a voice to comfort my body, since I am my body, here and now, and not some other body somewhere else. However, my argument is damaged by another admission which I must also make: We are a minority, those of us who remember what words are for. The prevailing opinion is therefore correct it is irrational to find comfort in spiritual companionship because irrational means what accepted usage says it means, not what we, who have better memories, say it should mean. Our point of view but really I should not be using the first person plural, since I do not know that you agree with me, so let me say instead my point of view is that I need to be comforted. To the extent that the cultures definition of rationality makes it impossible to fill ones aching mind with beautiful images, to reassure one another and to lift each other up, rationality should change. My argument for change is this: as our culture is, it is not working. This is the end of the detour. I had to tell you this story about a person in pain who said a prayer for... so many reasons. Because it is true. Because we do what we need to do to survive: we look for friends and we hang out with them even if they are bad company; we turn to crime; we turn to drugs; we turn to prayer and we are born again. Because the poor the real poor, not the ones in theories and statistics are in pain. If you walk down a street in the ghetto you can see in their faces their jangling nerves. Because, pace Habermas, real communication is born in constraint, necessity. Because we are the majority. We, the wounded. Because when philosophy adopts serenity as its style, as it usually has, it is pretending to be real. (This is not the full development of my notion of pretending to be real. That will come in later letters. This is just a hint.) Because I need to put Habermas in context, and since he, like all great philosophers, has written a comprehensive system which appears to provide a place for everything, it is necessary to go rather far afield to find a framework even wider than his extremely comprehensive framework, so as to have a context for his text. Because his philosophy is (as I will try to show) an expression of the spirit of our century, so that to see beyond his horizon is to see beyond the horizon of the spirit of our time, which requires an attempt to hear again the voices of previous times (such as the ancient meanings of ratio and logos). And to hear the voices of the human body; the body is beyond the horizon of the spirit of our century, for the time passed since its signals were encoded is measured in thousands, millions, of years. Call this detour a brief attempt, with some help from Sigmund Freud and an assist from Aristotle, to learn what the body wants. Our opening into the thoughts of the wonderful German professor will be an essay he wrote in 1976 called Hannah Arendts Begriff der Macht (Hannah Arendts Concept of Power). This essay was for some reason (or for all I know for no reason) omitted when the rest of 201 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Habermas 1976 essays were published in English translation as Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press,). Macht. Power. You will remember from Lapps and Collins Food First* that the problem of hunger is a problem of power. If the poor had power they would not be poor. They are poor because they lack power. How many people have tried to learn the secret of power in order to get some! Peace among nations will become a reality when a global institution, such as the United Nations, has the power to enforce international law. To work for justice is to do those things which empower the powerless. Power. Hannah Arendts

thinking on power is the topic on which the essay which will be our point of entry into Habermas thought is a commentary. Arendts discussion of the subject was itself provoked by the mindless abuse of the concept of power in academic social science, in some of the student ideologies of the 1960s, by some spokespersons for Black Power, by Frantz Fanon in his book The Wretched of the Earth, and by Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to Fanons book, where Sartre wrote, among other things, irrepressible violence... is man recreating himself, it is through mad fury that the wretched of the earth can become men. And, To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone... there remain a dead man and a free man.** It was in response to academic pseudo-science and the reckless glorification of mindless chaos that Arendt tried to articulate a valid and reasonable concept of power. First I will quote some of Arendts words and paraphrase others, taking advantage of the occasion to add two points of my own. Then I will discuss two doubts Habermas raises about her concept of power. Then I will claim that Habermas misperception of Arendt provides a clue to a mystery, a mystery whose solution requires further investigation of this modern mind this modern mind which holds us captive because we are in it, we think with it, it is in us, it thinks in us. Finally I will come back to my reflections on Freuds Pleasure Principle. Arendt writes, It is, I think, a rather sad reflection on the present state of political science that our terminology does not distinguish among such key words as power, strength, force, authority, and, finally, violence all of which refer to distinct, different phenomena and would hardly exist unless they did. (In the words of dEntreves, might, power, authority: these are all words to whose exact implications no great weight is attached in current speech; even the greatest thinkers sometimes use them at random. Yet it is fair to presume that they refer to different properties, and their meaning should therefore be carefully assessed and examined... The correct use of these words is a question not only of logical grammar, but of historical perspective.) To use them as synonyms not only indicates a certain deafness to linguistic meanings, which would be serious enough, but it has also resulted in a kind of blindness to the realities they correspond to. In such a situation it is always tempting to introduce new definitions, but though I shall briefly yield to temptation what is involved is not simply a matter of careless speech, behind the apparent confusion is a firm conviction in whose light all distinctions would be, at best, of minor importance: the conviction that the most crucial political issue is, and always has been, the question of who rules whom? Power, strength, force, authority, violence these are but words to indicate the means by which man rules over man; they are held to be synonyms because they have the same function. It is only after one ceases to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion that the original data in the realm of human affairs will appear, or, rather, reappear, in their authentic diversity. * Letters 6 and 7. ** Sartre, J.-P., as quoted by Hannah Arendt. On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969, pp.12-13. On Violence, pp. 43-44. 202 Letter 26 I agree with this passage except insofar as it may mean that some one meaning of each key words, such as power or violence, is its single correct meaning. That is to say, I agree that there are important distinctions to be made (as well as important similarities to notice) although lam willing to let differing writers use words in the ways they prefer for their purposes without calling any of

them wrong. However, there are two points I need to add. The first is that the excessive running together of different meanings, which Arendt rightly protests, is abetted by pseudo-scientific methods in the social sciences, which Arendt also rightly protests. Social pseudo-science is mostly the product of physics envy; it consists of measuring variables and simulating the logic of the controlled experiment. A variable can also be called a factor, a force, an effect, or a power, and in the design of experiments the independent variable can be called a treatment, factor, or force. Indeed, in the extreme, any common noun or noun phrase can be operationally defined by a procedure for measuring it, and then treated as a variable. Then it matters little what words are used to name the entities studied because their sum and substance is given by the operations that measure them, and by the mathematics and logic used in the analysis. Thus pseudo-science is a cause as well as a result of a careless use of words which disregards the histories of their meanings and the diversity of their functions. It is just one step from the logic of forces used in quantitative science and pseudo-science to the logic of domination. To see human relations in terms of the dominant and the dominated meshes well with studying politics as if it were a matter of discovering the equations which predict the impact of one variable on another. A variable is a force. The dominant are those who have force and the dominated are those who lack it. My second point is that the blindness to authentic diversity which Arendt protests is also abetted by the common sense of our culture. We are a business civilization in which everything has a common measure, its price. Calculating revenues, costs, and budget lines is part of our common sense, which is strongly influenced by our main activity, which is business. The managers who study cost impact and the engineers who study technical impacts communicate in a common language it could not be otherwise; they need a common language because the managers process data to make decisions, and the engineers supply the necessary technical data for the decisions. Variable is a key word in that common language; it meshes with our other key words both for functional reasons and because of the history of the language. Our culture, like other cultures, has a pattern, and the pattern runs through its means of livelihood, its technology, its decision-making processes, its everyday common sense, and, inevitably, its way of picturing human relations. Who dominates whom? and the means by which man rules over man, strike us as the question to ask and the facts to discover through research not just because they have fascinated our theorists and scientists, but also because they mesh with the common sense of the modern mind. Arendt goes on to offer a better concept of power. Power is, on her view, distinct from strength, force, authority, and violence. Power is the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.* The little word act means a lot in the phrase to act in concert. Arendt is speaking out of a classical tradition according to which a human act is always partly a mental act. There is thinking and choice, deliberation concerning the means and the end; otherwise it is not really an act, although it may be something like an act, such as, for example, an involuntary arm movement, or on automatic reflex response of the eyelids. * On Violence, p. 44. 203 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II The mental (or symbolic) aspect of human action properly so called, as seen from Arendts

classical (and, I think, correct) perspective, justifies the use of the word mindless in describing the pseudo-sciences which study human action as if its mechanism were adequately depicted by equations showing the coefficients relating variables to other variables. This classical perspective also sheds further light on the complicity between the mindless research done in universities and those mindless forms of activism which consist of generating pressure in order to push or shove political leaders to do this or that. Habermas in his commentary rightly calls Arendts approach a consensus theory of power. There is power because there is consensus, i.e. (going back to the Latin roots of the word consensus) with-meaning. People have power when they think in concert; their thoughts and actions are coordinated by shared meanings. They have power because they can act as if of one mind. Arendt reviews the works of several leading modern and contemporary thinkers in order to show that they have misunderstood power. Power, said the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire, consists in making others act as I choose.* Max Weber, Bertrand de Jouvenal, Bertrand Russell, and the mainstreams of academic sociology and political science echo, with slight variations, this individualistic and mechanistic definition. Voltaires formula, making others act as I choose, is a verbal artifact which exemplifies the main pattern of modern culture. Our distorted concept of power is our egoistic psyche writ large; it reflects the calculating self-centeredness of homo economicus. Our culture is not, however, composed of a single simple pattern, and Arendt rescues herself from having to say that the way everyone uses the word power is wrong (which would be like saying, what everyone calls a rabbit is really a hare, and what everyone calls a hare is really a rabbit) by showing that her way of talking about power stands in a venerable tradition, which is not lost to us, not even now, not even in the corrupt denouement of western civilization which we witness in our times. Many thinkers in our tradition have recognized that even the monarch especially the monarch, for in a single-person government the ruler is most outnumbered can only play her or his role as long as opinion supports it, as long as the institution of monarchy exists in the minds of the subjects. There are Greek, Roman, medieval, and recent precedents for seeing power as belonging to groups, and as consisting of the ability of humans to coordinate their actions. About Arendts theory Habermas expresses two major doubts. The first concerns to what extent it describes anything real. Habermas is inclined to see the consensus theory as an ideal which states what power ought to be, and to question how much it describes what is. In some passages it is clear that Arendt means her theory to describe what is. She writes, for example, Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use; and the question of obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relation but by opinion, and, of course, by the number of those who share it. Everything depends on the power behind the violence. The sudden dramatic breakdown in power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience to laws, to rulers, to institutions is but the outward manifestation of support and consent.** Other passages, however, are more ambiguous, for example, she asserts that even if violence wins, it cannot create power. Here it seems that the justification for the assertion may lie in the definitions she has given of power and of violence, rather than in any matter of fact. * On Violence, p. 36.1 have added Bertrand Russell to Arendts list, and the reference to homo economicus to her analysis. ** On Violence, p. 49. Habermas commentary, by the way, refers directly not to On Violence, but

to Macht und Gewalt, a similar essay by Arendt written in German. 204 Letter 26 Also, where she speaks of power as granted to their representatives by the citizens, she might perhaps be read as identifying real power with legitimately acquired power. In such cases one might (although one need not) interpret Arendt as arguing from a formal definition and from a norm, without resting her case on facts. Whatever Arendts exact meaning may be, I believe that an open-minded reader of Habermas commentary will see that he finds the most plausible and central parts of her theory to be those that see power as resting on the consent of the governed. Consensus, when viewed through Habermas lenses, tends to mean consent. And it is true that Arendt sometimes writes as though the only or the main constituent of power were the disposition of the citizens to support a government because they have freely consented to it. However, to the extent that she says this she weakens her case. It is easier to believe that a number of shared meanings enable a human group to be powerful because it is cohesive than it is to believe that there is only one such shared meaning and it is freely given consent. Habermas bias in favor of construing Arendts power-as-consensus to be a theory about an ideal is of a piece with the concept that consent is the legitimate justification of government. This latter concept is our bias too yours and mine. It is typical of us denizens of the modern social structure. Already in the 18th century Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the harbingers of modern ideas, said that there is a moral order only where there is free consent. No social contract, no morals. We tend to identify the legitimate with the agreed, with the contract. The message of the Bible is nearly the opposite: the moral, the legitimate, is following the prescribed pattern, obeying. In some other cultures people would neither agree nor disagree if someone should tell them that legitimate authority derives from the consent of the governed. They would be baffled; the proposition would have no meaning in their language and yet, on Arendts broader account, such peoples have some power, because they have some ability to act cohesively as if of one mind. There is a corollary to our modern bias in favor of construing consensus as consent. Consent is what we want to see in consensus because free agreement is our norm. Then, having defined free consent in human relationships as the ideal, we draw the corollary conclusion that it is not real. Its very status as an ideal makes suspect the claim that it is effective in practice. As Kant put it (here I anticipate), the free realm of pure reason is in principle distinct from the unfree realm of nature. This tendency to see the ideal and the real as two separate realms makes it difficult to see Arendts theory of power as a theory about how the world really works. The second of the two doubts of Habermas about Arendt that I wish to mention concerns economic power.* He points out, quite rightly, that Arendt deals almost entirely with political power. (She actually holds the conservative view that using politics to work for the socio-economic goal of a classless society can only lead to grief.) When you couple the point that Arendt ignores economics with an interpretation of her theory of power that sees first and foremost the ideal of consent, you are, I believe, likely, if you are a typical reader, to come to focus on the following Picture One: a. Arendt says power is based on consent. b. Her view is more an ideal than a reality. c. Her view has, however, some degree of reality as long as attention is confined to politics, especially in countries where there are free elections. Indeed elections lend credence to the illusion that our institutions are validated by consent.

d. But when economic and social power are brought into consideration, Arendts ideal corresponds to reality even less. di. * The phrase Habermas uses is structural violence. I believe that economic power expresses the main meaning of structural violence and expresses it better. 205 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II There is, however, another way to view Arendts theory, namely the following Picture Two: a. Arendts consensus theory of power shows that institutions depend for their existence on opinion. b. However, in reality, institutions are maintained both by software and by hardware, i.e. by power and by violence, so that one does not see pure cases of institutions maintained solely by power, or solely by violence. c. Even the most despotic regime needs power, i.e. some degree of willing support among some sector of the population. d. Although Arendts theory is about politics narrowly conceived, her theory can be extended to economics. Economic institutions (like property) and social institutions (like marriage) also depend on opinion. The mystery is: why does Habermas not see Picture Two? Why does he not seize on the consensus theory of power to show how cultural action can be used to transform economics? Arendts concept of power shows opportunities to do what Habermas and all people of good will want to do, namely, to transform the structures of the modern world, but Habermas does not rush to accept the opportunities she offers. De te fabula narratur. (The story is about you.) We are all, I believe, like Habermas, to a considerable extent mental captives of the basic structure of the modern world. Even when we catch a glimpse beyond it, as in Arendt, as in Wittgenstein, as in Marx, as in the writings of Arendts friend Martin Heidegger, as in Habermas at his best, we still slip back into seeing economics as if it were a natural science, into seeing economic realities as quasi-physical, into. seeing dominance and subordination in human relationships through the lenses of mechanical metaphors, into seeing the free as the essence of the moral, and hence we are all inclined to read Arendt according to Picture One. A clue to the solution of the mystery lies in the connection between the two doubts. Habermas first doubt about Arendt depended on identifying the moral and the free. (He wondered how close to reality Arendt was, because he tended to see her as advocating something like what Habermas himself advocates, an ideal of communication not distorted by force, i.e. an ideal of free consent.) His second doubt depended on seeing the economy as we moderns are prone to do, as a quasimachine. (In Habermas terminology the quasi-machine is clothed in the garb of instrumental rationality, so that the use of mechanical metaphors is hidden as technical calculation concerning how to achieve a given objective.)* The two doubts come together in the conclusion that Arendt does not recognize how much we are dominated because she ignores economic domination a conclusion which is true enough, but not perceptive enough. What we need to study more thoroughly, then, is this relationship between freedom and science, where freedom is the moral norm, and where the paradigm of science is Newtons classical mechanics, the paradigm of social science being free market economics, modelled morally on the ideal of freedom and modelled scientifically on the ideal of Newtons physics. This relationship constitutes the main pattern of the modern mind. We (or rather, our ancestors) made it. It made us.

We do not easily transcend it. The classic articulation of the basic structure of modernity is found in the philosophy of Kant. To Kant we will go for the next seven letters, letter 2 7, following this one, introduces the 18th century world whose symbolic structures Kant synthesized. Eighteenth century Europe * See letters 8 and 9. Note also that Habermas in his discussion of Peirce in Knowledge and Human Action does not question the substance of the then standard scientific procedures, but only seeks their justification, which he finds in a technical interest in control. 206 Letter 26 was the wellspring of modernity, the conqueror of Africa and Asia, the progenitor of our senseless and shameful 20th century. I will try to sketch briefly the main problems which philosophers were called upon to solve in the 18th Century. Kant did solve them. Preeminently. Kants solution to the problems of the middle class in his day is an obstacle obstructing the solutions of the problems of all people in our day. And yet we can only solve our problems by going through Kant; there is no way around him. We still inhabit his worldview when we try to build consensus around alternative power structures. We use his words: freedom, person, dignity, and their contraries, totalitarian, victim, humiliation. We cannot go anywhere until we know better where we are, and when eventually we do develop a feasible plan for going somewhere else, we will find that all possible roads to there start from here. From Kant. From the worldview (classically articulated by Kant) which sees freedom as the essence of the person and of morals, and which sees science (and therefore, by extension, social science) as a mathematical prcis of the laws of nature. The beginning of this letter included a detour about pleasure. Now, at the end, we could move straight ahead and take the next step in studying the relationship between Kant and Habermas (a relationship which is, in miniature, that between the basic structure of our civilization laid down in the 18th century and our 20th century good-but-not-good-enough efforts to transform the world our foreparents made). The next step would be to examine Kants context. Or else we could do another detour about pleasure, perhaps even God willing a pleasant detour. The detour at the beginning of this letter had among its many motives seeking to sketch a broader perspective by raising the whole question of the relation of the human body (i.e. of you and me) to the environment and to words. This broad perspective was to be a setting in which the conversation about power could be placed, as a cookstove is the wider setting where one places a pot of water to boil. This concluding detour, on the other hand, will be a flash-forward, an anticipation. We take a glance around the stove-top, so to speak, now that the water is boiling, and we have a few onions cooking away in it, and we notice what other dishes are en marche, and we take a peek in the oven too, and then after all these anticipatory glances we let our mind dwell for a moment on the dessert. We are skipping steps. There is a next step, and a step after that and, on the other hand, there is the tease. This is the tease. You do not deserve this. You will not understand it. You will misunderstand it. You have not worked through the arguments that lead up to it. I, for my part, have no right to state conclusions which lack premises, nor to use forms of speech whose meanings have not been developed. 1 am like a cook who interrupts the shelling of the peas to taste in his imagination an apple crisp which he wont even start until he finishes the sauce for the fish, when he has not yet begun the fish, much less the sauce. However, given our mutual impatience, we will no doubt do this detour anyway. As the scene opens we are walking down a country lane near an old English village, one of those

that has thatched roofs, hedgerows, bed and breakfast for 2.50 (including a grilled tomato), and sleek black and white Holstein cows, which belong to a neighboring dairy, which has machines that milk sixteen of them at once. I am saying to you that we will not be effective as activists until we learn to make the discourses and the social practices that we are creating into sources of pleasure. The enjoyment of pleasure, excitement and blissful relaxation, is the natural and normal activity of human beings. The signals that guide us are electric, the firings of neurons; pleasure is their bent. 207 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Life is a series of strange and unusual sensual encounters, through which we gradually learn what the body wants. Most of them are imaginary. Some of them are with chocolates. They have strangeness (ostrananie in Russian, a word used by people who claim that the function of art is to show the familiar in an unfamiliar light) because in us lives an infinite past, which never succeeds in becoming accustomed to the tiny, always passing, stretch of time we call the present moment. This one, here, is with a wild rose beside the lane. Our encounter with the blossom, through colors, shapes, textures and odors, decodes for us the cambrian, the pre-cambrian, the paleolithic and the neolithic, all the ages of the cells within us, all that has passed since life emerged from the sea, carrying the sea-water that still circulates in our blood, as well as our more recent histories, in the womb, at mothers breast, the beating on the playground in primary school, our love life, auto accidents, thin mountain air, sickness... Every petal, every street filled with passing automobiles, every human face, every dip into icy water encounters in us our past. What we are accustomed to calling the voice is only one of many voices speaking through us. There are voices in the hands. There is a voice in each muscle. There are voices of forgotten personalities, great grandparents we never knew and sultry kindergarten chums we did know, which echo and re-echo every time we take a breath or a sip of coffee. We are connections. The human body finds itself by finding its connections, not always or usually through the cerebral cortex, but through every fiber. Through the heart, as we say. It seeks itself with the electronic homing mechanism we call the nerves, by finding what moves it and what gives it release from tension. It finds itself singing a gospel hymn like Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling. It finds itself kissing and hugging. It finds itself giving a saucer of milk to a kitten or pulling weeds in a garden. It finds itself watching its favorite television program, eating pizza, swimming, playing basketball, giggling together.... It finds its connections. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, the great architects of the pre-modern period of western civilization, were faithful to the erotic principle. Platonic love, as described in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, extends sensual desire to philosophy.* The care of the true lover is to help the beloved to grow in wisdom. Aristotle tells us that the well-educated person is one who takes pleasure in virtue. The badly educated person takes pleasure in vice. The legislator and educator (for Aristotle the legislator is an educator, and the educator is a legislator) has the task of organizing the community so that the citizens find pleasure in doing justice (justice, following right measure in all actions, being, in its wide sense, synonymous with virtue). Augustine, who called God the teacher of the heart,** sang, following Plato and inspiring Aquinas, Late have I loved thee, O thou Beauty, so old and yet so fair. The divine is the greatest and only fully satisfying Beauty, compared with which the lesser pleasures are, by definition, sin, since for Augustine (as for Aquinas) to sin is to choose the lesser good over the greater good. The human was created to love and to serve lovingly, and to spend eternity in the full joy of divine friendship, compared with which all other pleasures are weary, flat, profitless, and stale. The public life of religious and

political ceremony extends the electrically-guided life of the cell through the life of the imagination, which is, in the first instance, dream life. I have a dream is, as it turns out, the most famous phrase of Americas greatest public leader. He was a great phrase-maker, and no one could have known in advance whether it would be the paralysis of analysis, or the world house, or call me a drum major for justice, or I have a dream that would prove to be his most memorable phrase. In retrospect we can see that the * Bishop Nygrens book Eros and Agape analyzes the erotic character of the pursuit of the intellectual virtues in Plato. ** See Letter 18. See letter 20. 208 Letter 26 word dream speaks to everybody because dreams are typically wish fulfillments. Dreams give us access to desires. Dreams can also be nightmares and express anxiety but these dimensions of the words meaning were obviously not what Dr. King meant in the context of his I have a dream speech. His genius was in raising the Pleasure Principle to the level of a set of shared public objectives. We need to share dreams because dreams become goals. And to share goals is part of developing the capacity to work together to realize our goals, and that as we have learned from Hannah Arendt is power. The dream drives the action. I find this phrase especially significant because its author* is a cultural historian, fluent in oriental languages, who offers it as a conclusion from his studies of ancient China, of North American and other shamanistic tribal cultures, of India, and of medieval Europe, as well as of the culture of the United States. The best dreams are the ones that fulfill every childs wish to be cared-for and caring, not to be abandoned, to be treated fairly and to be fair, and to live in a world which as a matter of fact reliably works. The ethos which socially fulfills the dream is a love ethic. A love ethic, however, is not only eros; it is also filia** and agape. And because of the importance of the Pleasure Principle we need to consider its limitations, those discovered by Freud and those noted by others. Freud himself was obliged to modify the Pleasure Principle when he analyzed little Hans, a three year old child who obsessively repeated a painful fantasy which symbolized his mother going away. Fort! said little Hans, which means (in German) Away! Later he would say Da! which means, in this context, Here! Hans re-enacted over and over again the drama of abandonment and return. Freud concluded that Hans chose pain because he needed control. In his fantasy he could control his mothers coming and going, while in reality he could do nothing but wail. From cases such as that of Hans we can deduce an amendment of the Pleasure Principle: sometimes people prefer control to pleasure. You know, of course, that quite apart from little Hans and his need to control his environment by replacing his mother with a fantasy, pleasure is not everything in life. That is why you have been looking at me as I talk with wide-open eyes, as if to say, Really? and listening in bemused silence while I present all these ideas while we walk down a country lane in old England. You are not the sort of person who draws premature and one-sided conclusions, who takes half-truths for truths, who is unaware of many other aspects of love and pleasure already discussed in this and other books. Nor do you feel any obligation at all to comment on what I have been saying, since you do not believe that every event in life requires a comment from each participant. If, however, you should make a comment and, as I have implied, it is by no means necessary

that you make one I hope your comment will not misinterpret my thoughts as advocating gross sensuality. As Freud says, the spiritual treasures of civilization depend on the sublimation of eras, on making it sublime. To point out that bread is made with flour and with water is not to advocate that people eat flour-and-water paste. What I hope is that your comment if you make one at this point will draw some tentative conclusions, in your own words and according to your own experience of life, which would say something like: (i) The whirl we humans live in is not in any way a changeless world, and (ii) We need to retrace the steps which have led modern culture away from the traditional spiritual interpretations of sensuality, into a set of problems which have no solutions in the terms in which they are posed, and * Dr. Thomas Berry. He says this annually at the July symposium sponsored by Holy Cross Centre, Port Burwell, Ontario. ** Letter 15 is about filia. 209 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II (iii) Social change activists can and should tap physical energies that can generate good forms of power, and (iv) The global system, whose economic and political and military structures come from 18th century Europe is not as real as it pretends to be; its version of human nature is a boring myth, not the human body as it really is, and, (v) If we could unravel our cultures basic myths, those classically stated by Kant, then we could re-imagine ourselves, so that our fun would be more fun, our suffering more shared and more meaningful, our institutions more geared to meeting human needs. 210 Letter 27 27 KANTS CONTEXT The beginning in time of the constellation of institutions we call modern society can be (ascribed to any number of dates because history is a continuous series of transformations in which no institution is so totally new as to be without prior germ or precedent. The place where the modern world began can be more easily and definitely determined, provided that one is content to name a region without trying to pinpoint the beginning of the process. The place was Europe; somewhat more specifically it was northern Europe, because in that part of the planet modern society emerged in painful birth, took form in a series of painful struggles, grew strong in technology and in organization; and from there it marched forth (or sailed forth) to conquer the earth. To return now to the problem of ascribing a beginning in time to the modern world, October 31, 1517 is a date less arbitrary than many others that might be chosen, because choosing it brings into focus the protestant reformation. Hallows Eve (later known as Halloween), the day before All Saints Day, of 1517, was the day when Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to a church door at Wittenberg. By dating the beginning of modernity by reference to a set of doctrines, Protestantism, we focus our historical inquiry on the words that circulate from mouth to mouth and the images displayed on the inner theater screens of brains and in public places such as churches, not because facts less symbolic and more brute such as the coming of gunpowder, the Black Plague, or the growth of towns lack relevance to the understanding of historical processes, but because the

particular purpose of these letters is to facilitate the transformation of cultural structures, for which purpose it is useful to make a plausible, although by no means uniquely valid, sketch of a transformation of symbolic structures which occurred in the past, to draw, so to speak, the emerging outline of the cultural structures we now have. (The last sentence was rather long, and I feel a need to pause for breath... Perhaps if I were in better physical shape I would not be exhausted by long sentences.) One reason why it is legitimate to conceive Protestantism as the beginning of modern cultural structures is that it declared itself to be different from medieval Catholicism, which was, everyone will agree, not modern. A reason why it is convenient for me to cite the 95 Theses as a key text for the transformation from not-modern to modern is that I number myself among those persons who find it illuminating to designate our modern society as economic society, our epoch as the age of economics, and it cannot escape the attention of any reader of Luthers theses that they were mainly about money. One could, however, say instead applying the principle that anything can be correctly described in several different ways that Luthers theses were mainly about the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. Interpreting the theses as about corruption does not contradict the claim that they were mainly about money, because the corruption which Luther denounced consisted largely of selling forgiveness for sins (indulgences) and of other ways of mulcting the faithful of their property in order to use the loot to finance the base gratifications of the so-called lords spiritual. If we endeavor in our minds eyes to take an ecological overview of early 16th century Europe, we may be able to form a vision of energy flows which will set Luthers complaints in a context of intraspecific competition for scarce resources. Imagine a flow from 211 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II north to south of resources whose production required high energy inputs, especially of energy in the form of human muscle-power. Think, for example, of wagons moving south over the Alps carrying foodstuffs and leather goods. It is a small flow compared to the energy delivered by the total sunlight falling on Europe, small even when compared to the portion of that total captured photosynthetically by plants to make primary sugars, small even in terms of the flow of energy-rich resources from primary sugars to plant tissues to cattle feed to cattle to consumption by talkative creatures, but nonetheless a flow of special concern to those members of the talkative species whose labor (or whose laborers) contributed to the production of the goods in question, but who did not wear the garments, eat the food, or otherwise use the energy-rich resources shipped from north to south, from Germany to Rome; and if an ecologist charting the energy flows could also overhear the discourse of the northerners deprived of the fruits of their labor, he would have heard, as Martin Luther put it in his 95 Theses, die sehr spitzen Argumenten des Legen (the very pointed arguments of the lay people). The implicit threat in Luthers reference to lay arguments is: if you are smart you will keep this dispute on a theological level, because otherwise you will hear from the masses and they will tell it to you straight. They are being bilked. (The institutional explanation of the north-south transfer of goods lies, of course, in prior flows of money; the cash derived from such transactions as sales of indulgences explains why, for example, edible items such as cattle moved south. Money being physically small, although symbolically large low in energy content, high in information content it is here assumed that flows of it would elude detection by the instruments of an ecologist.) It is reasonable to assume that whenever there is a felt need to change a culture, there will be a flurry of attempts to change it, and that the ultimately successful version of the change will I be a more-effective-than average innovation an idea that distinguishes itself by doing the same

cultural work many new ideas are trying to do, but doing it better. A trump card, so to speak. There was a felt need in northern Europe in 1517 to adjust the symbolic structures to delete from them the norm that Germans should obey (and hence feed) the Roman hierarchy (hence also its minions and legions), and there were in the 15th and 16th centuries many movements using diverse doctrinal claims, all tending to resist exploitation. Luthers most brilliant doctrine, his trump so to speak, declared a bit after 1517, was salvation by faith a stroke of genius comparable to Marx trumping the dispute over how much profit owners deserve in return for their contributions to production by asserting with the labor theory of value that owners make no contribution at all to production, comparable to empiricists and positivists devastating the bastions of idealism without exposing themselves to the charge of materialism by declaring that all metaphysics (whether idealist or materialist) cannot possibly be anything but sophistry and illusion. A bold doctrinal stroke was needed because protests against the corruption of the church imply only that the church should cease to be corrupt; they leave the Roman bishops the option of replying, OK, we repent and henceforth we will be good; now just keep handing property over to us and we will henceforth use it to care for the sick and poor, as we are supposed to do. Suppose now that one introduces the premise, Faith, not works, brings salvation. Immediately the context of the argument is changed what the bishops do with worldly property is a secondary question at most; the primary question is faith. Disagreements on articles of faith are then reasons for starting new churches and new societies (remember that in 1517 the national state was not yet invented, and Christendom, like Islam, was in principle a theocracy) new churches and societies not in principle subject to the authority of the old hierarchies. The Catholic scholar Erasmus was able to make fun of Luther by writing in an open letter to him that some protestants reply when it is pointed out to them that they are leading wicked lives that it does not matter, because we are saved by faith, not by works. But Luther was not 212 Letter 27 a fair target for Erasmus joke because Luther was not unaware of the importance of good works, nor were Catholics unaware of the importance of faith. Several centuries of theological debate over what exactly separates the two traditions teachings about the relationship of works to faith have finally in the late 20th century arrived at the conclusion that nothing separates them, except an unfortunate history during which each side has sometimes failed to understand what the other side believed. In the 16th century, however, the doctrine of faith alone was admirably suited to serve as a rationale for changing the command structure of Europe. It was a trump card. What I am supposing must have happened given my general suppositions about the ecological functions of culture is that the doctrine of salvation by faith (or, to be more exact, the ensemble of characteristic protestant doctrines) served to separate northern Europe from a church which was sapping its strength. The reformation might have separated northern Europe from Rome by rejecting Christ; instead it proclaimed the purification of the old religion; it was formally a revival. It humbled man before God more, not less; it rejected the authority of those who claimed to represent divinity by appealing over their heads to the sacred text, the Bible. It used certain texts of St. Paul to emphasize the total depravity of human nature, our utter dependence on God for salvation a move which glorified God (by emphasizing His superiority and otherness), nurtured the emotion of gratitude (since we are infinitely grateful when we appreciate that amazing grace has saved wretches like us), underlined the futility of justifying the Roman church by pointing to the good works it was supposed to do (since God would not be moved to save us by any act mere humans

might do in the vain hope of pleasing Him by works), justified severe punishments (since the unsaved remain depraved, governable only by threats and force), and cast doubt on all organized hierarchies (since the high officers of organizations are humans too). When Luther published The Freedom of a Christian in 1520, freedom was launched on its way to becoming the name of the major ideals of modern civilization. The word free had been used before the 16th century in special contexts such as when one has occasion to contrast people out of captivity with those in it, or to name special privileges (i.e. the liberties of the English Magna Carta of 1215), or to refer to the family members of households as distinct from slaves and bound servants. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 16th century nobody could have predicted that by the 19th century freedom would have in Europe the sacred status celebrated by the Norwegian poet Johan Nordhal Grieg when he wrote: In us is born the conviction That freedom is lifes first law And our faith is as pure and as simple As the very breath we draw. Luther said, The Christian is a perfectly free master of all, subject to none, and at the same time, a perfectly obedient servant of all. Luther thus performed a transformation on the idea of master and servant, equalizing everybody by making them masters and servants at the same time (i.e. equalizing all Christians, which in Germany at that time meant almost everybody). Freedom as equalization was also a corollary of the priesthood of all believers. The priesthood of all believers was a transformation of the ideas of priest and believer, similar to Luthers parallel transformation of master and servant. Similarly, somewhat later, the modern idea of dignity of the person was born by taking the old word dignity, which referred to the ranks of people with high social standing, and transforming its meaning to say, every person has dignity. A less momentous example of a 213 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II similar process is that still later the French expression, Mon Sieur, which vassals used to express deference to their lords, was transformed in to Monsieur, a title awarded to every adult male. Although I think it is in the obscure texts of 16th and 17th century North European theologians that many of the origins of modern symbolic structures, later classically articulated by Kant, must be sought, I am communicating an exaggerated confidence in my own ability to discern the main threads linking confusing masses of detail if I am giving the impression that I think I know all the protestant reformation did or exactly why it came to pass. All I can really say is that it seems to me that something of the general sort I have sketched happened in the 16th century in northern Europe. It is in any case clear that by the 18th century, which was Kants century, theology was no longer the principal arena of ideas in conflict; by then the main cultural innovations and struggles transformed civil, not religious, strands of tradition, notably) law, economics (which was previously had not existed), and science (which as then called natural philosophy). The 18th century lawyers, the clergy of capitalism as Alexis de Tocqueville called them, contributed another concept of freedom, classically formulated by Denis Diderot in the Encyclopedia (the first encyclopedia) in his article on La Libert. Freedom, he wrote (expressing not a personal opinion but a gestalt shift of European cultural structures) means that whatever the law does not expressly forbid is permitted. Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics had said nearly the opposite: the law (nomos) commands every virtue and forbids every vice. 18th century thought explicitly rejects the principle that it is a function of law to mold human

conduct to make it conform to ideals of virtue. It employs redefinitions of justice (Aristotle had regarded general justice as a summary of all virtue) in ways that regard justice as a minimum compliance with basic rules. Justice, so defined, is enforceable in a court of law. The rest of virtue is not the business of law and is not enforceable. The trend of thought represented by Diderots definition of freedom constituted another brilliant series of moves. If the newly powerful social classes feared that the old doctrines, in both their Catholic and their protestant versions, were likely to impose on them disciplines of stewardship and discipleship contrary to their interests which they did fear, then instead of proposing new values to live by, they could propose something else, a different kind of value, in a sense an antivalue, to be named freedom. Freedom is logically different from other values because it does not prescribe rules for human conduct, or ideals toward which people should strive; it prescribes instead an absence of rules, a sphere for choosing ones own ideals. Trumps. Freedom became the key doctrine of what Robert Bellah calls civil religion, and the legal system built around it provided the structure for what Hegel called civil society, which I often call economic society. Legal freedom was the juridical side of a coin whose other side was the economic doctrine, laissez faire, classically expressed in The Wealth of Nations, where Adam Smith argues that we are better off when instead of government or church or tradition deciding what people in general should do, millions of individuals each make their own decisions separately. The best general policy is to have no general policy: that government is best which governs least, as Thomas Jefferson wrote. Stated and justified as in the preceding paragraph, laissez faire has an obvious limitation. The doctrine holds that a nation will be better off when decisions are made by individual choice, but to state that the better result will happen when a laissez faire policy is adopted is to predict a matter of fact. The facts sometimes will and sometimes will not confirm the prediction. Sometimes collective decisions made by government, church, family or tradition, or by scientific expertise, turn out to be better than individual choices made in free markets, insofar as the results of the decision for human welfare can be measured. (Notice that the problem here 214 Letter 21 is a logical one that no policy argument whose validity rests on a factual claim is safe from refutation in case the factual claim turns out to be false. It is not the same as a problem to which economists have devoted many books: namely, how while remaining within economic theory to make a proper list of exceptions to the general rule, assigning government certain specific tasks, such as protecting private property from thieves, making war, etc.) Over-enthusiastic partisans of laissez faire can, however, shield their policies from refutation by sometimes recalcitrant facts. They can, on the one hand, advance moral principles which hold that individuals ought to make choices, or that they have a right to make choices. What people ought to do can be held to be known independently of what the results of their actions are, and rights, by definition, are not lost when the people who have the rights use them unwisely. Anyone who advances facts to criticize laissez faire policies can then be dismissed as a vulgar person whose moral development is insufficient to permit her or him to realize that thoughts and rights are made of higher stuff than mere material welfare. If individual choices made in free markets lead, for example, to too many automobiles, too much traffic, air pollution, death on the highways, and the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, then from this point of view these bad material results are a price we are morally obliged to pay in order to honor the principle of freedom. On the other hand, a different line of reasoning leads to a similar result. Suppose that economics is a science, which describes how people behave, and suppose that at the times and places studied

there are markets where decisions are made through the choices of individuals and firms acting like individuals. Then suppose it is meaningless to make value judgments about whether society should be as it is. Laissez faire, insofar as it is part of the status quo, then wins with another trump card: the card which decrees descriptions to be respectable science and justifications to be nonsense. This line of reasoning is, of course, incompatible with the one mentioned in the previous paragraph, it being hypo-moral and the former hypermoral, but it is often functionally equivalent; the foundations for both were laid when Kant published his major works in the period 1780-1800. It is characteristic of Kants context, which is modernity, and which is to a large extent our context too, that the mainstream of thought shifts its focus away from providing means to make people good, such as Platos plans for education, Aristotles legislator who is above all an educator in virtue, Augustines God who is the teacher of the heart, St. Thomas universe ordered systematically to lead each soul toward glory; the focus shifts toward recognizing evil and harnessing it. Recognition of evil is a theme of Protestantism (Martin Luther: Most men, baptized or not, are bad.), of scientific atheism (for example, Hobbes application of Galileos physics to the study of human conduct, which led to conceiving the natural state as a war of all against all), and of the invisible hand of the economists which produces the transubstantiation of individual selfishness into the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The situation was neatly analyzed by Mandeville in his The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Publick Benefits (1714) where it is argued that traditional vices of self-indulgence and vanity create employment and progress. Kant himself only echoed the common sense of his age when he wrote: Without these in themselves unamiable characteristics of unsociability from whence opposition springs characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherds life, with all its concord, contentment, and mutual affection. Men, goodnatured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by achieving their end, which is rational nature. Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for the heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep undeveloped. The story of Dr. Faustus expressed the spirit of the age allegorically: Europe had made a pact with 215 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II the devil. From an economic and legal point of view, the problem of harnessing evil human nature for good is solved mainly with contracts; contracts are so important that Sir Henry Maine in his book Ancient Law was able to organize a comprehensive account of the evolution of legal systems with this single principle: while traditional societies are organized by social status, each status having its prescribed duties (e.g. the duties of king, duke, baron, yeoman, serf...), modern societies are organized by individuals freely contracting with each other to buy, to sell, to lease, to work, to lend, to borrow, to pay wages, to pay rent, etc. Contract is the general word and concept for the many meetings of minds which specify the conditions of transactions in economic society. From traditional to modern, says Sir Henry Maine, means from status to contract. Although freedom is the label of modernity, contract is its functioning mechanism. The great social thinkers of early modern times, Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Spinoza... could hardly imagine any origin and foundation for society other than contract. Perhaps they thought they were doing science. Today their stories about individuals living in a state of nature prior to the existence of society, who then agree to the terms and conditions of the contract under

which they will agree to live together in societies, seem so ludicrous when regarded as history or as anthropology that it is hard to believe that anybody much less the great minds of an age ever thought society really started with a contract, but in the 17th and 18th centuries philosophers may have honestly thought that by providing a secular alternative to Biblical stories about human origins they were doing a sort of science, extrapolating backwards from the society they saw around them to make a rational inference about how society must have begun. In using a rational and secular method they perhaps thought they were replacing myth with a sort of fact. From a 20th century viewpoint, however, we must regard early economic societys story about its origin in a great contract in the same way we regard a pastoral societys myths about the Great Shepherd or the fishy cosmologies of tribes who live by fishing. In many ways science is the centerpiece of the new constellation of institutions that religious, legal, and economic thought helped to create. Karl Marxs classic critique of economic society criticizes it in the name of science and presents itself as a contribution to science; Marx thus uses the common notion that science is more fundamental than other forms of thought, more able to grasp reality as it is and therefore to provide the context in which other forms of thought are to be evaluated and changed. He accepts in this respect the view of his erstwhile enemy, P.-J. Proudhon, who had written that the partisans of capitalism and of socialism (this was in the 19th century) agreed in spite of their differences that the questions at issue were scientific questions, to be resolved by scientific methods. But I am getting ahead of myself; what I should be discussing is not what science became in the 19th and 20th centuries, but the beginnings of modern science in the centuries immediately preceding the life and times of one Immanuel Kant, Professor of Metaphysics in Konigsberg, East Prussia (1722-1804). Modern science in its beginnings has been aptly characterized as the offspring of the marriage of technology and metaphysics. From technology, its mother, came the material of which it was composed, the many useful mechanical and optical inventions which proliferated increasingly starting in the 15th and 16th centuries; from metaphysics, its father, came the passion for generalization, the desire to reduce the understanding of the new machines to a few universal principles. The marriage image is apt provided that one also considers the contributions to science of another series of processes call it a midwife or a godmother, or call it the elder sister which already combined the spirits of technology and metaphysics the prolongation of the ancient tradition of the calendar-making priests, the astronomers, sometimes hardly distinguished 216 Letter 27 from mathematicians, whose technological functions were to refine ever more precisely the calculation of years, months, days, and hours, and to improve the calculations of navigators who guided ships by sighting stars; and whose metaphysical function was to place humanity in its cosmic context. Already in 1543 the Polish astronomer Copernicus had facilitated the gestalt shift of occidental symbolic structures by demonstrating that the earth turns on its axis and revolves around the sun, which made the older theories concerning the revolution of the heavens above the earth untenable; to the considerable consternation of over-enthusiastic followers of Dante Alighieri and St. Thomas Aquinas, who had given a convenient geographical interpretation to the metaphysical conception of a universe ordered toward spiritual glory by supposing that God and his angels awaited the just departing from this life in the heavens up beyond the clouds, while the torments of hell and purgatory were located beneath the surface of the earth; but to the considerable relief of the forces vivants of the enlightened, progressive classes, who were happy to see the shackles of superstition

loosened, and who were increasingly willing to subsidize research. Although Galileo (1534-1642) was the first great systematizer of the principles of mechanical technology, it was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, one Isaac Newton (1642-1727) who gave science its classic form. Nature and Natures Laws lay hid in night God said Let Newton be and all was light. epitaph for Newton proposed by Alexander Pope Newton began his Principia Mathematica (1685) (which is actually, according to the way we divide subjects now, as much about physics and astronomy as it is about mathematics) by stating some definitions and (remarkably) only three laws. They were: Law I: Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right (i.e. straight HR) line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. (Law of inertia.) Law II: The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed. (Often taken to imply that F=MA, force equals mass times acceleration). Law III: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. (Often expressed as: for every reaction there is a reaction, which is equal in force and opposite in direction.) After stating his three laws, Newton proceeded to deduce corollaries and theorems. The first of the corollaries concern the composition of forces, neatly expressed as the parallelogram principle. Newton drew this diagram 217 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II

Suppose that a force would move a body from A to B in some given time, say 10 seconds. Suppose that another force would move the same body from A. to C in the same time, 10 seconds in this example. Now, the principle of composition of forces states that the two forces AB and AC acting together on the same body will move it from A to D in the same time (here 10 seconds). (An example not Newtons: think of AB as the force supplied by an airplane engine moving the airplane forward, and think of AC as the force of a crosswind.) In other words, knowing what each force would do separately, we can calculate geometrically or algebraically what the two forces will do together, i.e. which direction the body will move in and how far it will go. Similar principles will apply to cases of 3 or more forces acting simultaneously, and to many analogous situations. And

the calculations will prove to be correct when we perform the relevant experiments and measure the results. Newton did not have to do any experiments to confirm the parallelogram rule for composition of forces because the principle was already, as he notes, abundantly confirmed from mechanics. What was original in Newtons work was that he showed it and other principles well known from technology and previous systematizing to be corollaries and theorems derived from a remarkably small number of generalizations. Thus he married technology and metaphysics. Newtons work was amazing in its cosmic scope. He showed the same principles of composition of forces (deduced from his laws) to govern pendulums and fluids, the micro-machinery inside a pocket-watch, the balance of attraction and repulsion that keeps the planets in their orbits, the phases of the moon, the heights of the tides, and the periodic appearances of comets in the skies. Calculation and observation supported each other throughout his system, the observations providing information which could be expressed in mathematical form, and the calculations correctly predicting the magnitudes of subsequent observations. The extension of the scope of the methods of physics to use them to understand social institutions (and implicitly or explicitly to prescribe what human institutions ought to be) was already well advanced in Europe before Newtons Principia, due partly to Hobbes use of Galileos earlier version of the principle of composition of forces to describe human institutions as a clash of force on force. Hobbes definition of will* quoted in Letter 15, above (Vol. I) is essentially the application of the parallelogram rule to psychology thus the inner workings of the human psyche are described in terms of force metaphors, at the same time as similar mechanical metaphors govern the discourse which describes social interaction. Newtons successes in mechanics stimulated a boom in mental and social physics, that is to say, in thinking about the mind and society in the ways Newton had so successfully thought * In Deliberation, the last appetite (i.e., force pulling toward HR) or aversion (i.e. force pushing away HR) immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that we call the will... (Leviathan, Ch. 6) The will thus appears as the resultant of a composition of forces. Compare Aquinas, Intellectus movet voluntatem ut finis; voluntas autem recipiens bonum in communi movet intellectum effective {the intellect moves the will, because the good understood is the object of the will, and moves it as an end}. Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 82, article IV. 218 Letter 27 about machines and planets. (Some familiar examples, the factors [i.e. forces] that determine IQ, market equilibrium, the law of supply and demand.) Newtons friend and admirer the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) started a trend in philosophy by conceiving the task of the philosopher to be that of an underlaborer who clears away nonsense to make the work easier for the great thinkers in other fields who do the real work of advancing knowledge. In introducing his essays on human understanding to the reader Locke wrote, ...in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an underlaborer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge... Lockes project is not unlike Descartes earlier methodical doubt followed by reconstruction of knowledge on a sound footing, but whereas Descartes attempted to unite the task of demolition and the task of reconstruction in his own powerful brain, Locke adopted the principle of division of labor (to which Adam Smith attributed

most of human progress) by specializing in demolition, leaving reconstruction to the great scientists and Newton was the Great Scientist, the paradigm to which one referred whenever it was necessary to define what science is. When David Hume (1711-1776) tried to improve on Locke by carrying out the same sort of ground-clearing project Locke and others of the age had carried out with insufficient rigor and consistency, Hume called his efforts an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects, in a conscious effort to emulate Newton. (Newton considered himself, and was considered by others, to be an experimental reasoner, in spite of the fact that he used mathematical principles whose validity was not experimentally proven. Newtons dependence on principles of mathematics not derived from experience was to be given a transcendental significance by Kant.) When at the beginning of this letter I confessed to believing that the wagon loads of goods rolling south over the Alps provide an important clue to the context of competition for scarce resources in which Luthers doctrine of salvation by faith was welcomed by northern audiences, I hope I did not give the impression either (1) that for the emergence of each characteristically modern idea I can provide an account of the ecological incentives which provided the background for its success in terms of intraspecific competition (humans vs. humans) or interspecific competition (humans vs. the rest of nature) or fruitful cooperation (with other humans or with nature), or (2) that I believe that once you know who is in conflict with whom over what, the resulting transformations of symbolic structures are inevitable and can be predicted. On the other hand, in certain ways there is an obvious ecological explanation for modernity, not so much for how the new ideas started as for why their influence spread and persisted. It is that the ensemble of innovations religious, legal, economic, technological, scientific worked. Europe became more prosperous, the needs of its inhabitants were on the whole better met (although large sections of the working classes probably suffered more than the medieval yeoman), and the military superiority of Europe became so great that by 1900 Europeans had conquered almost the entire globe and had compelled the peoples of the remaining unconquered areas, such as Japan and China, to participate in a modern global commercial system. Successful as it was, or rather, successful as it was beginning to be, the new cultural forms were messy. Taken one by one, each of the characteristically modern ways of operating with symbols (symbols such as words, numbers, crucifixes...) contributed to the construction of modernity. Taken all together, the various strands of the culture of economic society appear to lack coherence and integrity. It is not easy to believe in moralistic Protestantism, in laissez faire economics, that society is in some sense based on contract, in the legal principles that order freedom in a commercial society, and in mechanistic science all at once without contradicting yourself. 219 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Robert Redfield has speculated that when Mayan civilization reached a certain degree of complexity it must have had philosophers, since it had a mythology, a literature, a technology, and a changing social order, which must have produced contradictions, which must have required a special class of artisans devoted to producing coherence. Whether there really were Mayan philosophers we do not yet know. We do know that Immanuel Kant provided philosophical services for economic society similar to those Redfield believed Mayan society needed and must have had. 220 Letter 28

28 THE MURMURING PINES From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar....I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Henry David Thoreau My cousin Malcolm and I spend a lot of time talking to each other about our troubles. Our troubles usually stem from the fact that the human being is a social animal who has to live with other people. If I hurry, for example, to avoid offending those people who become anxious when I am late, then I disturb those people who dont like to be around me when I am in a hurry. People take offense. They get upset. They misunderstand. People are, on the whole, hard to get along with. Malcolm lives in a city about two hours away, and we occasionally get together on weekends to go camping. The motive of our expeditions is not hunting, it is not fishing, it is not curiosity about the world around us. We do not camp for the sake of exercise or sport, nor are we interested in admiring the colors and the forms found in the hills and in the forests, although we do seek companionship and solace among our brother trees and sister lakes. Our primary motive, however, is to get away from people. If for some reason we are forced to camp so close to other campers that we can hear them and see their fires, the weekend is regarded as a total failure; if there are other hikers on the trails the weekend is a moderate failure. If between Friday evening when we leave and Sunday evening when we return we see other campers or hikers only once or twice, and if we see them only briefly and do not exchange any words, the trip is a success. If we see nobody at all and few signs of human existence, then we go back to our respective homes with a sense of triumph. One Saturday afternoon in October Malcolm and I were having a good day. We had followed a creek far back into the hills, where there was no trail, forcing our way through the underbrush, and we had not seen any people or any signs of human existence since ten in the morning. We decided it was safe to begin to look for a campsite. We are choosy about campsites. We always taste the water in the area and if it carries even the slightest trace of contamination, we move on. We seek purity. The trees and the bushes and everything about the setting have to be perfect. We had almost found the perfect place when Malcolm made a pointing gesture and uttered a profane monosyllable. There was a beer can stranded in the middle of the creek. The rushing waters sailed angrily over it, desiring to wash it away but unable to loosen it from the mesh of fallen logs and underbrush within which it was caught. Tears formed in our eyes as we resumed our march with an attitude of glum hostility, not saying a word to each other, sympathizing silently with the resentment of the pines, whom we imagined to be stewing with shame and anger inside their trunks and branches because of the dishonor they had suffered at the hands of the person who had tossed the beer can into the water. Three kilometers farther on we found another imperfect place; the beeches and birches were scrawny, and the sweet little spruces were not yet old enough to be boon companions at a campsite. Imperfect as it was, however, we had 221 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II to stop there, because it would soon be too dark to gather firewood. As the evening sky turned* to red and then to purple, we gathered logs and branches and started our fire. The flames danced spiritedly at first, but when they had lowered a bit and the kindling had burned, we put two roughskinned potatoes into the ashes and heated up a can of beans. It was dark by the time we; sat down

next to our fire and began to talk about philosophy. When I looked at her closed eyelids while she was asleep, Malcolm said, I had a feeling of comfort, as though it were true that I could trust her. As he spoke he stared into the fire, while millions of stars stared down at us through the thin foliage (it was fall, and all the trees except the evergreens were baring their branches). I did not mind being stared at by the stars, although if anyone else had stared at us I would have considered it an invasion of our privacy. The starlight was comforting, perhaps because the stars were so far away, so calm, and so unlikely to do us harm, but more likely because I have always felt that the stars understood my good intentions. When humans misunderstand me I appeal to the stars because I trust them and I feel that they trust me. I should explain what Malcolm meant by his remark because in our family there are several people who cannot be understood by an outsider unless someone provides the outsider with an explanation, and Malcolm is one of those people. There are many families which are similar to ours in this respect; you need to know life histories and the peculiar significance which certain words and phrases have in order to interpret the remarks that people make, such as, for example, the remark Malcolm made beside our campfire that October evening. Those of us who are in Malcolms family are used to hearing him make announcements about the sad condition of his heart. Malcolm discusses his relationships with women with the candidness of a movie magazine. Unlike the movie magazines, however, which have new headlines each week, Malcolm always tells the same story. The woman to whom he refers is one he lived with for several months arid considered marrying. She proposed to him, but she did not succeed in persuading him that she was really ready to commit herself to him until death did them part. She insisted that Malcolm could trust her, and when she was asleep he could almost believe that she was telling him the truth. But most of the time he suspected that she was not. He finally left her, although he was and is convinced that at the time he left her she was about to leave him evidence to support this belief he sometimes points out that shortly after he left her she married someone else, whom, by the way, she later divorced. I nudged a potato with a stick, pushing it deeper into the warm ashes. When she slept, Malcolm went on, she seemed so innocent, so incapable of deceiving me; it was as if she had abandoned her body entirely to me, as if our attachment would never end. I would listen to her breathing at night, and when she was awake I tried to notice whether her breath had that same innocence. I wanted to know whether she was only pretending to be happy with me, whether I should believe her words. Sooner or later, I thought, she will want to be free. Sooner or later she will not be able to bear the burden of having to respond to me with constant smiles and constant words of reassurance. Malcolm, I said to myself, you must not threaten her by being too dependent. You must not drive her away by making too many demands, wanting too much care. She must relax with you; she must feel free to express her true feelings. (I knew she wasnt expressing her true feelings.) I adore you, she said, Youre my angel, my prince, my movie star, my favorite singer, my best dancing partner. When I prepared breakfast for her she would tenderly declare that I make the most delicious coffee and eggs she had ever eaten. She even told me that she loved to smell my hair, even when it was dirty how could she expect me to believe that? Basically, Howard, she made me very suspicious. Real love is always expressed indirectly it is only people who dont really care very much who can afford to say that they adore someone, because only people who dont care can risk having their uninterested would-be lovers laugh in their faces. I could tell from her gestures and from some 222

Letter 28 of the things she said when she was talking to other people that for her I was only a good friend, someone with an income that she could have fun with. She wanted a marriage just so she could get a divorce and start collecting alimony. She was using me. I, on the other hand, loved her latterly; I would have died for her. My only desire was to live with her always. But what was I supposed to do? The situation was quite tedious. I knew that once we were married she would leave me, so I tried to put off the marriage by pretending that I too had some doubts about our relationship. Just stay with me another week, another month, I said, and then if you want to leave we can separate by mutual agreement and remain friends. We wont have to make an unpleasant scene. Basically, I wanted to put off the decision about marriage. I told her that we should live together longer, and when she insisted on marriage, I said goodbye. I was not sure about her, and as it turned out I was right to be dubious, wasnt I? I did not answer his question. The beans were bubbling and were beginning to stick to the sides of the can, which I had placed directly in the flames. I removed the can from the fire with a pair of tongs and poured some beans into Malcolms sierra cup and some into mine. By the time I sat down Malcolm himself was questioning whether the fact that his lover had married someone else soon after he left her proved that he was right to suppose she had not cared about him. I wasnt listening very closely. My attention was diverted by the empty bean can, its tin blackened on the outside with ashes and on the inside with burnt beans. When it was cool I would have to put it in my pack and carry it back to the impure world that it had come from. I would have to put it in an impure garbage can so it could be tossed in an impure landfill or dumped into an increasinglyimpure ocean. Malcolm, I said, I wish there were such a thing as a biodegradable bean can. Love is like war, Malcolm answered. If you believe the enemy will eventually attack, it is better to take the initiative and attack yourself. If you believe that your lover will leave you, then you should try to beat her to it. You should always give the impression that you have nothing to lose. Basically, thats your best strategy. If the enemy believes you are strong, she will not try to trick you. So I did the right thing. I guess. If I could have known that she would have been loyal to me forever, I would have married her, but according to all my predictions it was only logical that in the future there would come a time when she would want to be free. We sat in silence for awhile, eating our beans and watching the red and yellow fire glowing in the logs and dancing on the twigs. The light illuminated Malcolms face. I hate to tell you this, Malcolm, I eventually said, as gently as possible, because it will probably just make you feel worse. But there are reasons for believing that the problems which you experience from the inside, so to speak, as you live your life and as you find yourself in frustrating relationships with women, are not personal problems in the sense that you are the only one who has them, but are the consequence of the cultural codes which prescribe the rules of irrational rationality. Your inability to share mutual trust with your lover is due to your use, and hers, of the myths about human nature which dominate economic society. According to the norms which these myths prescribe, each one of us has a right to be free, indeed, a duty to be free, since to renounce our freedom is to violate the ideal of dignity which is also established by our myths. We have established social spaces in which one is more or less free to do whatever one chooses. And within these social spaces the rules of rational conduct prescribe mat one do whatever happens to be in ones best interest. Everyone thus assumes that everyone else is freely pursuing their own interests, and (not surprisingly) wars and broken hearts result. The rational calculations of each side lead to ungovernable conflicts. In the absence of Holy Wisdom, an old tradition which was painfully and slowly constructed, and in the absence of a new wisdom not yet born which would

perform its ancient functions, the logic of homo economicus governs thought and action. The environment is gutted as each individual person and individual firm make rational profit-making decisions, capitalism and socialism are both 223 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II rendered incapable of meeting human needs, and family life is ruined by unstable romances, as you have discovered. We are sensitive leaves blown by an eternal wind, dear cousin Malcolm. Our charming colloquies with our lovers are just sub-routines of a larger program, a program of personalities in cultures, cultures in ecosystems, ecosystems in the cosmos, or cosmoi, I should say, because we do not know how many cosmoi there are, nor how many billions of years it took to produce the closed eyelids and rhythmic breathing of your sleeping lady, nor do we know how much longer it will take the earth processes to work out the kinks in irrational rationality. Hopefully, blown leaves like ourselves will be part of the process, as co-creators of culture who may play a small part in achieving the happy adjustment of subjectivity to reality. On a souvent besoin de quelque chose plus que soi, sighed Malcolm, which, freely translated, means Life is a chancy thing. It makes a person watchful, and sometimes a little bit lonely. Perhaps you are beginning to see, I went on, why I have an at first-acquaintance-rather-bizarreappearing (erstesanschaunngenscheinlichetwasseltsames) penchant for blaming all the worlds troubles on Immanuel Kant, who was born in 1722 and who died in 1804, and why I consider one of the major problems with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School to be their failure to overcome the limitations of the symbolic structures of this greatest of all German philosophers. Kant makes it impossible for us to be co-creators of culture, to help the earth work out the kinks. He conceives the human being as a composite of inclination and will, our inclinations being determined by the mechanical laws of nature, and our wills being subject only to the laws of freedom which are equally acultural. Kants laws of freedom are eternal, just as Newtons laws are eternal, and they define all the moral and legal structures which Kant deems necessary. The neverending creation of ever more beautiful cultural subsystems of the ecosystem is neither possible nor necessary, except as the gradual narrowing of the gap between reality and the ideals defined by the eternal laws of freedom. Somewhat similarly, Habermas of the Frankfurt School proposes a universal pragmatics which is supposed to establish for us an inventory of certain basic minimum necessary features of every culture everywhere, while what we need, on the contrary, is the cultural analogue of an abundant gene pool; we need the preservation and recovery and creation of the symbolic analogues of living germ plasms, from which the hybrids of the future can be born, so that there will be, among other things, abundant cultural resources supporting the creativity of future pairs of lovers who create a world for two. Youre right, said Malcolm, picking up a twig from the ground and breaking it in two. I am? I asked, surprised. Malcolm usually doesnt agree with me. Yes, Malcolm said unhappily, You said you would make me feel worse and you did. A man loses the woman he loves and instead of trying to console him you tell him that he doesnt have an isolated case of heartbrokenness but that the whole world is messed up and there are three zillion other broken relationships out there. Malcolm, I began, The.... I know, I know, sighed Malcolm, interrupting me. This business about overcoming the limitations of the Kantian cultural structures was supposed to encourage me. Were supposed to create a more beautiful culture. Thats what you always say. Basically, Howard, your argument is getting tedious. I would be especially upset if I were Immanuel Kant or Jrgen Habermas. Suppose they were seated on the ground beyond yon bush, just outside the circle of our firelight, and

suppose they overheard your irreverent comments on the fruits of their labors. I suspect they would think that homo sapiens is an ungrateful and irresponsible species. Kant wrote books full of proofs, you know, and basically I dont think you can just throw all his proofs out the window, even though he did call philosophy a science of the boundaries of human thought, and even though his proofs are hardly of the sort that one would expect to find in my high school geometry textbook. 224 Letter 28 It has been a tradition in philosophy at least since Socrates, I answered patiently, a tradition so strong that one might say that without it philosophy would lack its spirit and would not be philosophy, that all proofs must be examined on their merits, regardless of who advances them and regardless of the motives behind advancing them. All fallacies must be distinguished from all correct deductions. It has been, on the other hand, a new tradition, so important that without it one might say that we will probably not survive, that all proofs must be examined on the basis of their contribution to the reembedding of human culture in the ecosystem. All creative and beautiful ideas must be distinguished from all destructive and unhelpful ones. Kant might cry foul and insist that the rules of the game forbid us to treat a philosopher like himself as a laborer like the one in Socrates argument with Thrasymachus who produces goods useful to society goods often especially useful, one might add, to its dominant elements and then to criticize him on the grounds that his goods are not useful enough. Habermas would be even less happy with us than Kant. Since Habermas has few of Kants 18th century ethnocentric illusions, and since we are saying nothing Habermas has not already said, he would insist that we should simply give him credit for already having said the true parts of what we say, instead of objecting that we feel frustrated when we read his essays because although he is not exactly wrong he is not exactly right either, his deviation from exact tightness consisting in an emphasis more critical and formal and less constructive and imaginative than the emphasis we think is needed. Malcolm uttered two profane monosyllables. He hadnt really wanted to hear how I could justify my irreverence for Kant and Habermas. What he really wanted was to be back together with the women he had left. Dont bother me with speculations about six million philosophers, he said. (Malcolm frequently exaggerates by several orders of magnitude.) As Henri Bergson once said, if you will just put what you think is true in your book (Malcolm knew I was trying to write a philosophy book), then the reader can compare your book with other books, and make up her mind for herself what to believe, without having to listen to tedious quarrels and speculations about what you think of the six million other philosophers and what they might think of you. [Malcolm calls things he does not like tedious.] What I need is wisdom I can use in my life. I am interested in Kant and Habermas only to the extent that they have the True Answer. (Malcolm is not to be taken seriously when he says things like that; he frequently mocks himself by making statements open to obvious objections indeed he considers self-depreciation to be a form of courtesy, a way to assure his listeners that anything they may find acceptable in what he says they will accept because they themselves deliberately make it their own thought, not because he forces his opinions on them.) Recently, I said, I have become acquainted with a woman who often seems to me to have the True Answer. When talking with Maria Luna I often find no way to escape the conclusion that her philosophy is completely right and my philosophy completely wrong. Even when I am not compelled to agree with her, I find that my own ideas become clearer when I consider how, if at all, I can justify a way of life different from the one she practices and recommends. How did you meet her? Malcolm asked.

Its a long story, I said. I like long stories, said Malcolm. Its late, I protested. Thats O.K., said Malcolm. Im not tired. Tell me about Maria Luna. Well, all right. If you insist. I met her at Century Center. You know I have been spending time at the CC. Cousin Malcolm replied that he did not know that I had been spending time at the CC, nor did he have reason to know, since I had never told him. He also denied ever having been to the CC and he denied knowing what it was or what people did there. 225 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II My feelings were hurt by Malcolms attitude because I am proud of our town (although I am not sure there is a good reason why one should be proud of the town in which one happens to reside); It was disconcerting to hear my own cousin, who lives in the same state, deny knowledge of our latest and greatest development. In our town we think the CC puts us on the map. The CC is a large, entirely indoor shopping mall. It has a news stand, a travel agency, a mens hair styling salon, a ladies hair styling salon, a shoe repair, a loan company, a pharmacy, a motion picture theater, a photofinisher, a florist, two booksellers, a pantorama (which sells pants), a post office, two banks, an optometrist, and a health spa that features a gymnasium and an indoor track. There are three large department stores where one can buy almost anything, as well as a large major national discount house, where one can buy almost anything at a low price. Anything which cannot be found in these large stores which sell almost anything can be purchased in specialty stores featuring sporting goods, television sets, designer jeans, tobacco, curtains, phonograph records, electronic equipment, household adornments, musical instruments, fine chocolates, cameras, paper flowers, sheets and bedroom accessories, cheese, china and fine dishware, ceramic objects, rare coffees, leather purses and belts, undergarments for women in their early teen years, and wallpaper. In the corridors inside the building there are 25 live trees, beneath each of which are polished wooden benches where one may sit and above each of which are special lamps which permit the trees to photosynthesize. There is also a statue of a tree by a local sculptor. The title of the statue is Tree. There are 30 boutiques selling ladies ready-to-wear clothing, 3 selling garments for children, 4 boutiques for men, 8 shoe stores, 4 jewelers, 5 restaurants one of the restaurants set among shrubs and ferns even though it is entirely indoors 4 public toilets, 28 pay telephones, underground parking for 1680 cars and outdoor parking for 1650, a delicatessen, 5 snack bars, a pizza counter, and a major grocer. The corridor where four of the snack bars and the pizza counter are located is widened to make space for 63 round orange plastic tables (tables like mushrooms with flat tops) and 189 brown plastic stools. Above one of the banks a seven story office tower rises. On the roof of the tower there is a discotheque in a glass bubble. The discotheque is named Star Place. I like to go to Century Center shopping mall because it is a place where people leave me alone. At the mall I am free of complaints and insane demands because nobody talks to me, or at least nobody used to until I met Maria Luna there. I sit on a brown stool at an orange plastic mushroom drinking a cup of coffee. Pairs of people and an occasional threesome walk by, chattering and looking at merchandise. They do not talk to me; I do not talk to them. It is as if I were protected by an invisible glass wall. Sometimes I buy something, like another cup of coffee or a phonograph record, and even then the people whom I am forced to talk to in order to make the purchase, the waitresses and sales people, do not attack me; they have to be polite because pleasing the

customers is what they are paid for. As long as I have money in my pocket I am safe. There are many loners like me walking around the mall by themselves and I wonder whether their thoughts are like my thoughts. If one spends a lot of time in a shopping mall, one gradually begins to notice the types of fauna with whom one shares the habitat. There is the obese and unbalanced elderly gentleman with a crew cut, in tennis shoes and a sweatshirt too small for him, stumbling forward with bulging paunch; the stick-legged little girl with her arm in a cast covered with hearts and signatures; the well-dressed blonde who inspects merchandise with an air of authority the executives wife type; a younger tousled blonde, thin body in baggy clothes, reading a book as she walks; Humphrey Bogart in a raincoat, smoking a cigarette; femme fatale in black leather; dark tigress in fur and black stockings; slight male body with head like whiskered egg, peering intently at the floor; prim suit and high heels, thin and elderly, small eyes looking straight ahead; bearded young man with leather jacket and glasses, pacing slowly as if looking for a connection. The first time I noticed Maria Luna I imagined she was an Italian actress on holiday in the 226 Letter 28 American midwest, traveling incognito in black loafers with white socks, ankle-length faded blue jeans, hip-level belt, white sweater, and frizzy hair. Later when I saw her seated at a plastic mushroom reading the New York Review of Books over a cup of tea I revised my opinion, because I had not heard of any Italian actress reading that publication. As I continued to observe her, what most impressed me was that she had so many friends. Although I have no friends myself, I am jealous of people who do. Maria was frequently the center of a happy party of electric bodies like the ones Walt Whitman described in his poem, I Sing the Body Electric: To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. Maria saunters through the interior spaces of Century Center like a magnet on patrol. Spotting a friend, she opens wide her hands and eyes, her face explodes in a smile; then she bows a little with her knees, flexing them downward and wheeling to the left or right to position herself for a straight line rush into the friends arms, laughing and exclaiming (for example), Oh Caroline! What have you done to your hair?!?! as she and friend embrace and express. Several weeks after the first time I noticed her I happened to be ambling past a shop specializing in sheets and bedroom accessories when I suddenly saw her come out of the doorway of one selling imported lamps and lampshades. To myself I muttered under my breath, What the heck? and Why not?; I opened my eyes and hands wide, smiled, flexed my knees, wheeled in her direction, and rushed into her arms. Although she had never spoken to me, nor I to her, and perhaps she had not even noticed me before, she obligingly returned my embrace, whispering in my ear as she gently hung her arm around my shoulder, What do you want? How about a pizza and a long conversation about Kant? I suggested. Its a deal, she said, I believe in giving people what they want. We agreed to meet at an orange mushroom at two the following afternoon, and when we were comfortably seated on brown stools munching pizza and green salad, I offered to share with her my summary of the 1787 edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Tell me your name first, she said. I did. Then she told me her name, explaining that although it sounds Spanish it is really Ukrainian. Her grandfather changed his name from Lunacarskij to Luna

when he immigrated to the USA in 1933. Then I said that Kant begins the book by remarking that human reason has the peculiar fate (besondere Schicksal) that it is concerned with questions it cannot answer, such as, for example, Does space come to an end somewhere? and Did time have a beginning? One of the topics of the book is why such questions cannot be answered, even though it is part of the nature of reason itself to ask them. The Critique of Pure Reason is about the difference between pure knowledge and empirical knowledge, where it turns out that pure knowledge is formal and empirical knowledge mechanical that is to say, empirical knowledge (i.e. knowledge based on experience) is assumed to be, as the scholars of the 18th century in general thought it was, modelled on the paradigm of Newtonian science. The remarkable fact, however, is not the existence of empirical knowledge, but the fact that humans possess knowledge not based on experience that is why the book is called a Critique of Pure Reason; it is a book about the pure, formal knowledge derived from pure reason, not from experience. That pure knowledge exists Kant has no doubt all of mathematics he considers to be pure knowledge, and Newton himself, who claimed to be an experimenter, would have gotten nowhere without mathematics. Space affords us more examples of pure knowledge: for example the proposition that there is only one space, not two or three, and all of us are in it. This proposition is known with 227 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II certainty. Its certainty, absolute certainty, shows it to be a truth of pure reason, because any knowledge based on experience is less than absolutely certain since any generalization from past experience may be contradicted by future experience. Similarly there is only one time, and it always goes forward, out of the past and through the present towards the future never backward into the past. Experience, far from being the source of all knowledge, presupposes pure reason. For example, experiential knowledge, i.e. empirical knowledge, is justified by what we nowadays call data (which Kant called intuition, his predecessor Hume called impressions, some people call sense impressions, others atomic facts, and others simply experience ignoring the subtleties which distinguish these similar terms from each other), but data always come in bits of data, and every datum is located at same place at some time. As Kant puts it, all possible intuitions come under the forms of space and time. Thus in a sense the whole is present in every part, e.g. identifying a particular second of a particular minute of a particular hour of a particular day implicitly refers to the whole calendar and to the whole sweep of time from the infinitely past to the infinitely future. Furthermore, experience must comply not only with the pure forms of space and time but also with the pure forms of logic, of which the most important is the law of causality: all changes happen according to the law of connection between cause and effect. (Alle veranderungen qeschehen nach dem Gesetze der Verknupfunq der Ursache und Wirkung.) Kant further claims that Newtons laws (inertia, force = mass X acceleration, action-reaction, the parallelogram rule) are consequences of general pure formal principles which must be true in any possible experience. (In other books Kant extends his method to show how pure reason guarantees the absolute validity of the basic principles of morals and law. The latter turn out to be, of course, the basic principles of contract and property which govern economic society.) Having discussed what must be true in any possible experience, as a condition of there being any experience at all, Kant goes on to consider those strange questions reason compels us to ask but

prevents us from answering. Did the world have a beginning in time? You can prove it must have had, because if it had no beginning it must have been going on for an infinite period of time up till now which is impossible, because if it took an infinite time to get up to now, now would never be reached and we would not be eating pizza and salad. However, you can also prove the world could not have had a beginning in time, because if the world had a beginning, then there must have been what Kant calls empty time (eine leere Zeit) but out of such a before-the-existence-ofanything empty time, no world could have arisen, since there would have been no cause (Ursache, or Bedingung, condition) operating to produce such an effect. Similarly, one can both prove and disprove that space is finite; and both prove and disprove that there are simple parts (Einfaches) of which all the compound things (zusammengsetztes) in the world are composed. Further, one can prove there is no freedom, since everything in the world happens necessarily according to laws of nature. However, the contrary thesis, that it is necessary to assume the existence of freedom, can also be proven. From such considerations, Kant deduces that it is hopeless to try to apply reason to answer questions beyond the reach of any possible experience. Such speculations Kant condemns as beyond the bounds of anything reason can cope with. One might think that from the conclusion that the peculiar questions it is the peculiar fate of human reason to ask lead only to hopelessly contradictory speculations, nothing would follow except that if you ask a silly question you get a silly answer. But for Kant important conclusions follow. Freedom is saved from the juggernaut of mechanistic science because since it is impossible to know whether we are free or not free, and since the moral law requires that we are free, the conclusion that we are free must be accepted. The traditional metaphysics which had claimed to know ultimate reality, with its proofs of the existence of God and of other 228 Letter 28 religious verities, goes out the window all of traditional metaphysics is invalid because it leads reason into the never-never land of perpetual contradiction. Since freedom is apparently the leading norm of the new (i.e. new in the 18th century) society, or at least its leading publicly stated norm; and since traditional metaphysics provided coherence for the old society that was on its way out in the 18th century, these conclusions are of the greatest practical importance. We are left then with a triple result: 1) On the one hand pure reason guarantees the absolute certainty of certain principles of mathematics, logic, physics, morals, and law these must be true. They are, so to speak, thoughts contribution to knowledge (to practice, in the case of morals and law). They are presupposed by thought (or practice) regardless of the particular material dealt with. 2) Freedom, the leading stated norm of the new social order, is guaranteed. 3) On the other hand, pure reason, which applies to every experience, cannot possibly apply to anything outside experience; it cannot apply to the not-experienced thing-in-itself (Dingan-sich). All attempts to reason beyond the bounds of experience are necessarily fallacious. When I had finished speaking, Maria folded her paper napkin into a square, placed it on the table beside her empty salad plate, and placed her glass of water on the napkin, neatly centering the glass on the paper. Delightful she exclaimed, turning her face to me and biting her thumbnail. Now before you tell me anything else, tell me why you care. Human beings have never been able to survive as individuals with their constructed-according-togenetic-coding physical equipment, I said. They have always required imaginative inventions to

construct the group cohesion required for survival and for happiness. How do you know these things? asked Maria. I usually make it a point not to believe sentences with words like never and always in them. They are conclusions from the study of anthropology, archaeology, and history. Your conclusions, she said. OK, my conclusions. At present we humans have constructed a world which needs more cohesion than it has. The world we have constructed consists to a great extent of buildings, streets, and vehicles on the streets. Buildings and vehicles are physical constructions. You are supposed to be talking about imaginative inventions. Cultures have patterns, I replied. The physical artifacts correspond to imaginative inventions, symbolic structures, which prescribe norms for conduct and logic for thinking. In our society the norm is that the only place you are allowed to be is the street (and a few other public places like the corridors of malls); anyplace else you have to pay. But you cant live on the street; it is made of asphalt and cement of no nutritional value and impossible to digest. Speak for yourself, said Maria. The only people with security are those with guaranteed flows of sufficient sums of money. Even owning a house with land does not give you a secure place to be, because you cant keep it up or pay the taxes without cash. Consequently, almost everybody is anxious, and a considerable number are down-and-out losers, politely called marginal populations. Sick, said Maria. You live in a fantasy where you walk alone down a long street; everyone tells you you are free and shuts doors in your face; people rush by in cars, taxis, and buses you are not allowed to ride. You see the world as a series of closed doors because you are a creep. 229 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II I pretended not to have heard her say I was a creep (I know its true) and continued to try to comply with her request to tell why I care about Kant, raising the level of the conversation from the personal to the political. In the Americas in the last 30 years we have lived through the failures of attempts to change the structures that hold us prisoners, I said, mainly under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism and Christian social doctrine in Latin America and of the New Left under the influence of the Frankfurt School in North America. Nobody believes in Marxism or the New Left anymore, she said, Progressive thinking has moved far beyond them. On the contrary, I said. The reason why the progressive movements are intellectually defenseless against the New Right is that they still have not moved beyond Kant. For a free lunch, said Maria, I will listen to almost anything. She leaned back and opened her arms as if praying for rain. But if I have to listen to preposterous remarks without a shred of evidence to back them up, then I am going to have to raise the price. The claim is not preposterous. It is not an assertion about Kant as an individual who happened by accident to think certain thoughts, but one about Kant as the product of and spokesperson for the emerging economic society. It is not preposterous to believe that if those who are working to change society still use premises originally developed for the purpose of keeping it the same, then they will he intellectually defenseless, fighting, so to speak, with weapons designed by the opponent and suitable mainly for achieving the opponents ends. Perhaps, said Maria, pursing her lips, but you have shown neither that Kants purpose was to

defend economic society, nor that contemporary progressives still use his premises. Consider Jrgen Habermas, the most widely read living progressive thinker. He correctly perceives that it is not enough to pile fact on fact to show how polluted the water is, how many people are hungry, how much damage nuclear blasts produce, how many people walking the streets ought to be in mental hospitals, how many prisoners are tortured unless at the same time we reform the rationality our culture uses to process facts. homo sapiens is the rational animal, whose wisdom consists of taking action according to conclusions reached by operating on the evidence with logic. Wrong, said Maria. Ignoring her demurral for the moment, I tried to explain how Habermas classifies three types of rationality operating in the contemporary world. 1. Instrumental rationality (Max Webers Zweckrationalitat). This is the technical rationality which discovers and uses Newtonian-Kantian relations of cause and effect, to find the most efficient means to achieve a given objective. It dominates modern society; it laughs at us and holds us prisoner even while philosophers heap proof upon proof to demonstrate its inadequacy. 2. The rationality of praxis (Max Webers Verstehen). This rationality enables you to stand in someone elses shoes, to understand the others meanings, norms, languages... and to understand oneself also as a participant in social relations. Habermas calls it practical understanding because it enables us to interact with others and to cooperate. 3. Emancipatory rationality. This is not so much a description of an existing rationality as it is the Frankfurt Schools proposal for the creation of a new one. The aim is liberation. As the preceding two rationalities were governed by their aims, in the first case technical manipulation and in the second practical understanding, so the new emancipatory rationality will govern research and action which is deliberately aimed at promoting the freedom and dignity of each person. 230 Letter 28 Now suppose, I continued, just suppose here I admit I am not offering you proofs that liberation is not a fitting name for the objective requirements of survival, nor for the beautiful life; suppose it is a word whose popularity comes from its roles on the banners of yesterdays revolutions and its universal acceptance as an emotionally charged glory-word used by all presentday factions left, right, and center; suppose that what we really need is more akin to the transformation of the second of Habermas three kinds of rationality, suppose we need the creative reconstruction of symbolic systems guiding, practice; suppose instrumental rationality is misleading (i.e. a consciousness-lowering logic of disunity Letter 9) even in areas where Weber and Habermas concede its competence; suppose that to conservatives talk about emancipatory rationality is so much twaddle when as is obvious to them what is needed is discipline to accomplish socially necessary tasks, such as producing high-quality export goods to compete in the international marketplace, i.e. what is needed is the effective application of Habermas first kind of rationality, and suppose everything happens in such a way as to convince the public and the military brass that the conservative viewpoint fits the facts because, among other things, the projects of progressives turn into demonstrations of how to be undisciplined and ineffective. One would then have to conclude that something went wrong somewhere in Habermas analysis, that what he did not see clearly was his first category, instrumental rationality, that what he overvalued was his third category, emancipatory rationality, and one would also have to conclude that

something in the formative processes which formed the minds of Habermas and his vast audience produced a theory not suitable for present-day realities, and if one follows Gramsci one will look for the clouding of the mind which obscures present-day realities among the sediments from the past, the bits and pieces of yesterdays ideas that still shape thought and language. But yesterdays ideology is precisely the culture of economic society, its greatest exponent is precisely Kant; and Kants conclusions asserted precisely (1) the absolute certainty of Newtonian cause-and-effect mechanical rationality (akin to Habermas first type of rationality), and (2) the reduction of morality to formal laws of freedom this will be discussed further in the next chapter. (Freedom is the value endorsed by Habermas third type of rationality) and (3) the absolute falsity of the imaginative processes previous metaphysicians had used in inventing symbolic structures (thus cutting off traditional sources of group cohesion). If such suppositions are correct and I think that although they are not completely correct, they are as correct as any brief simplification is likely to be then the ghost of Kant is walking the corridors of the shopping mall. The social structures whose legitimating ideas Kant synthesized keep merchandise at the center of attention; they support the levels of anxiety which create a market for the industry which makes designer jeans for people who feel a need to have a famous name on their rears; Kant is the lonely man staring at the floor, the teenager looking for a tribe. The absolute certainty which won its spurs in geometry, algebra, logic, and physics, then endorsed 18th century moral and legal principles which still underwrite the flow of rent from the boutiques to those who hold ownership rights in the mall. Kant is the distant invisible supplier of the rhetoric of the girl who tells her mother she is mature enough to make her own decisions you will observe her in the mall wearing clothes she likes, not clothes her mother likes; freedom is on her lips, and on those of the businessperson who complains of government interference with her activities, and on those of the druggie who feels persecuted because society tries to deny him the right to blow his mind. 231 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II

232 Letter 29 29 MACH DICH MEIN HERZE REIN* The first time I read the first part of Kants Foundations of the Metaphysics Of Morals I shuddered with fear because Kant seemed to be praising the morals of Sammy Martins father. Sammy was a boy in my sixth grade class who came to school with black, blue, and red scars because his father had beaten him for masturbating. Mr. Martin recognized that he had little formal instruction, but, he said, I knows right from wrong. Kant says, ...the knowledge of what everyone is obliged to do, is within the reach of everyone, even the most ordinary man. Philosophy should limit itself to making more scientific, more complete and comprehensible the moral rules already found in the happy simplicity of the common understanding. On studying Kant farther I discovered that what his philosophy supports is not really Mr. Martins racism, sexism, xenophobia, puritanism, and chauvinism, but other notions of the common understanding concerning which a complacent ethnocentricity is even more dangerous: namely promise-keeping, freedom, property, and human dignity. When Kant was dean of Konigsberg University, so it is said, he would lead the graduating students in their baccalaureate processions as far as the door of the church, and would then respectfully stand aside while they filed in. Kants reservations about established religion, which according to legend he expressed in this dramatic way, no doubt stemmed in part as do mine about Mr. Martins morals from miserable experiences in sixth grade. Kants mother sent him to a pietist school where the children were expected to burst into spontaneous prayer to express their religious sentiments passionately and. publicly. One suspects too that even when he was reluctant to say so Kant did not believe the prevailing popular theologies, since, as a convinced Newtonian, Kant

believed nature was governed not by the Holy Spirit but by quantitative rigors such as the famous diagonal of the parallelogram. Kant wrote in a letter to his friend Mendelssohn, Although I am absolutely convinced of many things I shall never have the courage to say, I shall never say anything I do not believe. (Kant to Mendelssohn Ap.8,1776) Nevertheless, the text of the first section of the Foundations of the Metaphysics Of Morals shows Kant to be a protestant manqu, the product of a time and place where fundamental doctrines of the reformation had entered into the warp and woof of daily social communication and could be taken for granted, while others (such as Luthers prohibition against lending money at interest) were still in the process of being shucked off by the expanding economic society. Kants doctrine that common human reason, equipped with the compass of pure respect for law, knows well how to distinguish what is good, what is bad, and what is consistent or inconsistent with duty (p.40, Akademie ed.) presupposes Luthers doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and in general the democratization achieved by the open Bible, the freedom of the Christian, the appeal to inner light, the competition of sects for the adherence of believers.... Kant is able to take as a premise in the late eighteenth century a faith in common human reason which would not have been regarded as a plausible premise five centuries earlier, in the thirteenth. St. Thomas had denied that the lower angels can teach anything to the higher angels, and the 13th century European mind would similarly have denied if anybody had the *Make thee my heart pure. 233 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II audacity to affirm that common human reason can distinguish what is good, what is bad, what is consistent or inconsistent with duty, without the aid of the father confessor, the magisterium of the church, the spiritual exercises which guide the heart toward a knowledge of its true end and resting place.... Even more than his democratic respect for the common man, and even more than his holding certain basic self-evident moral truths (parallel to the basic arithmetic, geometric, logical and physical truths of the Critique of Pure Reason), Kants assumptions concerning what basic truths the common man holds show Kant to be a product of his times. The common man. Kant tells us, seeks the decisive criterion of right and wrong in the innere Wert der Person (the inner value of the person). This inner value is found in acting contrary to ones desires and needs, nicht aus Neigung sondern aus Pflicht (not on the basis of desire and need, but on the basis of duty). And Pflicht (duty) is action based on reine Achtung pure respect. But reine respect for what? Respect for pure command, for pure principle, otherwise known as respect for pure reason, pure law. It is evident that Kant captured the spirit of his times with his emphases on the value of being rein and on the commands of Pflicht. Rein is translated into English as clean, or as pure, and the word is also used figuratively to mean chaste or innocent. Kants incessant repetition of the word he uses it at least once on almost every page is reminiscent of the splendid aria in the St. Matthew Passion where, at the point when Jesus has saved us from sin by dying on the cross, the soloist sings mach dich mein Herze rein (Make thee my heart pure). Kant did his philosophical work in a civilization which honored Pflicht und Arbeit (duty and work). Pflicht is for Kant a brake rather than a motor; it commands us to limit our Neigungen (i.e. our desires, the satisfaction of our needs, the aspirations summed up as the pursuit of happiness). It is evident that Kants milieu is different from the earlier and more southerly context where Augustine and Thomas conceived God as the teacher of the heart who guides us to know our true Neigungen, the infinite and sacred need

to rest always in divine love and adoration, the infinite desire to become what we really are and always have been by attuning our minds and souls to the indwelling essences of creation and creator. What is likely to pass unnoticed in the first part of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals is the narrowing of the scope of morality. For Aristotle morals was simply mores, moeurs, custom, social practice. What Aristotle deals with in his Ethics and Politics, and in some supporting passages in other works, is the whole process of cultural guidance of behavior through symbolic structures, the education (the character formation) of the zoon politikon (the animal whose nature it is to live in a polis) who is also the zoon logos echon (the animal who has the word). For Kant, on the other hand, to have value (Wert) is not the same thing as to have true moral value (wahren sittlichen Wert), or sittliche Gehalt (moral import). To have true moral value an action must be done nicht aus Neigung sondern aus Pflicht. (Not from inclination but from duty). Duty (Pflicht) constitutes the oberster Bedingung (supreme condition) which limits what men may do in pursuit of Privatabsicht (private purposes). What is likely to pass unnoticed here, as a void in the text, a space inhabited but not defined, is that there is a sphere of private purposes with which morals has nothing to do. Yet it is just here that economic society receives its charter. Of course economic society existed before philosophers amended symbolic structures to legitimate it; here Kant ratifies more than he creates. The charter of the new society is given by a sweeping and perhaps not wholly conscious assumption that there is a great sphere of human action where people legitimately pursue happiness according their Neigungen, which can be studied scientifically in the same way the material world in general is studied, i.e. by seeking laws like those discovered by Newton. Thus the greater part of the study of human rational deliberation is relinquished to economics, and the moralist is relegated to the role of supervisor of the boundary conditions which define the 234 Letter 29 symbolic space within which the economic sphere functions. Morals for Kant concerns only the oberster Bedingung which limit Privatabsicht, as if it were an especially high honor to be a moral question, so that merely being a question about human conduct is not a sufficient distinction to make a question worthy to be regarded as having sittliche Gehalt. It is worthwhile to dwell for a while on the relationship between the oberster Bedingung (the highest, commanding, requirement) and the Privatabsicht (the private purpose). If one spends a day or a week thinking about that relationship, using it, so to speak, as a pair of glasses through whose lenses everything can be seen, one will come to understand, among other things, the failure of the New Left. The oberster Bedingung is the command of reason. Stripped of Kants Newtonian mythology, it is the command of society. Of a particular kind of society. Our kind. Most of life, however, takes place in the vast regions of Privatabsicht, which are governed (according to Kants mythology, which is still the dominant mythology) by the laws of mechanics, and by other laws created in their image. Habermas proposal for an emancipatory rationality operates within Kants worldview. Interpreting Freud, Habermas sees the commands of society as the superego writ large, imposing social order on the impulses (the Antrieben) as an authoritative parent disciplines an unruly child. Interpreting Marx, Habermas sees much of the discipline as unnecessary. It is a discipline imposed to maintain the privileges of the bourgeoisie, which is not objectively needed if one measures what is needed by what humans must do to satisfy their needs, given the physical environment and the laws of technology. Social emancipation is conceived on the model of the personal emancipation achieved through psychoanalysis. In one case

as in the other reason brings freedom by unmasking nonfunctional restrictions on impulse, and by organizing functional ones. But what are the impulses, the Antrieben? They are psychological forces imagined on the model of Newtons physical impulses. That is the usual way to read Antrieben, given our cultural coding. Hence we are led to, or at least not led away from, a discipline vs. impulse way of thinking that is all too natural for people in our society. The New Left becomes the party of what its conservative opponents pejoratively but correctly label permissiveness, i.e. more impulse, less discipline. There is no way out of the discipline vs. impulse way of seeing the problem (a way of seeing the problem that can only lead to bad solutions of it) without getting out of Kants articulation of morality as the Bedingung imposed on the Privatabsicht. And in spite of the protests of the New Left against the technocracy, their recognition of a sphere of Privatabsicht governed by laws analogous to Newtons (they call it the sphere of instrumental rationality) leads to entrusting the achievement of social purposes to a technocratic bureaucracy. It could not lead anywhere else on a Kantian view, since human inclinations are part of nature, which is governed throughout by laws, and which can therefore be understood and manipulated by those who have discovered and studied the relevant laws. Kant and Habermas view themselves as liberators because they stress that not everything in human nature is governed by laws, since there is pure reason too (or, in Habermas, communication and emancipatory reason), which makes it too easy to overlook the crucial concession, which is that almost everything is. In practice, society is run by economists, the experts on the study of behavior organized by Privatabsicht, while the critical theorists of the New Left are the loyal opposition, loyal because they criticize modern society from within its own 18th century worldview. Kant may have been innocent of the conscious intention of ratifying the separation of economics and morals, but it is hard to believe he did not intend the first sentence of the first section of the Foundations of the Metaphysics Of Morals as a salvo against Aristotle. Nothing in the world... can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will, wrote Kant. The good is that toward which all things aim, Aristotle had said, and that toward which all things aim was eudaimonia, happiness, or blessedness, or being well (eu) in spirit (daimon). Now if it be granted that ethics is about the good, then it is evident that 235 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II morals (Im using ethics and morals as synonyms) is on Aristotles principles about the whole human project of satisfying needs and achieving aspirations, while for Kant ethics is only about the condition for having a good will, which is to act aus Pflicht, which is to act from reine Achtung, which is only relevant to certain situations, and which only happens some of the time, if indeed action from respect for pure reason is not, as Hume was led to declare, something that never happens at all, so that Kants beloved rational Pflicht would have to be considered at most as a formal ideal which we are in some sense commanded to obey while in material fact we can never obey it because in our every act we remain prisoners of the flesh. Kant begins the second part of the Foundations of the Metaphysics Of Morals by insisting at considerable length that Pflicht (duty) is not an Erfahrungsbergriff (a concept based on experience). It is so far from being a concept based on experience that it is doubtful whether anyone has ever observed single instance of a person acting from duty; it is indeed more than doubtful, since to act from duty is to have the moral worth stemming from pure obedience to *S the strict commands of Pflicht, and since the command to be obeyed is an inner principle and since the obedience required is an inner obedience. Whether or not a person is acting from duty is invisible to an observer.

Kant is happy with the conclusion that Pflicht must be wholly inner and formal, because if there were anything material about Pflicht it would lack purity, certainty, and universality. (For Kant the material, the based-on-experience, and the nature-subject-to-Newtonian-sorts-of-mechanical-typelaws are three names for the same thing.) Nevertheless, a problem arises: to do ones duty, one must act from the pure motive of obeying formal law, but humans appear to be part of nature, and the human will appears to be like the rest of nature, hence the will appears to be governed by/the mechanical law of cause and effect. However much Kant insists that action from duty is rare and unobservable, he must still dispute with Hume; he must find a way to say it is possible to act aus Pflicht; otherwise the common human reason which says humans are commanded to act aus Pflicht would make no sense. As Kant puts the problem: the formal must be practical. The problem is of course not just Kants personal problem. It is a reflection of contradictory elements in his societys ideology. Since the guiding symbolic structures of the emerging economic society came from diverse sources some of them arising from technology, others from law, religion or some other source theres no reason to expect them to harmonize with each other. And the problems cultures run into when they try to organize human action using symbolic structures which contradict each other are the reasons why philosophers are needed in the first place. It is at this point that Kant makes his master stroke. Ein jedes Ding der Natur wirkt nach Gesetzen. Nur ein Vernunftiges Wesen hat das Vermogen nach der Vorstellung der Gesetze, d.i, nach Prinzipien zu handeln, oder einen Willen. (Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being has the capacity to conduct himself according to the conception of laws, i.e. according to principles, i.e. has a will.) The relationship between working according to the laws of cause and effect (nach Gesetzen) and working according to the conception of laws (nach Prinzipien) is the key to Kants contribution to the ideological coherence of economic society. a) The scientific worldview which organizes the guiding ideas of the cultures technology is ratified because ein jedes Ding der Natur wirkt nach Gesetzen. b) The democratic tendencies of the reformation and of the revolts against the feudal nobility are endorsed because any vernunftiges Wesen (rational being) has a special capacity to act from principle. c) The sensuously rich subjectivity of the individual, which had been threatened with demotion to the status of illusion or at best the status of a third-rate reality by 236 Letter 29 philosophers like Hobbes and the French materialists who conceived reality as mechanical forces working according to Galilean-Newtonian laws, is rescued as follows: Kant shows that any conception of things following laws of nature presupposes a subject to stell it vor, to conceive it. Kant thus drives a wedge of subjectivity into the armor of vulgar materialism, through which droves of 19th and 20th century philosophers, theologians, and artists have pressed their attacks. d) Regression to the traditional worlds composed of personal relationships which would have stunted (and indeed in many parts of the world still today does stunt) the growth of the impersonal market relationships of capitalism is avoided because man owes obedience to Prinzipien, not to divinities, kings, masters, or persons of any kind. (Kant is careful to add when he says we must respect persons that we must respect them as instances of principles.) e) The principles every rational being is morally obliged to obey are only those which are

implicit in the Vorstellung der Gesetze. Strictly speaking, there is only one such principle, of which all the others are reformulations, applications, or derivatives. It is: Act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should be a universal law. The anti-value of freedom is preserved, since no matter how the one principle is interpreted it will not yield the detailed norms and ideals governing and inspiring every aspect of life which many cultures (such as, for example, Confucian China and the European middle ages) have sought to achieve. The moral rules will be strict but few. f) The axe of science, which was being successfully used by sectors of the rising bourgeoisie to demolish by ridicule the religious ideologies of the aristocrats who claimed to rule by divine right and those of the enthusiastic worker and peasant rebels who claimed to have a divine right to share the wealth, is prevented from demolishing social order altogether. The moral imperatives implicit in the Vorstellung der Gesetze are perfectly consistent with Natur, indeed they are presupposed by Natur, since Natur is a system of Gesetze, and they are sufficient to legitimate the requirements of order. g) The Vorstellung der Gesetze (conception of laws) distinguishes human society from nature, because society is constructed by vernunftigen Wesen who follow Prinzipien (i.e. the Vorstellung) while nature is governed by plain old (laws ). Newtonian Gesetze (laws). At the same time, the way is opened to conceive society in terms of mechanical metaphors, since the capacity for Vorstellung which sets humans apart from nature is after all a capacity for Vorstellung der Gesetze; nature is thus the model, and human laws are analogies to it the notion of Prinzipien is derived from the notion of Gesetze by the transformation laws undergo when the perspective is shifted to the point of view of the rational subject who is doing the conceiving of the laws. But the form is still mechanical; hence institutions are conceived as having laws analogous to natural laws, such as the basic laws protecting property and forbidding crime (discussed by Kant in other books under the heading of metaphysical elements of justice). By further extension the habit of thinking of social laws as quasi-mechanical entities makes it seem natural to talk of the law of supply and demand, the balance of power, checks and balances in constitutional systems, pressure groups in politics these latter are not specifically Kantian ideas, but they are ideas which come naturally to the modern frame of mind to which Kant added legitimacy, from the materialist juggernaut. Kant thus rescues from the materialist juggernaut the Aristotelian notion of praxis (i.e. Or humans acting kata logon, according to the word, after deliberation) but it is only a partial rescue, since the capacity to act from Vorstellung is qualified by calling it Vorstellung der Gesetze. 237 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II h) We get from Kant a definition of person. A person is a rational will. And a definition! of will: will is nothing else than practical reason, which in turn is nothing else than the! capacity to act nach der Vorstellung der Gesetze. The ancient definitions of the human as homo sapiens, as the creature made in the image of God, as the heart of the universe (this third one is from China) are thus subtly reformulated. Now the human person is that which makes rational decisions and acts on them. i) It follows that persons should never be regarded merely as means to someone elses ends, because the person is by definition an end-chooser, a goal-decider, a purpose-haver (the word translated end is Zweck, which might also have been translated as goal or purpose), a selecting-of-ends reasoner, an end-maker. Making a person merely a Mittel

(means, instrument, tool) therefore violates what a person essentially is. It remains for Kant to give examples of practical maxims for conduct which can be derived from the Vorstellung der Gesetze Initially he gives four examples, one in each of four categories, and one of the examples is actually a repetition of the case he cited in the first section when the basic principle was pulled out (gezogen) from common rational knowledge of morals. The four categories are: (1) strict duties which must be obeyed, which we owe to ourselves, (2) strict duties which must be obeyed, which we owe to others, (3) meritorious duties, which it is praiseworthy but not absolutely necessary to obey, and which we owe to ourselves, and (4) meritorious duties which it is praiseworthy but not absolutely necessary to obey, which we owe to others. What I am most interested in is (2), strict duties to others. The example of strict duty is, moreover, the one which repeats and elaborates the case already considered in section one. It is as follows: 2. Another man finds himself forced by need to borrow money. He well knows that he will not be able to repay it, but he also sees that nothing will be loaned him if he does not firmly promise to repay it at a certain time. He desires to make such a promise, but he has enough conscience to ask himself whether it is not improper and opposed to duty to relieve his distress in such a way. Now, assuming he does decide to do so, the maxim of his action would be as follows: When I believe myself to be in need of money, I will borrow money and promise to repay it, although I know I shall never do so. Now this principle of self-love or of his own benefit may very well be compatible with his whole future welfare, but the question is whether it is right. He changes the pretension of self-love into a universal law and then puts the quotation: How would it be if my maxim became a universal law? He immediately see that it could never hold as a universal law of nature and be consistent with itself; rather it must necessarily contradict itself. For the universality of a law which says that anyone who believes himself to be in need could promise what he pleased with the intention of not fulfilling it would make the promise itself and the end to be accomplished by it impossible; no one would believe what was promised to him but would only laugh at any such assertion as vain pretense. Kant further develops the same example when he elaborates on the point that humanity should never be treated merely as means, as follows: Second, as concerns necessary or obligatory duties to others, he who intends a deceitful promise to others sees immediately that he intends to use another man merely as a means, without the latter containing the end in himself at the same time. For he whom I want to use for my own purposes by means of such a promise cannot 238 Letter29 possibly assent to my mode of acting against him and cannot contain the end of this action in himself. This conflict against the principle of other men is even clearer if we cite examples of attacks on their freedom and property. For then it is clear that he who transgresses the rights of men intends to make use of the persons of others merely as a means, without considering that, as rational beings, they must always be esteemed at the same time as ends, i.e., only as beings who must be able to contain in themselves the end of the very same action. Maria Luna is a busy person and in any case she permits herself pizza for breakfast only once a week. (The 2 p.m. meal is breakfast for her.) Consequently, it was not until a week after outlining the Critique of Pure Reason for her that I was able to present her with the preceding interpretations and comments concerning (mainly) the Foundations of the Metaphysics Of Morals. I concluded my

remarks by telling her that Kants work consists of several books full of German sentences, which taken all together bring into harmonious accord the main symbolic structures employed by advanced minds in late 18th century Europe. A person who accepts Kants philosophy can maintain moral rules as strict as those of Luther or Calvin, and accept laissez-faire principles of freedom and property, and be a liberty-loving law-loving democrat, and regard promise-keeping as in some sense the origin and basis of society, and see human rights and human dignity as sacred (beyond price), and believe in the worldview produced by generalizing the discoveries of 18th century physics all at once without contradicting herself. Maria had some criticisms to make. She regarded what I had said as unfair to Kant in some ways, as an exaggeration of his achievement in other ways, and in still other ways as a failure to notice what is most important about Kant. Rather than make her criticisms immediately, she preferred to check some sources first in the public library, where she sometimes reads books in the wee hours of the morning when she is through dancing at Star Place. Her friend the janitor lets her in to read books while he mops the floor. We agreed to meet at an orange mushroom a week later. Since I believed that her capacity to criticize my interpretation of Kant would be enhanced by acquaintance with its context, I provided her with two copies of letters 1 through 28, one for her and one for the janitor. 239 240 30 THE INTIMATE DINOSAUR Sometimes I have a mystical experience when I watch the infinite waves on the sea, stretching forever and ever beyond the farthest horizon, or when I watch the cars going by on Chester Boulevard, more cars than I can count going back and forth forever and ever carrying people I dont know, who are all going some place or other, God knows where. I was having one at Century Center watching the passing people in the corridor, an endlessly self-renewing stream of fellow creatures, living lives somehow like mine, and yet somehow beyond my comprehension, when Maria arrived and sat down next to me on a brown plastic toadstool beside an orange mushroom. She was stunning in a recently laundered white sweater. The soft background music was oldfashioned big band swing. I was pleased by the low price of the pizza and by her willingness to talk to me at no charge except for me paying for her breakfast. However I was not pleased by what she said. She said she does not agree with my philosophy, she wanted to make it abundantly clear that she did not agree with my philosophy. Nevertheless, she has enough faith in the philosophical process of interchange of ideas and critical discussion that she wants to see all ideas, even the worst ones, even mine, presented clearly and effectively so they will be considered and discussed. She said she was dismayed to see how badly I presented my ideas. She said I had presented my philosophy in a form everyone would reject and no one would take seriously. Who, for example, is going to listen to someone who calls freedom an anti-value? It is acceptable to come out in favor of world peace or some other impeccably worthy goal, and if you should write a pamphlet on how to prevent world War III, you could probably succeed in getting a dozen people to read it in a city of 100,000, and if you took a door-to-door census in the same city asking the citizens whether they are upset that more than half the worlds population is malnourished you would get a respectable number who would agree with you that it is a problem and something should be done. When you move beyond endorsing worthy aims and start assigning blame to the people whose behavior is the cause

of the problem then you lose respectability and make enemies, but at least you have a chance to become famous because when a person makes a controversial, combative accusation then the public likes to read about it and to see it on TV. But when you start criticizing freedom nobody will listen to you, nobody at all. It is as if you tried to talk to a dinosaur, who had noticed that the days were tending to get cooler, some warmer, some cooler, but on the whole tending toward the cool side, and the dinosaur had noticed that on some days it was hard to find enough food, some days not so bad, some days hungry, but on the whole the food supply tending toward the scarce side, and you tried to tell the dinosaur that something in the basic code governing the growth of its physical structure made it a creature headed toward extinction. The dinosaur would say to you, I dont like your attitude, and that would be the extent of its interest in your opinions. Dont think you will get any farther when you criticize the central themes of contemporary cultural coding, and dont expect, in particular, any sympathy from the Communists; remember that they consider themselves the advocates of freedom and they consider Americans to be unfree. Frei Deutsche Jungen (Free German Youth) is the name of the Communist youth movement in Germany, not the name of a pro-American movement. Cuba calls itself territorio libre de America, the free 241 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II territory of the Americas. Dont expect help from Catholics; it is enough to remember that a leading Roman Catholic treatise on moral theology is called Free and Faithful in Christ. The rightwing dictators of the third world will not help you either; it will be fruitless to apply for asylum in Paraguay or Chile when you are driven out of everyplace else; the word freedom is never far from the lips of General Stroessner and General Pinochet. They regard themselves! as heroes of the Free World. Habermas is smarter than you are. He calls his proposed new rationality a logic of emancipation, of freedom for all. According to Habermas the goal of social emancipation and emancipatory rationality is communication free of domination and a general and unforced consensus. (J. Habermas, Toward A Rational Society, London: Heinemann, 1971) He makes his task easier, as you would too if you were not perverse, so that instead of asking people to question freedom, all he needs to do is to persuade people that what he calls domination (the opposite of freedom) really is domination even though some people call it freedom, and that what he calls freedom is real freedom or true freedom or positive freedom as distinct from the unreal, false, and negative notions which some people mistakenly call freedom. You, on the other hand, propose a critique of modern ideals in a form nobody will consider, and if you persist you will be put in jail, in any country in the world, and there you will learn the value of freedom by bitter experience, because you will have lost it, and there you will regret having called freedom an anti-value. I noticed a young man wearing cowboy boots walk by smoking a cigarette. He seemed to be looking for a Great Pleasure. I also noticed the passage of a dolly loaded high with cardboard cartons full of shoes. She said my offbeat sense of humor did not appeal to her, and in any case a comical style, by its very nature, is incompatible with philosophy, since philosophy in its very essence is a pursuit of answers to grave and elevated questions. Falstaff can play at philosophizing as Lears fool can play at being king, but Falstaff cannot be a philosopher any more than a clown can be a king. Philosophys social identity is inseparable from sermo gravis, the high style used to depict the acts and speech of important, significant, powerful, and noble people; philosophy cannot without ceasing to be itself employ sermo humilis, the low style used to depict the rabble, the grotesque, the marginal, the comic. I noticed a pretty woman three mushrooms away who was wearing heavy eye shadow. She touched

her knees now and then as she chattered, as if maybe she needed to pull down her skirt to cover them. Maria said I had further isolated myself from any possible audience by my disregard for the boundary between truth and fiction, since the reader wants facts, not confusion, and since on the whole philosophy prides itself, justifies itself, by its bimillenarian tradition of relentless pursuit of truth come what may. You tell us a story about your grandmother in Pasadena who talked to animals (Letter 7) and we are willing to believe you really had such a grandmother, but then the stories get stranger and stranger until the poppies are talking to you in a public park in Toronto (Letter 25) and sometimes you tell us things like when your mother conceived you in Spanish Fork, Utah, there was one nitrogen atom missing in each of two of her molecules which you could not possibly know even if it were true. You seem to think the human world is composed of imagination as much as it is composed of facts, and to think reality is best portrayed in moving images which come momentarily into focus and then fade into the context, and to think the philosophers task is demythologizing as much as remythologizing, and to prefer openly to compose stories, woven of strands of fact, strands of imagination, now that contemporary logical analysis has exposed the ruses philosophers used to employ as cement for their metaphysical constructions, and to see your own role not as that of a chercheur who tries to find a new truth to add to the accumulating mountains of knowledge stored in libraries, but as a participant in a conversation among persons, partly real persons, partly fictitious persons, 242 Letter 30 human nature being an identity constructed at the junction of reality and fiction, a conversation I in many voices through which the cultural code adapts to the ecosystem. My eyes could not avoid a chubby balding man with mustache and dark glasses, stirring I with a plastic spoon a coffee in a paper cup. She said I am afraid of freedom, a buffoon to the point of masochism, mystical, a game-player, repressed, out of touch with my feelings, rigid, ashamed of my body, not able to express anger, inappropriate in my responses because I dont acknowledge my emotions, limited in my capacity to relate to others sexually, inhibited, immature, incapable of sharing love because I dont love myself, and frightened of intimacy. She said Erich Fromm (a member of the Frankfurt School) demonstrated in his book Escape from Freedom that self-denying personalities like mine produced the mass support for National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s, while another book by the same Fromm of Frankfurt, The Sane Society, shows that self-affirming personalities like hers (Marias) are needed to produce the good socialist society of the future; and in still another book, The Dogma of Christ, the same author denounces the damage Jesus has done by providing a model of selfdenial. Theodor Adorno (another member of the Frankfurt School) and others show in The Authoritarian Personality how rigid personalities like mine, more concerned with enforcing social norms than with allowing individuals to express their autonomy, have political attitudes characteristic of the extreme right and the extreme left. She said people like me formed the cadres of Hitlers rightists and Stalins leftists. I do not take criticism well. When Maria finished I stood up and said to her, Perhaps we can discuss your criticisms of my interpretation of Kant some other time, and I walked out of the shopping center. 243 244

Letter 31 31 CERTAIN DIFFICULTIES OF ONE OF MANY ANONYMOUS PERSONS Concerning the Payment of his Rent, Together with Sundry Other Matters which may be Regarded Partly as Causes, Partly as Consequences, of Difficulties with Rents. After Maria Luna told me I had an authoritarian personality I decided to look into alcoholism. I called up Alcoholics Anonymous to find out the time and place of a meeting, explaining that although I was not an alcoholic at the present time I was considering becoming one, because I had had a kind grandmother, and now that I was becoming aware that people like her are the exceptions rather than the rule, I could not cope. Also I recently met a woman who damaged my selfconfidence. The meetings were held at the St. Francis of Assisi Hospital, next door to the church of the same name, in the basement of the section of the hospital devoted to treating alcohol and drug abuse. The contents of the elevator car, which had come down from a higher story, and in which I journeyed from the first floor to the basement, were, besides myself, two silent orderlies and a gray box of a size and shape suitable for holding a dead body, which was unnerving. The meeting was to be held in the last room on the left at the end of the hall. It was a plain staff room with greenish walls and ceiling, a dark green linoleum floor. Its contents were, besides myself, two coffee machines, one candy machine, four long tables arranged in a square, six ashtrays on the tables, and 36 chairs around the tables. While I was waiting for the meeting to begin, I thought about how to reply to Maria. Now Maria, I would say, this has all been a terrible misunderstanding. Believe me, I am not against freedom. I want to create the condition of its possibility: namely, a world where conflict is regulated by civilized norms. The point of calling freedom an anti-value is not to say freedom is bad. It is to call attention to a logical distinction between freedom and many other values. Instead of prescribing a pattern conduct is required to follow, freedom establishes a zone of autonomy where the free person makes her own decisions. There are other anti-values too; none of them are dishonorable. Forgiveness (which Hegel considered the most adequate ethic) is an anti-value insofar as it does not prescribe a pattern or ideal for conduct to follow. Forgiveness tells you that even though you failed to behave properly, you are still accepted. Rights is another honorable concept which frequently acts as an anti-value, as in the analysis of Benthams concept of rights provided by H.L.A. Hart where it is pointed out that a right often establishes a symbolic perimeter around an individual, so that within the perimeter the individual may do as he pleases. For example, if she has the property rights of an owner of a salad (to use N. Wesley Hohfelds example) she may eat the salad, give the salad away, throw it away, store it, ignore it, or liquefy it. Within wide limits she may do as she pleases with the salad and still be, as we say, within her rights, which is why it is illuminating to describe rights as establishing symbolic perimeters. The civilization of Sung dynasty China had fewer anti-values than ours and made better use of poetry. The mandarins were connoisseurs of fine images, painted and poetic, and their 245 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II moral expertise, their qualification for guiding the conduct of others, consisted in an exquisite capacity to discern the proper pattern to follow, for example in eating a salad, holding a chopstick, choosing which bean sprout to serve to whom and when. This is not to say that ancient Chinese civilization, governed by standards of good taste which filled in the details of the socially prescribed norms for conduct, was good, and that economic society, governed by laws of freedom,

is bad. The anti-value is just a peculiar sort of value, which happens to be especially prominent in the particular cultural structures we happen to inhabit... I went on and on in a similar vein talking to Maria in my imagination. I had come early since the meeting was in a part of town I do not habitually frequent, and I had anticipated delays due to false steps. No one else had arrived yet. Gradually I came to realize that I was not being fully honest with her. I was pretending to be a freedom-lover like everyone else, differing from everyone else only in proposing a slightly novel logical analysis of the concept. But actually I agreed with Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he said in a commencement address at Harvard that American civilization is defective because it encourages the idea that anything not illegal is permissible conduct an idea which is similar to Diderots 18th century definition of freedom in the Encyclopedia. Actually I think the Kantian dichotomy mechanical-laws-of-nature/laws-of-freedom is a source of our contemporary tendency to focus on the dichotomy oppressed/free, a tendency which hinders the creation of subtle (simultaneously tight and loose) cultural guidance systems. And since I think Kants unhelpful dichotomy is built into our institutions and thought, I actually think there is something amiss with the anti-value which inspires our institutions and fascinates our thought. Im sorry, Maria, I said to myself. Please let me start over. A trouble with Habermas, Marcuse, Fromm, and many other Frankfurters and non-Frankfurters, is that they mistakenly believe they can do moral jiu-jitsu by using economic societys own ideas against it, in order to transform it. They want to transform the structures of the modern world, but part of their method consists of appealing to an ideal of freedom that is an element of the structures so closely tied to the other elements (property, individualism, mechanical rationality, manipulation of nature...) that you cant change the other elements without changing freedom too, and, furthermore, as long as the ideal of freedom remains in place, certain automatic defense mechanisms (the structural traps) remain in place too, obstructing and bamboozling the project of transforming the modern world. Let me give you an example of the difficulty of trying to change the culture by using its own premises to criticize it without an ecological or broad anthropological frame of reference. John Rawls, a liberal professor of philosophy at Harvard, author of A Theory of Justice, takes his stand foursquare inside the frame of reference of the Anglo-American philosophy of the past few centuries and within contemporary Anglo-American culture. His criterion for distinguishing n good theory of justice from a bad theory of justice is this: if the theory states general principles which coincide with what we decide is just in particular cases, then the theory is a good one. He then advocates a theory which would require a considerable transfer of property from the rich to the poor, according to the principle that inequality in the possession of property is just only to the extent that the poor benefit from it. (Maria might wonder why the poor benefit from inequality at all. It is because total equality would hurt everybody, including the poor, since people would then be lazy and unproductive. Therefore, up to a point inequality helps even those who have least, and inequality up to that point, and not past it, is, according to Rawls, just.) A difficulty with Rawls theory is that one of his intellectual enemies, Robert Nozick, a conservative philosopher at the same university, is able to refute it. In his book Anarchy State and Utopia Nozick shows that Rawls principle does not coincide with what we decide is just in particular cases. He can show this because we live in a culture where freedom is the central value, and what we actually ask when we need to decide whether it is just that a certain person have certain property is whether she is entitled to it, that is: whether she bought it with her own money, or made it herself, or somebody gave it to her of his or her own free will. The anti-value 246

Letter 31 If freedom allows humans to act without following any particular socially prescribed pattern, and it is in conflict with any theory of justice which says we should follow some particular pattern in distributing property; and in particular it is in conflict with the principle which calls for enough inequality to benefit the poor and no more. Thus Rawls is refuted by his own criterion. (Another difficulty with Rawls is that he is taken in by irrational rationality. He takes over from the writings of some prominent economists a generalization which he and they suppose to be an established fact: that by increasing inequality you can increase the total production of goods and services, and thus have, as the economists say, a larger pie to slice. In taking over this principle Rawls does not clearly distinguish between (a) increased size of pie due to greater incentives to work, and (b) increased size of pie due to increased incentives to invest. The failure to make this distinction is consciousness-lowering insofar as it obscures the role of cultural structures in designating certain persons as property owners, who have the privilege of investing or not investing, while others, lacking wealth, have only the choice of working or not working.) Furthermore, I went on, talking to an invisible audience, at this point in human history, when we are becoming aware that the word freedom is an adorable but neurotic hunk (or, if you prefer to use a feminine image here, a beautiful but complicated woman) in whose irresistible arms one can easily become so entangled that one cannot function properly, we should also reexamine the charms of the word person. The discriminating awareness of the subtleties of the word freedom, which humans in general and readers of this book in particular are acquiring, empowers us to resist seduction by person also, or by the individual, which is a two-word phrase sometimes used as a synonym for the word person. We must ask our dear friends Martin Luther King Jr., the Polish philosopher Karyl Wojtyla (who subsequently became Pope John Paul II), Emmanuel Mounier, et al., just exactly what they mean by calling themselves personalists and making the word person the centerpiece of their philosophies. Insofar as they mean, as King put it, that every person needs to feel loved, that a person who does not feel loved does not feel that she or he is really a person, the personalists are talking true poetry, poetry whose truth is confirmed, for example, by the best research on the needs of children, such as that of Mary Ainsworth. If the personalists mean to propose as a goal meeting all the needs of persons, for love, for food, for security, for clean drinking water, pure air, recreation, medical attention, dental services, heat, shelter, clothing... then they propose a natural goal a goal which can only be reached through more solidarity and intelligence than nature provides without the special subsystem of nature known as culture, but a natural goal nonetheless. If the personalists mean that in a cold, lifeless, dreary, uncommunicative, somewhat mechanically determined universe, the acting human person introduces elements of warmth, life, joy, communication, and choice, then they are surely correct from a human point of view, although if forests and lakes could talk they would just as surely darken the picture by making the complaint that acting human persons have, on the whole, done forests and lakes more harm than good. If personalists mean that persons deserve respect not only as beings-whose-needs-should-be-met but also as active agents who can participate with others in gathering information, analyzing problems, making choices, setting goals, implementing plans, and evaluating the work done, then King and other personalists are stewards of the sunny side of the Kantian legacy, the side which makes it a sacred duty to regard humanity as end-choosing and never as a means only. If personalists mean that rocks and trees are persons, or that the twinkling of the stars expresses the benevolence of the Great Mother in the sky, or that in some mysterious way, deep calling to deep, the idea of person expresses the essence of all-that-is, so that our human journey is accompanied by what King calls a loving presence, then personalists are

speculating about topics which, as Kant has shown, must remain forever beyond the reach of human understanding, although anyone who has studied the chemistry of human cells will recognize at once that the proposition, Nature, like a loving 247 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II parent, takes care of us in ways of which we are not aware, is more true than false. If, on the other hand, person means, as Kant said it meant, a rational will, and if rational means, as Kant said, able to act from the conception of laws, and if it is presupposed as it is in Kant and was generally among the philosophers who articulated the laws and morals of economic society, that usually human action consists of rational homo economicus pursuing private interests (the sovereign consumer), and the rest of the time human action consists of honest obedience to the basic moral and legal rules that govern a market economy (the businessman with integrity), then by endorsing person one has implicitly endorsed the rationality of economic society. Person brings with it the rest of the legal semantic field where person classically functions, as in such phrases as the law permits all persons to own property, a corporation, because the law regards it as a person, may own property, a contract is a meeting of minds between two persons... and the result is to endorse capitalism. Martin Luther King Jr. did not mean to endorse capitalism; in fact King said he was a socialist. King came to what he called personalism for reasons unrelated to the use of person in cementing the legal foundations of laissez-faire. As a divinity student King was troubled by excessively austere interpretations of Christian agape as unconditional love. King could not live with theologies which maintained, in effect, The human race is a vile and worthless lot, but we must love it anyway, each and every disgusting and reprehensible one, because God, for reasons known to Himself alone, has commanded us to love it. Partly because of such theologies, which consider humanity intrinsically worthless, King opted for personalism in order to emphasize that each person does have intrinsic worth, each person is someone valuable; service to our sisters and brothers appreciates the good that is in each person. Although it is on the whole not the intention of King, Wojtyla, Mounier etc. to endorse the status quo, the words they must use, freedom, person, dignity, the individual, rights, justice... are part of the status quo. We must use the same words; they are economic societys moral vocabulary; they are our moral vocabulary, because we are living in economic society even as we seek to transform and improve it. Scarred by history, twisted by lies, they are our heritage, our Kantian heritage; they are still the bearers of our hopes as they speak through us, carrying in our voices Kants messages in Kants code. There was still nobody in the room. I had arrived quite early. When someone did come it was a nurse who wanted to get some coffee. The machine rejected her coin. I offered her one of my quarters, but she turned my quarter down. Her mother must have told her not to accept gifts from strangers. She left and I thought Maria might understand my point better if I used Ronald Reagan as an example. I would say to her, Look at it this way, Maria. Suppose you are running for President against Ronald Reagan. You know he is a better actor than you are, he has more money, and more TV exposure. You believe, however, that justice is on your side, that it is you who understand the needs and rights of persons, and you believe that since all of the key terms of morals work together as a coherent cultural structure, Reagan has opened himself up for attack by endorsing the moral ideal of freedom. Your plan for defeating him is to use moral jiu-jitsu, to throw him with his own ideal. You will claim that your philosophy of social transformation represents true freedom while Ronald Reagan is merely an impostor, who offers ersatz freedom

instead of the real thing. Unfortunately, however, your claim is not true. It is Reagan who stands for true freedom as it is classically understood in the mainstream thinking of the USA, and it is you who are the impostor. The USA happens to be the one major nation founded in the 18th century, and 18th century ideals happen to be Americanism. Since you know you are going to be out-acted, outspent, and out-imaged, you should not add to your political handicap by taking a stand that sounds fishy and is intellectually indefensible. Your approach to the word freedom and to your electoral opponent will have to be more complex. Finally a group of Gods children arrived for the meeting. I noticed that some of them were talking to themselves, just like me. I knew who had shattered my self-confidence, and I wondered who had shattered theirs. On the other hand, it did not seem fair for me to criticize 248 Letter 31 Habermas emancipatory rationality as a misguided attempt to do moral jiu-jitsu when I myself advocate cultural action, which calls for taking as points of departure themes which already exist in the culture which needs to be transformed, and freedom is certainly a theme which exists in our culture. If I were consistent with my own method I would, moreover, take a cultural activist approach to my dialogue with Maria, using as points of departure themes which exist in her culture. I would say, Hey Maria, I know reevaluation counseling, peer therapy, and the womens support group have done wonders for your life. They empowered you to accept being a free and responsible person, OK? They gave you faith in yourself, helped you wake up to reality, showed you how to get beyond the game-playing stage in relationships, made you feel comfortable acknowledging and owning hostile and dangerous thoughts you previously concealed from yourself as well as from others, got you in touch with your feelings, increased your ability to adjust to new situations and decreased your demand to be always in control, made you proud of your body, able to express anger, appropriate in your responses, warm, expressive, mature, able to share love because you love yourself, ready for intimacy. But Maria, please Maria, do not leap to the conclusion that the model of human nature, the model of good (= healthy) conduct and bad (= sick) conduct which serves you well in your personal experience is ne-ces-sa-ri-ly the model most adequate for preventing World War III, ending inflation and unemployment and crime, and keeping the ecosystem alive. It is not ne-ces-sa-ri-ly true that if everyone had a personality like yours homo sapiens would be on its way to becoming a viable species, since, after all, as Jerome Frank has shown in Persuasion and Healing, therapists in economic society perform the same function exorcists perform in more primitive societies, namely reintegrating the isolated individual into the group which in our culture is a bit paradoxical because the norm of our group is to be autonomous. If mental health means integration into the way of life of a people, and if the way of life of the people in question is programmed to self-destruct, then mental health can be like a copacetic toaster on a sinking submarine. You must realize, Maria, that since everything else in our culture economics, law, military, philosophy, science, religion, etc. fits together in a structure whose elements support each other, then our ideal of mental health must be another element of the same set of symbolic structures, and the norm for mental health will also have to be transformed in the process of the general transformation of the structures of the modern world. Adornos book The Authoritarian Personality is evidence for these propositions, for Adorno and his co-authors skillfully weave together psychological and political ideals, with much quantitative fanfare of rigorous method, in a way which makes the Kantian ethic of autonomy the ideal for both psychology and polities. The autonomous person is the ideal of mental health. Autonomy and respect for the autonomy of others are the criteria for legitimate (= non-authoritarian) politics.

Since Adorno considers himself a socialist he cannot without shame draw attention to the parallel principle for economics; it is consumer sovereignty. Consider a person who believes our culture would-benefit from a more subtle, nuanced, and qualified employment of the ideal of autonomy, and who believes that the-fact-that-most-peoplecant-think-of-any-alternative-to-autonomy-except-mechanical-force-e.g.-scriptural-prohibitionpunished-by-hellfire-e.g.-the-government-passing-a-law-and-compelling-people-to-obey-it shows we have not moved beyond Kant however much we may think we have moved beyond Marx and Freud. Such a person will not respond enthusiastically when told that self-affirmation is the answer. The person will be reminded when he hears the phrase self-affirmation of parents telling their little lad, Go out there and fight that boy! You can win! And Go in there and ace that mathematics test! You can do it! And Go up there on that stage and sing that song and wow the audience! You have talent! The person will be reminded of such pep talks because for most people in our culture self-affirmation means believing you can be a winner, and all the other parents are telling their little kids to go out there and be winners too, and for every child who is above average there must (for mathematical reasons) be a child who is below average. It is like the religious movements called triumphalist which forget the sisterly 249 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II concern for the strength of the weak expressed in the Bible by the words, Our sister has no breasts; what shall we do for her on her wedding day? (Song of Solomon 8:8) and instead teach that whosoever believes in Jesus will be made by Jesus into the most successful used car dealer in Natchez, Mississippi, and God will drive the competition into bankruptcy for His people Israel. Excuse me, Maria, I know I am forgetting to whom I am talking, because I know you are one of our secular sisters who prefers to refrain from personal relationships with divine spirits, to remain mentally chaste so to speak, and I know you do not relate to theological controversies about triumphalism, or about anything. What I am trying to say is that secular movements like humanistic psychology and feminism run the same risk religious movements run of confusing personal salvation with social salvation. What makes you feel good and lifts you up and increases your chances of being a winner may be confused with what will stop the war, and you may fail to understand how the competition of capitals crushes the gentle philosophies. What I am trying to say is that the phrase self-affirmation is likely to be misleading and it would be better to advocate instead the unconditional affirmation of solidarity, the affirmation of the first-person-plural-future, the affirmation of the worth of everyone, whatever their talents and gifts, or lack of talents and gifts, even if their only talent is to need help and their only gift is to be able to give someone else an opportunity to be a helper. A doubt seized me concerning whether Maria would consider the things I was planning to say to her to be relevant replies to her attack on my personality, and in order to release myself from the doubt I tried to detect clues to her opinions in her facial expressions, which brought it to my attention that she was not there, which brought it to my attention that the meeting had already started and I had missed the first part of it by daydreaming. Somebody was talking in sermo humilis. It was one of the members telling the story of his life. At the moment when I emerged from my thoughts he was telling the story of his first big drunk. The proximate cause of the drinking bout was that when he tried to rent a room in a new town, the landlady wanted two months rent in advance, which came to $500. I would have thought he could have found a less expensive room, but apparently the incident occurred in a small northern town near a construction site where he had gone to work, and rents were high because other people were moving into the

same town for the same reason. Although he had been told to expect to make big money, it turned out that he was going to make only $160 a week and he had not started work yet and he had only a little over $100 when he arrived. He said he had never had $500 in his entire life. When he is not working he gets $57 a week on welfare and his room is $120 a month. Once when he did not pay his rent the landlady locked him out of his room with his clothes still in the room. The landlady said he could keep food in her refrigerator, and then she threw his food out of the refrigerator, and he moved out and went to get his rent back and she slammed the door in his face. Apparently he was talking about several different landladies in several different towns. He said he expected to die young and to be a beautiful cadaver. The alcoholics story about his rent difficulties gave me an idea. I would establish the context for my reply to Maria by telling Maria a similar story. The next day I went to the shopping mall to look for Maria and to line up a rendezvous. I found Maria lifting weights in the health spa. One of Marias girlfriends is an instructor at the spa, and she lets Maria in free. Maria teaches her shiatsu massage. Its not a trade, just a friendly arrangement. Maria and I agreed to meet in 8 days for a philosophical discussion at 3 p.m. at the restaurant in the indoor garden. 250 Letter 32 32 WOMANPOWER Maria repeated her opinion that my interpretation of Kant treated him unfairly in a way, exaggerated his achievement in another way, and missed the most important point. My interpretation treated Kant unfairly because it portrayed him as an advocate of the modern freedom ethic without mentioning that the traditional love ethic is also part of Kants thought. Benevolence (i.e. charity) in helping those in need is a duty for Kant, although admittedly only a meritorious duty, not a strict duty Moreover, Kant sometimes seems aware that property is a social institution and not a natural fact, as in this passage from Tugendlehre: The ability to practice benevolence, which depends on property, follows largely from the injustice of the government, which favours certain men and so introduces an inequality of wealth that makes others need help. This being the case, does the rich mans help to the needy, on which he so readily prides himself, really deserve to be called benevolence at all? (tr. Mary J. Gregor, The Doctrine of Virtue, p. 122, Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1964) I replied to Maria that for Kant strict property rights are firmly in place, however much those who hold them are admonished to be kind and not to be proud. I quoted a passage from Perpetual Peace: ...philanthropy and respect for the rights of man, both are duty. The former is a conditioned duty, while the latter is an unconditional and mandatory duty. One who wishes to give himself up to the sweet feeling of benevolence must make sure that he has not transgressed this absolute duty. (Bobbs-Merrill ed. p. 52) The distinction between strict and meritorious duties (respecting property rights being strict and charity being meritorious) is not original with Kant. It is part of the common sense of his and the following age of European culture, and the role of the philosopher was not so much to persuade people to believe in such a distinction since almost everyone already believed in it anyway as to construct a neat rationale for it which integrated it with the rest of the culture. Different

philosophers provided different rationales for it, but Kants is by far the most ingenious. According to Kant, moral action proceeds from the form of law: act on that maxim which you can at the same time will to be a universal law. Now there are two ways a maxim can fail this test. (1) The law you try to will may be one you cannot imagine as universal. (2) The law you try to will may be one you can imagine as universal, but one you are unable to will. Examples: a maxim permitting violation of a property rights cannot be a universal law because such a law cannot be imagined as universal; property rights would not exist at all if there 251 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II were at the same time a universal law permitting their violation. Example 2: a world where the universal law is that people do not help each other is imaginable, but nobody could will such a world, since no one would want to live there. Generalization: strict duties are distinguished from meritorious duties because universal laws violating strict duties cannot even be imagined, while those violating meritorious duties can be imagined but not willed. Ingenious, no? Maria said romanticism, which she broadly defined as the admiration or adoration of feelings, was part of 18th century culture and is part of ours. She said my interpretation exaggerates Kants achievement because in saying Kant found a way to unite the differing elements of the modern worldview my interpretation overlooks a certain flaw: Kants system a is essentially hostile to feelings. Those who cannot think except help from feelings, says Kant. So Kant does not and cannot include romanticism in his synthesis. J. W. von Goethe was never impressed by Kant; he found Kant arid and dry, as indeed he is. Kant regarded himself, I commented, as a disciple of the great romantic J.-J. Rousseau, and he kept a portrait of Rousseau in his room. Rousseau claimed that man finds his own ethical standards within himself provided by nature, which Kant says too, although not quite in the same way. Rousseaus followers have returned the favor by regarding themselves as disciples of Kant, or at least as followers of Kants precepts. Kant says the human person determines its own ends; thus autonomy is the highest principle of morals. To be autonomous and to respect the autonomy of others is to respect the essence of what a person is. A person is an end-determiner. Kant says der Mensch muss als Zweck an sich selbst betrachtet werden (Man must be treated as an end in himself.). If you ask Kant why a person is always an end in itself, always to be regarded as autonomous, never to be treated as means only, Kant will say it is because a person is a rational nature. But the romantically inclined sometimes erroneously assuming themselves to be followers of Kant, other times enthusiastically echoing his precepts without knowing their source or context endorse an ethic of autonomy which implicitly regards the human person as a feeling nature. I have done a little experiment with a small sample of contemporary people, and I find that when they read Kants beautiful sentence, Treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end, and never as means only, people take the phrase to call for respecting other peoples feelings and to validate the belief that everyones feelings have worth. Something similar proves to be true of Kant principle that whereas things that can be bought and sold in the market have prices, a human person has something higher than any price, namely dignity. Kant considered human dignity to be conferred by rational nature; dignity is a consequence of being an entity capable of acting from the conception of law. We modern romantics think humans have dignity and deserve respect because they have hearts and souls. Kant has helped us to create a coherent modern culture where the feelings as well as the rationality of each individual are regarded as sacred. In this respect romanticism fits well, with Kants legacy, and the portrait of Rousseau on the wall of Kants room has proven to be prophetic.

Maria then told me I had missed the main point. Kant comes off in my account, she said, as the quintessential bourgeois thinker, but, as my own analysis shows, he should be regarded as the quintessential male thinker. His emphasis on purity and reason simply carries to an extreme the ideology of male supremacy, since the feminine is the archetypically impure (because women menstruate) and the archetypically irrational (because woman is the sex object). My missing of the main point is important, Maria said, because if one picks Kant as ones example of a philosopher who welds into a coherent pattern the leading themes of modern society, then what one notices about Kant is what one notices about modern society. Your methods for social transformation ignore the roots of our problems because what you notice 252 Letter 32 about our society is its economics. Male economics is just one of the consequences of patriarchy at every level of society, and the most profound and basic level is psychic. All behavior is psychological by definition, she said, Since psychology is defined as the study of behavior, so we want to get at the fundamental causes of our military, economic, and environmental problems (all or which are caused by human behavior) we must look at psychology, and it specifically at male psychology, exemplified in Kant, which is the dominant kind, and female psychology, which is the alternative kind, the hope for the future. The psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote a study called In a Different Voice which shows that males tend to find safety in separation and individuality, and to fear dependence and connectedness. The women in Gilligans study placed a higher value on relationships, feeling danger in situations implying separation. The female thought-form, Maria continued, sees the interconnectedness of the whole rather than the separation of its parts; it accepts passion and emotion as intertwined with intellect. Only a male like Kant would take seriously the notion that the highest principle of ethics is the autonomy of the will; women have always known that goodness is interconnectedness. Maria said feminine thinking is needed for survival, as Joanna Macy argues in Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age and as Helen Caldicott says in Womanpower. Men seek to keep peace by building barriers to keep others out; this separation is maintained internationally by using threats to establish fear in the enemy. A consequence of seeking peace through separation and barriers is an accelerating arms race. The alternative to Kant is a feminist based mind set, based not on powerover but on power-with, tapping, as Caldicott says, That mother energy that enables us to nurture and care and feel one with life.... (Womanpower, p. 18) I tried to decide whether the table top was white marble or imitation white marble. The wall behind the indoor garden was tiled with mirrors which reflected the white play of lights in the spray of fountains, the green play of shadows in the foliage of trees, the red play of flowers swinging on vines from hanging pots It seemed important to me to make some sort of reply to Maria. I did not want to have sex with her, whatever she might think, but nevertheless I did not want her to regard me as a fool. I was perhaps too much impressed by her; I found her way of life too attractive, or perhaps I found her too attractive, and I was tempted to change my life to make it more like hers, or to change my life to win her approval. I was not convinced that my approach to Kant was misleading, but I was afraid that everything I was saying to her was only confirming her belief that I was the dupe of the oppressors, or else an oppressor myself. It seemed that every time I tried to explain my thoughts to her she heard what I was saying as the voice of a mind of a certain psychological type, as a typical this or that. Now I am a typical male. I misread Kant because of my gender. Perhaps I could make

her stop psychologizing everything I say if I could persuade her to take economics seriously. Yes, that is the problem with our relationship. I read Kant as justifying a certain kind of economics. She reads him as justifying a necrophilic psychology. Suppose, I said to Maria, that you are just an ordinary sort of person, living in some ordinary sort of country, about average in wealth, about average in other ways too, so that you are about averagely miserable when compared to the mean, mode, and median persons on this planet. Now suppose you and several million of your fellow citizens undertake to gain more; control of your lives and to put more bread on your tables. This is not an unlikely supposition. It is the sort of thing that really happens. To gain control of your lives what you must do first of all is to gain control of the use of property of the farms, mines, and factories functioning in your country in order to cause them to function in a way that serves your needs and those of your fellow citizens. At this point you have your first collision with Kant since respect for property rights is a strict duty. (Kant even promotes absentee ownership to the status of rational property while the property of the farmer who works his own land is merely 253 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II empirical property.) and according to Kantian principles putting bread on tables is no excuse for tampering with the Vorstellung der Gesetze. The next thing you need to do is reduce and reschedule debts, particularly debts of small farmers and the international debt. This is your second collision with Kant, for payment of debts is a strict duty, and even if fewer people would starve if certain debts were canceled, respecting the rights of creditors is a mandatory duty according to reine Vernunft. Yet to come is your third and greatest collision with Kant, or, to be more exact, with the whole set of modern institutions for which Kant provided legitimating principles more ingenious and more influential than those of any other philosopher. The third collision is slightly complex and it will take a few sentences to explain. The scenario in question will be familiar to anyone who has followed the destinies of reformist and revolutionary governments. The scenario is: inflation, unemployment, capital flight, hoarding, shortages of consumer goods, shortages of producer goods, shortages of spare parts, closed factories, unplanted fields. In two words: production stagnates. There is an unceasing ideological battle over how to interpret these facts. Every day there are articles in the bourgeois press saying press implying, The facts show that socialism does not work. The leftist press says, The facts show that the bourgeoisie is sabotaging the revolution. With all this background I have given in order to sketch an ideal-type of an historical pattern common in our century, you may be surprised, Maria, to learn that the point I want to make is a bit of a logical technicality To lead up to the point suppose we ask the question what the government can do to stop the stagnation of production. In general we can answer this question by saying that the government can issue decrees specifying certain things people must I do and make laws specifying certain things people must not do. Now let us ask what the millions of people can do who are not in the government, the people who are selling rice on street-corners, fixing trucks in garages, unloading boxes from ships onto docks.... The answer is that they are free to do anything at all except what the law forbids, provided they comply with the decrees specifying things they are commanded to do. The normal social expectation in economic society is that they will do what is in their self-interest. You seem to mean, said Maria, that the creativity of individuals pursuing their self-interest can always outwit a government which relies on decrees and laws to accomplish its objectives. Dont you see? I exclaimed. The anti-value of freedom means it is practically impossible to stop inflation, unemployment, capital flight, shortages of spare parts, and so on, because the

government acts only by decrees and laws, while the millions of free individuals it is trying to govern invent new and myriad types of conduct hourly, which serve their own individual interests, and evade and befuddle any plan for channeling production and distribution toward meeting human needs. Social change requires, therefore, a new culture; it requires a shift in the values of the people, new collective habits, new images of human nature. What you are proving, said Maria, is that only feminine thinking can solve our economic problems. If our two options are male freedom (the separate male afraid of being in relationships of dependence) and male force (the dominant male who commands by decree and law) then trying to establish democratic control of the means of production in order to meet human needs will always be either unsuccessful or brutal, or both unsuccessful and brutal. I did not disagree with Marias point that social transformation must avoid the mechanistic extremes of total liberty or total compulsion. Third ways software, la douceur, communicating, the appeal to reason, cooperating to find inclusive solutions to problems, nonviolence, charm, education... etc. are my preferred transformational methods. My objection to Kant is, in a certain sense, the same as Marias, inasmuch as his philosophy gives us only two kinds of brick with which to build a society, namely: 254 Letter 32 1. FREEDOM, associated with pure reason, the a priori, the formal, the moral, the capacity of the rational being to represent the form of laws, the realm of ends, the person as rational will, the person as having dignity above all price, the person as end and never means only. 2. FORCE, associated with nature, the a posteriori, the material, inclinations, private purposes, the laws of Newton rewritten as metaphysical principles, the necessary principles of any possible science, the universal law of cause and effect. That Maria regards Kants limited vision as typically male does not seem wrong to me either. Certainly I do not deny the evidence coming from Carol Gilligan and others who find empirically that womens thinking is less Kantian than mens. I believe that women, on the whole and on the average, have the qualities the world needs more than men do. Nevertheless, I still had some objections to Marias attitude towards me, which I was reluctant to express for fear of hurting her feelings. Or perhaps I was afraid of my own anger. I tried to decide whether to be honest with her or to be nice. Finally I said to myself, What the heck? and dove in. You say I am afraid of freedom, but I prefer to say I am in favor of responsibility. You say I am a masochist, but! prefer to say that I know how to suffer. You object to me being mystical, but I say, What is life without mystery? Il y a des illusions plus prcieuses que la vie. You say I am a game-player, but I say authenticity is not a possible choice for humans. We can only choose which games to play and how to play them. You say I am repressed, but I say I am civilized. You say I am out of touch with my feelings, but actually my feelings and I are in frequent communication. You say I am rigid, but I am so flexible that I can see some truth in any viewpoint, even yours. You say I am ashamed of my body, but I have my own reasons for avoiding unnecessary physical display, and I prefer not to call them shame. You say I am not able to express anger, but I believe anger to be a highly overrated emotion, which does not do its practitioners nearly as much good as they suppose. You say I am inappropriate, but I say that since this society is corrupt, if I acted in the ways considered appropriate I would be contributing to its corrupt practices. You say I am limited in my capacity to relate to others sexually, but I say true love is best. You say I am inhibited; I say I am cautious. You say I am immature; I say I am optimistic. You say I am incapable of sharing love because I do not love myself; I say my level of self-confidence is about

the same as the self-confidence level of the average person, which is to say, about zero; and I am grateful for all the love I get; and I do not expect to deserve any. You say I am frightened of intimacy, but I really do not want your warm and tender body. I already have a lover, who is, if you will pardon the expression, my wife, and I do not want to make my life more complicated than it already is. At my last remark Maria Luna broke into gales of laughter. She almost choked on her pizza. She had to cover her mouth with her napkin. Some people at other tables looked at us. They probably thought we were happy. So why are you so hostile to me? I continued. Our objectives are not different. We both want to transform the structures of the modern world, and we want to transform them in the same way, by making human relationships more cooperative, less economic. Why is it that as soon as a person shows an inclination to cling to the old rugged Cross, a second person considers the first to be a threat to the movement? Answering my own question, I said, It is because nowadays personality has become a political issue. There was a time when people were willing to live and let live; then they said, It takes all kinds to make a world. Think for example of the diversity of human types who inhabited the novels of Charles Dickens, the Comdie Humaine of Honor de Balzac, the novelas * Letter 30 255 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II costumbristas of Spain and Latin America, and the plays of Shakespeare. The enjoyment of galleries of charmingly diverse human characters was a luxury that burgeoning capitalist; permitted itself in its early days. Now we are in an advanced phase of class struggle. Everything is political. The statement I am not political is especially political. Now moribund, capitalism has become a utopian ideology, advocated by rightwing reformers like Milton Friedman. Bourgeois civilization is collapsing in chaos and in flames, in short bursts of superficial prosperity, in fear, smoke, kinky sex, asphalt; every year the thrills are weirder, more packaging, less content, more cameras, less food. From the most remote rural village in the third world to the heart of suburbia in the first world, people sense that the struggle for survival is political, and political loyalty is defined by personality type. Different is sick. Not really because we overuse medical language by defining as sick whatever we dont like. It is really because we need a label to dehumanize people we believe will not be on our side when the chips are down, and medicine provides us with the convenient term, sick. I admit, I went on, wondering whether I was being carried away by my feelings and saying things that were not true, that you did not call me sick, but you did call me an authoritarian personality, which is almost the same. The concept authoritarian personality was invented shortly after World War II by a research team under the influence of the Frankfurt School. Recent German history (Hitler and the war) formed the background of their study. Their aim was to measure the personality characteristics which had contributed to Hitlers rise to power, and they named the set of characteristics they aimed to measure, the authoritarian personality. The implicit educational program was to utilize knowledge from research in raising children so that they would become non-authoritarian adults, so that there would never be another Nazi dictatorship, never another holocaust. Hitlers anti-semitism, his anti-homosexuality, his persecution of certain Christians, his male chauvinism, and the personality types found in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s were special

features of German fascism. Hitlers main and stated purposes, however, were to exalt the German nation and to save it from Communism, and the most notable features of the context were that production was stagnant and class conflict was severe. In these latter respects, Hitler was similar to dozens of fascist dictators the world over, before his time and after his time. The American and West European publics did not want to acknowledge the general causes of fascism. That would have obliged them to change their rhetoric and their economic structures. They preferred to hear about the authoritarian personality. Furthermore, the authoritarian personality concept could be applied equally to Stalins Russia and to Hitlers Germany, which was also what the public wanted, since people wanted to be anti-fascist and anti-communist with equal vehemence. Several generations of parents were convinced that it was their patriotic duty to raise children who were non-authoritarian. The defense of democracy began, they thought, with the right formation of the personalities of children. Then along comes little old me, a person who happens to have a working-class background, to have lived most of his life outside the American middle class and outside academia, who by accident never got turned on to youth culture, who has a certain amount of common sense, to whom it is as plain as day that institutions cannot function without authority, and equally plain that the risk of people sacrificing themselves too much to help others is a small risk. And I get called an authoritarian personality! It is an unnecessary slap in the face for no reason. Is it my fault that Hitler came to power? Is it my fault that millions of parents, teachers, psychologists, counselors, and intellectuals think it is their political duty to deconstruct any and all traces of authoritarian personality root and branch? I am an innocent swimmer dunked by a wave thrown up by the flip of the tailfin of a passing whale. It is easy for you, said Maria, opening her hands, her face and upper body framed against a background of hanging ferns, to believe in authority and in the benevolence of the 256 Letter 32 authorities, because you are Anglo-Saxon, male, straight, married, and employed. For those of who hustle for a living, the issues are not abstract and the authorities are not friendly. The cries from the heart of victims who are suffering deserve special attention because of their direct experience of the pain they express, I replied, but there is also a quota of truth in the wider point of view of an organic intellectual who may and may not be a victim. I honored myself with the title organic intellectual, which I was not sure I deserved, as compensation for having recently been dishonored by the title authoritarian personality which I believed I did not deserve either. The organic intellectual, I continued, relates the immediate struggles in which victims participate to the global process of social transformation. Act locally, think globally. In the context of young hustlers at and around Century Center Shopping Mall, the point to make about the authority of the police may be that it is misused. We will not, however, build global peace and justice with a philosophy which holds good will to be always impossible and all authority to be always misused. I think I am beginning to understand your philosophy, said Maria. The picture is coming into focus for me. Yes? The key is understanding what you mean by pretending to be real. Something you just said about the relationship of the particular concrete experiences of victims to the general organizing ideas provided by organic intellectuals reminded me of Catalina, a compaera who worked with me at the factory, and then I understood pretending to be real.

The factory? International Specialty Products Inc., apparently the property of one William Wiseman, although we never did find out who really owned it. We made gloves. I worked there after I quit college teaching. You never told me about your career as a college teacher, I said. I was considering buying another piece of pizza. The garden restaurant serves a clientele composed mainly of ladies on diets, which permits the restaurant to charge high prices for small portions. However, I forgot my hunger because I was eager to question Maria about her background. Let me summarize the story of my life for you, said Maria obligingly. First I went to school forever and ever, quarreled with my mother, did drugs, and had lots of lovers the same as everyone else. I mean, the same as everyone else I knew. I nodded. Then I got a job teaching Humanities at one of those creepy Christian colleges with compulsory chapel. At first I loved it. I was financially independent of my parents for the first time. But the school kept me so busy correcting papers that I had no time to finish my doctorate. Besides, I was having an affair with a student. Eventually the time came when I said to myself, They are going to fire me. They will say it is because my doctorate is unfinished, but really it will be because of Alice. Then I considered my options. I decided to use my insecurity as an opportunity to experience something new factory work. I quit before they fired me, and got a factory job by pretending to pretend to be Puerto Rican. It was after the factory that I developed my present way of life. I hate not having a job, but I would feel even worse if I had one, mostly because I feel guilty when I take a job that should belong to someone who needs it more than I do. I have certain skills which make it relatively easy for me to live in the shadow sector of the economy, and I am living a feminine option cooperating, cultivating relationships, loving, recycling. Why did you pretend to pretend to be Puerto Rican? I asked. As I said, we made gloves. The machinery was fairly old, but still automatic. The humans did setups for the machines, quality control, packing, shipping, and rework when the machines messed up. The place was hot in summer and cold in winter. The pay was about half minimum wage, when there was work, which was not always, because the factory ran only when it had 257 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II orders to fill. The bosses were men, and the workers women mainly from Guatemala and Mexico, pretending to be from Puerto Rico. As you probably know, Puerto Ricans have a legal right to live and work in the states. I was not paying attention to the details of her story because I was hung up on figuring out what she meant by pretend to pretend. I asked her, So you pretended to be a Puerto Rican too? Not exactly. Mr. Wiseman did not want real Puerto Ricans. He wanted women at his mercy, women he could order deported in 24 hours whenever he chose. He wanted us to pretend to be Puerto Ricans so if he got in trouble for employing illegal aliens he could claim to be innocent because we were deceiving him. I pretended to be an Argentine pretending to be a Puerto Rican. I dont speak much Spanish but Wiseman speaks less and I learned to say llanura pronouncing the ll like a jj and to say vos instead of tu, to put on a show for him. She demonstrated: Coma estais vos? Yo soy de la jjanura. The first month I developed my capacity for masochism. I delighted in every exquisite pain, reveled in humiliation. The second month I was spending my days off knocking on the doors of

labor unions, leftwing lawyers, even churches imagine me in a church! I wanted to find someone who would help me change that place. I tried to organize the compaeras, which was frustrating. I talked to them about socialist feminism. No response. Then I tried simple things like trying to get someone to go with me to ask the company to install a drinking fountain. Nobody would join me. I couldnt even get a witness to corroborate the stories I was telling on the outside. Once I persuaded Ines, who was from Bogota, if she was telling me the truth, to go with me to the office of a lawyer who spoke Spanish. I bribed her by giving her a free breakfast first. When she got to the lawyers office she told nothing but lies Wiseman was an angel, the factory a paradise. That was when I found Catalina. I mean I developed Catalina. She was from Guatemala. I did the free breakfast again, and this time I told her exactly what to say to the lawyer. In the office I sat next to her and held her hand. She followed my instructions. Whenever she wavered and seemed about to express her gratitude to dear Wiseman I squeezed her finger until she winced and straightened out her story. The lawyer was impressed and took us both to lunch. At the Netherlands Plaza. After that Catalina was a star witness. She even told things I did not know because they happened before I started working at the glove factory. Maybe she exaggerated. It was the memory of Catalina that came back to me when you said something about the voice of the victim not necessarily being the last word if you want to understand what happened, why it happened, how what happened fits into the global system, how to make local action contribute to changing global structures.... And then I said to myself, Aha! Now I understand what he means by pretending to be real! Everyone always pretends, Maria continued, so the only way to be real is to pretend to be real. Catalina was pretending even when she was telling the truth. In a sense I must be wrong if that is what I mean, I said. We must be able to distinguish pretending from not pretending in order to give to pretend a meaning, so it cannot be true that everyone always pretends. We can disregard the sense in which you must be wrong, said Maria, because one needs to invent new ways to use words if one is going to do metaphysics at all. The important question is: Do these unusual and very general remarks, which (I believe) summarize your philosophy, have any uses? Yes, she replied, answering her own question, they have at least four uses. 258 Letter 32 1) If you say, Lets pretend were real, you recognize that people have a choice, and you advocate choosing reality, that is to say, choosing solidity, truth. People need stability, and you are advocating that we accept what we need. 2) If you say, Kant is pretending to be real, you express both praise and criticism. Praise because Kant did good philosophical work. He gave economic society what it needed: eternal truths which provided justifications for its main institutions. Criticism because Kant did not know he was pretending, or if he did know he did not tell his readers. Here is your main criticism of Kant: It is not that Kant makes the principles of economic society eternal. It is not that he makes a male worldview eternal. It is not that he makes the ethics of autonomy eternal. It is that his type of philosophy has too much solidity. It pretends to be real without knowing it is pretending. 3) And here is your main criticism of Habermas: the impulses he says we are to satisfy when unnecessary discipline is eliminated only pretend to be real. There are no such impulses in nature. There are only human actors playing one game or another, who interpret the physical events in the human body according to one or another cultural code.

4) And here is your method for transforming the world: show people how to play more satisfying games. To use Foucaults language: help people to disinvest the energy they have invested in destructive discourses and practices, and to reinvest their energy in games that are more fun and more functional. The waiter had given me the bill, and I was in any case in no mood to continue the conversation, since I was getting along with Maria better than I ever had before, and I was sure I would spoil the magic if I tried to add or subtract anything from her prcis of my philosophy. As I stood to go and took the check to the cashier, I suggested that our next conversation about Kant be about his proposals for achieving world peace. Id like to meet your wife, she said, kissing me lightly on the lips. Why dont you two come to Star Place some night? You could watch me dance. Then she added, I have seven levels. So far I have only given you three. 259 260 Letter 33 33 A FEASIBLE PEACE PLAN or THE SERVANT OF THE WORD AT THE DISCOTHEQUE or A MOTHERS KISS Kants Perpetual Peace begins with discussions of six provisional principles of peace; they are negative, being prohibitions of practices which obstruct the establishment of peace, namely: (1) signing peace treaties while tacitly intending to resume fighting later when no longer too exhausted to carry on the war. (2) subjecting a state, however small, to foreign rule. (3) maintaining standing armies. (4) incurring national debts to amass treasure for war-making. (5) intervening by force in the constitution or government of another state. (6) using trust-destroying tactics in fighting, such as assassins and poisoners. There follow discussions of three definitive principles which establish peace itself. The summaries of the principles given by Kant are: (1) Die brgerliche Verfassung in jedem staat soll republikanisch sein. (The civil constitution of every nation-state should be republican.) (2) Das Volkerrecht soll auf einem Fderalismus freier Staaten gegrndet sein. (The law of all peoples should be based on a federation of free states. Here I interpret Volkerrecht as a global jus gentium to be agreed on by the federating free states.) (3) Das Weltbrgerrecht soll auf Bedingungen der allgemeinen Hospitalitt eingeschrnkt sein. (The rights of world citizenship should be limited to the right to be treated by foreign countries with general hospitality.) The point of this rather obscure principle is to permit peaceful contact and commerce among nations, while outlawing the conduct of world citizens like the English who entered foreign countries like India ostensibly to engage in trade, and then ...carried thither foreign troops, and by their means oppressed the natives, excited wars among the different states of that vast country; spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole deluge of evils that afflict mankind...

Next comes a supplement called the Guarantee of Peace which argues that nature is bringing about peace even by war, since the scourge of war teaches humans that only/by establishing law can they survive; and by commerce, since the spirit of commerce which sooner or later gains the upper hand in every nation, was supposed by Kant in 1795 to be incompatible with the spirit of war. 261 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II A second supplement urges the practitioners of statecraft to consult philosophers for advice on how to build peace. Perpetual Peace concludes with two appendices on the relationship of politics to morality. Their general theme is a familiar one; the mechanical thinking of the politician who manipulates people as if man were a machine like any other is incomplete and ultimately unsuccessful unless supplemented and limited by the formal principles of morality. My arrival at Star Place to discuss Perpetual Peace with Maria Luna was delayed for several weeks. I would have been embarrassed to hang around the discotheque looking like a lonely old philosopher trying to mingle with the young crowd because he is afraid life has passed him by, so I waited for my wife to come with me, as Maria had suggested. It was several weeks until she could accompany me because she works in New York and only flies out to see me once a month. Our careers have taken us to different places. When we arrived we did not see Maria so we sat down at a small silver mushroom between the dance floor and the panoramic window, heavy percussion behind us, the lights of the city below us, and started to make conversation. I could feel the beat of heavy percussion massaging my stomach as I shouted to a nearby person in tight black leather that Kant begins the definitive articles of perpetual peace by saying, Der Friedenszustand unter Menschen, die nebeneinander leben, ist kein Naturzustand (status naturalis), der vielmehr ein Zustand des Krieges ist, d.i. wenn gleich nicht immer ein Ausbruch der Feindseligkeiten, doch immerwhrende Bedrohung mit denselben. Er mu also gestiftet werden... In the English of the London edition of 1796, a translation presumably revised by the author, the same passage reads: With men, the state of nature (status naturalis) is not a state of peace, but of war; though not of open war, at least, ever ready to break out. A state of peace must therefore be established... Everything depends, I commented, on how one understands nature, and on how one understands the gestiften (establishing) that will change a state of nature to a state of peace. Kant in Perpetual Peace identifies the pre-legal pre-social phase of human history postulated by the social contract theorists with his own concept of nature as a set of Newtonian mechanical laws, and Kant also, following Hobbes, identifies a nature of predator-prey relationships, a war of all against all, (Hobbes phrase) with the power politics we associate with Machiavelli. Thus the status naturalis blends in one phrase mechanical thinking, power politics, animal competition for scarce resources, and the absence of law, while implicitly standing in the tradition of protestant and Jansenist conceptions of an evil, fallen human nature. I further commented that it is typical of human societies tribal-shamanistic societies, classical civilizations, and economic society included to orient human identity and human action with the aid of a creation myth; the contract establishing the rule of law where formerly there was a state of nature is the creation myth of economic society, and Kants plan for perpetual peace is essentially, as he himself calls is, a contract among nations, and a supplement to the social contract which will establish a legal dam or barrier to save us from den Strom der rechtscheunden, feindseligen Neigung (the stream of lawless and hostile feelings).

The person in tight black leather responded to my remarks on Kant by asking, How did the world begin? Caroline, who is more intelligent that I am, immediately realized that to establish communication we should couch our reply in the terms of a mythology which we and the person in black leather shared. The world began with the Big Bang, she said. Right! shouted the person in black leather. And how will the world end? Caroline immediately understood the point the person in black leather was making. With another Big Bang, she said. Right! said the person, taking a deep breath of smoke. And who am I? We had to admit that we did not know the answer to the persons third question until we 262 Letter 33 were told. I am a super-nova, the person in tight black leather said, I am a Big Bang in outer space, I am a brief blaze of light, I am matter becoming energy. Rising to a toe-stand beside the table, the person broke into a rhythmic trance, waving arms as if leading a cheer, revolving hips as if grinding grain, shaking shoulders as if shuddering, bending knees, dipping buttocks, stretching fingertips. A few minutes later, having returned from the trance, the person asked us, Would you buy a drink for a super-nova? We did. As it turned out we bought several and I discussed Kant with Super Nova instead of with Maria. Fortunately the super-nova in tight leather proved to be endowed with a voice strong enough to prevail over ear-dulling pulsations emanating from loudspeakers equipped with echo chambers, to be close to the inner circle of Maria Lunas friends and through Maria acquainted with the text of Letters from Qubec and to be a conversationalist remarkable for candor and for erudition. You probably agree with Kant, said the person, that to create a favorable climate for establishing peace, humanity should forbid and indeed does forbid, since the very essence of humanity, the rational will living according to the conception of law, forbids insincere treaties, the swallowing up of small states by large states, standing armies, raising huge sums for buying arms, intervention in foreign governments, and covert warfare. All these things except standing armies and borrowing to buy arms are already prohibited by international law. War itself was prohibited by the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, to which most nations are signatories. You would agree with Kant though, said the person, pursuing the question, that if those provisional principles could be enforced, then the world would be ready for an international contract to obey the Volkerrecht, along the lines of Kants definitive articles for peace. I dont think Kant meant exactly that, I said. He seems rather to envision a long process of several centuries duration, through which humanity gradually learns, by painful experience, that its only prospect for survival is to give up its hostile and lawless Neigungen* submitting itself to the rule of international public law. During the same process the moral force of Achtung must grow until the psychological strength of the law is so strong that obedience to law moves the human personality with a force analogous to and stronger than material force. If Kant did not mean, the person inquired, that the provisional peace articles had to be complied with before the promulgation of the definitive articles, then why did he divide his peace principles into two lands, provisional and definitive? The provisional articles are negative, being prohibitions of trust-destroying practices. The definitive articles constitute, create and construct the Friedenzustand, the state of peace. I think

Kant had in mind Kenneth Bouldings distinction, borrowed from civil engineering, between strain and strength. A bridge will collapse if subjected to a strain too great for its strength; similarly, in peacebuilding, peaceful institutions must be built with enough strength to withstand the strains (sometimes called stresses or tensions) that cause war, and, simultaneously, the level of strain must be kept below the breaking point at which peace will collapse. Kants provisional articles are about Bouldings strain and Kants definitive articles are about what Boulding and his followers in the 20th century call strength. It is broadminded of you to adopt a figure of speech borrowed from engineering after all your ranting and raving about the overuse of mechanical metaphors, the person in black leather tights shouted above the din. Thank you for the compliment, I replied. A shaggy head above black leather stood in outline against a background featuring an orange mushroom cloud painted on the wall behind the bar as the person said, Then you do not consider compliance with the provisional articles necessary to peace; the requirement for * inclinations, feelings, needs 263 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II peace is a less stringent one, and one easier to achieve, namely that the strength of the law must be greater than the strains imposed on the rule of law. The strength of the law is the principal problem I said. As the historian Quincy Wright says in A Study of War, the most persistent condition of war, however, has been the inherent difficulty... of organizing peace. (p. 1516) Your last comment helps to explain your somewhat tenuous and tangential relation to the peace movement, said the person. Most of the peace movement follows the plausible and no doubt true doctrine that the existence of nuclear weapons is itself a cause of tension that leads to war, a doctrine supported by studies in the tradition of Richardsons mathematical models of arms races, which analyze the process of threat, counter-threat, counter-counter-threat... Escalation of strain is what the majority of the peace movement sees, and escalation of strain is what the peace movement tries to reverse and diminish. You, on the other hand, are more impressed by la faiblesse des lois, the weakness of civilized conflict resolution processes, and you want to build the strength of peace in hearts and minds and institutions. I would like to convince them that they are mistaken, I said. Their root metaphors are sediments deposited in our culture by 18th and 19th century ruling class ideology; what they see is hardware, and their form of struggle is pressure group politics; they are forever bringing pressure on decisionmaker X to stop weapon Y. An alternative root metaphor is to conceive of humans as homo sapiens, i.e. as the philosophical animal, to see culture as the human adaptation, language as the genetically coded mechanism which makes possible the cultural coding of the principal symbolic structures. An alternative form of struggle is cultural action. Some of us cannot help thinking, replied the person, that it is they who are wise and you who are mistaken. The existing threat to human survival is nuclear weaponry. The manufacturers, governments, and military officers who produce, deploy, and eventually detonate nuclear weapons are the proximate causes of World War III. Pressure on them to change their behavior would seem to be humanitys most urgent need, and many people, including your friends Boulding and Wright, regard justice, eradicating hunger and poverty, ecology, womens rights, and other human needs issues as secondary for the time being. You, on the other hand, seem to take a disproportionate

interest in the marginal populations, the black lady running out of food stamps in Richmond, Indiana; the flu of the Huilliche speaking peasants in the hills of southern Chile; the unemployed alcoholic who cant pay his rent. The marginals are a minority, and even if they were organized they could not bring enough pressure on the military-industrial complex to stop the arms race, and even if they could stop the arms race they probably wouldnt. The person recounted a true story about a marginal population in Californias central valley organized by petty-bourgeois-idealistcollege-dropouts. The group decided, according to democratic procedures with everyone participating, that the urgent need in their community was jobs, and they invited a weapons manufacturer to locate a factory in their area, promising to work for the minimum wage, and never to form a union. Humanity can establish the rule of law only on the basis of principles it can love, I said. I was trying to get across the implication that even though I was quite aware that the poor will never make a revolution, I had another reason for giving them a disproportionate share of my attention, namely: to start building the norms of the new society here and now by living according to principles of solidarity. But I do not think the Super Nova in black leather caught that implication, and anyway I must admit the connection between that implication and what I actually said was obscure. You agree with Kant inasmuch as you think the establishment of peace consists of accepting a minimum global consensus on cultural norms sufficient to provide alternatives to war for dispute settlement, but whereas Kant defined the cultural norms rather narrowly as the reign of pure practical reason, and whereas Kant conceived the motive for obeying the norms 264 Letter 33 rather narrowly as respect for duty, you are willing to search all of history and all of anthropology to find viable cultural patterns, and to examine every hormone and every instinctual tendency and all possible ways art and religion might give form to the bodys responses in order to generate what you call the love humanity must have for its principles. So my thesis that humanity can only establish the rule of law on the basis of principles it can love is like so many philosophical statements a tautology. The rule of law can only exist to paraphrase Kant when people are motivated to obey legal principles. When such motivation is present we say the people love the principles... While finishing a Zombie cocktail, the Super Nova said one would expect the thesis that peace can be established only on lovable principles to be asserted in some context where an attempt is being made to establish peace on unlovable principles. Precisely, I said. Perhaps, said the person you extend the Freudian view that morality is rooted in mother-love to take in the roots of law in morality, the identification of citizens with the abstract institutional principles of complex societies and the rules of international organizations being emotionally an extension of the bond between mother and child, perhaps strengthened by father-child, siblingsibling, close friendship and close community ties, but always depending on touching and nurturing relationships to provide the power of the rich, warm feeling of security that Charles Stevenson says we feel when others endorse a moral principle we identify with, and the power of the reine Quelle (pure source) Kant attributes to Republican principles of legality in Perpetual Peace. An unlovable principle would be one that does not kiss you nicely the way your mother did. Economic society, I said, is a stepmother who rejects her children. If you have ever spent time

in prisons or in welfare lines, you will know that people rejected by society feel a deep and bitter resentment, as if life made them a promise at birth and then failed to keep it. Somebody lied to them, somebody betrayed them... but they do not have the words to speak clearly, and they are apt to say nothing, or to make hermetic remarks intelligible only to people who know them well; they have more than their share of psychotic breaks. They understand, nevertheless, the meaning of hunger; what hunger means is that people dont care about you; it means you are the wolf outside the fold, the enemy. There is a certain corollary to Jacques Lacans famous dictum, Every demand is a demand for love, which is, If your basic demands are not met, you are unloved. Now suppose, I went on, you have a set of ethical principles which makes respect for property rights an absolute duty, philanthropy optional, and the kind of justice which empowers people to assume control over the resources required to meet their needs unacceptable because it collides with property rights, debt-repayment, and freedom. An intriguing supposition, said the person. A declaration of war, I said. And just this set of principles is defended by force in the modern word. I am at war with Roger* because I have somehow managed to achieve a relative economic security of a modest and unstable sort, and if he tries to take what I have the police will protect me, and if instead of using the hit-and-run methods for sharing the wealth characteristic of the criminal class, Roger and his marginal friends venture a frontal assault, then the army will protect me, and if the masses of Asia or some such hungry horde want my hamburger, then I am shielded by my nuclear umbrella. A sober assessment, said the person. You mean to say that pace Richardson, arms races do not occur only because nation A perceives nation B as a threat, so A arms and becomes a threat to B, so B arms etc. Your theory la J.-P. Sartre** holds that the structure of society * See Letter 1. ** In his late work Critique de la Raison Dialectique. 265 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II separates the haves and the have-nots by force, and the haves utilize all available technologies to defend what they have against any level of threat from the have-nots. We caught a glimpse of Maria dancing with a muscular man in white tennis shoes, white jeans, and a black sleeveless T-shirt. His biceps twitched as he moved, quivering like dynamite on the verge of explosion. I was becoming exasperated with the inability of the person in black leather tights to grasp my attempt to speak of peacebuilding in terms of cultural action, or my own inability to express myself, or both. What I was trying to say was that we should focus on constructing peace, not on trying to explain why there are nuclear weapons. It is the sacred bond of mother and child that is the source of our strength. I was trying to advocate a gestalt shift of the symbolic structures of economic society, so that the laws would speak to each of their children with a transformed message: Yes, we care, we listen and hear. We are your good mother; we are the supportive context of your actions. We are your security. I was trying to agree with Kants belief that peace can be achieved by a federation of states agreeing on a common Volkerrecht while disagreeing with the particular Volkerrecht Kant advocated because it is too cold to inspire the allegiance of humans. But I could not get my point across so I gave up and stared out the window, not at the city lights below but at the reflections in the sky of the blinking lights of the dance floor yellow, blue, green, orange. I watched the lights for a long time. Caroline had taken a Greek New Testament from her purse

and was reading the gospel kata logon (according to Luke). The person in black leather tights had fallen asleep. Maria had left with her quivering friend. I was waiting for Maria to come back so I could introduce her to Caroline and ascertain her opinion of Perpetual Peace. At 3 a.m. the music stopped. A waiter came to tell me that Maria had said I was the person who would pay for her drinks. I suppose I am, I said. The waiter apologized for the size of the bill, explaining that they give Maria free drinks when she comes alone and make up their losses on the people she brings in. We know who you are, the waiter said, You are the philosopher Maria has breakfast with. You blame all the worlds troubles on Immanuel Kant. A bizarre opinion, I would say. You probably mean, said Caroline, that since Kant did his best to combat skepticism and vulgar materialism by providing a rational basis for upholding high moral standards, it is bizarre to attack him because he nevertheless included in his comprehensive system the characteristic ideas of his age, and consequently when Kant is regarded from the point of view of building peace in our age, he appears in some ways to be a skeptic and a vulgar materialist and to have rather low (although strict) moral standards. What I more had in mind, said the waiter, is that the gentleman bizarrely accepts certain of Kants conclusions while rejecting the premises from which Kant deduces them. The gentleman is no romantic who will tell you people were good until civilization corrupted human nature. He is a pessimist like Kant, but the reasons why Kant was a pessimist he treats as picturesque 18th century lore without scientific merit. The gentleman thinks humans can act from principle, but pure respect for pure reason, which Kant considers the only possible explanation for the human capacity to act from principle, the gentleman regards as an ideological jeu desprit. (The waiter pronounced French with a Montreal East End accent.) It would in any case be an illusion, Caroline said, to suppose that philosophy consists of deducing conclusions from premises. We overlook Kants main achievements if we observe only that he first establishes the premise All nature works according to laws, as a proposition necessarily true because it is a condition of any possible experience, and then by a series of steps he deduces from it and other premises that the Neigungen* which naturally govern human action are material forces like any other forces of nature, from which he takes it to follow that Machiavellian politics and pessimistic expectations regarding interpersonal conduct are inclinations, feelings, needs 266 Letter 33 realistic as long as mechanical nature is not limited by formal maxims of morals expressing the commands of pure reason. To read Kant as deducing conclusions from premises in this way would be to overlook that, as Kant himself tells us, philosophy is concerned with the frontiers or boundaries of knowledge, rather than, as we might say, the normal process of knowledge production. As Plato says, geometers deduce conclusions from premises, while dialecticians (i.e. philosophers) question all premises and ascertain the grounds of first premises. The first premises or boundaries of knowledge in question are not facts one verifies by observation as one might verify the fact that there is chicken in the icebox by opening the icebox and looking. They set up our way of seeing things, and they can be called very general statements inasmuch as by their generality they escape refutation by any observation and influence a great many descriptions of observations (as the first move in a chess game influences the whole game); they are story-like to the extent that, as Roland Barthes says, the function of story is constituer un spectacle rather than reprsenter.

Now, Caroline continued, the philosophical treatment of a statement like humans are by nature bad, does not consist simply of looking for anthropological facts which would confirm or refute such a claim, nor of noting the logical place the statement occupies in the deductive system constructed by a philosopher; it includes also the situating of the words in their context, their Sitz im Leben (place in life), so that we see why and where somebody might say such a thing and are rescued from the temptation if we were ever tempted to see the proposition as some sort of abstraction engraved in the sky independent of any social function or use the uttering of humans are by nature bad might have. And, more importantly, it is the role of philosophy to come up with another metaphysical generalization, such as, Humanity can organize the rule of law only on the basis of principles it can love, designed to play a constructive role in the context where the philosopher and the philosophers readers find themselves now. One might, indeed, rest content with saying that the present state of knowledge of behavioral biology, of the influence of hormones, brain structure, etc. on conduct, gives us no reason to suppose humans will be good according to the standards of some given culture or according to the objective requirements for human survival, unless a process of moral education intervenes to make human conduct good. If one were to rest content with such a statement one might appear to have replaced the rather irresponsible generalization humans are by nature bad with a brief summary of the current state of scientific knowledge. However, even so, one would be interpreting an enormous corpus of scientific reports, and generalizing far beyond any possible confirmation by observing simple facts like drumsticks in refrigerators. Since one is going to generalize and constituer un spectacle anyway, one should do so in the light of ones vision of what the problems are and what guiding precepts might help to solve them. In the light of what any undergraduate learns in college today, Kant now appears to us to have made an error in generalizing about different kinds of force, Newtonian impacts, Machiavellian tactics, animal predation. (One hesitates to say baldly that this was an error on Kants part, which we can correct now that 20th century science has taught us the truth, since future generations with more knowledge, or those of our contemporaries better informed than oneself, may say it now appears to us that ones own generalizations are mistaken, and one wants to reply that in philosophy generalizing is not necessarily an error just because it puts different kinds of things in the same category. It all depends on what is grouped how, for what reason, and with what result. So let us say now that one wants to replace Kants story with a story now appearing to us to be less scientifically erroneous, and more artistically designed to inspire human conduct that will help homo sapiens to survive and help people to lead beautiful lives.) If Immanuel Kant had taken Biology 11 (ecological biology) he would have learned that species compete with other species to obtain enough energy to live. If he had taken Anthropol267 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II ogy 11 and read, e.g., Nancy Tanner or Clifford Geertz, he would have become acquainted with the view that homo sapiens has won its place in the ecosystem by being biologically coded to be culturally coded, notably through the mechanism of language. If Kant had taken Psychology 11, or perhaps Psychology 41, he would have studied Jean Piaget. Piaget was trained as a biologist and he studied child development with an approach which looks on the growth of intelligence as a series of adaptations of the childs actions to the social and physical environments. The validity of many of Piagets findings is now questioned by psychologists, but he can nevertheless still be credited with placing the symbolic function in the context of biological theory so that one can coherently view humans both in terms of biology and in terms of hermeneutics (i.e. interpretation of

meanings). Another psychologist often read in Psychology 11, Robert Gagne, remarks that humans manipulative their environment symbolically using mathematics, dancing, music, liturgy, and language. In Linguistics 11 Kant would have learned that the fundamental mechanism of human language is a two-level structure composed of phonemes and morphemes, un systme, in the words of Saussure, dont toutes les parties peuvent et doivent tre considers dans leur solidarit synchronique (a system in which all the parts can and should considered as standing in meaningful relationships to each other at the same moment in time). In Education 11 Kant would have studied Kohlberg and learned that most adults possess the mental structure of conventional morality, which characterizes their judgments when facing moral dilemmas, and guides their action. In Womens Studies 11 Kant would have learned that the all-male all-American sample studied by Kohlberg failed to represent the characteristic structures of womens moral judgment, and Kants anthropology teacher would have commented that there is considerable cross-cultural variation in what counts as conventional morality. In Religion 11 (Old Testament) Kant would have studied the sacred writings of the early Hebrews and learned that the dichotomy pure/impure is an ancient distinction used in symbolic structures that organize human action. In History 45 (intellectual history of Europe) Kant would have learned about Kant, becoming acquainted with the context in which Newtonian mechanics and astronomy came to be taken as paradigms of science by a certain culture at a certain part of the world at a certain time, and also as models reflecting the social organization of economic society as in a mirror. From his undergraduate education, Caroline went on, Kant would acquire a paralog for himself. Just as in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant provides paralogs for certain philosophical arguments, which show why the arguments appeared correct to their authors even though they were fallacious, so he would see why his own worldview appeared to himself to be correct, even though it has proven to be inadequate. He would see that there is no need to postulate pure practical reason as a capacity of humans to act from principle instead of acting as a mechanical force acts. Acting from principle in a broad sense, under the guidance of language and in concert with others, is simply the usual mode of human action it is our adaptation to our niche. Kant might even become a convert to the cultural action approach to social change, once he realizes that since the normal actions of the normal adult are conventional, the way to change action is to change the culture so that different conventions prevail. Of course we cannot blame Kant for overlooking 20th century science; there was no way for him to know that in collecting forces of different kinds in the omnibus category laws of nature, he was veiling and making invisible the evolutionary process that produced homo sapiens. Constructive action to organize peace will remember, as Anthony Giddens has pointed out, that interpreting social action is a double hermeneutic, i.e. a double interpretation; the first hermeneutic is understanding the meaning of the social situation for the actors (this first hermeneutic is akin to Webers Verstehen); the second hermeneutic takes into account that the first interprets a social reality already pre-constructed, that homo economicus and property rights have already been built into the background when everyday actions in economic society come 268 Letter 33 into focus. Part of the contribution of philosophy to constructive action to organize peace is to build them out, or to transform their meanings. It is a background condition of our present situation, and perhaps of all or most human situations, that we begin brokenhearted, without a supportive context in which our lives are meaningful for beloved persons in a beloved (extended family. The hungry are brokenhearted because they are rejected; we well-fed are brokenhearted

because we are rejecting; the community is brokenhearted because its members do not communicate and cooperate. Healing images and stories restore the sacred bonds, as do forgiveness and sacrifice; we are cleansed and made whole when we rejoin one another as we once were joined to our mothers. And since it is our language itself that is pathological and nonfunctional, language itself that presupposes our isolation like whirling planets and stars in outer space, we need to construct together, using the elements left us by the dead and ruined languages, the adequate idiom of peace. Transformation. The reconstitution of the spectacle. And since it is our goodness itself that is bad, even though we can still find many valid uses for our ethic of respect for persons just as we can still find valid occasions for pressure politics and mechanical metaphors, we need to transform our ways of distinguishing right from wrong in order to help the gentle philosophies of Carol Gilligan, Gandhi, Jesus, and the friends of the earth, and the gentle aspects of the philosophy of Kant, to become practical. As the planet is now organized, economics and militarism tend to overwhelm ethics, but changes in ethics can change the roots and sources of economic and military power. When we think globally, Caroline continued, unfortunately we think economically and militarily, since it is commerce that has unified the globe, so that we all buy and sell our merchandise and labor-power in branches of the international market, and since every person is, as Kant says, naturally in a state of war with every other person just because we nebeneinander leben, just because we live next to each other in the global village and compete with each other for access to the same scarce resources. The ways we think globally are unfortunately causes as well as effects of our global problems. When we act locally to change global structures and locally is the only place we can act, since everybody is at some particular place; even the queen acts in the palace, not in the kingdom then it is not a poor choice to select an activity tied to concrete needs and to existing meanings functioning as ides-forces in interpersonal relationships. The structures will change if many people in many places catalyze gestalt shifts of understanding, responding to felt needs, transforming the pre-constructed symbolic structures which divide us. Local cultural action is an essential element of a feasible peace plan because we will not be able to love our global Volkerrecht if it is not an image of our personal experience. When Caroline finished speaking Maria had still not returned and the waiter, asked Caroline whether she was a scientific socialist. Of course, she said. The waiter said wouldnt it be nice if the four of us, he and Caroline and Maria and the gentleman, would meet at Marias pad and he would cook his specialty which is spare ribs in soul sauce, and we would drink wine and talk about scientific socialism? We said it would be nice. The waiter said he was interested in Carolines concepts of bad goodness and of the transformation of right and wrong, and he hoped she would explain what she meant. 269 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II

270 Letter 34 34 CHARLIES ANGELS WERE HENRIETTA AND HEINRICH ...the time of an angels movement can be non-continuous. So an angel can be in one place in one instant, and in another place in the next instant, without any time intervening....Nevertheless, he is partly in one of the continuous places, and partly in another....* In the universities and colleges of our modern societies, or at least the ones it has been my fate to know, departments of philosophy have been havens for the tender-minded. Set in sacred precincts, high-ceilinged rooms in small but imposing buildings on leafy campuses, or else low-ceilinged rooms to which one travels by elevator on towered campuses, their settings resonating in the former type of case to the pillared porticos of old Athens and the Pbiksopbenweg (the tree-lined Philosophers Walk) of old Heidelberg, and in the latter type of case to the hushed serenity of bank lobbies, the philosophy departments attract mainly fairly prosperous and fairly sensitive young people, who can afford to be fairly careless about questions of personal economic survival, who are fairly appalled by the dismal quality of personal relations in economic society, who want to be assured that the universe is in reality a more friendly place than it is in appearance, and who acquire in the sacred precincts an attitude of unshakable confidence in the beneficial effect of reading and rereading over and over again the writings of Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger, as well as other texts which also repay new readings with new insights, no matter how painful ones love life, ones health, or ones finances may be at the moment, and an attitude of aristocratic benevolence toward the masses trapped in common fallacies, in television, in scientism, and in psychology, whom the patient practice of philosophy may perhaps, in the long run, contribute in some way to rescuing from their unfortunate tendency to produce plastic drinking cups, acrylic sweaters, and wars. Exceptionally the philosophy departments are frequented by brash and breezy students, who major in philosophy because all the other subjects are too easy. They will become

the tough-minded philosophers who devote themselves to dispelling the illusions of their tenderminded colleagues, who regret that on small campuses philosophy and religion are often combined in a single department, since they believe if philosophy is to be with anything it should be with mathematics or with linguistics, or with computer science. It was William James in 1879 who thought of classifying philosophers as tender-minded and tough-minded; his point was that there are often no decisive logical or factual arguments for or against a philosophical position, and supposing equal theoretic clearness and consistency on two sides of an issue, it is the emotional constitution of the thinker which will determine which position is rejected and which accepted. The tender-minded will choose to be idealists and the toughminded will choose to be materialists. * St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Q. 53, Art. 3. 271 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II It has been much disputed whether Karl Marx was tender-minded or tough-minded, or, in other words, whether there are idealistic strands in his thought in spite of his professed materialism it being generally agreed that he was inclined to be tender in his youth and got tougher as he grew older, evolving in a direction opposite to the evolution of a certain relative of mine who as a youth was so tough-minded that he despised people who ate chocolates, maintaining that chocolate-eaters were deluded in believing chocolates are sweet because in reality chocolates are nothing but congeries of atomic nuclei with electrons spinning around them, while in middle age he was so tender-minded that he discovered a personal message from God to himself whenever he studied bus schedules or gazed upon mud-covered rocks in the bottoms of small clear ponds. Whether Karl Marx was in general what somebody or other might call an idealist or a materialist or a tender mind or a tough mind is, however, neither here nor there, since Marx called himself a materialist and anti-idealist, and when he so identified himself he used those terms in a specific sense and in a specific context, and it was that sense in that context which was what Marx meant, and if we Americans would rather risk destroying the earth than seek an ideological consensus with the Russians because they, following Marx, are materialists, and if their materialism is a cloud hanging over our efforts to find mutually acceptable norms for conduct in the global community, then we had best know what Marx meant by materialism. A gentleman never starts a nuclear war without defining his terms correctly, as a courtesy to the survivors so they will know what the war was about. According to V I. Lenin, Marxs conversion from idealism to materialism began early in his career, in 1842-43, when he published a series of articles in n newspaper called Rheinische Zeitung, notably concerning a new law against stealing wood. Marx himself later described one of his early (1843) articles as follows: My research led to the result, that legal relationships and political forms are neither to be understood by just looking directly at them (an sich selbst tu begreifen) nor to be regarded as predicates of the so called general development of the human mind, but are, on the contrary, much more correctly viewed as rooted in the material relationships of life, as a total set of relationships (gesamtheit) which Hegel, following the precedents set by the English and French of the 18th century, designated by the name civil society relationships whose anatomy is to be discovered in economics. Let us look more closely at this brief passage in which Marx describes part of the process of his conversion to materialism.

My research led to the result.... [Here Marx implies that he regards his work as scientific, leading to results somewhat similar to the products of scientific research.] ...that legal relationships and political forms.... [Marx has in mind especially the legal relationship of private property which identifies one person as the legal owner of, for example, a wood lot, and defines another as a thief, for example of wood; and the political form of government, in Germany in 1842 a monarchy under the Kaiser, in France at that time a Republic, in England a constitutional monarchy.] ...are neither to be understood by just looking directly at them.... [as if their natures were obvious and self-evident in themselves] ...nor to be regarded as predicates of the so-called general development of the human mind.... [The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) had transformed Kantian ideas by denying that the pure forms of reason are unchanging. Instead, according to Hegel the forms of reason change over time, and, furthermore, history and logic are the same 272 Letter 34 thing, so that the general development over time of mind explains (and in a sense is) both human history and human logic. Here Marx says politely that Hegels notions are bunk, insofar as they try to explain law and politics on the basis of the general development of the mind (Geist) as Hegel conceived it.] ...but are, on the contrary, much more correctly viewed as rooted in the material relationships of life.... [That is, law and politics are not (a) self-evident, or (b) products of Hegels Geist. They are (c) rooted in material relationships.] ...as a total set of relationships.... [This point shows an emphasis on wholeness. The previous materialists, often called vulgar materialists, tended to be focalists, looking at things in isolation from each other. Marx, and following him the Marxist materialists, often called dialectic materialists, try as best they can to see things whole. In this respect Marx learned from Hegel, who had criticized one-sided viewpoints and had attempted to achieve an allsided viewpoint.] ...which Hegel, following the precedents set by the English and French of the 18th century, designated by the name civil society.... [burgerliche Gesellschaft, translated as civil society or bourgeois society, grew out of medieval society as the processes of producing and circulating merchandise, according to the laws of property, contract, and freedoms, gained a certain degree of autonomy so that they went on in daily life somewhat automatically and somewhat independently of the doings of the political and military authorities who nominally governed the realm. I prefer to call the burgerliche Gesellschaft economic society, and to call its development a disembedding of economic relations from social relations, following Karl Polanyi. I prefer to call the material relationships in which the law and politics of burgerliche Gesellschaft and indeed all the institutions of any Gesellschaft, are rooted, the ecosystem, following contemporary science.]

... relationships whose anatomy is to be discovered in economics. [It is the study of economics which will show the structure of the whole, so that law, politics, and other institutions will all fall into place in an overall picture of how society works.] In other words, what Marx means when he calls himself a materialist is that the cultural structures of economic society should be understood in their relationships to each other (not in what Paulo Freire would call a focalist way) and in their relationships to physical, chemical, geological, and biological nature. Let us now inquire what it was about the Prussian law punishing the stealing of wood which led Marx to adopt this eminently reasonable viewpoint. For centuries it had been the custom in German forests and valleys that the peasants would gather the dry wood fallen from trees to make fires for heating and cooking. The green wood still growing on the trees was regarded as under the protection of the lord of the manor and was not to be touched. Times changed, however; dry wood became a marketable commodity and the lord of the manor became the owner of the woodland. The Prussian legislature, observed by a young newspaperman named Karl Heinrich Marx, saw fit to decree that dry wood is the same as green wood. The decree was, Marx noted, a lie; the legislature, possessing coercive power, enacted as law a statement that is not true, namely that two different kinds of wood, one dead wood and the other living wood, were the same. The common people would never understand the law; they would never understand that what they had always done, what they had to do to satisfy their 273 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II basic needs, was now theft. They would see only the brute fact that now they are punished for gathering wood. A similar issue concerned the gathering of berries in the woods, traditionally done by children as a service to their parents. However, a member of the legislature noted in the debates that in his region these berries are already an article in commerce, and are shipped to Holland in barrels (p. 120). It was consequently self-evident to the members of the legislature that berry-gathering was theft. The legislators, being themselves landowners or allies of landowners, passed laws favoring themselves without much regard for facts, logic, or principle, as the young newspaperman demonstrated in great detail in his lengthy accounts of their debates and decisions for the Rheinische Zeitung. The young newspaperman had, however, until recently been an even younger university student, and through professors of law and professors of philosophy he had come into contact with the minds of subtle folk, such as, for example, that of Georg Wilhelm Frederich von Hegel. Die Notwendigkeit in der Idealitat ist die Entwicklung der Idee innerhalb ihrerselbst... ( 267) (The necessity in the ideality is the development of the idea within itself), said Hegel. Boiling Hegel down, translating him into prose, as Marx loved to say, the newspaperman expressed the philosophers main point succinctly: the structures of economic society are necessary, they could not be otherwise, they are the latest development of the eternal self-development of the Idea. The rights of the landowner are merely minor developments of the Idea, thrown in apparently almost as an afterthought in a comprehensive philosophical system including the necessary development of all history. In Marxs early writings the following antitheses are always parallel: politics economic relations

democracy socialism idealism materialism political freedom human freedom Idealistic philosophy provides the rhetoric for democratic politics, the kind of politics that seeks the political emancipation of Germany under the banners of freedom, property, and parliamentary rule. Materialistic philosophy guides the scientific analysis of economic relations, and expresses the vital life interests of human freedom. It comes down to this: if you are with the professors who provide the subtle rationalizations for the landowners who pass laws against the stealing of wood in their parliament, then you should be an idealist. If you are on the side of the common people who need warmth and food, then you should be a materialist. Let us now shift the scene from the dry wood on the floors of German forests in 1842 reflected in the polished wood on the ceilings of the halls of the Prussian parliament, to a pair of horsemen riding through Virginia on a journey through the southern colonies of America in 1746, one of whom is another tender-minded philosopher, less prolific and systematic in his writings than Karl Heinrich Marx, but no less well-intentioned and no less determined to live by his principles the American Quaker John Woolman. When John Woolman and [his Friend] Isaac Andrews rode out of the woods into Cheadless plantation, the setting sun upon their right hand shone over a vast green expanse, not of rolling pasture nor of corn and wheat, but of the bewitching Vegetable, Tobacco. Many Negroes were at work between the rows, the man in red cotton drawers and battered broad hats, the women in faded dresses with white kerchiefs [wrapped] turbanwise around their wool. A white overseer leaned against a tree in the shade, responsible all day long for preventing idleness, but now getting ready to blow the whistle at sunset.* Two things were remarkable * Janet Whitney, John Woolman American Quaker (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., pp. 113-4. 1942) 274 Letter 34 to me in this journey, Woolman wrote in his journal, first in regard to my Entertainment when I Eat, Drunk And Lodged free-cost with people that lived in Ease on the toil of their Slaves I felt uneasy and as my mind was inward I found from place to place this uneasiness to return upon me through the whole Visit. Where the Masters have A Considerable Share of the Burden And living on moderate Expenses made their servants labour moderately And live pretty well I felt Some Easier But where they lived in A costly way acquitted labour and laid the whole on their Slaves my Exercise was Sore. Secondly this trade of Importing them from Guinea being so much Encouraged among them; And the white people living so much without labour.* Woolman told the slaveowners that they ought to release their slaves; the slaveowners told Woolman that he was an impractical idealist. The tobacco growers replied to John Woolman by telling him tough material facts, i.e. about the competition of capitals. Each tobacco grower is a capitalist making rational decisions, i.e. deciding to buy inputs as low as possible and to sell tobacco as high as possible. The main input in the tobacco business is labor. The least expensive labor is slave labor; they know, they costed it out. If a tobacco grower follows John Woolmans advice, he will pay much more for labor than his competitors, thus produce his tobacco at a higher price, and thus (assuming he does not have some extraordinarily lucky break like happening to own super-rich soil which produces more and better

tobacco with less labor) he will price his tobacco out of the market. Tough material fact: one less tobacco grower. Now if John Woolman had been the typical 20th century middle-wing extremist liberal social scientist of the positivist temper, he would do a study to prove the tobacco grower is wrong, to prove that free labor actually produces more tobacco per dollar invested than slave labor, or, if that happy theorem could not be proven, then at least he would demonstrate that the studies purporting to prove that slave labor is cheaper can be criticized for grave errors in data processing and grave omissions of variables. Consequently, he would conclude that enlightened self-interest is all we need; there is no conflict between idealism and materialism, or at least it is an open question whether there is such a conflict, i.e. the jury is still out. John Woolman was not, however, a 20th century middle-wing extremist liberal social scientist, and the sort of thing Woolman actually said to the planters was, for example, When we remember that all nations are of one blood (Gen. 3:20); that in this world we are but sojourners; that we are subject to the like afflictions and infirmities of body, the like disorders and frailties in mind, the like temptations, the same death and the same judgment and that the All-wise Being is judge and Lord over us all, it seems to raise an idea of a general brotherhood.... We allow them to be of the same species with ourselves, the odds is we are in a higher station and enjoy greater favours than they. To consider mankind otherwise than brethren, to think favours are peculiar to one nation and exclude others, plainly supposes a darkness in the understanding. For as Gods love is universal, so where the mind is sufficiently influenced by it, it begets a likeness of itself and the heart is enlarged towards all men. ** Such idealism! The idea of a general brotherhood, says Woolman, unites humanity, as Platos ideas united the people in the polis. The universe around us is in its essence a friendly * Ibid., p. 116. ** Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes essay written by John Woolman shortly after his 1746 journey into Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Phillips P. Moulton, editor, The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, New York: Oxford University Press 1971, pp. 200-202. 275 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II place where the individual hearts spiritual yearning for communion is the human likeness of universal love. Against the tough material facts adduced by the tobacco planters, Woolman adduces tender ideas and sentiments. The measure of the power of tender ideas is not zero, as John Woolmans ministry proved. Individuals were converted, and general progress toward emancipation was achieved only to be drastically set back by a tough material fact, the invention of the cotton gin, which made slaveowning even more profitable than it previously had been. I agree with Woolmans idealism for the same reason I agree with Marxs materialism. The reason is that the slaves should be freed of their burdens and the peasants should have their winter fuel. I call this the same reason instead of two different reasons, because there is a sameness of motives motives stemming respectively in the three cases (mine, Woolmans, and Marxs) from the kindness of my sweet grandmother and parents, the affection lavished on tiny John Woolman by his mother and older sister (both named Elizabeth), and the love of Henrietta and Heinrich for Karl Heinrich, since if the psychological studies of Mary Ainsworth and the review of the literature by

John Bowlby in Maternal Care and the Growth of Love are correct, and I think they are, then we must thank love in early life for the capacity to show solidarity with the misfortunes of others in later life. Concerning other features of their personalities and their sources I make no comment, nor do I claim to know what philosophy Woolman would have adopted if, per imposibile he had been sent to Bonn and Berlin and exposed to several years of academic lectures by Hegelian idealists and then assigned as a newspaperman to cover the debates of the Prussian parliament on the stealing of wood. When I say Woolman and Marx agree, I mean only that human solidarity is in both cases a motive, and that the choice of doctrine was in each case appropriate to that motive. 276 Letter35 35 LOVE BELIEVES ALL THINGS The wealth of those societies where the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as a vast collection of commodities. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1st sentence of 1st chapter [The word commodities is the usual translation of the German Waren here, but it may not be the best translation. Waren is actually the same as the English wares, as in Said Simple Simon to the pieman, let me taste your wares. Maybe we should say instead a vast collection of merchandise. Or of items for sale. Or maybe we should break down and be literal, a vast collection of wares. Admittedly, wares is too quaint, but commodities suffers from its narrowuse in phrases like commodity speculation and commodities markets, as if the only Waren were soybeans, cotton, barley, and the like, while merchandise suffers from identification with labels reading Contents: Merchandise. Postmaster: maybe opened for inspection if necessary; as if the only Waren were things that come in the mail in brown paper packages.] But I digress. I was going to say, before I sidetracked myself into quibbles about the precise nature of the entity which Simple Simon wanted to taste, that everything clicked into place for me beside the beach at Rio de Janeiro. Marx was right! I exclaimed. He said, The wealth of those societies where the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as a vast collection of commodities; and that is exactly how it does appear! The boulevard by the beach is lined with shops; the shops are lined with windows, the windows lined with displays, the displays are lined with items obviously Waren, because you can walk in the shop, put down your money (if you have money) and walk out of the shop holding the item in your hand. Obviously, too, the women are merchandise; even those who follow the younger professions (I mean younger than prostitution or wifery), and sell their services as dentists, TV personalities, or schoolteachers. Of course men are also for sale: the high-priced items display themselves at the Club dos Engenheiros (Engineers Club) while the trash, defined precisely as commodities with no value, inhabit the favela along with thrown-away packing cases, worn out tires, woman-trash, child-trash, and other zero priced merchandise. I felt like an impostor walking beside the beach appearing to be a rich foreigner, because actually back in my own country and without an airline ticket to a UNESCO meeting in Rio given to me by a charitable institution, I belong more with the trash than with the engineers. As an eleven year old consumer trainee, I used to admire airline advertisements in glossy magazines with pictures of Copacabana Beach and captions which read Buy a ticket to Argentina and we give you Rio de Janeiro free. The pictures always showed the wide sidewalk by the beach made of black and yellow stones arranged in wavy lines. Now that I was standing on the wavy-

lined sidewalk at Copacabana I felt that I had purchased the advertised product; I had purchased the right to be in this picture with these palms and these scavenging sea gulls, these clouds overhead and these green islands in the Bay, just as for a similar fee I could have acquired a right to stand and see the Pope bless the multitudes from a balcony in St. Peters Square, Rome, with Amsterdam thrown in as a bonus, which is, by the way, probably the reason 277 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II why I puzzled so long over how to translate Waren since what Marx wants to say is that from the point of view of exchange-value (i.e., for most purposes, from the point of view of price) everything is on the same level, i.e. everything is for sale for some price or other, and it is hard to find the right word to name everything since the usual function of the usual word is to designate something by distinguishing it from other things which it is not, and Marxs point is just that everything whatever appears from a certain point of view as a commodity, which is, by the way, what Simple Simon did not understand, since regarded as a use-value (as something to use) a pie is a particular kind of thing, namely something to eat, whereas from the point of view of a pieman a pie is not a use-value but an exchange-value; to be more exact, for a pieman a pie is a commodity, a potential penny, and a penny is something which, when accumulated in sufficient quantities, can be used to buy Copacabana, Rome, Amsterdam, dental services, entertainment, education, salvation, eternal life, or anything whatever. The corollary to the proposition that the world appears as a vast collection of commodities is that apparently money can acquire anything in the world. By bringing into focus the commodity and the production of the commodity, Marx was able to synthesize many of the concerns expressed in socialist thought. He also found full employment for his talents as a coiner of paradoxical, striking phrases, and his connoisseurship as a borrower of such from Feuerbach and Hegel. When we produce, commodities, he says, we are not ourselves (we are entaussert or entfremdt).Now how, you might ask, can a person be not herself? Well, you are not yourself, you are separated from yourself when you make a commodity. Yes, you say, clear as mud, you say, but why are you separated from yourself? Well, first, because this product you are making is not yours. For example, if you work in a cookie factory, turning a wheel on a giant cookie-cutter which cuts 500,000 cookies per minute, when you are through it is General Biscuit Company, Inc. which owns the cookies. The more cookies you make, the more cookies General Biscuit Company, Inc. has. Furthermore, your own activity does not belong to you; you sold it to the cookie company, and now it is theirs. You are also separated (most translations say alienated) from other persons, because they are your competitors, selling their little commodity (namely their labor-powers, their services) on the labor market. Your separated little self contrasts pitifully with the magnificence achieved by the Commodity itself, that great mass of cookie (500,000 a minute!) which is now towering over you and dominating you by its wealth. It soon becomes clear to you that never in your life can you afford to buy such an enormous mass of cookie, the cookie does not need you. General Biscuit Company, Inc. can fire you and buy someone else, cheap, to put in your place. But you need the cookie, if not this particular cookie then something else edible and nourishing. Here is the paradox of use-value and exchange-value: you think at first you are making a cookie, something to eat, but actually you are making a Cookie, i.e. a commodity, i.e. something to sell. You are separated, alienated. Your product dominates you. There is a certain optimism in all of this, since if you are separated then you are not by nature separate. The real human essence, the being of the species, the real you you would be if you were not turned into not-yourself by capitalism, is something unseparated, unalienated, in other words social. So Marxs analysis of the commodity includes a promise as well as a critique. The promise

is that we can return to the social way of being characteristic of our species (our Gattungswesen). We do not need to be separated from each other by private property; oppression by the state will wither away when commodity production is replaced by some better system, since the state is mainly a police and judiciary organization devoted to enforcing the rules of the commodity game; egoism and selfishness are not natural, they are just the consequence of each of us being a commodity trying to sell herself in a competitive market; poverty is the consequence of commodity production, since it is through commodity production that the Cookie gets ever wealthier while the cookie-makers are driven more and more into 278 Letter 35 the category of people-who-can-be-replaced, or into the reserve industrial army of the unemployed; nor is inequality necessary. Inequality is mainly a consequence of who has a piece of paper saying she owns the cookie machine; and if it is the low quality of TV programs that gets you down, you can take heart thinking how much better it will be when the world is run without commercials and without the artists always having to sell art as if it were a commodity. In short, in the commoditys world, our human relations become relations among things; but we have it in us to take our world back and construct a world of human social relationships. Everything clicked into place for me as I was walking beside the beach at Rio de Janeiro breathing a heavily humid sea wind laced with exhaust, politely declining the propositions of the commercial ladies and those of the juvenile vendors of chewing gum, courteously sharing cruzeiros with my fellow undeserving impostors, who probably actually needed the cruzeiros less than the children selling gum and less than the more elderly of the ladies in the carnal pleasure business. I favored the beggars because they raised a flag of resistance to the system in a small way by claiming my largesse, even in this day and age, not on the grounds that I needed what they had to offer, but simply on the grounds that they were hungry. At that time it seemed to me that Marx had read reality the way it was; the symbolic structures governing economic society are such that everything of value appears as a commodity. And everything not of value is so conditioned by the commoditymentality, that everything whatever appears to us denizens of the e.s. as colored by the lenses of Waren. Everything was as Paul Nizan had said it would be when in Aden Arabie he wrote that the essential characteristics of capitalism are more clearly visible when the system is viewed from its periphery, and if someone had said to me at the time that Marx had made a creative choice in beginning his analysis of capitalism with the commodity, as Kant had creatively chosen law/conception of law, as Aristotle had chosen being, as Plato had chosen justice, then I would have said, No creativity was needed. The man had a mind like a mirror a mirror which reflected only the unaltered image of the world as it is just look at the beach! On the other hand, now that even the most exact sciences, such as physics and chemistry, have been shown to be underdetermined in the sense that the experimental facts do not uniquely determine a single correct theoretical interpretation, surely in the case of a comparatively less exact science, such as the science of socialism, there must be more than one correct way to describe the same facts even if at a given point in time a given individual cannot imagine any correct alternative to, for example, the analysis of the economic relations of burgerliche Gesellschaft in terms of the category commodity. In searching for an alternative correct description of the essential structures of modern society we do not, of course, consider our search successfully terminated if we merely start the analysis with a different word. After all, since the symbolic structures of a culture forms a whole in which each

element relates to all the others, one can begin to analyze the whole by focusing on any element. Marx himself sometimes starts with alienation, sometimes with private property, instead of commodity, and by explaining how alienation or private property is a feature of a series of economic relations, he sooner or later analyzes all the main symbolic structures, including commodity. The meanings of the interconnected terms are like a circle which remains the same circle even though one can enter it and begin to walk around its circumference at any point on it. We would, on the other hand, call the description different if it is designed to make capitalism look good instead of bad. Sir Henry Maine, for example, analyzes the same relations Marx analyzes, in terms of contract. Throughout Maines analysis, buyer-seller relationships, employer-employee relationships, markets, landlord-tenant relationships, owner-object relationships... appear suffused in the warm glow of freedom a value cherished by all modern westerners, including Marx. Instead of the doctrine that our Gattungswesen, the nature of our 279 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II species, is such that we would behave in a more sisterly way if we could overcome our alienation and revert to our true selves, Maine proposes a different historical vision, in whose prism humans become more human as they become true individuals independent of family and tribe, responsible for making their own identities instead of playing out the roles that go with inherited status. Assuming that neither Marx nor Maine has concealed any facts, that both minds are faithful mirrors reflecting all the evidence, then we should say we have two different but equally correct descriptions of the same facts indeed two correct descriptions of the same facts both standing in the shadow of the same ethics (the one classically articulated by Kant), one of them throwing into relief the commodity, which is always, even when it is a person, a means to someone elses end, and the other throwing into relief the free, sovereign choice of the rational human agent. Now if instead of me walking beside the beach alone, you and I were strolling down Copacabana Beach, and if we should politely decline to buy lottery tickets from an emaciated, barefoot teenager, and if we should then stop at a sidewalk cafe to drink a mineral water under banana fronds, guarded by a white-uniformed waiter who chases the beggars out and periodically runs into the kitchen to pour a fake bottle of fake ketchup on the cook, the fake ketchup being really a red paper tongue which emerges from the bottle to create the illusion that the waiter is pouring ketchup on the cook, which both waiter and cook think is great fun, and if you should ask me whether my conviction that the first line in the first chapter of Das Kapital simply reports the facts about the world as it is becomes somewhat unglued by confrontation with Sir Henry Maine and his ilk (he has many ilk) who report almost the same facts under different descriptions with nearly opposite valuations, then I would be quite grateful to you for having asked the question. It is helpful to be reminded that one can see the same thing filtered through a language that makes it look good instead of bad. You reminded me that contracts and free choices by individuals have done a lot of good in the world, and will continue to do good unless humanity becomes mesmerized by excessively simple critiques of the capitalist system in which they play such a prominent part. Marx, too, would have had to admit, if you had asked him, that his project faces a serious setback when his portrayal of the alienation of human nature by commodity production is exposed as one of several possible ways to depict our main modern institutions, distinguished from others not so much by its greater accuracy as by its more sombre treatment of competitive individualism and its rosier implications concerning collectivist alternatives. I assume that Marxs project is to be of service to those who suffer, to show them that someone from the learned classes is on their side; to help them to understand their situation, to organize, and

to promote their vital interests. When Marx constructs an analysis of a commodity which promotes the interests of the toiling masses by (among other things) calling attention to the contradictions between treating labor-power as a commodity and the Kantian ethic proscribing treating persons as means, Marx is not thereby endorsing Kant, any more than Marx endorses generally irony, scorn, wit, Martin Luthers sermons on economic justice, the Greek, Latin, and Italian classics he so frequently quotes, or Hegels dialectics for their own sakes apart from the use he is able to make of these resources in the service of the cause of the oppressed. Thus a weakness in an argument is not so much a call to find a way to strengthen the argument per se as it is a call to find a better way to strengthen the working classes, which may and may not involve strengthening the argument or moving the argument to a higher, more comprehensive, level. At any rate, the foregoing assumption is consistent with what actually happens in Das Kapital, since although the line about commodities with which the book opens is a good reminder of Marxs work prior to writing his masterpiece, in the masterpiece itself the theme is introductory and is soon incorporated into a more comprehensive vision: the labor theory of value. Commodities are the appearance, the surface of value in bourgeois society. To 280 Letter 35 achieve a scientific understanding in a stronger sense of the term scientific it is necessary to delve beneath the surface to dig out the substance. The substance, i.e. that which is beneath the surface and determines what appears, is value. So, as it turns out, Marx himself provides an alternative description and theoretical interpretation of life beside the beach at Rio de Janeiro; he asks us to see, instead of just commodities for sale, commodities as manifestations of value in action. The labor theory of value can be succinctly stated: labor is value, value is labor. Nevertheless, what this stark joining of two nouns by the verb to be in the third person singular present indicative might possibly mean, and why a careful mind ought to regard what it views as truth, are questions that can only be answered gradually. Prior to Marx the classical English political economists had labor theories of value more or less of the following sort: (1) Suppose that what economics wants to explain and predict is the price (P) of a commodity (C); (2) Suppose that P of C is determined by supply and demand in a free market. (3) If the supply of C goes up (as it will, since producers will seek greater profits by increasing sales volume), then P of C will go down. (4) Supposition (3), carried far enough, implies the bankruptcy of certain producers, namely those whose costs of production exceed the revenue obtained from selling CatP. (5) Which (i.e. 4) will reduce the supply and drive up P; (6) At least to the point where the remaining producers can cover their costs. (7) However, the producers with large profits per item at P will often cut prices anyway, in order to maximize profits by increasing sales volume; (8) Which will drive out more competitors, (9) Until P is at or near that cost of production which is common to the remaining producers (CP) or near because entrepreneurs require a bit of profit they wont stay in business if they barely meet costs. (10) CP, what it costs to produce C, is not determined by chance, but by the objective

(11)

(12) (13) (14) (15)

requirements of making C. These objective requirements have costs. The costs of the objective requirements for producing C can be analyzed into three kinds of cost: (i) land (including minerals from mines, etc.) (ii) labor (iii) capital Of these three, the third, capital, is really a combination of the other two, since capital is savings accumulated from labor applied to land in the past. Land was not in the beginning a cost at all, since land is a gift of nature to humankind. Furthermore, Ricardos theory of rent shows that labor can be used to measure the rent of land, e.g. land with high rent is land where less labor grows the same corn. Consequently P (price) is determined by CP(cost of production), and CP is determined (on different versions of the theory) (i) by labor or (ii) mainly by labor or (iii) by labor at the natural price toward which real prices tend when not artificially distorted or (iv) by labor and by land the cost of the latter, i.e. rent, being measurable as a function of labor costs.

281 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II In short, economics prior to Marx had already assigned labor a prominent role in its attempts to provide systematic explanations of the prices of commodities. In Marx himself I find four proofs for the proposition I have succinctly stated as labor is value, value is labor, or perhaps I should say I find four headings under which the reasons given in support of the proposition can conveniently be arranged. What exactly the proposition means is perhaps no more nor less than the sum total of the reasons adduced to prove it is true. 1. Marx argues that in a market there must be some quality all commodities have in common, which determines the ratios at which any one commodity, say iron, is exchanged for any other, say wheat, shoe polish, or chocolates. Marx considers labor a plausible candidate for this role because a quality all commodities have in common is that they are all products of human labor. In this way market exchange becomes intelligible it becomes intelligible, for example, that 4 wheats are worth 1 iron, when it is explained that the amount of labor embodied in 4 wheats is equal to the amount of labor in 1 iron. 2. Marx builds on the work already done by other economists in using amount-of-laborembodied-in-a-commodity to explain and predict the commoditys price. Like any scientific theory (the theory of gravitation for example), the defense of the theory does not require a simple relationship such as hours-of-labor-needed-to-make-it equals price. Defending the theory is a matter of explaining all the apparent discrepancies (why some balloons go up instead of down in the case of gravitation) in a way consistent with the theory. Thus Marx considers diamonds-in-the-rough, which appear to have a price but not to be products of labor monopolies, which drive prices above the labor-value, etc. etc. always maintaining that in the end to understand prices we must assume, as he says at one point, that price is value in money-form. 3. Marx is able to solve certain technical problems in economics which earlier economists could not solve. He argues that he can do this because he started with a basic truth: namely,

labor is value. Similarly, Copernicus is able to make correct calculations about the paths of heavenly bodies in the sky because he starts with a basic truth: the earth revolves around the sun while rotating on its axis. 4. To the three types of argument above there are well-known counter-arguments (see e.g. An Analysis of Marxian Economics by Joan Robinson). But Marx has a counter-counter argument which he frequently employs in the pages of Das Kapital which is to ask the reader to conceive society as a great collective laborer as if humanity were one body, and the earth an island in space on which the many arms and brains of the one great laborer worked. It is then evident that the cost of producing any commodity is the time and trouble and collective laborer must devote to producing. Marxs strategy is Platonic. Plato thought we could see justice better if we took a social point of view, the viewpoint of a polis planner who considers the needs of a whole society in a sustainable relationship with its environment. Marx says we will understand value better if we assume the social point of view of the planner who considers that the society as a whole, including each person, has X needs, possesses Y resources, and must make decisions concerning how to use the resources Y to satisfy needs X. The planner will see that all the decisions concern the allocation of labor, and the whole value of anything is determined by what portion of the total labor of society it takes to produce it or, in other words, by what it costs to assign labor to producing it instead of to producing something else. (Even a decision about how to allocate 282 Letter 35 a non-labor resource, for example, copper, concerns allocation of labor, since the copper itself just sits in the ground as ore, and will continue to sit there until arms of the great collective laborer are assigned to mine, smelt, and fashion; the value of copperware will be low, from a social point of view, insofar as producing copperware costs little labor, and it will be high insofar as it costs much labor. If the planner decides to raise the shadow price of copper to consider the future disadvantage to society of possible exhaustion of its supply of the mineral, then treatment of the planning problem in terms of the labor theory of value becomes a bit complex but this is a quibble which, although it has caused headaches for Soviet planners, is tangential rather than crucial to appreciating the perspective gained by accepting Marxs proposal to take a social point of view. Because each of the more technical arguments has one or more weak points, the argument from a social point of view is the most convincing of Marxs proofs. It is also the one closest to a love ethic. It calls upon the mind to rise to a level of equal care for each persons needs, and equal appreciation of each persons efforts. Value is then measured by labor alone, since the labor of anybody at all counts equally as a social cost, and delivery of goods or services to anybody at all counts equally as a social benefit. We are all counted as one, sharing each others burdens. To rise to this level requires love as well as intelligence. In the end, then, it is love which believes the labor theory of value is true. One of the formulas given in the second volume of Capital can serve as a summary of much of Marxs account of capitalism. It is: M C P C M Reading from left to right, what this diagram means is: 1. First money is exchanged for commodities. M C The commodities in question at this first stage comprise everything the capitalist needs to invest in production, i.e. purchase of raw materials, etc., including note this the purchase of the peculiar commodity, labor-

power, i.e. the hiring of workers. 2. Next, the commodities purchased are put to work in production. C......P What happens here is that the capitalist uses the commodities he or she has bought. The use of the peculiar commodity labor-power is: setting workers to work making something out of the raw materials. 3. The next step follows, namely: the workers make the product. P......C As a result of the labor done in the productive process, the capitalist ends up with commodities again, but this time they are the products. The magic happens here, because the resulting commodities C have a higher value than the initial commodities C. Value grows because the labor transforms the raw materials, adding value. The worker adds the value; the capitalist gets the benefit. Of course everything is fair and square because the capitalist bought the workers labor-power; he owns it so he owns its product. 4. The next step is called the realization or sale. C M Here the products are sold, and the result is that the capitalist has more money than she or he started with. So the process ends as it began, with money. The difference and the whole point is that at the endthere is more money. The difference between the money at the end and the money at the beginning can be expressed as: M M = M The quantity M Marx calls surplus value. 283 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II It will readily be seen that if the surplus value M is thrown back into the production process, then it will generate still more money. This cycle can go around and around any number of times, producing what Marx calls accumulation. Marx points out that a great many economic processes and historical events which appear from some points of view to be humans acting on the basis of decisions made of their own free will, are from another point of view surplus value reproducing itself and accumulating. The cycle described by the formula goes on and on, over and over; individuals, nations, empires are shaped and changed by surplus value being thrown into production, and then emerging from production augmented over and over again. The diagram just discussed can also be used to illustrate the most important of Marxs reasons for considering capitalism unstable. The reason is simply that as the process goes on and on, the accumulation of wealth by some people is necessarily accompanied by the relative poverty of others, which will produce polarization and conflict. Marx gives other arguments, such as the law of the falling rate of profit, which shows how capitalists by competing among themselves drive down profits and thereby weaken the motive to invest. And Marx gives analyses of the periodic crises when banks fail and debtors are driven to suicide because there is no way to get the cash they need to pay their debts as they fall due. Marxs arguments never amount to an ironclad deductive demonstration that revolution will occur; the tenor is to reinforce what an ordinary mind is likely to surmise from examining the formula M C......P......C M, considered as a repeating cycle. We are in a positive feedback loop, and therefore we are in a process prone to system crash. Marx is a pessimistic optimist, or an optimistic pessimist. He thinks the basic design of the system is such that it will work badly, by fits, starts, and periodic collapses. And that since it works badly, it will be replaced by another system that works better. And he identifies the people who will do the replacing of the capitalist system by a better one, namely: the systems victims, who will become numerous like the waves of the sea, organized, aware of their plight and its

remedy, and desperate, as time goes on. 284 Letter 36 36 THE MAKING OF A COUNTERCULTURE The apartment was full of roses and lilies when we arrived. Marias friend Father John had done a funeral and had brought Maria the leftovers. On our trek through parking lots from Century Center to her pad we had gone in the back entrance of a supermarket to see the boy in charge of culling the produce; he gave Maria a large green pepper, two aubergines, a cauliflower, and a sack of navel oranges. Maria gave the boy a hug and a kiss. While Willy began to prepare the supper (the waiters name was Willy) Maria seated herself crosslegged on the floor between baskets of roses and told me she would like to clarify in her own mind my proposed method for transforming the structures of the modern world. Evidently I believe that human conduct is governed by symbolic structures, also called rgulations hermneutiques, which do not cancel the biologically given behavior-guidance mechanisms since they are, after all, extensions and developments of the biologically given capacities of language, imagery, and actioncoordination; the cultural structures do not cancel the human capacity for self-government either, being themselves the means by which self-government is done, since when we choose and deliberate (as Aristotle would say) what we do is think rationally, according to whatever canons of rationality the cultural structures pervading our milieu provide, and according to whatever personal prejudices our personal histories have given us. The method for transformation is, Maria went on, to change the cultural structures through a process called cultural action, which is the same thing as philosophy, although carried on, unlike most traditional philosophy, by the people, with the people, and for the people, as a process of empowerment and at the same time as a process of adjustment to reality. In cultural action people work together to change the collective representation of reality to make it more accurate, hence more, useful as a guide for living harmoniously in the environment in which the human group finds itself. (Maria mentioned in passing that she herself does not agree with anything she is saying, because she considers only insincere conduct to be governed by cultural structures, and advocates social change through jettisoning the structures, jettisoning the culture, jettisoning all cultures; learning to listen and respond to the primitive and true language of the body. However, her purpose at the moment was to try to understand me, not to refute me.) Maria said she found it helpful to contrast my ideas with those of a member of the North American social science establishment, Ted Robert Gurr, whose book Why Men Rebel has been regarded as a compendious summary of what is known about political violence. Both Gurr and I, she said, are doing peace research in some sense; Maria wanted to make clear to herself in what senses our respective scholarly efforts are contributions to peace. A striking contrast between Gurr and me, Maria noted, is that I use ides-forces where Gurr uses operational definitions. I search the history of our culture for resources and search contemporary usage for growth-points, seeking in every case words that act, words that do things, which organize, inspire, encourage, facilitate and guide cooperation which is why she 285 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II says I use ides-forces. Gurr on the contrary invents theoretical concepts, notably Relative

Deprivation, which he abbreviates RD, and he defines it operationally by specifying what measuring processes using what instruments determine how much RD is present in a given case. You know what RD is when you know what operations measure it. The instructions for measuring it are the operational definitions. Knowing the operational definitions of RD and the other variables, social scientists can talk to each other and test each others theories. Maria said it was clear to her why I prefer ides-forces. It is because peace can be built only with principles we can love. These are, in the first instance, principles people do love, symbolic structures people already feel identified with and attached to; concepts known to the public; words with roots, with histories, with commitments such as justice, for example. In the second place, Maria supposed, a lovable principle must be one that really does serve vital needs for food, warmth, medicine, water, air, and affirmation as a cared for beloved person. Humans can only be expected to learn to love new principles when the new principles really serve their vital needs. Also, Maria said, the discussion of Marx made her think I would add another qualification to the lovable principles that cultural action is supposed to bring into existence, by starting always with what is, nurturing growth points, building always toward viable and beautiful rgulations hermneutiques. The qualification is that they must not lead to accumulation and crash. Marx has shown that certain legal structures, which feature private ownership of the means of production, tend to produce positive feedback loops that are destabilizing as Dutch elm virus destabilized North American elm groves by multiplying exponentially in a positive feedback loop in the absence of any natural enemy, until the virus destroyed the groves and with them its own hosts. To be lovable, a principle must be sustainable. Gurr, on the other hand, wants to build a theory, and by a theory he means an empirically confirmed set of relationships among variables. He would like to show with empirical studies that knowing the level of RD, and knowing the extent of politicization of discontent, a social scientist will be able to predict accurately the magnitude of political violence. Y = f(X1 X2) where Y = magnitude of political violence X1 = RD (Relative Deprivation) X2 = politicization of discontent f ( ) = what the social scientist would like to know. Once some such equation is confirmed, then people will know how to avoid political violence because they will know its causes. Peace could be attained by learning what values of what variables produce political violence, and then making sure that those values never occur. I must say, Maria went on, that when I read Gurr and his ilk I think peace research is still in its infancy. The data do not bear out the generalizations, and I doubt that the researchers are measuring the right variables. On the other hand, when I read your Feasible Peace Plan (Letter 33) your approach seems to be not so much in its infancy as infantile. You simply make up pompous rhetoric with no evidence at all to support it. When Maria compares Gurrs approach to mine, she must credit Gurr with at least making an effort to use facts to support his generalizations. She tickled my nose with a pink rosebud. How do you know, she asked, that economic society is a stepmother who rejects her children or that we are all broken-hearted (Letter 33)? 286 Letter 36 Did you interview everybody in the world? And if you did interview everybody, would they tell

you the truth? If you came up to me in the food stamp line and asked me whether I felt resentment toward a society that rejects me, I would say, Society goes its way. I go my way. I learned to get by without them. My religion is the religion of the body. Flesh on flesh. Forget the symbolic structures. Actually, I said, pausing a moment to examine a tiny yellow ant climbing on a green lily stem, my method is similar to Marxs. Karl Popper criticized Marx for committing a logical fallacy, but Poppers criticism of Marx was mistaken, and your criticism of me is mistaken for the same reason. Poppers criticism of Marx is this. Marx, says Popper, develops an elaborate theory about alienation, commodities, use-value, exchange value, plain old basic value which is labor, surplus value, accumulation, exploitation, etc. etc. and then armed with his cumbersome theoretical apparatus he marches out to explain the real world. When Marx gets to the real world he sees the misery of the proletariat in the cotton mills at Manchester, and he says, Voila! Here are the facts which confirm my theory! The proletariat is miserable just as my theory predicted! But this is a fallacy, says Popper. Everybody knew all along that the proletariat was miserable, so Marx s scientific theory did not predict anything except a previously known fact. Any theory could have done that. If you tell me the facts, and then ask me to compose a theory to predict them, then I can compose any number which will fit the bill. It is a general truth of logic that from a proposition q the consequence if p then q always follows. So that if q is, for example, the wages of the workers in the English cotton industry were cut 10% in 1847 (a fact cited by Marx, Das Kapital, vol. I, ch. 15, 7) and p is, for example, the labor theory of value is true then it follows from q that if p then q The problem is that if r then q, if s then q, if t then q also follow from q, where r, s, and t represent any propositions whatever, true or false, and with or without any relation to q, such as for example r = the cat is on the mat, s = the moon is a blue plum, t = whatever you wish. So none of Marxs evidence proves his theory, or even counts in favor of it, for to prove his theory Marx would have to submit hypotheses to empirical tests, predicting something not previously known in such a way that the hypotheses would run the risk of being falsified when and if the phenomenon predicted failed to happen. Even if the theory passed these tests, we still could not say, strictly speaking, that Marxs theory was true only that several of his hypotheses had successfully passed several tests. In fact, however, Marxs theory is neither tested nor testable. Nevertheless, I went on, this criticism of Marx is mistaken because Marx is not doing the sort of theory Popper says he does badly. Marx is not fallaciously proffering q as evidence for 287 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II p because he is not analyzing p and q as separate propositions at all, as if the point were to note the impact of force p on phenomenon q. Marx is like an observer of a game of chess who at first understands the game very imperfectly if at all, who, as his observations and analyses continue gradually acquires insight into the rules the players are playing by. And who by further thought is able to deduce certain conclusions concerning what will happen if the players continue to play the same game by the same rules such as the conclusion that it is likely that sooner or later one or

the other of the players will win the game. The game Marx is analyzing is called capitalism. There is a short cut to learning its rules, which does not require interviews with all the players it is to read the Civil Code, which Marx did in law school; there you learn such basic rules as that property owners are authorized to exclude others from their property, that if you own something and it grows then you also own the growth, that you may do as you wish (unless, what you wish is forbidden by law) with your property, etc. And as Marx said more than once, economics (he called it political economy) is only the working out of the consequences of private property. Similarly, the claim economic society rejects its children states a fact about the cultural structures, admittedly not a fact expressed in the most boring possible way, but a fact nonetheless. When an infant comes yowling and howling into the world, it has, from a biological point of view, as much right to be on this planet as anyone else. However, a careful study of the deeds on record at the office of the County Clerk will show that the infant owns no real estate. Similar checks with banks, brokerage houses, insurance companies, will show that the infant has no income-earning investments. The Board of Employment will certify that the successful sale of the infants future labor at a satisfactory price cannot be guaranteed. Of course the yowler and howler doesnt know this it thinks its mother is its security. Some parents, realizing how little they can provide security for their children, disabuse them of their naive sense that the world is a caring and trustworthy place while they are still young. In other cases, disillusionment comes later, and in some cases people pass through life from cradle to grave, from loving parents to lucky breaks to more lucky breaks, convinced unto death that God would care for them in their hour of need if they ever had an hour of need. The structural fact is, however, that most people are born rejected; they come into a world divided into properties, and the ownerships of the properties are already recorded on deeds and ledgers, in somebody elses name. According to the rules of burgerliche Gesellschaft, they have no resources but themselves, and their selves are not necessarily worth anything. I was interrupted: and rather rudely prevented from making a number of necessary qualifications and concessions, and thereby was quite unfairly and wholly against my will put in the position of appearing to want to depict capitalism as simpler than it really is,* and Popper as more easily refuted than he really is, by the arrival of the tomato soldier with six tomatoes, just in time for their addition to the soul sauce, and by the subsequent general winebibbing, merriment, white bread, spare ribs, soul fruit salad, and soul veggies. Later when I got to know him I came to realize that he was a trifle daffy, as many people are. A man with a certain military experience, a felt hat, and a leather jacket; he was given to saying gravely This time its for keeps, as if the war had started, when apprised of the weather forecast; and Its been a rough ride to passing strangers when descending from a bus; and I got my teeth full of steel when referring to the grazing of the mouth by a zipper while removing a jacket over the head because the zipper was, as he said, out of commission. He lived alone in the basement where he kept his clothes immaculately in several closets, and among the residents of the building he had the distinction of being employed as a civilian assistant at an Ordinance Depot where the Army keeps enough Black Death Virus to poison Russia, if ever the need should arise, which is why Popper is further discussed in Letter 48. 288 Letter 36 he is called the Tomato Soldier, because, since the Black Death is kept in glacial suspended animation, and since nobody in the building has a freezer, and since during the summer the residents of the building raise tomatoes on the roof, he has acquired the habit of slipping the

collective produce into some of the underutilized military facilities in the fall, and from thence supplying the neighbors with tomatoes in the winter and spring. These tomatoes were, however, fresh, direct from the roof, because it was summer, and Maria turned off the light so we could dine by the green, blue, and pink flicker cast against the white wall by the neon sign of the cleaners and dyers across the street. Its one of the nice things about the second storey, said Marias roommate Margaret, and Willy said, serving himself some sauted cauliflower with aubergines, I think she meant the same thing I meant when I put up the sign. Caroline, who is more observant than I am and has a better memory, understood that Willy must be implying that it was he who had affixed to the swinging doors leading from the public part of Star Place to the work area where the open-faced sandwiches are prepared and the drinking glasses steamwashed, a sign reading No Admittance Except on Business. Immediately upon noticing the sign, Caroline had recognized its allusion to the following famous passage from Marx s Das Kapital: The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or of the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face No admittance except on business. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labourpower goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the preestablished harmony of things, or under the auspices of an allshrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the Free-trader Vulgaris with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but a hiding. 289 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Yes indeed, said Caroline (she is the only person I know who says Yes indeed). When I spoke paradoxically of bad goodness, Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham is just what I meant. This is the goodness which is, as Marx says, on the surface of economic society, in

contrast to the exploitation which takes places in the factories, mines, and fields where commodities are produced. Thats why I put up the sign, Willy interrupted. A discotheque is fun on the surface, for the customers, but when you work there you find its a business like any other. The international economic system is another example, said Caroline. Freedom, Equality, Rights, and Bentham on a global scale. Which is why the critique of bad goodness is the most important clarification to add to Kants peace plan. If Kants Volkerrecht is interpreted to mean Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham, then it means accumulation, polarization, strain greater than strength... war. Kants error does not lie where General von Clausewitz, Reinhold Niebuhr et al, thought it was; Kants error was not in overestimating the capacity of the nation-state and the humans composing it to act from duty. Kants error was in failing to provide a viable set of rules for individuals and collectivities to be dutiful to. Its like a guy you cant give a loaf of bread to, Willy went on, moving aside some alreadywilting lilies so he could see Caroline better. Right away he gets out his change and starts counting the pennies. He gives you the exact price of the bread. You tell him you didnt pay for the bread. You stole it. No matter. He still gives you the exact price of the bread. You know right away that is a guy who figures the system is going for him. He figures he keeps everything on the up and up and he comes out ahead in the end. There is no way you are going to get that guy into a sharing and buddy-buddy type relationship. Right! exclaimed Caroline, Right on! Thats all I wanted to hear! said Willy, raising his hands like an umpire calling a batter out, Thats all I wanted to hear! Im glad I invited you. Im glad I cooked the ribs. Im glad I heisted the drinks. I knew you were the kind of people we could talk scientific socialism and we would understand each other. I still thought I needed to explain exactly why Ted Robert Gurrs research does not help humanity to construct principles it can love, but I was denied the opportunity by the arrival of Marias roommate Magaret, Margarets friend Donn.a and her little boy Winston who was named after a cigarette with a case of small light cakes filled with a sweet white mousse known commercially as Hostess Twinkies. One of Donnas regular clients had taken the case of Twinkles from a delivery van and bestowed it upon her to return a favor she had done him several weeks ago when she provided him with the usual professional services without the usual professional fee at a time when he was depressed and out of funds at considerable risk to herself, since her sister streetwalkers have been known to wreak terrible vengeance on price cutters. The neighboring tribes came over to help eat the Twinkies, bringing a stereo tape deck with them, and playing it loud so we could dance, which did not prevent Willy and Maria from engaging in animated disputes about revolutionary strategy between numbers. Willy, a graduate of Folsom, who had done further study abroad at Joliette (near Montral) maintained that crime was the means of struggle of the American proletariat, which sooner or later would achieve a Police State. What! shouted Maria, slapping him on the mouth. You cant be serious! The Police State is the best thing for us, Willy replied. The police cant deny that the criminal element exists and we have our troubles. They have to deal with us every day. He went on to say that Hitlers Police State did more for the workers and the unemployed than any previous German government. More for the Jews too! said Maria, livid with rage. And dont forget: when they decide to clean up America, its you and I who go into the oven. 290

Letter 36 A fast samba to the music of Lionel Richie quickly cured Maria of her rage. Your problem, Willie, she said bluntly but calmly, is that you have a male mind. You are always empirebuilding in your imagination, dreaming great fantasies of yourself saving the world with your Great Plan. Then you agree with Popper, I interrupted. Popper attacks Plato and Marx for being Great Planners, on the ground that Great Planning is necessarily irrational, because it changes the values of too many variables at once, and it is therefore impossible to distinguish the impact of any given variable. The only rational plans are small ones, because if the number of variables is low you can measure each one, and then it is possible to know whether the means (the independent variable) is achieving the end (the dependent variable) which permits rationality by Def. 1, Letter 4. Popper calls it piecemeal social engineering. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Maria commented, Popper astutely stipulates that for piecemeal social engineering to work political power must dominate economic power. In practice this requirement is not met. We have seen a great many piecemeal reforms minimum wage laws, exemptions from minimum wage laws (to encourage employment), job training programs, legal aid for the poor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, community action, scholarships, youth employment programs, tax benefits for businesses which hire the unemployed, affirmative action, food stamps, general tax cuts (to give business more money to invest), general tax increases (to curb inflation), import restrictions (to protect local jobs), repeal of import restrictions (to lower prices), zoning restrictions (to attract industry to the area), repeal of zoning restrictions (to attract industry to the area), repeal of taxes (to attract industry) All of this piecemeal engineering leaves poverty more or less where it was and always for the same reason: economic power dominates, political power is compelled to acquiesce. Given this situation, males say: play around with the variables to find the best among the possible options (leaving out challenging economic power because that is not a possible option). The best among the possible options keeps getting worse and worse because the international market puts the squeeze on the U. S. of A. and on every nation; produce it better and for less, or else. Or else. Or else the international market wont buy. So you work harder for less. Less wages, less fringe benefits, less social benefits financed through taxes. Or else. Or else you dont work. Now females say: Who is going to help me? It has to be somebody I know. Somebody I can feel and touch. Nobody is going to help us but us, Maria went on. Forget the system. Its their system. Its collapsing anyway too many billions of debt that cant be paid, too many trillions in infrastructure that cant be maintained, too much overload of mother earths carrying capacity, Let it collapse. We have better things to do than worrying about the [expletive deleted] system. We are the new hunter-gatherers, living amid the ruins of industrial society. Our way of life is physical. Our bodies. Our selves.... At this point a stocky young man with a beard and a clipboard entered to general applause. The children rushed to give him Twinkies, clasp his knees, and lass his hands. He gave every child a small present: a pencil marked County of Wayne. His name was Mark, a welfare Inspector, on a midnight raid to certify that Marias children were living with her and Willy was not. Although Marias children lived with her mother, she kept a highchair and a rocking horse in the kitchenette in order to avoid having to make a total liar out of Mark. In addition, there were a number of pages Mark had to fill with stories; in particular a long fantasy in several installments about the measures being taken to pursue the fathers of Marias children to compel them to pay child support, which he

and Maria were in the process of composing together. Mark made himself comfortable and commenced his labors. I, on the other hand, was not comfortable. Since my methods for buildingpeace and justice call for strengthening respect for the law, I could not be comfortable reveling in stolen 291 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Twinkies. We deemed the moment to be opportune to take affectionate leave of each of our new friends, and made our way to and through the door, leaving Mark lying on his stomach on the floor, his chest on a pillow, his arms propped up by his elbows, writing notes on his clipboard with his right hand, eating segments of navel orange with his left hand while Margaret, Maria, Donna, and Willy took turns rubbing his back, legs, and feet. 292 Letter 37 37 THE FOREST CREATURES HEAR A CONFESSION Contadme todo Cadena a cadena.* Neruda, Macchu Picchu Of course Maria answers her own question, said Malcolm as he turned over his coffee roaster. The small copper roaster he had carried into the woods in his backpack was like the one T. E. Lawrence carried into the desert in his saddlebag. Engraved on the outside with flowing arabesques, lined on the inside with a wash of tin, it was shaped like two small frying pans hinged together, the two identical pans forming between them a sealed chamber where the beans are roasted, equipped with a long double handle used by Malcolm to position the apparatus among the coals and to turn it over. At precisely the right moment the coffee beans are removed from the campfire; then left in the roaster to cool for 71/2 minutes; then introduced into the mouth of a small enameled white and blue Swedish grinding machine, which was, like the roaster, transported into the woods in a backpack for the purpose; ground; and immediately brewed. Malcolm is nothing if not a perfectionist, and as is the case with so many of us (and with so many of our institutions) the same essential quality by which he is structurally constituted gives him both his weaknesses and his strengths. Malcolms total perfectionism is the reason why he is hard to get along with and also the reason why he makes good coffee. The question Maria is really asking, Malcolm went on, is how to change the system. She does not see in the U.S.A. any fulfillment of Marxs hope that the victims of the system would become numerous as the waves on the sea, organized, aware of their situation and its remedy, and desperate. Willys idea, on the other hand, is to use crime as a means of social struggle, until the bourgeoisie is compelled to militarize the country, relinquishing its political power to the professionals in police technology in exchange for protection. But Maria regards Willys plan as a recipe for suicide, The establishment approach to social change, known as Piecemeal social engineering, leaves poverty in place because it leaves the system poverty is part of in place. In practice piecemeal social engineering amounts to devising schemes for pleasing the holders of economic power through larger and safer profits. So the question Maria is asking, is Is there any way at all to challenge economic power? Her literal answer is that there is no answer Challenging economic power is not possible. But she

is being ironic; she means that as the male mind plays with the variables looking for an optimal solution, the economic pouvoir en place (power in place) must be accepted as an unmoveable constraint. But of course she has an answer. She IS an answer. She is the goddess of survival skills, the mistress of networking, sorceress of friendship, priestess of the non-formal shadow economy, prophetess of the social relations that operate in and around the relations Marx analyzed, queen * These two lines by Neruda compress a great deal of meaning into five words. I would translate them into English as: Tell me your whole story, sisters and brothers,/Tell me each link of the chains that bind you, and then the next link. This letter is about the links of the chains that bind us. 293 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II of the person-to-person cooperation which existed for thousands of years before economic society came into being, and which will continue to exist after modern societys peculiar institutions go out of being. Instead of fighting the system through political parties or revolutionary conspiracies, she dissolves the system with mutual aid and charm. Malcolms praise of Marias philosophy left me speechless and unable to reply. Staring into the fire I paid particular attention to the unusual colors in the coals and flames, the colors different from red and orange, that is to say the whites, the yellows, and the greens. Every now and then the pitch in a pine branch exploded and hissed a miniature super-nova in a campfire here on our remote planet. My mind wandered to Mexico City, a city about average, as this world goes, in its level of wealth and welfare, in its mixture of capitalist and socialist institutions, its intense nationalistic sentiment and equally intense involvement with international business, its contrast of misery and privilege, its corruption, the pollution of its atmosphere distinguished from other cities mainly because it is larger, having grown faster and bigger than the rest of the worlds cities, being perhaps the image of what the rest of the world can expect as population increases, urbanization increases, and as the living conditions of substantial portions of the peoples of the first world fall toward third world levels. There are some 18 million souls in Mexico City, somewhat loosely attached to 18 million bodies, for a total of 3 6 million, if you count the souls and the bodies separately, or, to be more precise, 3 7 million, since although 18 plus 18 is 36, 18.3 + 18.3 is 36.6, which rounded to the nearest million is 37. Counting the soul and the body as two separate entities is an innovation in demography, which is justified in the case of Mexico City because Mexicans tend to be ensimismados that is to say, absorbed in their own thoughts, inclined to stare into fires, or into television screens, living more in the spaces of their imaginations than in the spaces where their bodies are. An even more accurate demographical methodology would be to say that there are (approximately) 18,3 00,001 separate Mexico Cities, 18,300,000 imaginary spaces inhabited by the same number of souls plus one physical space occupied by 18,300,000 bodies. Using this method, the population for the average Mexico City would be Total Souls + Total Bodies Number of Mexico Cities which is, substituting constants for the variables, 18.3 million + 18.3 million 18,300,001 i.e. slightly less than two. Now if ceteris were paribus (i.e. if other things were equal), which it never is, the crime rate and the unemployment rate would correlate rather closely with each other,

which is to say sometimes they correlate closely enough that even the hardest of the hard scientists in the PRI (the political party always in office in Mexico) notices that something has got to be done to bring down the level of misery, so they get up a seminar for international investors, and invite down the heavies from the Economic Club in New York, and throw them a party at the Fiesta Palace on the Paseo de la Reforma, and wine them and dine them and raise local money to share the risks, and talk up the size of Mexicos domestic markets and Mexicos expected growth with new oil production coming on line and the heavies from New York and Riyadh, Tokyo, and Germany check out the tax rates and the labor costs and check out Mexicos credit rating at the IMF and check out the environmental impact regulations (if any) and they say theyll think about it, and maybe theyll build a factory and maybe theyll put in an order to buy something, and sooner or later a deal is struck and the PRI puts an article in 294 Letter 37 Excelsior and Una mas Uno and the other periodicos, and 18.3 million Mexicans wake up to the good news in the morning paper that 10,000 jobs have been created. Well, the whole process is pretty corrupt, and its sort of like selling the country; and sooner or later even the least ideological of the hard scientists in the PRI (the political party always in office in Mexico) decides something has to be done to affirm the national dignity, and to get Mexicans a larger share of their countrys wealth, and to raise wages. So they to something, and the heavies from New York, and Riyadh and Tokyo and Germany say well maybe this year we will buy more tomatoes from Morocco, and maybe we will manufacture more television sets in Brazil this year, because Brazil has a free trade agreement with Mexico anyway so you can make the sets in Brazil and sell them in Mexico, so lucky Morocco, lucky Brazil, unlucky Mexico, and 10,000 Mexicans wake up in the morning with pink slips, and they say Easy come, easy go, and drift into some other region of their imagination, with their typical Mexican resignation and ensimismamiento until some politician makes some particularly hypocritical statement which incites them to throw rocks at the police and burn a few buses, and maybe some men knife a few well-dressed intellectuals from the PRI in the subway, not because they need the money but just because they want to prove they are men, and then the hard scientists decide its time for another seminar at the Fiesta Palace on the Paseo de la Reforma. And meanwhile the fumes in the air become more and more toxic, and the water table under the ground in the Bajo just north of Mexico City, which used to be one of the earths richest agricultural areas, goes down and down and down, and the bodies somewhat loosely attached to the 18.3 million souls are finding it harder and harder and harder to breathe, to walk safely on the street, to drink water, and to eat, while the souls move among the televised images and move from Excelsior to pornography and around and around and back and forth, and the logistiche psuche (the rational parts of the souls) move around and around and back and forth in the irrational rationality of economic society. And sooner or later the army will take over the government in Mexico and the top military officers will call together the hard scientists on their economic team and issue them strict orders to be rational, and the military officers will promise, for their part, that anybody who interferes with rationality will be detected, detained, and if necessary dismembered, and the military will keep its promises and the economists will obey their orders and the attachment of the bodies to the souls will get looser and looser and meanwhile I have to listen to Malcolm telling me that Maria Luna and her religion of the body are going to dissolve the structures of economic society with charm. I took a picture postcard out of my pocket. The postcard was a print of Woman at the Harpsichord by Emanuel de Witte (Dutch, 1617-1692) which I had picked up at the Toledo Art

Museum. There are people who keep postcards in their pockets, even when they are in the woods, so that if they think of something to say to their spouses and the spouse is not there, they can write it down in a ready-to-mail form before they forget what it was they wanted to say. On the postcard I wrote: Question: Is the rest of the world crazy or are we? Answer: The rest of the world is crazy. The night was already nearing dawn; the eastern sky already turning an eggshell blue. As the sky brightened the eastern stars disappeared, leaving in the East only the strong silver light of Venus as a single distinct illuminated point against an illuminated plane, while in the West the stars still marked infinitely many lighted points in the vast three-dimensional darkness. Meanwhile Malcolm had ambled away from our circle of light into the already thinning outer darkness, in search of fuel for our fire. Thinking to be helpful, or at least to dramatize my unhelpfulness as involuntary incompetence in the field of firewood selection in damp woods on hazy nights, as distinct from voluntary sloth, I eventually followed Malcolm into the woods. When we startled a doe with her fawn we realized we were not alone, and when we stumbled back into camp with armloads of burnables it seemed as though the eyes of forest creatures 295 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II watched us. We thought we saw our firelight reflected in the eyes of squirrels glancing toward us, squirrels momentarily fascinated by red-orange radiations from a source that was not the sun squirrel metaphysicians struck, like Aristotle, with a sense of wonder as they confronted a new phenomenon, who interrupted the gathering of pine nuts to philosophize for a few moments, until; with the existence of the campfire duly recorded in the structures of their internal communication systems, they would return with reduced anxiety to their work in the forest floor, reassured that the arche (principle) and aitai (cause) of things as they appear to squirrel were synchronized with things as they are in themselves. Or perhaps it was only the glint of reflected firelight on the fronts of ferns at the outer boundary of our illuminated circle which gave us the impression of being observed by so many eyes. It would be easier for me to explain myself, continued Malcolm after he had rebuilt the fire and neatly stacked a reserve supply of firewood, if I believed in my own sincerity. He spoke pensively as if he had been listening to the silences and had been chastened by them. Securely fortified as I am behind a series of structural traps backed up by philosophical heavy artillery, it is hard for me to believe in myself when I contrive to give myself and others the impression that I am on the site of the broken people, the rotos (broken ones) as they say in Chile, since, of course, the same system which makes their lives precarious makes my life secure. I do not know whether lam honest or not. Usually I do not know whether I want to be honest. The only times when I really despise dishonesty are when somebody plays games with me, like the way she would admire everything I said. (Malcolm could not get his former girlfriend out of his mind.) I would say, The probability of nuclear war some time in the next 200 years is well over 90%, and she would beam and glow as if to say Isnt he wonderful to say such intelligent things? When people treat me that way I say to myself, I will be honest. I am going to be honest. I am not going to be like the rest of the world. Then after a time believing in my own sincerity loses importance for me; it fades off my list of priorities, and I revert to my usual wicked hypocrisy. Malcolm had never struck me as wicked or hypocritical. Insensitive, yes. Wicked, no. And, far from hypocritical, I thought him obsessed with revealing his innermost feelings to people not necessarily interested in hearing about them. I thought of asking what he meant by his usual wicked hypocrisy, but, since I was enjoying being silent, instead of interrupting I waited to see if

he would explain. If you measured my values with a stopwatch, Malcolm went on, following the principle that to know what a person most values in life is equivalent to knowing which activities she or he devotes the most time to, you would find that my two highest values are washing my hair and drinking coffee. (Malcolm is proud of his hair, which is thicker, longer, and shinier than the hair of most men who are, like him, in their late 40s.) I like to take a hot bath, wash my hair with an exotic shampoo from the health food store, give the hair a good conditioning rinse, and blow dry it. I like to camp out in the wildlands where nobody is here to give me trouble and drink coffee under the stars. Sometimes I go to Qubec for a week to sip coffee at the Cafe Krieghoff with quiche aux pinards (spinach quiche), or out to Santa Fe. I tell people I go to Santa Fe for skiing in the winter and opera in the summer, but really what I like best is coffee at Jodys with a hot tamale. From what I could tell so far, what Malcolm meant by his usual wicked hypocrisy, was mainly his passing time sitting in cafes sipping coffee. I finally broke my silence to ask him what it was about his coffee drinking that he considered wicked. A stranger looking at me would not see anything unusual, Malcolm said. Detectives and secret agents observing me would consider copying my dress and manners in order to improve their professional effectiveness by making themselves inconspicuous. But they see only the outside. They do not see the hardness of my heart. 296 Letter 37 The Ethics of Respect for Persons Complemented by Damyata As I drink coffee I meditate, for example, on taxes. Taxes are one of the structural traps constituted by the symbolic structures of economic society. Of course I hate taxes everybody does; I can join in conversation about taxes with perfect strangers over coffee and Wyoming-style chili at Dotties Diner in Temple, Texas; we have a feeling of identification with each other as we chat in the diner because, although we have just met, we all hate taxes. I know just what you mean, I say. We know just how you feel, they say. The perfect crime, I whisper silently to myself. Whether I engage in a little amiable ranting and raving over pancakes and coffee at the Busy Bee in Seattle, or whether I just gloat silently to myself alone over coffee with bougatsa (a custard-filled Greek pastry) at the Pegasus in Detroit, I enjoy malicious glee when I consider how Karl Poppers plans to reform capitalism are stymied by taxes. When people say, We know just how you feel, as we chat about taxes, they are deceived. They do not know how I feel. My feeling is Heh heh like the villain with the black hat in the comic books. The perfect crime. Popper of course was neither an accountant nor a lawyer, and he really did not know the details of the tax legislation of an industrial society; he did not know how little my checks in the mail are actually affected by laws which on the surface seem to redistribute wealth. He was certainly aware, as everyone is, that the people on welfare depend absolutely on the people paying taxes for the source of their income, and I suppose he must have imagined taxes to be one of the weapons political power could use to dominate economic power. Popper does not actually say anything about how his proposed miracle of politics dominating economics is supposed to come about he contents himself with stirring rhetoric, declaring forcefully that politics must dominate economics, as if heat in the blood would be sufficient to guarantee the successful implementation of the deed. In any case, if not taxes then some other instrument fit for the purpose is essential to Poppers philosophy, for if we pay attention to Popper and to his distinguished predecessor John Stuart Mill

and their ilk, we will be told that the reason why democracy is better than totalitarianism is that the defects of a democratic society will be cured over time, be they crime, poverty, an excessive proportion of the population drifting through life in an idiotic fog at their wits end, or whatever the problems may be. Democracy is in principle a step forward in humanitys quest for more rational forms of government because it is inherently self-correcting; whatever is wrong will not stay wrong, because the people have the power and the motive to change it, the power being the vote and the motive being self-interest. Suppose you object that the power and the motive are not necessarily united with wisdom sufficient to make an intelligent connection between the problem to be solved (crime, unemployment, war, or whatever it may be) and the solution (i.e. the legislation to be passed by the representatives of the voters in the parliament or congress, which will change the rules of the social game in such a way that the problem will be solved). Sir Karl Popper and John Stuart Mill will reply; We are glad you asked us that question for they were just about to say, even without being asked, that the open society as Popper calls it is precisely that society designed to make intelligent connections between problems and their solutions. Freedom of speech, the public schools, freedom of the press, academic freedom, research in the social sciences, and the debates among philosophers concerning the logic and methodology to be followed in producing knowledge (all these are characteristics of the open society) have their payoff in adding to the power of the people the indispensable ingredient needed for the wise use of power: knowledge. Economic societys ideal image of itself portrays the peculiar genius of its institutions in terms of (1) the market, (2) the vote market, (3) the idea market. In the market consumers freely 297 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II choose what to buy, thereby making the crucial decisions of any society, namely: what will be produced and in what quantities and using what resources. Whatever defects market (1) may have will be corrected by market (2). In market (2) politicians compete freely for the votes of the citizens; this political process of market (2) produces decisions modifying the rules the society lives by. There are, of course, defects in market (2), such as, for example, well-financed electoral campaigns which propel poorly qualified candidates into office through clever advertising. We can, however, in the longrun rely on market (3) to correct them, since wherever ideas are allowed to compete freely for the allegiance of free minds, and wherever research using sound scientific methods is subsidized, there will be a long run tendency for truth to advance and falsehood to recede, and truth is all the people need since through market (1) and market (2) the people already have the power to use the truth as soon as they acquire it to promote the peoples vital interests and the ideal values the people hold dear. One might add, by the way, that whoever considers the values of the people to be corrupt or vulgar is offered freedom of religion and freedom of artistic expression as channels through which she may do whatever she thinks needs to be done to improve the publics values. On a superficial view the peculiar symbolic structures of industrial democracies pose a threat to my security, since, it might seem, it will sooner or later become evident to the majority of the people that there is no good reason for me to get checks in the mail. However, heh, heh. Let us deepen the analysis by considering the formulas describing the system provided by the systems leading critic: M C P C M M M = M My checks in the mail are part of M (surplus value). My checks are interest, dividends, and rents

from my investments. I dont manage my investments, they are tied up in trust funds with professional managers; all I do is receive the checks. Now suppose some overly radical legislators put heavy taxes on M. The result will be a shortage of money to throw back into the cycle M C P C M The result will be a diminution of P (production) which will hurt everybody. Everybody depends on production for food and other basic needs. That is why they need me. I just sit here drinking my coffee, but I am necessary. They struggle and squirm, Vote and revolt, orate and organize, legislate and adjudicate. Still they cannot escape my vise-like grip. When they try to hurt me they hurt themselves. Labor unions, desirable as they often are, are structural traps similar to taxes, that is to say, as a method for changing the system they are guaranteed to fail. The public does not like it when service is interrupted by a labor dispute. For the public taxes are a plague; strikes are another plague. The common sense of the general public intuits that taxes and unions slow down the production of the vital goods and services everybody needs, ...la grve est scandaleuse parcquelle gne precisement ceux quelle ne concerne pas.* A deeper truth underlies what the public intuits: contrary to what Popper would have us believe, the political process has no choice but to administer the economy as it is it is impossible to make economics subordinate to politics, as Popper advocates, and for that reason the Popper-Mill philosophy cannot deliver the gradual perfection of institutions through research, free speech, a free press, and free elections. * The strike is scandalous because it harms precisely those whom it does not concern. Roland Barthes, Mythologies p. 134. 298 Letter 37 The impossibility of achieving a rational society through politics and through the labor movement is backed up by the heavy artillery of ethical philosophy, or, to change the metaphor, the structural trap is constituted by the symbolic structures that organize the mythic consciousness of economic society namely the ethics which proclaims with Kant the Heiligkeit of Wurde, i.e. the holiness of human dignity, also known as respect for persons, also known as autonomy is the supreme principle of morals. Most people do not see the connection between the structural trap and the ethic, but I, as I sip my coffee, see it quite clearly, so clearly that I would defend the ethic doggedly if I were a person who wanted to defend the system, instead of being, as I am, a half-hearted person of divided will who sort of complains about the system while sort of enjoying its benefits, who sympathizes with the poor sort of sincerely and sort of insincerely and sort of not knowing whether I am sincere or whether I want to be sincere. If I were a wholehearted advocate of the structural traps that keep the system in place, then I would do what the philosophical establishment does, i.e. I would declare the accompanying ethic sacred, or else, if I were afraid that meddling with religious words might damage my credibility or my interests, I would declare the ethic of respect for persons to be rational. Or to be a good summary of how ethical language works. Respect for persons means above all, as Kant has taught us, respect for freedom; autonomy and dignity carry the same consequence, for they are different paths of entry into the circle of Kantian symbolic structures, i.e. into modern societys circle, a circle whose symbols facilitate the cycle: M C P C M In our system production starts with free agreements among buyers and sellers of commodities, say of labor power, for example, and it does not start any other way. To make me produce, with my money or my talents, would be immoral, indeed making me do anything is immoral, and since the

Kantian dichotomy leaves only two choices, the mechanistic make me and the formal free choice.. The upshot of the ethic is that I am within my rights in using my free choice to decline to put my money and other resources into production, or to move them wherever I choose and those rights are all I need to turn into a boomerang any scheme the legislator may devise to stop the flow of the little papers which permit me to pass my time washing my hair and drinking coffee, namely the checks which come to my mailbox in white envelopes. As I listened to Malcolm I thought that after all respect for each person is a good value to have, and I rummaged in my mind for some way to enhance respect for persons while detaching it from our tangled-up system where so many measures taken to solve problems are either ineffective or else worse than the problem they are supposed to solve. Since it is modern western civilization which has tied the world into knots, I rummaged for an unravelment in the categories non-modern and non-western; I knew my unravelment would be a bit of a hoax because surely there are many ways out of our dilemmas, not one, and surely it is millions of minds working on human problems from all sides, not one persons bright idea, conceived from one point of view, which will give us real solutions. But what am I to do? A philosopher is a specialist in generalities; all I can to is to draw on the treasure trove of humanitys spiritual resources to give you a word that solves the problem as I have posed it in general and in principle, and here is what I come up with: the ancient Sanskrit word Damyata. Damyata means master yourselves, which means that the higher powers submit to the law of the word. Now suppose this is really deep stuff and Im not sure I understand my own thoughts that at the high and low levels of our society the mythic consciousness which forges our identity did not say I have a right to do what I want, and did say, I must master myself to give 299 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II myself in solidarity. Damyata would change the whole context of tax legislation and labor unions it would change the whole meanings of the words tax, legislation, labor, and union, among others. The result would be that the big P, production, would tend in all conditions to go forward for reasons of social conscience, self-concept, accepted norms, submission to duty, peoples mutual expectations concerning one anothers conduct. Damyata would mitigate the problem of social change bringing production slowdowns (manifested as unemployment and inflation, i.e. as fewer jobs and fewer goods the fewness of the goods driving up the prices) production slowdowns which act as a drag and a brake on the transformation of the structures of this modern world. Since Damyata made sense to millions of ancient Hindus there is no reason to regard it as a far-out idealistic concept after all, our peculiar method for tying ourselves up in knots would have seemed weird and far-out to them. The Rationality of Exchange Complemented by Datta Malcolm did not hear my thoughts because I did not say them. He examined the dark branches of a sugar pine outlined against the purple sky of the north, as if seeking to discern a hidden message in the trees silhouette, and then continued his soliloquy. My glee, he continued, is multiplied when I contemplate the efficacy of the international market as an enforcer of the structural traps. If a nation raises taxes at the expense of profits, or if that nation raises wages at the expense of profits (through supporting labor unions, enforcing minimum wage laws, or otherwise), the nation will be punished it will surely be punished by the international market. Capital will flow out, seeking higher profits elsewhere. The cost of the

products the nation sells will tend to go up, and the quantities sold will tend to fall correspondingly down, making it harder for the nation in question to export enough to pay for its imports. A marvelous mechanism! The international market is the Great Enforcer; it imposes discipline on workers and parliaments; it protects the interests of the consumer, and since I am the perfect consumer, being a person who consumes without producing, it protects my interests. Not infrequently there is a nation which declines to submit itself to the discipline of the international market, preferring its own way of life to the international style. Many wars and armed interventions have had as their motives compelling one nation or another to get into the international market when it preferred to stay out. But let us not emphasize steel artillery; our topic is philosophy. The metaphorical heavy artillery of rationality is our subject; persuasion by argument is philosophys force. Here is an argument: Everyone gains by trade, for if each party to an exchange did not get something she wanted more and give up something she wanted less, there would be no meeting of the minds, no contract, no deal, no exchange, no trade. Trade is, therefore, rational; it is both parties maximizing their payoffs (Def. 7, Letter 4). Better yet: participation in the international market defines rationality, for to exchange what one wants less to get what one wants more just is pursuing ones objectives rationally. Free trade = participation in the market = efficiency = rationality. I love it! When Commodore Perry sailed his warships into Tokyo Bay in 1853 to fire a few salvos at the defenseless Japanese in order to compel the Japanese to participate in the international market, Perrys literal artillery was in alliance with the epistemological artillery of modern societys main conceptions of rationality. I was not sure that Malcolm was using the word epistemology in quite the usual way. Epistemology usually means theory of knowledge, or the study of how we know what we know. What Malcolm had in mind, no doubt, was that when August Hecksher, for example, produces studies which claim to show quantitatively how much the worlds peoples gain by trading with each other, he is claiming to have a sort of knowledge about trade, hence he has an implicit theory about what knowledge is. He assumes that gain is getting more of what you 300 Letter 37 want, or, to say the same thing in other words, gain is pursuing ones objectives as rational people are presumed to do. Hence the usual economic model of human nature and of rationality is presupposed by Hecksher, as it is presupposed by most economists, and there is a certain dovetailing of the epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the image of rational economic-man (the entity one claims to produce knowledge about). I thought I remembered reading somewhere a logical refutation of the proposition that everyone gains by trade, and the arguments supporting it; it had something to do with detecting equivocations in the identity of the subject who does the gaining, whether the everyone in the proposition refers to I or you or whoever or they or we, and if, for example, it is we who gain, just exactly who is the we who does the gaining, whether it is the coffee plantation owner, or the peon who hacks out the weeds on the plantation with a machete, or the banker who finances the coffee exports, or Maxwell House, or the people who drink coffee. But I was getting a bit sleepy and I could not bring to mind just exactly what it was that I had found to be erroneous in the proposition everyone gains by trade, when I read whatever it was I vaguely remembered having read, and I decided to assume until such time as I could muster the mental energy to examine the question thoroughly that the proposition everyone gains by trade is like most propositions, probably sometimes true, sometimes false, sometimes mostly true and partly false, sometimes mostly false and partly true, sometimes without any clear application in the situation at

hand, sometimes irrelevant, sometimes illuminating, and sometimes misleading. I speculated as the birds began to sing, and as a wind began to move a few clouds into the southern sky, on whether we in modern civilization might still be capable of remembering the adage, In the beginning was the Logos (John 1:1), and on whether we could still hear the Logos say to us what Prajapati, God of thunder, said to the ancient Hindus, Datta give. Their rationality would be efficient giving. (Logos would say Datta.) When a person, such as myself, for example, looked for a friend to keep him or her company in the solitudes of life, the person would seek someone to care for as much or more as someone to be cared for by. Perhaps people would count their children among their main joys in life just because the little creatures are opportunities for giving. Perhaps it would be true, perhaps it always will be true that we give each other the basic gift of personhood, which makes us humans, by listening to each others words. Maybe acting silly (from seelig, blessedly joyful) is more fun than gaining. Work and love, as well as play, might all be giving. An interesting hypothesis this all is gift. Nothing in our blood and bones prevents us from choosing to consider it true, for, as anthropologists and sociologists have discovered (see e.g. Marcel Mauss, The Gift) many human groups have organized the metabolism of life, the flow of matter and energy to and from the environment, the production and distribution of goods and services, on principles of gift-giving. The first symbols (our word symbol originally meant pact) were gifts. Rationality as gift, considered from the point of view of the social construction of reality, could not be regarded as an original idea; its banality is the affidavit of its feasibility. Although Datta is banal in the light of the Wertrationalitat (value-rationality) which has inspired and to some extent governed humans at many times and places, Datta does call for a gestalt shift of modernitys conception of the peculiar institution called the international market. The Great Enforcer of Labor Discipline would become the International Festival of Sharing; the competition of capitals would become intelligent cooperation. The United States, and Canada, to whom Nature has given the prairies, to whom history has given the gift of agronomic technology, would calculate the most efficient methods for sharing wheat. Surely they would choose to use donations to complement participatory self-help programs, and they would favor regimes which allocate local resources to building beautiful hospitals for infirm 301 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II indigents, so raise your taxes as high as you wish, my friends, the USA and Canada would say, the Great Enforcer has gone to sleep and will no longer punish you for raising taxes to build hospitals; and, incidentally, you will no longer need to provide rooms in your police stations for torturing labor leaders, because keeping the cost of labor down will no longer be the indispensable condition for selling enough exports to import the wheat your people need for survival; the torture chambers can become kindergartens, where the children can learn to sing, and dance for the infirm indigents and for the police on their off-duty hours, for the police will have more off-duty hours when there are fewer people wandering the streets hungry. And the kindergarten children through working to serve others as they practice their shows and slats for the entertainment of the off-duty policemen and the amusement of the people confined to the hospitals will learn the joy of giving. The Ontology of Force Complemented by Dayadhvam I was awakened from my reverie of children placing garlands of flowers around the necks of

repentant ex-torturers, by the voice of Malcolm, who had fallen into a quarrelsome mood. The idea that people like me are in a conspiracy to keep the capitalist system afloat would be ludicrous if it were not vile, said Malcolm as he stood before the smoldering campfire. As you know I do not do much of anything; I spend my time taking trips here and there, following sports, reading books, keeping up my personal appearance. Sometimes I go to a movie; more than anything else I sit in cafs. I like to be neat, but I am not proud or pushy. It irks me. that people who never have the slightest doubt concerning themselves, simply assume that people like me are to blame for war and poverty. What have I done? I tried working for a while, but I felt guilty about it. I was taking a job away from somebody who needed it. One effort I to make is to be polite, to keep up standards. I always answer Christmas cards. Which is more than I can say for our self-styled leftists, who are mostly richer than I am. They want to be famous because they are already rich, so they write journalistic exposes, throwing as much mud as they can at the CIA and the multinationals. They run left-wing magazines so they can instruct the working class on how to act like a working class. Strident. Obnoxious. I have my share of self-doubt and self-criticism, but I have my point of view too. Im not just here so everybody can dump on me and blame me. As I see it, the real alternatives to sending me my checks in the mail-are unacceptable. There is Fidel Castro with his sweat and smell and spitting and profanity, his hair he never washes. Fidels Marxism I can forgive; its his dirty uniform I cant stand. Then there is the Soviet Onion (Malcolm meant to say Soviet Union, but he pronounced it strangely) a gray, faceless bureaucracy. The idealistic socialisms are not real alternatives. I mean Habermas with his communicative society, Marcuse with his direct control of production by producers, Agnes Heller with her full implementation of the bourgeois ideal of respect for persons, Michael Harrington with his democratic socialism, Lech Walesa with his participation, Mao Tse-Tung with his constant renovation of culture from below, Gandhis self-sufficient villages. Nice ideas, but they dont work. They are really only one nice idea in different forms. Coming out of the 18th and 19th centuries with a predominantly European global civilization, as we are, our minds are shaped by the impact metaphor. Power is our theme; power and powerlessness are the two options we see. The one nice idea is this: divide the power so that everybody has equal power. This is idealistic socialism and it does not work no engineer ever thought it would work, and no worker ever really wanted to spend forever in boring meetings. The nice idea of dividing up the power is an intellectuals solution to an intellectuals problem, namely the problem of how to keep the broken promises of capitalism. Trapped by their own ideology, middle-wing 302 Letter 37 extremists to the core, they want to make into realities the ideals they learned in social studies class in junior high school. The Soviet Union on the other hand, is not an intellectuals idea. It was built by trial and error. What the Soviets learned by trial and error is that the real alternative to capitalism is technocratic planning. China and Cuba are learning the same lesson. The scientists direct the engineers, and the engineers direct everyone else, except for the party members, who possess their own special science (the science of socialism). Americas relatively decentralized system, defective as it is, at least avoids some of the extreme bureaucracy of Rule by Experts. Socialism itself is a structural trap, which protects my interests and half-convinces me that I am justified as well as secure. Socialism is a trap because either it does not work at all, or it does work but with so much repression that people read about it in the papers and say We dont want that. I

just happen to be one of the defects Americans have to put up with in order to avoid the only real alternatives, which are systems with more and worse defects. If I had talent I might use my privileged status to make some contribution to art or science, but since I have no talent I must content myself with simply being a defect. What else can I do? Sharing my income with spongers would no nothing to improve the system, and nothing to improve the character of the spongers. Dividing my capital and passing it out to the poor would be worse, since without capital production does not go forward. As the economist A.C. Pigou put it when discussing crackpot schemes to end poverty by distributing the capital of the rich among the poor, ...the demise of the last capital item would surely be preceded by the demise of the last man. What can I do? I can come out to the woods and seek the company of rocks, hills, flora, and fauna. The trees make no accusations against my way of life, the deer in the forests have no schemes in their minds for separating me from my money. Among all the living species I have come to enjoy the company of homo sapiens the least as a species it is the least trustworthy. Give me the soft meadow grass to lie on, the scent of the pine forest to breathe, pure water, the long silences of the lonely trail.... I like to pet the soft underbellies of lizards, and the kind of party I like to throw is the kind the birds flock to when I put bread crumbs in my feeder in midwinter. It gives me pleasure at my bird parties to think of all the humans who do not come to them, because of the trouble they would give me if they did come. Basically my problem is other people. Other peoples problem is me. Sometimes I get so depressed I wonder whether I still want to live. I know that if I slashed my wrists and bled to death, it would be three days before anyone would notice. If I killed myself in the wintertime, the birds would still come to my feeder for a few days. Then they would stop coming. When they found my body they would put a little article in the newspaper and people would read it while they drank coffee. The people who read about my death in the newspaper would never know how little I believed in myself. Malcolms speech sort of blew my mind. I really dont know how to cope with my cousin when he is upset. He is so angry and so afraid at the same time, and so illogical. First Malcolm told me that Maria had found the way to transform the structures of the modern world. Then he said the structures are firmly entrenched behind a series of traps that turn attempts to change them into boomerangs. Malcolm showed that economic society, like any fairly stable system (for example the homeostatic system that keeps the interior temperature of the human body near 98.6 F.) has a series of stabilizing mechanisms, so that deviations from normality automatically set up countervailing tendencies which move the system back toward normality. In the case of economic society it is a hot normality (Levi-Strauss word-hot contrasts our society with the many cold societies which reproduce social structures with little variation from generation to generation); our hot normality is characterized by social conflict, new technologies, ups and downs of the business cycle, new fashions in clothes, 303 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II new ways for young people to have fun, new ideas. Our hot normality, in spite of the dizzying pace of change, nevertheless possesses a certain stability in its own peculiar way: Big Poppa manages to stay in charge, his holy temple The Bank always dominates Main Street. The poor stay poor and the majority of families while not actually poor live under the threat of poverty. Malcolm feels secure when he contemplates how solidly established the system is, and how dependably it works for him. And at the same time he is ashamed of himself for taking so much pleasure in contemplating the security he enjoys in a system with so many victims. And at the beginning of his soliloquy he seemed to think he was not secure at all, because he seemed to think Maria Luna, had

found the way to change the system. Let us state Marias position schematically in order to examine it more closely: 1. The system is going to collapse because of enormous debts that cant be paid, installations (homes, roads....) that cant be maintained, a relationship to the environment that cant be sustained.... (It is interesting to note that Kant also thought the system would change because slowly but surely military expenditures would bring financial ruin but Kant thought the unmanageability of the debt would be one of the reasons compelling nations to inaugurate global law.) 2. It is possible to live outside the system by sharing with friends, stealing, corrupting officials, scavenging for leftovers, producing things yourself (e.g. the tomatoes on the roof)... 3. By living outside the system, you hasten its collapse and prepare the new way of life, which will be a new form of tribal hunting and gathering, amid the ruins. Malcolm probably does not really subscribe to the views stated above, because Malcolm is probably aware that in the third world when systems collapse they do not disappear and make room for a better system to appear; instead they transmogrify into brutal military repression, and Malcolm probably knows repression happens in the first world and the second world also, as in the cases of European fascism and Stalinism. Consequently, Malcolm has probably drawn the conclusion that if it is true that the system is likely to collapse, and if it is desirable that the system be transformed in constructive ways, the path to the desirable probably leads through avoiding system collapse and not through hastening it or accepting it as inevitable. What Malcolm probably really thinks is that people who opt out of the system will probably be ineffective, and if, on the other hand, they should ever become effective, they will be dealt with by the system in the same way other tendencies which move in the direction of chaos, tend to slow production, weaken the international competitive position of American industry, and sap the countrys military strength are dealt with. Marginals will be tolerated while they provide a safety valve for discontent and allow the mainstream to move cheerfully forward, but when the marginals start dissolving the system they wont be tolerated anymore that is probably what Malcolm really thinks. His praise for Maria is probably another instance of his insincerity, his divided mind; Malcolm enjoys being upto-date, being on the cutting edge of the newest, most radical, most fascinating ideas, so he probably permitted himself to amuse himself by pretending to believe in feminist eco-anarchism. Nature seemed to be wanting to remind us that a nights conversation among talking animals on a remote planet is a very minor event in the history of the universe because without asking our consent she had changed the sky from black to blue and from blue to white; she had dispersed the squirrels leaving the forest with an emptiness like the emptiness of the dance floor 304 Letter 37 the morning after the prom; she had silenced the birds and sent gusts of south wind to tickle our ears and rustle our ashes all this without our permission, with no contract, no election, no referendum, no legislation, no plebiscite, not even a formal declaration of rights acknowledging our dignity as persons. Jeepers! I said to myself (I am the only person I know who says Jeepers). We are lucky to be alive at all! Nature might have decided to hurl our planet with us on it deep into the fiery mass of the sun! Filled with a feeling of gratitude (because of not having been hurled deep into the fiery mass of the sun), I reflected that, small as our conversation was by interplanetary standards, nevertheless I

should be doing a better job of holding up my end of it. I had hardly said a word to Malcolm all night. It was my turn. Dear cousin Malcolm, I said. (I am the only person I know who addresses his cousin as dear.) The question you are asking is the same as Marias how to change the system. The answer you give is that the pouvoir en place is unmovably en place. Even socialism turns out to be a structural trap backed up by heavy 19th century metaphysical artillery, which works to keep the system in place in two ways: (1) Because the image of Bolshevism present in the West is used by the right wing, (2) Because the new system in some ways turns out to be the same as the old system. But of course, dear cousin Malcolm, you have a better answer to your question. You are a better answer to your question. The structural traps of taxes, labor unions, and socialist movements do not transform the system because their context is the cultural structures inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries. Taxes brake production because production starts with investment; labor unions are only cartels of seekers of labor; all they can do is to refuse to sell labor-power. They are ineffective because they control no property, and unpopular because their strikes inconvenience the public. Free trade compels each nation to meet the requirements of international competition, which implies selling better products at lower cost, the costs of course including labor costs. Since you understand all of this, you can transform the system better than someone who is in the dark. You may object, clear cousin Malcolm, that understanding the system is not enough to make you an answer to your own question because you have no material motive to change the system, only idealistic sentiments. But you have the most material of motives: the survival of self, kith and kin. Nuclear war and ecosystem breakdown are two inevitable results of the reigning logic of disunity. Building the strength of peace requires principles humanity can love, and sustainable approaches to agriculture and mining require planning. You may object; dear cousin Malcolm, that although you understand how the symbolic structures of modernity, notably freedom, property, contract... provide the foundation and context for the systems self-stabilizing mechanisms, and although you have many motives for wishing to transform the structures, still there is nothing transformative that you personally can do at this moment. But you have already taken the decisive step. You have stepped away from homo economicus as a snake slides away from its old skin; you are no longer the solid vector force of personal desire; you are the one who has come to question himself, Malcolm Bhai (Brother Malcolm) as they say in Hindi; you are vulnerable, willing to listen and learn, willing to be honest with others if they will be honest with you. You understand why respect for persons should not mean, Nobody can tell me what to do with rny property. You communicate your feelings as best you can whenever you can and wherever you are, striking up conversations with anybody you meet, whether it be in the opera crowd at Santa Fe or among the folks who happen to drop in at Dotties Diner in Temple, Texas. Even though yours is one of the softest hearts going, you are ashamed of its hardness. You are open and direct with everyone smokers, non-smokers, drug addicts, the uptight upright, women who have had abortions (Malcolms girlfriend had had an abortion); you to not make unreasonable demands like expecting China 305 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II to install a two-party system tomorrow, or the USA to install full employment. You read all kinds of books. You accept people and nations as they are, each with a distinct history which has made her or him or it what she, he, or it is, each with distinct growth-points, each with hidden sadness, and with cherished illusions.... It is only you yourself who have no illusions, only you yourself you cannot accept, which is why when you are overwhelmed by despair your thoughts turn to suicide

instead of to aggression. i If everyone were like you, dear cousin Malcolm, it would be easy to make intelligent plans for cooperative labor and for international sharing. Rain began to fall in desultory drops. Malcolm reached into his equipment and took out what appeared to be a 50 pound block of ice. It was actually a Japanese miniature tent made of light, clear plastic, neatly folded so that when unfolded it immediately became a warm, waterproof shelter which economically enveloped Malcolm from head to toe, shielding him from bumps and rocks by a built-in air mattress floor, which inflated itself automatically by means of CO2 cartridges triggered by the unfolding process. Malcolm fell asleep quickly, snoring contentedly while the rain pelted the roof of his small paradise. I delayed the mobilization of my own somewhat more conventional rain gear in order to spend time watching the raindrops plash into the ashes of our campfire and to listen to the thunder DO BE DE THI DA DA DA said the thunder. Dont be depressed, think Damyata, Datta, Dayadhvam. It is of course not unusual for the thunder to say DA DA DA, Damyata, Datta, Dayadhvam. Prajapati, the god of thunder, has been repeating DA DA DA in India for thousands of years. An American poet resident in England listened to similar peals in the British Isles. T.S. Eliot, What the Thunder Said, Part V of The Waste Land), and a reliable French source has reported having heard the thunder saying DA DA DA near Paris (the aforesaid Jacques Lacan in Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse, Conclusion) That the thunder should say DO BE DE, Dont be depressed, is, however, highly unusual. And that the thunder should say, THI, Think, is so contrary to ordinary experience that I decided to report the phenomenon to the weather bureau. 306 Letter 38 38 LEAVES FROM GRANDFATHER LUNAS NOTEBOOK* I here must have been some trauma in my youth or my childhood, because I compulsively open my suitcase in train depots. In this respect my attitude is different from the attitude of most persons. Most persons prefer air travel because of speed or bus travel because of economy or auto travel because of independence. Persons who travel by rail are a decreasing minority, and among our thinning ranks the number who deliberately choose to be rail passengers in order to have an opportunity to open a suitcase in a depot is small. I have observed in my travels that, on the contrary, most persons will go to considerable lengths to avoid displays of the items located in the private spaces of the interiors of their cases and parcels. It has also struck me, in the sundry contemplations of my travels, that most persons are inclined to suppose that in our times homo sapiens is already a defeated species, stumbling through its last days. The average person on the street will say, Peace? No. No way. The war is coming. I have observed that it is increasingly common for lovers to forget about their rendezvous, for babies not to care enough to cry, for old men to sit motionless in gardens hour after tedious hour without

being able to bring themselves to brush the flies from their eyes. Drunks no longer bother to hold their heads up, there are priests who no longer bother to baptize, and in many areas mothers have ceased to summon their children in for supper. I do not agree at all with these pessimistic attitudes. I believe that most persons are in for quite a surprise. The surprise will be that World War III will not happen, contrary to all their expectations. Instead, an era of stable peace will begin. Admittedly, I have no reasons for believing stable peace to be inevitable. I wish I did. What I believe is that history will offer us opportunities to achieve survival. For me the unanswered question is not whether we still have a chance; the question is whether we will be prepared to take advantage of the chances that the course of events will offer us, the openings with which it will provide us. It is of course possible to entertain the hypothesis that the same childhood trauma which makes me unusual in my attitude toward suitcases in railway depots has also produced in me an irrational optimism. Let us here today run a little test of this hypothesis. I assume that each of us gathered in this room is at least a little bit rational. Now let me tell you the reasons for my optimism, and if my reasons make sense to you, you who in all probability do not have my hangups, although you may have hangups of your own, then we will say, so to speak, that the contrary supposition, that my optimism is rational, has stood up across several intervening! variables, or, to use a different metaphor, across several intervening hangups. The reason for my optimism is that I believe peace will come about through a three-phase scenario. Phase One, the construction of a consensus among people who are well informed concerning what must be done to achieve stable peace, is already accomplished. The consensus is well founded in the sense that if its prescriptions were followed, there would be stable peace; * This chapter was originally a talk given for a faculty retreat at Indiana University, Bloomington, under the auspices of the Department of Religious Studies of the university. : 307 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II the substance of its prescriptions can be expressed in the phrase global thinking and summarized in what I call the Einstein principles. I call them the Einstein principles because they follow, more or less, the precepts which the discoverer of the theoretical basis of nuclear weapons regarded as the requirements for survival in a world where such weapons exist. In Phase Two we, i.e. the people who care and understand, are now in a position to expand and to weave into networks the pockets of global thinking that already exist, nurturing always the heart as well as the mind so that as we expand understanding of the global process, we inspire solidarity with all its victims. We sow the seeds of the Einstein principles in places where they have not been planted, and we build conceptual bridges among people who already accept the essence of the principles, but who express their essential acceptance in diverse conceptual frameworks, such as those of Marxism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity, and mainstream liberal social science, to name a few. This expansion, networking, nurturing, and bridge-building I call cultural action; some people call it consciousnessraising, cmcientizacion, education, mission, organizing, evangelization, ministry, or communitybuilding. The outcome of Phase Two is that global thinking becomes a significant alternative worldview throughout the world, or, to be more precise, the outcome of Phase Two is that there will exist under different labels, of which my label global thinking may be neither the best nor the most widely used, a coalescing of existing caring and intelligent worldviews around a true appreciation of the requirements for species survival. Phase Three will happen we-know-not-when, due to a disaster or a series of disasters, short of all-out nuclear destruction. Phase Three represents

the wager that history will continue to be, as Hegel called it, a slaughterhouse, while postponing total disaster long enough to furnish us with several partial disasters, such as major famines and ecological breakdowns, accidental firings of nuclear missiles which destroy several first-world and second-world cities, the collapse of the world financial system due to the default of major debtors like Brazil and Argentina, a nuclear war limited to the Middle East, etc. The partial disasters will be sufficient to awaken elite decision makers from their irrational rationality and to release the mind of the public from the hypnotic grip of entertainments on television. Stable peace will crystallize when enough people are shocked enough to exclaim, There must be a better way to organize human life than the chaos and cruelty we have now! and when their exclamation is true, not just because it is a theoretical possibility written somewhere as a theorem in a book hidden in a corner of a library, but because it is a real alternative, because the outline and shadows of a great and reasonable spirit of organization have become visible through the labors of cultural activists in Phase Two. We are now in Phase Two, at a point where we have the understanding but not the energy. We know the requirements of stable peace, but the energy needed to bring stable peace about has not been mobilized. In Phase Three the necessary energy will be mobilized, but it will have a rational direction only if global thinking has achieved enough salience to provide in the minds and hearts of the millions and in the minds and hearts of the elites the fundamental elements from which a new global social structure can crystallize. If history catches us napping, if we cultural workers who make our living by facilitating the production of meanings have not done our work, and if as a consequence world culture is not able to make a gestalt shift from an unsustainable to a viable global structure, then the defeat of the species will be our fault, not historys. There have been, unfortunately, cases where the cultural workers failed to prepare the ground for creating a new social structure. One case is that of Russia in October of 1918. Exhausted and decimated, Russia had deposed first the Czar and then the Mensheviks, and the victorious Bolsheviks found themselves with a task for which neither they nor Russia were prepared, that of implementing a cultural policy that would build the new socialist person with the resources provided by the old Russian culture. It was not easy. Among the resources of the existing culture there was, for example, the great Russian composer Scriabin. I quote a few lines on Scriabin from some notes on literature and art written 308 Letter 38 by a close friend of V I. Lenin, one Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Republics first Peoples Commissar of Education: Scriabin believed he could create a musical mystery which would actually evolve into the solemn chords of conciliation, of the triumph of the spiritual essence of creation, so that after the fantastic performance of this all-encompassingmystery, there would actually be no reason for the universe to exist any longer. The colorful world of visible things would shrivel and vanish, and the spirit would enter a new phase of existence which would be an extension of itself, its complete-selfknowledge and, at the same time, its release from the glittering, seductive nightmares it alone had created. (p. H7) This was not promising material. The material provided by the very popular Russian poet Alexander Blok was not very helpful either. Blok summarized his philosophy as follows: In the beginning was Music. Music is the essence of the world. The world grows in supple rhythms. Growth is retarded and then comes on with a rush. Such is the law of all organic life on

Earth, of man also, and of mankind. Pressure heads off volition. The growth of the world is culture. Culture is musical rhythm. (p. 175) This was written on March 31, 1919, six months after the October Revolution, not by an enemy of the revolution, but by one of its enthusiastic supporters, and not by an unimportant person, but by a well-read highly educated major poet, a folk-hero, who after an early period of celebrating romantic love in his poetry, had gone through a phase of finding inspiration for his writing by draining vodka glasses and sleeping with (he claimed) several hundred women, until he found in revolution a purifying volcanic eruption breaking through the thick, frozen crust of an anti-musical epoch. Among my many reasons for supposing that Western European culture was no better prepared than Russia for the advent of the New Society, are the remarks made to Lunacharsky by a group of French surrealists, headed by Breton and Aragon: We need the revolution in order to overthrow the sovereignty of the bourgeoisie and with it the sovereignty of reason, to recall the great sovereignty of elemental life....Come, you Muscovites, and bring in your wake countless detachments of Asiatics, tread our European after-culture into the ground. Even if we ourselves are to die beneath the hoofs of the wild steppe horses, then let us die! Only let reason die with us, and calculation, and the deadly, stifling principle of bourgeois life! (p. 199) In 1945 millions of Europeans had been personally shocked by war, and immense horrors in Asia had ended with Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In 1945 there was plenty of energy behind peace plans, and at San Francisco a group of leading intellectuals drafted the papers for bringing into being an international order inspired by what was then the significant alternative worldview throughout the globe. They drafted a charter for a strengthened version of the League of Nations which would be called the United Nations. It was a perfect 18th century peace plan everything Kant had asked for in his Perpetual Peace (1794), and more. A legal framework for well-behaved nations in a world without social struggle. Why could not the United Nations be a world government, Einstein and others asked in the pages of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists? Reinhold Niebuhr gave them the answer, in a reply written in the same journal: The United Nations cannot be a world government, because a world government 309 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II supposes the existence of world law, and world law cannot exist without world community, and community cannot exist without consensus on principles of justice, and there is no consensus on principles of justice. People use the same word, justice, and they agree that it means in some sense a fair distribution of property, but they do not agree on what distribution of property is fair. So, no consensus on justice, no global community, no enforceable world law. Conclusion: a weak United Nations system unable to prevent nuclear-armed nation-states from making war on one another. That was Niebuhrs answer to Einstein et al.: an answer which was the echo and the expression of the cultural poverty of the world in 1945. To paraphrase Einstein: the new weapons imply the need for a new culture. To paraphrase Niebuhr: we have no new culture. So why am I an optimist? It is partly because since the progressive intellectuals were caught napping in 1918 and in 194S, and many other times, we are in a position to learn from these experiences so that we will not be caught napping again. And it is partly because we now understand cultural processes better than we did then. Now, having outlined my scenario, I am going to return to the Einstein principles which were

mentioned in Phase One, and I am going to tell you what you already know. I believe you already know and accept what I call the three Einstein Principles, even though I realize that 3 0 minutes before this moment you had not heard about Einstein Principles, and that 3 0 seconds before this moment you had not heard that there were three of them. The three principles are (1) world government, (2) organized caring for human needs, and (3) from Newton to relativity. World government can take many forms. The simplest way to bring it about is to strengthen the existing United Nations system, making the jurisdiction of the World Court compulsory, repealing the right to veto in the Security Council, disarming the nation states, and increasing the numbers of casques bleu (UN soldiers, who wear blue hard hats). But I should not be saying these things: I am contradicting my own philosophy. I should not be outlining the details of a peace plan, when my philosophy says that history will surprise us by bringing about peace in a way we do not expect, providing the conditions in which it will be possible to create a world government, the exact form of which we cannot now anticipate. I want to give you details because I want to prove there is a way to govern the globe, but the fact of the matter is that there are 1001 ways to govern it. At this point we cannot know the details, but only the principle on which the details will eventually be based. Einstein expressed the principle clearly in 1945. There can be no doubt that world law is bound to come soon, whether by coercion or by peaceful agreement: No other effective defense exists against the modern methods of mass destruction. In ah open letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Einstein wrote in 1946, The present impasse lies in the fact that there is no sufficient, reliable supranational authority. Thus the responsible leaders of all governments are obliged to act on the assumption of eventual war. Every step motivated by that assumption contributes to the general fear and distrust and hastens the final catastrophe. I call the second Einstein principle Organized caring for human needs; Einstein himself called the principle socialism. The Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, approved by the General Assembly of the UN, also known as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) is its current political application. This principle solves the problem of the ambiguity of the word justice raised by Reinhold Niebuhr by agreeing to accept economic diversity and international cooperation within the framework of socialist principles of justice instead of capitalist ones.* For a discussion of the relationship of concepts of justice to the New International Economic Order, see Richards, H. and Meza Lopehandia, J., Economic Justice: Appraisal of Quito Declaration, in Alternatives: a Journal of World Policy. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., vol. 2, no. 1, February 1976, pp. 61-69. 310 Letter 38 At this point some people, not you of course, might object that although we might agree that systematic organization which matches resources to needs is a good idea, and the victims of the present system might be easy to persuade that organized caring would be a good idea, the beneficiaries of the existing global economy will not agree because they will defend their interests. This objection was on the whole valid before 1945. It is no longer valid because the existing chaos is not now in anyones interest, not even David Rockefellers. (Of course the USA did vote against the NIEO but that vote was a mistake; it was penny wise and pound foolish.) Two months after the bomb fell on Hiroshima Einstein wrote these words in a letter to the New York Times: The first atomic bomb destroyed more than the city of Hiroshima. It also exploded our inherited outdated political ideas. The idea that somebody benefits from a system where the poor are kept poor by threats, violence, false consciousness, and bourgeois ideology, is one of those outdated ideas. It is not necessary to persuade you that peace with economic justice is the only possible peace, but

please let me sketch the beginning of a proof of the proposition anyway, in four premises. Premise One. It is not the police force which is the strength of the law, but the strength of the law which makes it possible to organize a police force. This premise is a quotation from J. Brierly, late professor of international law at Cambridge. Premise Two. The law must have a psychological force equivalent to the power of physical force. This premise paraphrases a passage in Perpetual Peace by Immanuel Kant. Premise Three. Humanity can organize peace only on the basis of principles it can love. I made this premise up myself, drawing on Platos image in the Crito where he says the laws are our parents, and on the Freudian insight that however distant, immense and abstract the principles of a world government may be, they will draw their psychological strength at an emotional level from the stuff dreams are made of. Dreams, according to psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, are made of only five kinds of symbols: representing the body, the bodies close to ones own body, birth, life, and death. Jones may not be quite right about dreams, but his claim dramatizes my point that the psychological strength of a very distant law can only come from a very close source. Premise Four. Honesty is the best policy. I have not been able to trace the source of this quotation. Myclaim, alluded to in premises 2 and 3, is that to be psychologically strong enough to be a sufficient and reliable authority, world law must come across to the masses on an emotional level as care. The symbols we use can perform their work in organizing peace only if they evoke warm and trusting responses. Consequently, world law had better really and truly and honestly represent organized caring for human, needs. If the system proves to be a fraud, humanity will continue to be as embittered,: resentful, hostile, and demented as it is now, and the civilizing mission of global legality, will be, as we say in Spanish, un gran fracaso (a great failure). In other words, to summarize my premises, peace with economic justice is the only possible peace because peace requires laws, and the strength of law includes the emotional strength of caring, and laws that do not meet basic economic needs do not care. Now here is the third and final Einstein Principle: From Newton to relativity. I use this label from Newton to relativity to identify what is sometimes called post-modern consciousness, which could more modestly be called an improved understanding of symbolic processes, an understanding which was mentioned earlier as a reason for optimism. These improved understandings of symbolic processes do not come from Einstein; 311 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II heading third Einstein principle of global thinking is a tribute to Einstein, not an attribution of authorship; it is an appropriate tribute because Einstein showed that even in physics Newtonian thinking is inadequate. Also, Einsteins word relativity is not a bad word to describe the contrary of the ethnoceritrism which led the Victorians to regard themselves as uniquely civilized, as if the ways of thinking characteristic of modern liberal capitalist societies were not embedded in historically conditioned cultures like everyone elses ways of thinking. However, the main problem of modern consciousness was not lack of sophistication in physics, and the main advances in understanding human symbolically ordered institutions and practices did not come from Einstein. From Newton to relativity refers mainly to the new intellectual climate created by the postHeideggerian, post-Wittgensteinian post-Saussurian scholars such as Barthes, Levi-Strauss,

Habermas, Lacan, etc. etc. etc. Thanks to the postmodern intellectual milieu in which we are now living, we are in a position to think globally in terms of symbolic structures. We are able to focus on social change as a process through which symbolic structures are transformed; to some extent we can transform them consciously in desirable directions. Our ability to draw on the ancient sources of our own sacred symbols and on the spiritual resources of non-western peoples is vastly improved. Ethnic diversity and diversity of national economic organization can be seen as resources, not obstacles. Let me give some examples of how concrete steps toward the global transformation of structures draw on our new resources for understanding culture. Paulo Freire, for example, in facilitating cmcientizarion among Latin American peasants through what he called culture circles drew directly on phenomenology and on Frankfurtian critical theory. Thomas Groomes method for doing political education in North American parishes and schools, which he calls sharing our story and vision, the shared praxis approach, draws on insights fnom sources stemming from Heideggers work on story (Geschichte) and seeing. The popular education projects I work with in South America rely on intellectual currents associated with the legacy of Wittgenstein and with Gramscis cultural Marxism. Since the consensus of progressive intellectuals has now moved from Newton to relativity, the ideas mentioned in the first two Einstein principles, world government and organized caring to meet human needs, take on new meanings because they are in a new context a context that is culture-centered instead of economics-centered, meaningful-structure centered instead of focussed on to dubious force and impact metaphors transplanted from Newtonian mechanics into social science. I like to describe some of the implications a better understanding of culture has for the growth of global thinking in terms of the idea of growth points. Growth points are what we are busy nurturing in Phase Two. Instead of defining growth point for you, let me give you an example. Letty Russell in her book Growth in Partnership in the chapter called Pedagogy for Oppressors retells the story of a woman whose basic identification with the other side was out of her own problem of obesity. She has experienced continual prejudice and hurt because of her appearance in spite of the fact that it is due to a physiological problem that cannot be cured. Thus she is well aware of what it means to be marginalized and considered inferior because of a particular biological characteristic. (p. 132) For this woman indignation over peoples response to her weight problem gave her energy. The theme marginalized victim was meaningful to her. Expanding the theme to identification with marginalized victims everywhere was a growth process lending her to an understanding of interlocking systems of racism, sexism, classism, and imperialism,... (p. 111) leading her to intellectual and emotional solidarity global in its scope. Thus, in one of many small but forwardlooking ways, global thinking was able to grow and reach out, working toward positioning itself as the significant alternative worldview which will be available at the moment when there is an opportunity for the crystallization of stable peace (as Althusser might say, for the crystallization of a new structure-in-dominance). The slaughter312 Letter 38 house of history will probably in the future, as it has in the past, galvanize enormous amounts of human energy in terrible ways, making it available for the transformation of structures and this time we will be ready. I would like to conclude by explaining to you why it is that I open my suitcase when I am m a tram station. It would seem that anyone who knows how to achieve world peace must understand

himself well enough to have some insight into his own compulsive habits Unfortunately, I do not understand my habit at all; I do it over and over again and I havent a clue as to why. My inability to understand myself reminds me that I am only one person trying to think about peace, only one person among the millions who try to improve history slightly while being earned by history like grains of sand carried by the waves of the ocean, a person who is not fond of reality, who does not like to be alone, who is prone to imagine, because he wants it to be true, that his ideas sing in harmony with the principal currents of inner excitement which ebb and flow in the myriad minds of all the passengers flowing in and out of trains, planes, buses, subway cars, vans, jeeps, autos, rickshaws, ships, ferries, saddles, shoes, boots, and paths for bare feet, in every city, village, town, field, jungle, desert, mountain, forest, sea, and sky of our blue planet. 313 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II

314 Letter 39 39 AND NOW: YOUR INSTRUCTOR IN THE MAGICAL ARTS WILL BE THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS According to the classical Marxist philosophy expressed in Capital, the impoverishment of the working class will at some point in rime provide the motive force for transforming the fundamental symbolic structures of economic society. In the preparatory times preceding fundamental change, economic distress which in the last analysis is the metabolic distress of the human organism provides the energy motivating workers to form labor unions and political parties. A crisis which multiplies and unifies the victims of poverty will, according to this classical view, precipitate structural transformation. The classical Marxian theory is incomplete. It is true that economic motives such as hunger and anxiety caused by inability to pay ones bills can provide the energy needed to raise consciousness and to organize. But there is a more general truth with respect to which the truths about motivation included in classical Marxian theory are a subset: namely, that many emotions can provide energy

to move people and to move ideas. The vital interests of the proletariat provide one large and important set of motives within a wider spectrum of sources of human energy which can provide the soul-electricity needed to raise consciousness. At certain times and places economic issues (narrowly conceived) do not provide the leading growth points, and economic collapse (narrowly defined) is not the catastrophe most expected. Here and now for example. In the USA in 1985. Here and now the nation has embarked on a crackpot military policy, consisting essentially of massive weapons procurement financed by massive borrowing, a policy which can only end in the long run in war or economic collapse or both. Since 650 B.C. there have been 1656 arms races, only 16 of which have not ended in war. The remainder have ended in economic collapse.* The policies we are now living with make nuclear war the most expected catastrophe, and in the short run they mask the trend toward the impoverishment of the working class by creatingdirectly arid indirectly large numbers of debt-financed jobs. Approximately 90% of the work force is employed (albeit often at low wages and without security); so from a strictly economic point of view the bulk of the population is not strongly motivated to develop alternatives to the reigning ideas. On the other hand, for many people in the USA today, the suffering of battered women is a leading growth point, a point where the-defects of the society become real to flesh and blood individuals. For others, the suffering of the homeless who wander the streets of major cities is a leading growth point. Abused women, street people, and other victims help us to see Karl Marxs concern with the exploitation of workers in the context of a wider sympathy. The solution to the problems of the victims of our imperfect cultural structures has a general form: the empowerment of the weak. Carrying out the solution is partly a matter of creating beloved * The Frequency of Wars, Canadian Army Journal. Fall 1960. v. 14, no. 4. p. 81. 315 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II communities (Martin Luther King, Jr.s phrase) where power over dissolves and power with flourishes, and it is partly a matter of transforming the symbolic structures to make whoever has military, economic, or any other kind of power accountable and responsible. For those of us who are trying to build a better world, the recent increase in awareness of the suffering of battered women (and battered children, and battered men) is a growth point because when abused women and their friends reflect on what has happened, consciousness grows. The women, to focus for the moment only on a particular class of victims, are enabled to see themselves in the context of their many sisters who have suffered in similar ways for similar reasons. In our society as in other societies, to speak more generally, the forms taken by fights between lovers mirror the flaws of the culture. Picture, for example, the case of a woman who is compelled by her husband to stay in the house day after day, perhaps with the door locked so she cant get out (as sometimes happens believe it or not). She waits like a prisoner for her man to return from his job or from a bar. When she complains he beats her. Suppose that somehow a way is found for her to join a group of women who reflect together on their respective situations. This might happen, for example, if in desperation she seeks refuge in a Friends of the Battered shelter. What Paulo Freire calls decodifying, i.e. systematic reflection with the group, is likely to show that the physical strength of the man, the societys image of womens role, her need to have a relationship with someone to escape loneliness and boredom in a society which in general tends to keep individuals isolated like

separate atomic particles, and her need for money to live all help to explain why she is put in such a position, why it is hard to get out of it, and why she herself has mixed motives. She wants the abusive relationship and she does not want it. Decodification also shows that her case is not unique millions of sisters around the world share a similar fate. In mens consciousness-raising groups parallel reflections show the feelings of particular men to be part of a social pattern. There may be causes which tend to make men macho in the y chromosome; in flows of testosterone, cortisone, and adrenalin; in size of body and percentage of body weight devoted to muscle. Nevertheless, we cannot overlook, if we honestly consider the context, what parents, childrens toys, television, music, schools, sports, employment in business enterprises, the army, and other agents of cultural coding build and fail to build with the raw material provided by the male body. Freire uses the word decodification to refer to a method of facilitating a group discussion, such that attention shifts back and forth between a particular persons experience, or the similar experiences shared by the members of a group, and the surrounding society. Decodification is a method for seeing the self in its social and environmental context, and for seeing how the context has produced the persons self-image. It is a method for consciousness-raising. It puts the self in context, and it puts the context in the self. It cannot for long escape the awareness of a woman who is becoming conscious of her context that the same fundamental structures which keep the war system in place keep her in her place.* Nor can a mens group which practices decodification remain unaware that in a mans world force is the root metaphor. Of course, even if the reality which unveils itself as we help each other to see ourselves in context is always a part of the same 20th century global reality, we will not necessarily all speak with the same words and phrases. Decodification, war-system and root metaphor are words and phrases meaningful to me, but I cannot predict, nor can anyone, what emerging patterns of discourse will provide the words and phrases meaningful to millions. The names of the principles that will crystallize out of our turbulent global village, and will constitute the shared social construction of reality which will unite us in a viable way for humans to live, are still unknown to us. * See, in this connection, Betty Reardon, Sexism and the War-System; Gray Cox, The Ways of Peace. 316 Letter 39 Meanwhile, as we work on building the discourse required for survival, we will find help and resources in many places, some of them quite unexpected places. There are pieces of the global puzzle, and constellations of pieces of the global puzzle, which we have so far not integrated into the worldview we are piecing together. Any examination of our basic social structures and the prospects for building alternatives to them must consider the work of Karl Marx, who thought long and hard about them in the 19th century. From a much different point of view, and with a different mindset, our relationship to the symbolic structures of modernity has been carefully examined by the so-called existentialists in the 20th century, and I believe that among them the one whose work most repays study with insight is Martin Heidegger. Heidegger opens his first and most important book, Being and Time, by asking, Do we in our time have an answer to the question what we really mean by the word being? Then he answers his own question, not at all. More literally, his answer is, No way. (Keineswegs.) Then he asks whether anybody in our time cares about our lack of understanding of the meaning of being. The

answer is no. Nobody cares what being is, or was, or might be. Heideggers aim in life, as he interpreted himself, was to recall our age to a concern for the question of being. However, I take the liberty of interpreting him somewhat differently from the way he interpreted himself. I think that either because he was a shrewd tactician or because he lacked awareness of his self in his context his own self-interpretation obscures the social functions of his work, As I interpret him, his aim in life was to find a visible spiritual authority for our times and for future times. Lacking the needed relationship to being, or, as I prefer to put it, lacking social norms with spiritual authority, i.e. legitimate authority to command the will, we modern humans are vicious automata of self-will.* To explain in more detail why I think Heideggers critique of modernity helps us to understand our world and to change it, I will follow up on the phrase vicious automata of self-will by offering a general theory of quarrels, which sheds light on the causes of person-abuse in war and in homes, and which sheds light on how our characteristic forms of fights between lovers mirror the defects of our culture, and which sheds light on how our culture fails to solve the problems it creates. All of this will shed light on why Martin Heidegger felt called, as he put it, to recall the question of being. My theory is this: A attempts to control the behavior of B. B resists control by A. Most (although not all) quarrels are variations and elaborations of this basic pattern. When we try to think about quarrels we use the resources for thinking that our cultures symbolic structures provide. Consequently, we ask questions like: Who is dominating whom? (force root metaphor) What am I getting and what am I giving? (the rationality of contract) How can I take charge of my life? (the ethic of autonomy) Given the structure of our discourse, it is not surprising that, as Hegel remarked in criticizing Kant, in every quarrel there is a surplus of rights. Mom is right, dad is right, son is right, daughter is right. Everybody has a good reason for saying she or he is right. And in a conflict of right vs. right, as Hegel said, force decides. It is all sort of awful and I am tired of it. Typical situation: A tries to control B. B resists control by A. Typical analysis: There is a power struggle here. Claims of right mask covert attempts at control. * This phrase is not Heideggers own. It is a paraphrase of his meaning coined by the Heidegger scholar Albert Hofstadter. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, with an Introduction by Albert Hofstadter, p. xv. 317 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Typical prescription: let each person control her or his own life. (The prescription that comes naturally to us is to follow the ethic of autonomy, our ethic, the ethic of modern society.) Typical results: boredom, violence, alcohol abuse, drug abuse. We live in the culture of the great loneliness, where our problem is loneliness, and where the solution to our problem suggested by our culture is more loneliness. Heidegger was concerned with the prevalence of the thought patterns just described, although his perception of them was clouded by his personal prejudices and by those of the social circles in which he lived, as my perceptions and yours are clouded by our prejudices. Werner Marxinhisbook

Heidegger and the Tradition says that Heidegger took the need of our time to be to find an alternative to relativism. I take the need to challenge relativism to be, in essence, the same as the need to challenge the ethic of autonomy. Heidegger takes up the critique of modern society where Marx left off. Marxs work shows how the economic structures of capitalism alienate us from our better selves. Since most of us are insecure because (as Marx points out) we are assigned by the system the role of labor-power for sale, labor-power which may be sold at a satisfactory price today and left on the shelf unsold tomorrow, we are too anxious to be fully human. Furthermore, we often achieve success, if we do achieve it, by sacrificing our social conscience and doing what the system requires of us. This is another form of alienation, another form of being less human and more like a commodity, like a thing. Heidegger goes on to ask, in effect, And suppose we were not alienated? What then? He wrote in Being and Time: ...that the danger consists of treating consciousness (of persons HR) as a thing, has been known for a long time. But what does it mean to treat as a thing? Where does it come from? Why are beings immediately treated as things-at-hand....? Why does treating-like-things return again and again to dominate? How is the being of consciousness positively structured, so that treating-as-a-thing is inappropriate to it?* Heideggers implicit answer is, I believe, that human consciousness is positively structured so that it needs a relationship to spiritual authority, to being. I would rather say, along the same lines but without Heideggers mysticism, that humans need to be in love. Heidegger did not himself say in so many words that he was looking for authority and trying to endow it with an aura of mystery. However, seeing the many twistings and turnings of Heideggers voluminous works as a persistent search for viable spiritual authority provides a coherent view of his way, as Heidegger himself called it, the way of a thinker in a time of need.** Our modern problem is that of people who are, as Heidegger says, too late for the gods, too early for Being, where Being is (I claim) the spiritual authority that has not come yet, which Heidegger prophesies, prepares for, and awaits. It is plausible to see a quest for authority in a persistent effort to understand and to remember Being, since in Aristotle being as form was a principle of authority (Letter 16), and in St. Thomas Aquinas Being as God was a principle of authority (Letter 20). Marx told us that our problem is alienation: that is, separation from each other and from our true selves (since our true selves are social beings). We can apply Marxs analysis to love relationships by saying that the structure of our society encourages us to see each other as sex objects in a sex market. In condemning alienation Marx invoked (in certain respects) the authority of Kant, since Kant had told us that persons are not means only but ends-in-themselves, that persons have a dignity beyond all price. For Heidegger neither Marx nor Kant go deeply enough into the Beingquestion; we have, Heidegger says, forgotten Being since Socrates and Plato, indeed since Parmenides, who was even earlier, and our present misery, our atom bombs and our status as cogs in a technological machine, is only the final working out of * Sein und Zeit p. 427, my translation. ** the title of Karl Lwiths book about Heidegger. 318 Letter 39 a fatal forgetfulness which happened in the earliest stages of the history of western culture. Heidegger attacks modernity by attacking what he regards as its deepest roots. We will not get a positive alternative to treating each other like objects until we re-think and reconstruct our culture

from its beginnings indeed we have to rethink what we mean by thinking and what we mean by construction (poesis). Professor Heidegger took it for granted as did just about everyone in the social circles in which German professors at the beginning of the twentieth century circulated, that materialism and egotism were symptoms of a crisis in western culture, and that philosophers, poets, and theologians had the high responsibility and high calling to save Europe from spiritual collapse.* If Professor Heidegger and his colleagues had sat with us as we decodified the experiences of suffering women, they would have commented, Im sure, or at least they would have thought to themselves, that nuclear weapons, soulless technology, the rape of the earth, the inhumanity of man to man, Communism, democracy, the leveling of social distinction and rank, and unchivalrous behavior toward ladies are all of a piece all symptoms of the lack of authority in our society, otherwise known as the forgetfulness of Being, to which Heidegger alluded when he asked, What has happened to us in the depths of our Being now that science has become our passion? ** An unscientific passion, a passion for renewing the wellsprings of culture and restoring authority, was normal among German intellectuals in the years 1890-1930, the years of Martin Heideggers childhood, youth, and first publications. Heidegger was not unusual in his aims. He was, however, unusually adept at combining the elements of classical western philosophy with elements of the cultural milieu where he lived and moved and had his being, in ways which promised solutions to the difficulties people of his type perceived as crucial. In studying how Heidegger did philosophical work to solve the problems of his time, place, and milieu we can learn more about how philosophy can help us to deal with our problems here and now. On a recent evening when we had some friends in for supper, after the dishes were cleared away and we had moved from the straight chairs around the table to the plush chairs in the parlor in order to sit in comfort while telling funny stories, the conversation turned to Martin Heidegger. One of our friends said she had never read anything by Martin Heidegger, but she had a friend who had tried to read something by him once. The friend of our friend found Heideggers dense arid idiosyncratic teutonic prose so strange that she understood nothing at all, absolutely nothing at all, and after three pages she surrendered. We all thought it was very funny when she said her friend had surrendered. It was like the time I bought a carton of shredded wheat at a grocery store and the clerk asked me if I wanted her to put it in a sack and I said, No thanks, Ill carry it raw. We are easily amused. Then she told about another friend of hers who found Heidegger endlessly comical because of his pompous inanity. The Nothing nothings, was one of the little sayings from Heidegger that he had taped beside his shaving mirror in order to entertain himself in the morning. The sky gives light to the earth, was another. It changed his whole perspective on reality to realize that someone could write complex philosophical essays to prove conclusions like the sky gives light to the earth, and become rich and famous because of them. And then there was the line from Heideggers great essay, What Is a Thing? which reads If the jug does not come to stand, it will flop over, and the water in it will flow out. * Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, (passim) Harvard U. Press, 1969. ** in his essay What is Metaphysics? 319 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II A serious guest, a heavy-set man who had married a Jewess and had become a convert to Judaism

himself, frowned for 2 minutes and 30 seconds, no doubt because he knew Heidegger had been a Nazi, a party member in 1932 and 1933, less than helpful to his mentor Edmund Husserl when Husserl was persecuted because of his race and religion. No doubt our serious guest was searching in his own mind for the appropriate means to introduce the unpleasant topic of Heideggers involvement with the Nazis into the conversation without bluntly challenging the reigning levity. When his face cleared I knew he had found the solution to his problem, and soon thereafter he pulled from the bookshelf a volume on which his eye had chanced to light, and read to us a passage from Dog Years by Gunter Grass, in which Grass links Heidegger to the holocaust: An always cautious Harry, who believed not in God but in the Nothing, yet did not want to have his sensitive tonsils removed. A melancholic, who liked honey cake, poppy-seed cake, and shredded coconut, and though not a good swimmer had volunteered for the Navy. A young man of inaction, who tried to murder his father by means of long poems in school copybooks and referred to his mother as the cook. A hypersensitive boy, who, standing and lying, broke out in sweat over his cousin and unswervingly though secretly thought of a black shepherd dog. A fetishist, who for reasons carried a pearl-white incisor tooth in his purse. A visionary, who lied a good deal, spoke softly, turned red when, believed this and that, and regarded the never-ending war as an extension of his schooling. A boy, a young man, a uniformed high school student, who venerated the Fhrer, Ulrich von Hutten, General Rommel, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, for brief moments Napoleon, and panting movie actor Emil Jannings, for a while Savonarola, then again Luther, and of late the philosopher Martin Heidegger. With the help of these models he succeeded in burying a real mound made of human bones under medieval allegories. The pile of bones, which in reality cried out to high heaven between Troyl and Kaiserhafen, was mentioned in his diary as a place of sacrifice, erected in order that purity might come-to-be in the luminous, which transluminates purity and so fosters light. Gunter Grass, Dog Years, (N.Y.: Harcourt Brace, 1963), pp. 310-311 After the politico-literary reading from Gunter Grass, I felt compelled to tell a Cesar Chavez story an expedient to which I often resort when I am placed in a position where I am obliged to justify spending time reading Martin Heidegger, or otherwise forced to prove that my sympathies are really with the working class. Cesar Chavez is an organizer of farm workers in California from whom I learned something about how to learn, namely to watch the smart cookies and learn to do what they do. If you had been, like me, a volunteer lawyer who hung around Cesars office in Delano, California, in the early days of the union, you would have noticed that meetings of the members of Chavezs small and struggling organization were marked by much chanting of slogans (Viva el campesino! Viva el trabajador agricola!)* and much ritual standing up and sitting down. The format of the meetings copied certain practices of the Catholic church, an institution which, Cesar pointed out, had been organizing people for many centuries. Cesar was doing what the church has done at many times in many places, namely building new cultural forms starting with the cultural forms that already existed. He utilized many themes from the Mexican side of the Mexican-American heritage of the chicano farm laborers, including the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexicos indigenous * Translation: Hurray for the country-person! Hurray lor the agricultural worker! 320 Letter 39

poor, herself a pagan deity transmuted into a Christian madonna by the smart cookies who brought Jesus to the Aztecs. Cesar used stories about the heroes of the Mexican Revolution too; and he used the thunderbird, an Aztec deity whose image adorned the stationery of the National Farm Workers Association, president: Cesar Chavez; headquarters: Delano, California. The thunderbird image on the stationery was black and red. Cesar told me that the reason why it was black and red was that he had learned from reading Mem Kampfby Adolf Hitler that of all color combinations black with red gives the most power to a symbol. When I had finished my Cesar Chavez story, people sat and looked at each other. They were puzzled. They had not understood the point of my story. They had also not understood the point of our serious friends story, borrowed from Gunter Grass, about the always cautious Harry who believed in the Nothing. Another example of my problem in life: nobody understands. Discouraged, I sat back silently in my plush chair. In time they will understand, I thought to myself, comforting myself by remembering the doctrine of my favorite psychiatrist,* who holds that a temps pour comprendre (time for understanding) must pass before the moment pour conclure (moment for concluding) arrives. Eventually one of our guests broke the silence by saying, You seem to say, in fact you repeat over and over, that the decodification of daily problems, such as family quarrels, can lead to a shared vision of some of the defects of the society we are in, and also to building sisterhood and other forms of community. I suppose you would say that the harm done by Heidegger consists of mystifying the structural defects of our society which Marxist analysis sees. And I suppose you would say that on the other hand the constructive use of Heideggers insights is found mainly in community-building. I think I understand the first part, since Ive heard you talk about it so often, but some day I wish you would explain what Heidegger has to do with, for example, what you just said about organizing a farm workers labor union. A does not try to control the behavior of B, I said. B does not resist A. A and B do not agree to go their separate ways, each in charge of one individual life, Instead A and B coordinate their perceptions and work together toward shared goals. There will be examples of how this happens, and of how insights from recent philosophy help it to happen, in the next letter. The ideas from recent philosophy whose practical applications will be discussed come from the school of philosophy called phenomenology. Heidegger is usually classed as a phenomenologist, and in general the most prominent philosophers called existentialists fall also in the broader category phenomenologist. Heideggers teacher and mentor Edmund Husserl was, however, the founder and leader of the school, the phenomenologist par excellence. * Jacques Lacan 321 322 Letter 40 40 PHENOMENOLOGY AND COMMUNITY Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) devoted his life to making philosophy into a rigorous science. He called his approach to philosophy phenomenology, which means literally the rational study of phenomena, and he was so convinced that only his approach could render philosophy truly scientific, that he can be described as taking the view that philosophy, strictly speaking, had,

strictly speaking, no history, because-true philosophy began with himself, Husserl.* All the earlier work was, in an important sense, pre-philosophy, which expressed a vocation for the infinite pursuit of truth, a vocation which defined Europeans as unique among the members of the human species because they, and only they, possessed the spirit of disinterested wonder which had produced science. Or, rather, to speak with an exaggerated accuracy, the pre-philosophical yearning produced pre-science, because even though mathematics, physics, and chemistry had made exemplary progress, they could not receive their charters and begin to function with a valid method until their foundations were guaranteed by Husserls phenomenology. Husserls first major work, Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891) sought to establish the foundations of quantitative thinking partly by analyzing the natural thought processes of human beings. His second major work, Logische Untersuchungen: prolegomena zur reinen Logik (Logical Investigations: Prolegomena to Pure Logic) (1900) was devoted to refuting a kind of thinking he himself employed in his earlier work. The main argument in the refutation can be condensed into one sentence as follows: If logic were based on natural processes such as those occurring in human brains and in social interaction, then logic could not produce truths which are absolutely certain; since the truths of logic do possess absolute certainty, the foundations of logic are not to be found in natural processes. An example of an absolutely certain logical truth-is: IF all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, THEN Socrates is mortal. An absolutely certain arithmetic truth is: 2 + 2=4. I do not say that philosophy is an imperfect science; I say simply that it is not yet a science at all, that as science it has not yet begun, wrote Husserl in his article, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (1911).** There were, to be sure, many contemporaries of Husserl who thought they were doing philosophy scientifically, including positivists, pragmatists, and neo-Kantians, as well as people who lived under the illusion that they were doing psychology scientifically. (Husserl thought that philosophy and psychology should be closely related, and that both needed phenomenological foundations.) Their mistake was to study mind (Geist) as if it were nature, i.e. as if it were composed of physical objects located in space and time and subject to universal laws of cause and effect. What Husserl meant by nature was essentially what Kant meant by nature, i.e. all that which is subject to the laws of Newtons mechanics, although in view of the great progress of chemistry, Husserl referred to nature as physico-chemical. The * In saying that Husserls attitude toward previous philosophy amounts to regarding it as prephilosophy I am following Quentin Lauer. ** Philosophy as Rigorous Science, (Lauer tr.) p. 7.1. 323 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II great and decisive mistake of the people who think they are being scientific but are not scientific is that they objectify and naturalize what is not object and not nature which is only to begin Husserls story, since, as it turns out, even what is object and is nature can only be studied validly by a method which is based on phenomenology. In Ideas* (1913) Husserl worked out systematically some consequences of commitments he had already made, namely: (1) The only knowledge worthy of being called scientific in the full sense of the word is absolutely certain knowledge, (2) Mind is not nature, (3) Since our knowledge of nature is always uncertain, nature cannot be known scientifically, (4) We must allow no dualisms, i.e. knowledge must be unified. From these commitments, which are, of course, expressed in my words, not his, it follows that scientific knowledge can only be knowledge of mind. That is what

phenomenology is: knowledge of mind. The only thing we can really know is mind nothing else is certain. For example, I cannot know that I see a red rose; it may be a cleverly made imitation flower, or a yellow rose which appears red in this light, etc. etc. What I can know is that the idea of something red is appearing in my mind. The systematic study of the essences given to the mind, i.e. of the phenomena, is the necessary foundation for all the sciences, and it is true philosophy. In other words, the only way to acquire certain knowledge is to be completely subjective. The foundations of science are to be found in the pure phenomena which the mind knows in direct experience. However, basing science on experience is just what those misguided fanatics, the positivists, the pragmatists, the neo-Kantians, and the physiological psychologists think they are doing. Their error is that what they consider to be direct experience is actually filtered by their own prejudices, their penchant for molding experience according to a Kantian view of nature. They are equally deluded whether they think they are experiencing physical objects or think they are experiencing data given to their senses. It cost Husserl a lifetime of pains to see and to name the pure phenomena that really are given in direct experience. (For this reason my attempt to paraphrase Husserl here can only be inadequate; Husserl had to name the world all over again, and his thought can really only be stated in the special terminology he created.) In a late work, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), Husserl makes it clearer how his program for making philosophy truly scientific is a way to save reason and by saving reason to save Europe. Authority in science is linked in his mind with authority in society. Both were undermined when a Galilean (later Newtonian) truncated version of reason became identified with true reason. Art and science were separated. Skepticism and relativism spring inevitably from that identification of the object of science with physico-chemical nature, which Husserl dedicated his life to combatting. Wilhelm Dilthey was able to make fun of Husserl by saving that he reduced the flow of experience to a series of static concepts, and then, to complete his work, he produced a static concept of flow. Dilthey could not have made the same joke about Henri Bergson, a French contemporary of Husserl, since Bergson devoted himself to recapturing the sense of flow that static concepts had failed to grasp. According to Bergson we lose touch with reality when we perform even the most ordinary intellectual operations, notably when we conceive of time in terms of space. Consider, for example, a calendar, in which a little square of space is used to symbolize each day, or a clock where the hands indicate the time by pointing in different directions to different places on the dial, or a simple chart where one represents with a spatial *Ideen I, so-called to distinguish it from Ideen II, which was put together from Husserls notes and published after his death. 324 Letter 40 diagram the change of temperature during the day, plotting time on the x axis and temperature on the y axis. Calendars, clocks, and charts use space to represent time, but real time, la dure, is more flowing, more creative, more indivisible, than anything our spatial representations of time can capture. Dilthey was right to note that Husserls rather ponderous system of rigorous concepts lacks the sense of flow found, for example, in Bergson. Nevertheless, regarded as cultural activists Husserl and Bergson have much in common. One wanted absolute certainty; the other wanted creativity. They were, however, both European intellectuals who lived at the same time. It was a time when

the basic structure of modern European society was threatened threatened from without by a revolutionary working class, and threatened from within by relativism. The dominant symbolic structures were uninspiring. Moreover, the positivist and neo-Kantian philosophers the ones whose thought reflected most closely the basic structure had successfully discredited medieval scholasticism and the more recent efforts to breathe a religious spirit into Europe with idealist philosophy, on the ground that they built their castles in the air with the flimsy building material provided by mere abstractions. Husserl, Bergson, and other leading 20th century philosophers responded to the cultural crisis in the only possible way: they found inspiration, but not in abstractions. They went back to direct immediate experience, and found there wonders unsuspected by those accustomed to swigging their experience in the standard mechanistic way. They and others were alike in this: they dealt with the same problem, namely a boring relativism. And they dealt with it in a similar way: they brought out values inherent in what is variously called the concrete, the immediate, direct experience, the given, pure phenomena. Their techniques were very different. The problem they were trying to solve is the same; it is the problem we are all up against. Still, in 1987. By speaking thus bravely in the singular about the problem, I assume that now in Letter 40 we are already fairly far advanced in showing the unity of the basic structure of the modern world, and in showing the directions in which that structure needs to be transformed in order to make our species viable. Presumably, too, the merits of our basic structure have been duly praised, so that alongside our growing awareness of how bad things are, there is a growing appreciation of how good things are, and a growing fear that things could be worse and that if we are not careful they will be. We have wended through discussions of power, capitalism, love, how to live, science, morals, and how to build world peace. We have analyzed Kants remarkable synthesis of the main components of the modern symbolic structures, and we have run up against the same structural obstacles over and over again as we have talked about power, capitalism, love, life, science, morals, and war. Although boring relativism is one good name for many facets of our structure, the basic structure has proven to be multi faceted, and to have different names according to the direction from which it is approached. From a political viewpoint it is the unsolvable dilemma of force vs. freedom. From an economic viewpoint it is private property and the global market. From a personal viewpoint it is loneliness and insecurity, on the negative side, and autonomy and responsibility on the positive side. From the point of view of how to live it is a misguided search for the will o-the-wisp authenticity. From the point of view of morals it is the ethic of respect for persons. From the point of view of science, the leading paradigm is Newtons mechanics, and a classical economics which conceived of social science on the model of mechanics. From the point of view of war, the basic structure is the nation which is inherently warlike because it recognizes no authority higher than itself. 325 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II If we want a single word to name the basic structure, we might pick individualism.* And if we want a single word to express how we use thinking globally to guide us as we act locally by identifying the projects which contribute to transforming the structure of the modern world, we might say, in the imperative, Cooperate! However, having chosen to name what needs to be transformed as individualism, we are likely to be misunderstood when we respond to someone who says, The problem with modern faceless bureaucracies is that there is no real caring for the individual, or, Modern humans are mass-

produced. We need individuals who can be themselves, not just carbon copies of other people. We are likely to be misunderstood because we will reply, Yes, that is quite right. That is just what we have been saying all along. People will think we are contradicting ourselves, since they will think we are both endorsing and opposing individualism. The truth is that in sonic ways our basic structure can be named as too individualistic and not cooperative enough, while in other ways it can be faulted for failing to appreciate the unique value of each person. So there you have it. Our basic structure has no short, fully satisfactory name. It does not even have a long and fully satisfactory name. I am happier with cooperate! as a short name for the sense of direction we are developing, the sense of direction which will distinguish progress from regress. I do not mean to claim for myself the right to name the direction in which we should go, since the naming of that direction can only come in the end from the transformative activity of millions of people, but, still, cooperate! strikes me as a fine short summary of the ideals we need. If a project strengthens the human capacity to cooperate to meet each others needs, and if it cooperates with that wider community of which the human community is a sub-system, the wider community which includes the air, the waters, the soil, and the living forms who share the planet with our species, then it is a good project. Husserl attacked certain philosophical aspects of the basic structure. He attacked the identification of reason with the methods of physics, which had become in many ways part of the science and part of the common sense of economic society. The usefulness of phenomenology for social change activists is not, however, mainly a matter of noting Husserls critique of certain aspects of the structures we are transforming. Nor does it lie in his program for making philosophy into a rigorous science a program which has been abandoned even by many who call themselves phenomenologists. It lies rather in his systematic efforts to study human subjectivity, particularly as these have been further developed by social scientists and psychologists. * Some writers identify the basic structure as alienating, and accordingly define the task of our epoch as de-alienation. Although I do not on the whole disagree with what these writers say, 1 do not choose to use the terms myself for the following reasons. (1) Alienation (as well as Entfremdung, Entausserung, anomie) is a technical term in philosophy and social science, which has no strong roots in ordinary speech. (2) Alienation is a pejorative term, while individualism can have either good or bad connotations. The truth is that our basic cultural coding, like the backbone of a dinosaur, gives us both our strength and our weakness. (3) Alienation suggests that we have true selves, a true human nature, which we could return to if we could only find it. The truth, as Merleau-Ponty notes, is that the human is not a natural species, hut always a project. The disagreement with Marx here is superficial, the agreement profound, since for Marx the human Gattungswesen is to be social, to be a social creation, although not in historical conditions we have chosen ourselves. (4) Fantasies are often described as alienating, but in truth we all need fantasies, and we delude ourselves when we think we are or can be undeluded. Hence the project of de-alienation, although not wrong, should be named in ways which give more emphasis to improving the quality of the life of the imagination. 326 Letter 40 We can use a systematic approach to subjectivity in social change work because new social structures, the ones we are creating, are new patterns of human action, and human action has a

subjective aspect, both when patterns change and when established patterns continue. The subjective aspect consists in part in this: people do not act just because the facts are so-and-so; people act because they believe the facts are so-and-so. It is the belief, which is always somebodys belief, the belief of some subject or set of subjects, which provides the motive for action, not the objective truth as it really is, which may and may not be known, and which is never completely known. Beliefs, along with desires and aversions, are subjective states. We must therefore work with and through human subjectivity in order to ascertain adequately what the presently existing collective habits are, to understand the discourses that are part of the existing practices and to nurture the growth points which are moving toward constructive change of the norms (and hence of the structures) of our global society. Phenomenology has had great direct influence on the social sciences through Husserls followers and the followers of his followers. However, the indirect influence of phenomenology through its contribution to the general atmosphere and trend of intellectual life has probably even greater. Nowadays (1987) scholars unashamedly write books consisting of interviews with ten female factory workers who tell the stories of their lives, or based on interviews with 40 middle-aged males who tell their stories, or based on the stories of five South American mine workers and their families, and then they list such books on their resumes as research in social science. There was a time (a time before phenomenology and other recent philosophies penetrated academic circles) when personal stories were regarded as merely anecdotal, suitable for suggesting hypotheses to be tested, suitable for newspaper reporters looking for human interest, or for novels but not social science. In some quarters such studies, and also more sophisticated efforts to understand how people see their own lives, are still regarded as in principle excluded from social science. By and large, however, the academic world has now recognized that even though subjective reality may not be as important as Husserl thought it was, it is at least a kind of reality, and therefore worthy of study. The scholar who publishes a paper based on interviews with ten women who work in factories, which tries to show the reader how life looks from their points of view, may know nothing of Husserl or of phenomenology, but he or she nevertheless benefits from the prestige now accorded to studies of peoples personal realities. What we mainly need to know, however, is not how-the-world-looks-to-X, where X is some particular human person. Even if one could understand Xs world so well that one could, if called upon to do so and provided with a well-made disguise, step into Xs shoes and play Xs role in life so well that nobody would know that X had been replaced by an impostor, even then ones achievement in understanding anothers point of view would not in itself produce any benefit or improvement. What we mainly need to know is how to transform our basic structures, because if we do not learn that we will destroy humanity and there will lie no subjects, no perspectives on life, and no particular kinds of person (black, white, Irish, straight, gay, old, female, Japanese, poor, rich, African, male, Russian...) who have perspectives typical of the kinds of person they are. The contribution of phenomenology to building cooperative communities needs to be put into perspective by noticing some of the ways in which subjective consciousness is not the key to understanding or to changing society, such as the following ones. After noting them, we will be able to go on in good conscience to discuss how phenomenology does help us to learn what we mainly need to know. 327 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II 1) The fate of the Roman Empire was decisively influenced by the exhaustion of Italian soil, which the Romans did not subjectively intend, and of which they were scarcely aware.

2) The strength of the British navy, and therefore the size of the British Empire, was augmented by the discovery of Vitamin C, but only a tiny minority was conscious of the measures taken to preserve the health of sailors on long voyages, and even fewer knew of their scientific basis. 3) The subjective intention of certain peasants and workers in Chile in 1972 was to seize land and factories and to operate them collectively, and they believed that their actions would lead to that result. What actually happened was that they were defeated ideologically and militarily and fascism was imposed on them. 4) Non-literate tribes are often organized according to elaborate structures of kinship. An anthropologist can develop a logical scheme which expresses the rules that govern the structure, even when subjectively the people are not aware of the rules they are following, or of anything so elaborate. 5) Somewhat similarly, most people when they speak construct sentences more or less according to the grammar of their language, but without being aware of the rules they are following. 6) Ones psychoanalyst, ones friends, and ones family often see patterns which objectively exist in ones behavior, although subjectively they are not there at all. Considerations such as these prohibit us from saying, peoples own stories from their own points of view are all that matter. Nevertheless, subjective perspectives play an important role in our transformational work because human activity is typically action in which the conscious mind plays some role. Humans are symbol-using creatures so we usually guide our actions with words or other symbols, and usually have some degree of awareness. It is perhaps arguable that humans might act entirely under the guidance of the subconscious or of conditioned reflexes of which they were unaware but that would be, if true at all, of limited practical use. Furthermore, to respect people it is necessary to understand and to respect their ideas, so as to be able to act in concert with them, or, if necessary, to oppose them conscientiously, as distinct from nonconscientiously attacking them physically without even knowing how they perceive themselves and what they want. And, in addition, one of the reasons we need to change our world is that it is a soulless world (a world dominated by exchange values), and correlatively one of our aims is a world which is not soulless, and in a non-soulless world people would feel comfortable, which is not entirely the same thing as having ones objective needs met. Subjectivity is hence an important part of our means and of our ends. In the process of enjoying the benefits of phenomenologys achievements, it is well to bear in mind that Husserls philosophy is not in general a satisfactory philosophy. His project for putting science on firm foundations is an example of what is known in Spanish as patudez, i.e. wearing shoes that are too big for you or pretending that your feet are bigger than they are. Authorizing science by discovering its foundations is patudez because scientific research is going forward around the world, discovering how things work, proposing and criticizing theories, being applied in technologies, and amassing vast quantities of information far too great to be grasped by any person or small group of people and science seems destined to go on doing what it is doing quite regardless of whether anyone thinks it has foundations. This remark applies, by the way, not just to phenomenology, but also to the work of those 328 Letter 40 philosophers of a positivistic temperament who try to write rules of logic or of method that are supposed to govern scientific activity, or to confer validity upon it.

The misguided idea of establishing foundations for science is part and parcel of the equally misguided idea of building a field of knowledge which science is supposed to presuppose. The project of creating knowledge-presupposed-by-science can be described as attempting an end-run around science, or going behind sciences back. On such a view it is not necessary, in order to arrive at valid norms for human conduct, to study the biology of human sexual reproduction, or the chemistry of hormones, of the physics of brain electricity because the knowledge required can be derived from consciousness or being or the I or any number of entities or non-entities which are supposed to exist in a field that systematic study (i.e. science) cannot touch because all research is supposed to presuppose it. It would be more reasonable to say that the new society will be built with science, not independently of it, and that whatever truths scientists can plausibly be said to presuppose should be cross-checked and put in context by fitting them into an overall picture which includes truths scientists have discovered. Considered as an attempt to put psychology in particular on firm foundations, Husserls project is open to the objections raised by Jean Piaget in Sagesse et Illusions de la Philosophie, namely that not much can be expected from a psychology which attempts to understand the facts of mental life while deliberately refusing to consider either (a) their causes, or (b) their genesis (bl) in childhood or (b2) in the history of culture. (Husserl does in fact consider the history of culture, especially in his late work, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, but when he does so he is not using the phenomenological method, but rather using a common sense, standard, and somewhat eclectic approach to the history of ideas to explain how Europe got itself into such a bind that Husserl is led to recommend phenomenology as the way to get Europe out of its bind.) Considered as a metaphysical synthesis of some of the leading themes of the culture of his time and place (in the sense of the word metaphysics which seems sensible to the one who pens these lines), Husserls work is a partial success. He succeeded in mobilizing the prestige of mathematics and logic, the two sciences with the strongest claims to certainty and to eternal validity, in the service of the humanistic goal of honoring subjectivity. However, that was not Husserls main goal. Husserl intimated more than once that his program for establishing absolute knowing was designed to lead eventually to absolute valuing and absolute willing. If Husserl had succeeded (i.e. if he had convinced Europe), he would have been guilty of overkill. Relativism, his bte noire, would have been defeated, but in its place there would have been a set of absolute norms which probably would have locked capitalism into place and certainly would have lacked flexibility. That his success as a metaphysician was not as great as the more persuasive and comprehensive systems of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, or Kant has turned out to be a plus for humanity. Husserls great achievement, on the other hand, was to teach a generation of scholars how to construct systematically alternatives to what he called the natural attitude.They included Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to name three of the most famous of Husserls philosophical legatees, as well as many-social scientists, psychiatrists, theologians, and psychologists. But what Husserl calls the natural attitude is not natural. It is not found in young children, nor in tribal peoples, nor in antiquity, nor is it found in all people or in any of the people all of the time among adults in modern western society. When Husserl characterizes the natural standpoint he speaks of physical objects locatable in a space-time grid the very stuff of Descartes analytic geometry, of the accounting practices of our commercial civilization, of Newtons mechanics, of Kants nature. 329

LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Merleau-Ponty did a brief review of phenomenologys career in the preface to his Phenomenologie de la Perception (1945), concluding that all that really remained of Husserls program after his followers abandoned most of its major features was a sense of wonder, a sense of mystery. The phenomenologist is able to see things afresh, as they appear pristinely in consciousness, and to so see them with help from the technical vocabulary produced by phenomenologys short but fecund tradition. The alternative to the freshness of vision which Merleau-Ponty notes m phenomenology is (I note) our cultures dominant world-view, which is connected to the basic structure of our society by a million tight threads. If instead of living with an air of mystery and wonder we were to process our sensory inputs according to a standard software programmed into our minds by our culture, then it is clear what software it would be and what its program is. Phenomenology has contributed to what is sometimes called post-modern consciousness by helping to free people from the tacit assumption that the structures of the modern world are inevitable and changeless. Theories of social change are on the whole of the same form as the other theories produced in our culture. They are stories about forces. Some of them are about the forces locked in class struggle. When these theories of change are applied as revolutionary strategies, they are about how to mobilize forces, and how to use forces in ways that will achieve victory for the dispossessed. Other theories of social change are about forces measured by variables.* They tell us what factors (i.e. forces) do and what factors do not lead to social change, and under what conditions each acts. From a practical point of view the stories about force are of limited use. The class straggle theories are only encouraging when the exploited have a chance to win. Otherwise such theories lead only to the depressing conclusion that the unjust are stronger than the just and will remain in power because they have power. The stories about variables, like all stories about variables, do not by themselves illuminate the mechanisms through which the factors studied achieve their effects. Such stories can teach you how to keep score, but not how to play. Phenomenology is among the schools of contemporary thought which help us to generate a new form for theories of social change. The new form consists of making them into stories about the growth of cultural structures. Cultural structures grow the way anything else grows by transforming energy into organized structures. The cultural structure is the mechanism at work in human action (and even, as Lacan and others have shown, in the unconscious) and when it has changed in the right way, i.e. from individualism to cooperation, then the revolution will have happened. Consciousness leads to action, actions to habits; collective habits are customs, and customs, when they are normative and sufficiently large in scale and organized into a system, form cultural structures. We know, of course, that a similar process occurs in reverse order: structures determine customs, customs mold peoples habits, habits govern actions, and actions produce consciousness. To contribute to building a viable and caring society, the social change activist enters this circle, or, if you prefer, enters this ascending spiral, or this network of interconnecting relationships, where best she or he can. Organic intellectuals, those secret agents of the Holy Spirit who have been called by angels of many colors to carry vessels of healing water to the suffering one who said I thirst (the suffering one who is present in every victim) do what they can where they are, watching for their opportunities no less diligently than Screwtape watched for his. * See the discussion of Gurrs theory about the variable named relative deprivation in Letter 36. 330

Letter 40 The following is a list of some useful terms adopted from phenomenology and from miscellaneous sources directly or indirectly influenced by phenomenology. My co-workers and I have used them in our practical work as activists and organizers. Regarded as a connected set of concepts,* this list of terms is a theory of social change in the new form; it is a story about how to nurture the transformation of the structures of the modern world, which does not rely on force as its root metaphor. The code-message dialectic (adapted from semiotics). A message can only be sent if there is a code to send it in, and if the code is shared by the sender and the receiver. On the other hand, codes cannot exist without messages. Unused codes decay and are forgotten. Repeated messages strengthen codes; creative messages extend codes. Example: in my youth I sometimes went to parties in Van Nuys, California, where all the conditions were propitious for fun. There was drink, dance, music, dope, and uninhibited behavior. Nevertheless, the most memorable times were often not so much the fun-times as the communication times. These were the times when I left the party with someone not so much for sex as for talk. We would walk around the block, or go to an all-night doughnut and coffee place, or stand by the car, or sit in a park and have a long talk. We felt united afterwards, and felt that we knew each other better. We had sent some creative messages that extended our codes, and the degree to which sender and receiver shared a code had been augmented. Horizon (adapted from Husserl). Every experience has a context. Everything that appears, appears against a background. Each person has limited vision, not only because of the things at the center of the persons attention, but also because the person has a limited context, a limited background. We can say the person has a limited horizon; there is a limit to what the person can see. Some things are beyond her or his horizon. Example: For many people the context, the hall-seen shadows, of daily hie in the modern world, consists of the threat of nuclear war. Everything appears against the background of imminent destruction. War is what can be imagined, what can be conceived as happening, and it can be called our horizon. On the other hand, peace is beyond our horizon, because the conditions of peace cannot be thought with our dominant thought-forms. Life-world (adapted from Husserl and others). The world of each persons experience has a certain unity of its own. This life-world is not the same as the official world, which reflects how life is supposed to be, or the objective world as science describes it. We can speak of people sharing a life-world to some extent, when their surroundings art-similar and their perceptions are coordinated. Example: Andrew Young, the Mayor of Atlanta, disguised himself as a homeless beggar, and spent a day and a night on the streets and in a shelter, in order to acquire insight into the life-world of a poor person. Theme (adapted from Husserl). The theme is the focus of the field of consciousness, as distinct from the horizon which is the background surrounding the locus. 1 he word theme designates something that is repeated (as in a musical theme). It also indicates that somebody is paying attention, as part of that persons activity. In the groups we work with we designate as themes repeated foci of attention; these are likely to be words and phrases, or images. We keep a card file on themes meaningful to the group, often classified by categories such as: family, street-life, school, television programs... We also keep a file of

images which reflect themes meaningful in the milieu, and a collection of tape recordings and records. *The connections among the concepts will be further elaborated in Volume III. 331 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Example: Linda, at the age of 12, was preoccupied by the theme Save the whales! She contributed money to Greenpeace, read their literature, had pictures of whales in her room, and listened to tape-recordings of whales. Symbolic structure (adapted from Habermas and others). The coherence of life-worlds depends on their having some structure, and on their participating in some structures made of symbols, such as language. The overlapping and coordination of life-worlds constitute the global cultural structures that govern us: money, the market, property, law, military organization (i.e. the symbol-systems that give armies their cohesion, as distinct from the hardware they employ), etc. Example: Shortly after the coup in Chile in 1973, a law school professor from Berkeley came to Santiago as a representative of Amnesty International with the purpose of persuading the new military government not to use torture. I told him that he was looking at only one aspect of the structure. The existing social structure as a whole produced so much polarization and so limited the motivation to produce (leading to economic stagnation) that the strain on the system was greater than its strength. The exhortation, Torture is illegal, was useful, but only to a very limited degree, and torture would not in fact be eliminated until the structures were reorganized to make Chile less polarized and more productive. Growth-point (adapted from biology). A growth point is a theme that is attracting energy. Hence the love root-metaphor: themes grow by attraction, not by impact. To be designated a growth point, there must be the strengthening of codes and the reorganization of structures moving in some desirable direction. Otherwise it is just a trend. Example: In talking with inmates at Pendleton Reformatory in Indiana, I found that none of them were ashamed of having been caught stealing other peoples property. Their ethic was share and share alike, and if people were not willing to share with them voluntarily, they were prepared to enforce their ethic by taking their share through burglary or robbery. They responded to the idea of brotherhood, since the idea of brothers and sisters is consistent with their ethic. Brotherhood is a theme that attracts energy, and one that can go somewhere. Religious groups, Christian and Muslim, use brotherhood as a growth-point in their prison ministries at Pendleton. It leads to more constructive forms of participation in society than crime. Energy flow (adapted from Anthony Wilden) The meaning-analysis characteristic of phenomenology, structuralism, semiotics, and so on, must be complemented by an energyanalysis of human behavior, whose frame of reference is the body. This is not phenomenology. It is cross-checking and putting in context the life-world with the help of ecology, where ecology is viewed not as a specialized science but as the synthesis of biology, chemistry, physics, and geology. Wilden suggests that all scientific explanations can be put in two categories, or analyzed as a mixture of the two: meaning-explanations, and energy-explanations. Following this cue, as we study meaningful themes, we try to notice where the energy is flowing on a physical level. Example: While doing a thematic study of a cultural scene (Freire would call it the codification of a thematic universe but

all this fancy language boils down to putting notes on cards, collecting pictures, and making tapes) at a Pentecostal church in Indiana we can feel the energy flowing when the preacher says Jesus gives us certainty for our lives, something solid to hold on to, definite rules to live by. We suspect that this positive response to the offer of certainty has a physical basis. Fusion of Horizons (adapted from H-G Gadamer). In order to cooperate, we need to understand each other, and in order to understand each other we need to fuse our 332 Letter 40 horizons. That is to say, we need to coordinate our perceptions. We need to communicate not just at the level of specific meanings encoded in language, but also at the level of the most significant themes of vital interest in daily life, and even at the level of sharing background and context. For this reason we sometimes speak of dream networking, i.e. networking with music and art which speaks to every level of the human body. We need to share dreams because shared dreams become shared goals, and, more than goals, they become fused horizons. J-P Sartre has outlined a process through which, one can say, the horizons of the revolutionary cadres become fused through revolutionary practice.* He describes one, but not the only, way in which commitment and cohesion can be achieved. Example: Many Americans were vaguely aware of the denial of civil rights to blacks, but they did not have the background to appreciate its full reality and monstrosity. As a result of nonviolent resistance led by M.L. King Jr. one aspect of the reality, police brutality, was shown live on television, and as a result the perceptions of millions of people were coordinated, which led to the approval of civil rights legislation. Losable theme. (A concept developed in the PPH Program in Chile) This is a theme which is not constructive, which people can talk each other out of by simply reflecting on it together. Example: I happen to be present when four elderly ladies and one elderly gentleman are conversing in a private home in Aurora, Colorado. One opines that a belief in the sacredness of private property is what has made America great. Another reflects that if property rights were strictly respected we would have to give the country back to the Indians, since it was theirs in the first place, and they were cheated out of it by crooked deals. The ensuing discussion is complex. But one might reasonably extrapolate from it the conclusion that private property is a means, not an end-in-itself. Invader theme (from Freire). An invader theme does not form part of the life-world of the subject or group of subjects. We avoid invader themes because they carry the implicit message: Your world is not official, not scientific. Example: School officials and parents in a small town in Ohio ask a college professor for advice because they are concerned about drug-abuse by teenagers in their town. It would be possible to say that drugs produce relaxation of inhibitions and stimulation of right-side-ofthe-brain activity similar to that found in pursuits highly valued in the local culture, such as attending basketball games. However, to say this, however valid it might be from the point of view of brain physiology, would be to introduce an invader theme, foreign to the frame of reference of the group. Hinge theme (from Freire) When the nurturing of a growth point in a cultural structure requires the introduction of an invader theme, one looks for a hinge, i.e. for a connection between the life-world of the group and the invader theme to be introduced. Example: A Catholic retreat center in Canada has taken on the mission of making people

aware that the destruction of the environment by humans can only be reversed by a new way of life, which will require new ways of thinking and new spiritualities. Anything new is, by definition, an invader, something from beyond the horizon. A hinge is provided by the theme of cancer. Cancer is real in the lives of many people, and a threat for everyone. It can be used as a theme to lead to a consideration of environmental pollution, and to food contamination, and from there to the need to * in La Critique de la Raison Dialectique. ** additional examples of growth points, losable themes, and invader themes are found in Chapter 15 of The Evaluation of Cultural Action. 333 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II reorient agribusiness and multinational corporations, and from there to the need to transform the structures of the modern world. Decision loop (from Management Science) In organizing any large activity, such as a political campaign, one needs to communicate with many people who do not necessarily read messages in the same way the sender encodes them. A decision loop consists of a group of people who can be contacted before any message is sent on a large scale, who are in a position to anticipate how the receivers will react to it. Example: in preparing materials for a family education program which was designed to empower women and reduce machismo, it seemed that a good theme to use would be friendship. (Actually amistad, since the program was in Colombia.) However, use of a decision loop showed that the theme friendship in poor areas was identified with husbands squandering their paychecks by drinking with the boys, instead of contributing to the womans effort to raise the children. The Evaluation of Cultural Action. In evaluating local actions guided by global thinking, the question to ask is whether more viable and desirable cultural structures are growing. Example: A community development project in Bolivia seeks to revive the indigenous ideal of Ayni-ruway, which means, in the Aymara language, living with constant obligations to one another, as distinct from living separately and taking no responsibility for one another. The question the participants ask themselves in evaluating the project is, To what extent have we become more faithful to the ideal of Ayni-ruway? 334 Letter 41 41 THE ROAD TO EMMAUS The following is a letter sent to a student as an explanation of why the work she was doing in philosophy class was not satisfactory. The letter continues my commentary on Heidegger s philosophy. Dear Anne Marie, Philosophy can be expected during any period of its history to speak about the problems that preoccupy the age, and to propose ideals of rationality to guide human thought and to guide human action. Philosophy is the love of wisdom and wisdom is the rule of the rational over the irrational. By its nature, as an activity producing general statements which orient homo sapiens sapiens in the cosmos, and by its function, as successor and supplement to ritual, it speaks with authority. Thus Plato and Aristotle claim to speak not in the voice of private willfulness, but with the authority of a

disciplined voice faithful to the leadings of the logos (of the word, of reason, of the argument, of logic). The truth spoken by Thomas Aquinas claimed to derive its authority from the Creator, who put into the essences of things the truth that human reason finds when it studies them. Ren Descartes believed that the individual subject could know truth and he claimed, as did most philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, that solitary meditators or experimenters could find truths of nature, whose authority did not come from society, whose implications justified changing society to remake it in the image of nature although Descartes himself, with characteristic caution, recommended the provisional acceptance of the conventional wisdom during the long process of discovering the ideally rational wisdom. Kant developed the classic synthesis and compromise which guaranteed the claims of Newtonian science to produce knowledge of nature and at the same time guaranteed the authority of a moral law grounded in pure reason. Marx added the authority of science to the moral authority of protests against the unequal distribution of property by, as he put it, laying ...bare the economic laws of motion of modern society. Friedrich Nietzsche, who died in 1900, on the threshold of our own century, carried the praise of the unfettered will of the free subject to its rational conclusion, by proposing a transvaluation of values in which authority would belong to the will to power, that is to say, to willing for the sake of willing. It is not surprising that in the 20th century philosophers speak to the problems that preoccupy the age, in philosophys own characteristic way, that is to say, with the authority of reason. For Martin Heidegger, however, words like reason, rational, logos, Grund, are less important than the word Being, and on Heideggers interpretation of the history of philosophy, philosophy is and always has been concerned primarily with being (with or without a capital B). Love of wisdom, the rule of the rational over the irrational, is secondary. It is secondary according to Heidegger because it is only when Being, philosophys proper object, is given a limited meaning as in, Being is logos or, in German, Being is Grund that logos and Grund, i.e. reason and rationality, move to center stage. Being is philosophys primary concern, and it is only when Being is equated with rationality that rationality appears to be philosophys primary concern. 335 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II But if one looks at what Heidegger does with his focus on being, one will see that it is the same as what other philosophers have done with a focus on reason; namely, he tries to establish authority; indeed many of the words whose authority Heidegger seeks to revive and strengthen are traditional religious words, as is being itself, which for St. Thomas corresponded to the first person of the trinity, God the Father. What is happening to us in the roots of our being, Heidegger asks, in an age when science has become our passion? Referring to nihilism, i.e. the negation of all authoritative principles, Heidegger wrote in 1944-46, as his country was losing World War II, We hardly need to illustrate in detail the spreading violence of actual nihilism, which we all personally experience to a sufficient degree, even without an ivory-tower definition of its essence. And, on the same page, ...which sows confusion and strife everywhere, which instigates crime and drives us to despair... whose violence, encroaching from all sides, makes almost every act of resistance futile. It is against this background of spreading chaos that Heidegger continues to pursue being. Heidegger dismisses as fantasy the dreams of naive people full of good faith and desirous of order who complain of one or another manifestation of violence without recognizing the basis of violence in ...the essential history of Being itself. For Heidegger the all-too-apparent disorder of our times is a symptom of a deeper disorder in the human relationship to Being, and all of our strife will settle nothing, will decide

nothing, as long as Being remains distant from us. The celebrated Krell, a noted Heidegger analyst, aptly chose as a preface to one of his analyses of Heidegger texts the following speech by Ulysses to the Greek princes on the plains of Troy from Shakespeares Troilus and Cressida. Here Shakespeare uses the word degree, as in the expression, a person of high degree, as a synonym for what Heidegger calls rank. Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe: Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead: Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong, Between whose endless jar justice resides, Should lose their names, and so should justice too. Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself. The typical family quarrel, which we discussed in class, echoes in these apt lines. We said: A tries to control the behavior of B. B resists control by A. Ulysses says: ...each thing meets/ In mere oppugnancy... Your term paper (which was not a typical term paper but a criticism of the course and an account of the sources of your anger, an account ...of things important to you which you needed to write about) shows what is meant by the lines, Power into will, will into appetite/And appetite, an universal wolf, Especially where you relate how you were, in effect, raped, although your lover extracted a sort of consent from you before first using you and then telling you to get out. 336 Letter 41 Heidegger, like the great schoolteacher-philosophers before him, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, is a passionate partisan of order and respect. He is, psychologically speaking, on the side of Parents. Politically speaking, he is like Plato a philosopher with a Utopian mission, an acerbic critic of modernism who dreams of an idealized aristocratic restoration. Heideggers psychology and politics were of course not obvious to me when as a novice Heidegger-reader I first picked up Being and Time and was duly astounded by its obscurity, properly assured that I was travelling in good company by the authors impressive command of the great texts of the western tradition, and so illuminated from within by Heideggerian fireworks that when I returned to reality after a few pages of immersion in Being and Time I was breathless and excited. The first thing I noticed in the first chapter was that Being is the Big Question. The question about the meaning of Being has priority and High Rank (Vorrang). In the same chapter I met the Stooge who does not realize that among questions the Being-question is number one. Stooge makes arguments like the following one: Stooge: Lets examine a specimen of being, like this big brown rock here. This specimen has

certain features, namely it is This i.e. the one I am pointing to; it is Big; it is Brown; it is a Rock; and it is Here. Now suppose I stop pointing to it. It ceases to be this. And suppose we disregard its size, its color, and whether or not it is a rock, and we also disregard its location. When we thus erase the distinguishing features this, big, brown, rock, and here, we are left with being, a concept which applies equally to everything. Thus being is the emptiest and most inclusive of all words; it is also the most useless, since it does not serve to distinguish anything from anything else. The Stooge is, of course, mistaken, since in order to say that being is a useless word, or to say anything of the sort, you first have to know what is means, and is is just the third person singular of the verb to be, whose gerund is being. So no such remarks about what being is can logically avoid the being-question. What does it mean to be? What is is? However, in my first readings oiBeing and Time I was not as moved by the clever logic which takes the being-question unavoidable as I was by the heavy heart-to-heart communion of one great lonely soul with another, to which Heidegger like his favorite poets Holderlin, Trakl, and Rilke treats his readers. I got drunk on authenticity, on feeling superior to the they, on freedom towards death, on resoluteness, and on conscience as the call of care, to name only a few of the words and phrases through which Heidegger establishes himself as the most charming philosopherpoet since Plato. I slept in a single room on the secord floor of a rooming house with Being arid Time on a small table beside the bed, and if for any reason I had to live for a week without reading it, all colors faded and the air turned sour. Heidegger is a modern hero for many people. In the midst of our frantic 20th century he has recalled the ancient question of Being. He sometimes appears, to be sure, to be a hard-bitten cynic, an atheist, a destroyer of tradition, a pessimist but in the end he yearns for order and gentleness, and his tough-minded passages are not his conclusions; they are, rather, his intellectual credentials; they are the evidence that he can accept and absorb all the barbs of cynics, atheists, destroyers, and pessimists and still provide philosophical support for kind authority. They are the unflinching realism which enables him to win the respect of young people. Jacques Derrida 337 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II quite rightly rejected the widespread notion that Heidegger has destroyed the western philosophical tradition when he said that Heidegger is the most powerful, because most profound, defender of traditional metaphysics. After stating that Being is The Question, Being and Time proceeds to state the method to be used to answer The Question. It will be the phenomenological method, which according to the phenomenologist interviewed in Letter Eleven, looks at wholes, not isolated parts, sees things from the inside, not the outside, uncovers and opens up what others naively pass over as they presuppose, and which, in the idiosyncratic account of it that Heidegger gives in Being and Time sets free (freilegt) the standing forth in unconcealment of beings. Phenomenology, the study of the phenomenon, would make no sense, says Heidegger, if we meant by phenomenon only a mere appearance, because it makes no sense for something to appear to be x if we do not also know what it is for that thing to really be x. Hence phenomenology is properly concerned with the

phenomenon as appearance in the sense of really standing forth in unconcealment, appearing not as mere appearance but primarily and originally as something that really is making an appearance and snowing itself for what it is. You will have to read the relevant section (section 7) of Being and Time to get a detailed account of Heideggers version of phenomenology and to make your own interpretation of it. I only want to note at this point that here is a first declaration that for Heidegger the lived-world, the mundovivido, is not mere appearance. Next there comes a digression. Before we can storm the gates of Being with the battering ram of phenomenology we need to make what Heidegger calls a preparatory fundamental analysis of being-there (of Dasein). As it turns out Being and Time consists entirely of preparations and digressions. All of it is the first part of a book whose second part was never published. As it turns out, Heideggers entire career is a series of preparations and digressions. Always on his way toward Being, this philosophical Don Quijote encounters along his way a series of preparatory fundamental analyses, each one an even more primordial postponement of The Question, each of which must be investigated before Dulcinea the sought-for, Being (or, as he later wrote, Being) can be approached. The first digression, the one he calls the preparatory fundamental analysis of being-there, turns a corner in the history of western civilization. As is often the case when a culture turns a corner, the motives of the turner were of special interest to the turner and the turners immediate audience, while the results of the turn proved the work to have been a part of the universal labor of humanity which opened up vast vistas resplendent with light, which, like the laser beam, homo sapiens has not yet fully comprehended and put to its full and proper uses. Heideggers motives are veiled as Richard Rorty has observed, he covered his tracks well. But the pattern discernible in the available fragments of evidence shows them to be conservative, hoary, stodgy, with a bit of the country bumpkin from an old Catholic town in southwest Germany, a bit of the romantic poet, a bit of the expressionist painter, a bit of the showman adept at promoting his own mystique, a bit of the university lecturer who needs to make himself credible to the Nietzsche freaks in his audience, a bit of the manufacturer of ideology for the European educated classes who is eager to steal a march on competitors who make similar products for the same clientle, and with a bit of sentimentality. He defines his problem as the Being Question, his method as an application of phenomenology, his next step as the preparatory fundamental analysis of being-there. This next step is the first of many prologues to a naming of Being that never comes. This first prologue is necessary, Heidegger says, because before we do anything else we must analyze thatbeing-for-whom-being-is-a-question. Most people would call that-being-for-whom-being-is-aquestion the human being. Heidegger calls it (or perhaps I should say he calls us) 338 Letter 41 being-there, Dasein. Although Dasein literally means being-there, since it combines the German words for being (Sein) and there (da), it is often translated existence, or life. John Wild renders it as transcience, evidently because he wants to draw attention to the brevity and fluidity of each passing moment that we are. In any case, whatever the best translation of Dasein may be, here we are, being up a storm, and it is our way of being-here, or, as Heidegger says, being-there, which must first be investigated before we can embark on our quest for Being. The investigation leads us to the lived-world, or, as Heidegger calls it, Being-in-the-world, as its starting point and fundamental basis.

There is no compelling logical reason why the next step must follow the course Heidegger says it must follow. If fifty philosophers skilled in logic, who had not read Being and Time, were given its first seven sections, i.e. the ones on the high rank of the Being Question and on the phenomenological method; pencils; blank paper; and the instruction, Now continue the text, many of them would not write the sort of thing Heidegger writes in his preparatory fundamental Dasein analysis. There is, however, a compelling psychological reason why doing what he does serves Heideggers semi-conscious purpose. Since Being is Authority, and Authority is Parents, and since Heidegger pursues, in Derridas terms, the metaphysics of presence, and since the presence pursued is from a psychological point of view sweet and reassuring because it is the presence of loving persons, of mother and father, of kin mortal, kin divine, kin of the forests and skies, and finally the presence of the Supreme Loving Person, then what Heidegger needs to do to make us attuned to the presence of such persons (or, for that matter, grieved by their absence) is to return us to a pre-scientific state of mind, a state of mind such that the cosmos around us is perceived less as object and more as person. Heidegger achieves a return to an appreciation of some aspects of pre-modern thinking in a way characteristic of 20th century philosophy. He relativizes our modern symbolic structures by clarifying the contexts from which they arise in the lived-world of everyday life. Instead of livedworld (Husserls term) Heidegger says Being-in-the-world. (I have actually been using the phrase lived-world after the fashion of some contemporary social scientists in a broad sense more akin to Heideggers Being-in-the-world than to the comparatively specialized sense Husserl assigns to Lebenswelt.) Being-in-the-world is person-saturated, color-saturated, mood-saturated. The preparatory fundamental analysis of being-there, and the analysis of Being-in-the-world (the two overlap So much that you need not try to keep straight which is which) achieve some features of pre-modern consciousness while staying in the 20th century, by taking a close look at everyday life. For example, Heidegger considers the work-world of the tailor who is always already involved with the cloth and with the customer for whom the cloth must be cut to the figure. The cloth of the tailor is always already in a world with persons. In such ways being-with-others is basic and primordial to Being-in-the world. The modern notions of autonomous individuality and objective physical nature are undercut by claiming that on a logically prior plane, that of everyday activity such as the making of clothes, there is a blurring of the distinctions between person and thing and between self-awareness and other-awareness. Heidegger performs a similar operation on the concept of space. Modern economic society is accustomed to represent space, following Descartes, in two dimensions, x and y, on a Cartesian plane, or in three dimensions x, y, and z on a Cartesian plane with a depth axis added. (In sections 18-21 of Being and Time, by the way, Heidegger argues that his analysis of Being-in-the-world is more comprehensive and therefore more primary than Descartes analysis of the world.) Before the workof Heidegger and his ilk, modern economic society was accustomed to think of an x y z representation of space as the space, the real space (or, as Kant put it, the necessary form of any possible experience), and to look on people who conceived space 339 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II differently as immature. Modern economic society thought of itself as civilization and of others as having cultures not yet mature enough to be civilized. Movement in Cartesian space dovetailed with the other main cultural structures of the civilization of which it is part and parcel thus the slope of a line tells you that for a certain movement on the x axis you get a

corresponding movement on the y axis, as in bookkeeping the payment of a certain price corresponds to the purchase of a certain product, in manufacturing a certain set of inputs yeilds a certain output, in science conceived as determining the equations which govern phenomena a certain value for x gives a corresponding value for f(x). The standard modern representation of space this one of several key elements in the interlocking symbolic structures of economic society: has been questioned in several ways. Riemann and others showed that from different postulates one can deduce different geometries, so that, for example, parallel lines will sometimes meet. Einstein showed that novel geometries describe the advance of the perihelion and other phenomena of the physical world better.than western standard xy zgeometry. With linear algebra one can represent algebraically spaces with 4, 5, 6... n dimensions. Twentieth century philosophy, for the most part, puts the dominant symbolic structures in context from another standpoint: that of everyday life. Heideggers analysis of space, which is part of his preparatory fundamental analysis of being-theres being-in-the-world, is in this respect typical of 20th century philosophy. A craftsman, Heidegger points out, notices (long before he constructs a 3D space) which of the tools are ready at hand, which are remote; and what is set up, installed, in its proper place, as distinct from just lying around. Each piece of equipment belongs somewhere. Spatial concepts originally and primordially are built up from close and remote, in its place and lying around, from the direction in which the worker must reach to get his tools... from the Being-inthe-world where all our concepts begin. Heidegger was not an anthropologist, and he seemed to think his account of the primordial experience of space was valid for every person every place at all times a bit of Heideggerian idiocy, in my opinion. Nevertheless, the result of his work, quite apart from his motives and quite apart from his own conception of the problems and methods of philosophy, has been to encourage anthropology. By criticizing and refocussing the dominant concepts of modern economic society on its own native grounds, in the heart of European symbolic structures, he cancelled the credentials of civilization and helped Europe to see itself as one member of the family of human cultures. The rational individual, the set of isolated facts (data), space represented as points on dimensions x y z... etc. are, in the light of Heideggers in-house critique, more easily seen as themes of a certain cultural formation, born in a certain place (West Europe), imposed on the rest of the world by force to form the basis of the present global economic and military disorder, and existing in a certain time period (the 17th through 20th centuries although Heidegger stresses the roots of modernity in medieval, Roman, and Greek thought, perceiving it as the most recent phase of the wests relationship to Being). Anyone who reads Being and Time carefully all the way through is sure to lose her or his mind in a most astonishing way. The persons old mind, the one she has as she opens the book and reads on the frontispiece, Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we, really mean by the word being? is (whatever its individual quirks) a product of our schools, our science, our economic society, of the daily shocks that show human inhumanity. As the book proceeds the standard components of a modern mind get the Heidegger treatment. Ive mentioned space, the isolated person, and the object or thing. Similar treatments refocus world, in, meaning, signs, self, fear, understanding, language, anxiety, care, truth, identity, death, project, time, future, history.... Heidegger leads the reader along a path where each step brings the walkers closer to the starting point. The new mind emerging from the process will be more like the mind of Vincent Van Gogh, one of the painters Heidegger admired. For Van Gogh haystacks, beds, peasants boots, and starry nights glow with life, not because the painter adds

340 Letter 41 life to them, but because he does not subtract life from his perceptions. According to its author, Being and Time achieves its remarkable capacity to restructure the minds of its readers by applying the phenomenological method, a method invented by Edmund Husserl, for whom Heidegger worked as an assistant for years. Husserl dreamed that all philosophers would use his method, and that by using the same method philosophers would get the same results, which would build on each other and accumulate, so that philosophy would supply humanity with an ever-growing stockpile of truths. It did not work out that way. One can, as Herbert Spiegelberg has done, classify a certain loose confederation of philosophers as the phenomenological movement, and write a history of the crisscross of influences and disagreements among its members. Nevertheless, contrary to what Husserl dreamed, a corps of phenomenological philosophers using the same method does not exist; phenomenology turns out to be as many methods as there are philosophers who apply it it is Heidegger, but it is also Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roman Ingarden, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karol Wojtyla (afterwards Pope John Paul II), Anna Maria Tyminiecka.... which is as it should be. Husserl was wrong to suppose that philosophical activity should follow a general method, suitable for solving whatever the philosopher conceives the problem to be, in whatever context. One can, on the other hand, propose some theses about phenomenology and about 20th Century philosophy generally, theses which Martin Heideggers philosophy illustrates. (1) Twentieth century philosophy speaks to the problem that preoccupies the age, namely the transformation of the structures of economic society, structures which increasingly plunge us into violence at every level. (2) Twentieth century philosophy finds a place to stand in the close examination of everyday life; it is able to propose ideals of rationality more adequate than those which guide the dominant modern social structures because it returns to the source of rationality in practical activity. Which is also as itshould be, since what philosophy is doing now is in the best tradition of what philosophy has done in other times and places. I do not know whether what I am writing is convincing you. You may think that in the process of packaging philosophy in bite size morsels I am taking out its natural whole grain goodness. You may think that what I say Heidegger said is not what he really said. You may find my theses about the main thrust of 20th century philosophy to be implausible. You may consider the work of a philosopher who admits he was a Nazi in 1933 to be an unlikely place to look for valuable insights, especially if one agrees with Piaget as I do that no adequate account of thought can disregard its causes and its genesis, and that therefore all phenomenological philosophies are inadequate. You may think I should simply regard phenomenology as a misguided enterprise and pay no more attention to it. I do not know whether I am convincing you. I do not even care very much whether I am convincing you. Mainly I want to see you enter into the process of trying to decide what to believe and what not to believe. I want you to try to sort out true from false, wise from foolish, in my comments, in the texts, in the comments of other students. Your approach to the class is in some respects admirable, but so far you have not been trying to distinguish the believable from the unbelievable. Instead you distinguish between my values and your values. You criticize the instructor, the school, and philosophy on the grounds that we are trying to dominate you and exercise power over you. You regard any assignment as incompatible with your right to live according to your values. You go farther than claiming that the demands the course makes on you lack legitimate authority, since if you are right there is no legitimate authority anywhere. You are opposed to all religion since religion teaches liberation from all egoism,

while you teach self assertion. You oppose philosophy, religions successor and complement, because if there is no legitimate rule of anything over anything, then it follows that there is no legitimate rule of the rational over the irrational. 341 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II The attitude you have assumed toward philosophy is not an accident. Your attitude is the natural result of your suffering, of your fight to survive physically and emotionally, and of the interpretation of your suffering which the culture in which you are immersed provides. What I am asking you to do is to adopt a critical attitude toward your own thinking, to consider the possibility that the ideas of Martin Heidegger, although they may well be misguided in many respects, may not be misguided in all respects, and, as Gramsci suggests, to make an inventory of what your ideas are and where they came from. Your paper begins several years ago with a vivid description of how you were virtually raped by the man you were going out with. You describe how for a month afterwards you lived in a nightmare of deep depression and complete loss of self-respect. I kept it from my parents and kept it from everyone until I kept thinking of killing myself for three days in a row and started making plans for it and then I realized... I was suicidal! Alarmed, you started seeing a psychologist. The psychologist helped you to steady yourself and to draw back from the brink of suicide. You and he together reviewed the history of your personality and both of you came to believe that it was your little-girl-self who was driving you to suicide because she could not stand you. There was a gap in your identity between the little-girl-you-were-not-any-longer and the project-for-an-adult-futureyou-did-not-have, and you dangled in the gap, abused, violated, used and rejected, victimized, alone, humiliated, terrified.... It is the surrounding culture that provides the repertory of possible projects a person can undertake in order to pull herself or himself together to fend off disintegration. A person in a culture is like a spider in a web; when ones center is shattered, one seizes threads, hangs on, reweaves. But unlike spiders we are made by webs more than we make webs. The project you undertook was ...to affirm your power as a woman. Power for yourself as a woman, and as a woman who reaches out to others who are powerless, became your cure, your cause, and your connection with other victims; it became your cosmic story, the story in which your actions are simultaneously for yourself, for women, for all oppressed people and all victims, women, men, children, aged, whether the oppression is sexual, racial, economic, or of any other kind. On the rear bumper of your automobile you placed a sticker that read Question Authority and you organized an extra-curricular workshop on Power Dynamics in the Classroom. The workshop participants drew the conclusion that the control of the classroom by the teacher is an image and source of the domination of the powerless by the powerful. From this conclusion it followed as a practical corollary that we (i.e. students) must take control of our education. By taking control of the classroom you became (according to the logic of the viewpoint expressed in your paper) the vanguard of the revolution. Your commitment to solidarity with all victims is admirable and your writing style, while disconcerting, shows consistency with your premises. Your style is to express anger. You refer repeatedly and proudly to my anger and my fury. Your paper is a description of things that if make you furious and it is the story of what made you angry. Anger is depicted positively as a feminine attribute while reason is depicted negatively as a masculine attribute. You are consistent in avoiding reasoned arguments since if you were to use one to attack reason, then you could be refuted by your arch-enemy Plato, who would point out that you had implicitly conceded that

reason is a legitimate authority, that consequently you had endorsed the rule of the rational over the irrational, and before long Plato would have you endorsing philosophy, order, discipline, and the control of the classroom by the teacher. On the other hand, it is a weakness of your paper that it relies on the unstated premise that whatever makes you angry is wrong. No doubt the reason you did not state the premise explicitly was that you took it for granted. Since rape is wrong, it is correct to say you have a right to be angry, and it was easy for you to slip into the generalization that whatever you are angry about you have a right to be angry about. The unstated premise that your anger is justified permits you to use reports about your feelings as indictments. 342 Letter 41 Your use of reports of feelings as indictments is not, however, just a personal idiosyncrasy of yours; it is an example and a revelation of a feature of our culture. Your confidence that people are ready to accept reports about your anger as evidence that whatever you are angry about should be changed tells us something about the high status of feelings in our society. Among us feelings justify many things; they tell us our aims in life, what we want, what we will. Our values are what we feel we want or else what we feel is right. Sometimes I feel and I believe are synonymous. We consult our feelings to find out whether we are in love, whether we should buy a new car, vote Democratic, have steak for supper, or get a divorce. The high status of private feelings is the reflection of our cultural poverty (of our forgetfulness of being, Heidegger would say) because ones feelings tend to take over as the arbiters which decide all questions when there is no other standard, no true rationality. Among us, anger tends to be looked upon as self-justifying just because anger is a feeling and feelings are often treated as the supreme and only court of appeal. Self-justifying anger is an example of the logic of disunity, since it authorizes each person to pursue her or his private anger. It is an example of consciousnesslowering, since it confuses a natural fact, the flow of adrenalin, with its cultural interpretation as a justification for assuming an attitude or taking an action. Hannah Arendt notes in On Violence dial anger is usually directed more against hypocrisy than against injustice. Her insight applies to your case because your fury is directed less at professors who assume it is their right to control the class than at professors like me who encourage participation by the students in the planning and directing of class activities. If I were not hypocritical, it would seem, I would abdicate like King Lear because according to my own principles we are all equal. Further, since I apparently believe that we should all be free to choose our own value I should not be making the class listen to my ideas, or at least I should not consider my ideas more important than anyone elses, particularly since I am male and a tenured member of the establishment, while it is women and the downtrodden generally who now should be demanding the right to speak out of their own experience and in their own voices. Rather than call myself a hypocrite I would prefer to say that I have some common sense. Common sense saves one from a foolish consistency when one lives in a culture like ours which leads one to endorse principles which, if consistently practiced, would lead to the extinction of the human species. If philosophy were only a matter of being consistent, then I would have to admit that what you are doing is philosophy. If philosophy were a matter of achieving an equilibrium of practice and principle so that a philosopher is a person who tries to make what we would do in particular cases fit harmoniously with what we would say about general principles (the we being the members of the culture in which the philosopher is a participant observer) then what you are doing

deserves credit for being an attempt to bring a particular case, namely the organization of the philosophy class, into harmony with the general principles of equality and free choice of ones values. To the extent that philosophy is a subject like chemistry, which has discovered truths about reality which beginners learn in college classes, then what you are doing is not philosophy. You would not, to extend the analogy, expect to pass a chemistry course by writing papers consisting of explanations of why you hate chemistry and refuse to study it, and by arguing in class that the teacher should not teach. But I suppose what I really want to say is that it particularly irks me I knew that sooner or later I would have to admit that I get mad too that you consider yourself a true revolutionary when you do not even pretend to have any proposals for solving humanitys problems, and your revolution in the classroom consists of preventing me from expressing my ideas and interpreting those of others, when I do have a constructive plan. I am prepared to 343 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II argue that the requirements for the survival of homo sapiens are the following: (1) World government, or the world rule of law of some sort; (2) Human economies compatible with the Great Economy of nature; (3) A global system applying principles of socialist solidarity, with local and national variations in the ways productive activities are embedded in culture [(3) being the only possible way to organize (1)]; (4) Artistic and liturgical creation and revival of beautiful forms of life compatible with the physical and emotional needs inherent in the species because of its thousands of years of biological and tribal evolution. And I am prepared to argue that a method for getting humans off the endangered species list is cultural action, i.e. nurturing the growth points in existing symbolic structures. I am prepared to argue that the study of philosophy can help us to act locally and think globally. What I want you to do, that you are not doing, is to try to understand me as a person, not just as a force which is dominating you, or trying to dominate you. I have no doubt that I have misunderstood you, I have no doubt that my views are in some respects mistaken. None of us is entirely accurate in our understanding of the world or in our interpretations of each other all we can really do is to try to understand why we disagree and to work together on finding solutions to our common problems. I admit that I am one of your problems, but we can try to understand that too. Of course one reason why lam your problem is that I am playing a role which you do not consider legitimate, namely the role of philosophy teacher. The main reason why I do consider the role legitimate is closely related to the reason why I do not consider Heidegger to be entirely misguided, namely that human groups are not viable without some form of authority. In order to have, for example, an authoritative prohibition of rape, we need some sense of legitimate curbing of the will. It is not enough to oppose the victims desire-not-to-be-raped to the rapists desire-torape. It is not enough to add up the cries of victims one by one without achieving solidarity amongvictims. I plusldoesnot equal we. Ending the reign of brutal and violent forms of power consists essentially in empowering democratic and nonviolent forms of authority. Hannah Arendt makes my point in a limited but clear way when she says that the promise is the cell of human existence; until two people recognize the authority of promises over them they are not cooperating and are not human. In New Testament symbolism, when we walk together thinking just of you and me, without acknowledging the spirit of solidarity that binds us, we are like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, who did not realize that it was Jesus there walking beside them. Philosophy is one of the activities that has the special role in human culture of criticizing the

culture. It examines the software of human cooperation. Remaining on the inside of a normative system and insisting on strict adherence to one or another principle endorsed by ones culture is not doing philosophy; it is not participating in philosophys distinctive contribution to the transformation and renewal of human communities. 344 Letter 42 42 HEIDEGGERS WAY It was one of those hot muggy days redolent of urine and of the exhaust fumes of the vehicles that cram the boulevards in the mornings and in the evenings. It was a day when the spirits of motorists and of pedestrians alike were charged with hostility, when one sensed intuitively that slight provocations would touch off angry discharges; a day when the dangers of escalated tension, of murder, of rape, of mayhem, of animal madness, hung heavily in the air. It was the sort of day when tempers flare as the drivers of crashed cars exchange information regarding insurance and domicile. Responsibilities are ascribed. Rights are demanded. Persons of low degree who have no cars become impudent, on such hot muggy days, when drivers of busses question the validity of their transfers, while those of still lower degree, who cannot afford to ride buses, become offensive on their feet. Even the police, whose mission it is to augment the sacred authority of the law through the measured application of disciplined force, occasionally express their feelings in a rough manner. On such days I am often visited by a doubt. The doubt begins as a small white doubt sailing in the sky, having originated I know not where, perhaps in some doubt-spawning-fogbank on the other side of a distant cloud, from whence it makes its way doggedly toward me through sultry gusts, and then swims into my ken. Hopping from rooftop to rooftop the doubt attracts the attention of the corner of my eye before it lands on my shoulder and slips through my ear into my head, where it gradually grows larger and darker until it rains on my heart and convinces me that I am wasting my life. The doubt is about my policy. I know I am taking the long way around to tell you about my policy, and I hope I am not boring you, and if I am boring you I hope you have a personality strong enough to withstand attacks of boredom. I mean I am sorry I am taking advantage of your patience with my circumlocutions, but I wanted to describe for you a hot muggy day which provokes doubt about my policy, and I wanted to describe how the doubt starts as a suspicion and then lingers, and grows. It nags. In the end it drives me to Heidegger. My policy is to be polite and good. Even when other people are obnoxious I try to be pleasant; although I am aware that people often lie and backstab, my policy is to be honest and cooperative; my policy is to stand by my friends when they need me. And to give little gifts and to plan fun surprises for people just to let them know they are appreciated. I like to slip postcard reproductions of great paintings into the envelopes when I pay bills and send thank-you notes. Although my efforts to implement my policy are not always successful, at least I try to give people encouragement and comfort and to bring out the good in them. Then along comes one of those hot muggy days when the dogs are eating the dogs as the saying goes (its a pretty gruesome image, the dogs eating the dogs, if you stop to think about it), when all the vicious automata of self-will are on the loose, and it seems that my policy of being polite amounts to acting like the blindfolded masked man at the knife-twisting ceremony, and my policy of being good is like sleepwalking. My throat becomes infinitely parched as if suddenly there were

no water at all anywhere, only steam, which under the artificially refrigerated conditions of childhood had appeared in the form of water. Thus one begins to suspect that ones relationship to Reality has become so distant that Reality no longer remembers ones name. 345 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II On such a hot muggy day ones faith in civilization hangs in the balance. One wavers between disappointment and despair. If goodness has failed, but it still exists, then it is merely disappointment, and ones faith in the eventual triumph of sweetness and light is sufficient to encourage one to volunteer to be a scoutmaster, or to go door to door collecting pennies for the Red Cross, or to continue doing whatever one does to build a better way of living. If, on the other hand, what has really happened is that goodness has been unmasked, definitely proven to be an illusion, then there is no better way to live and no place of refuge. That is despair. It was on one of those hot muggy days when my faith in goodness hung in the balance that I understood Martin Heidegger. Of course one might question whether I understood Heidegger correctly. Ever since the day when I understood him, or came to think I understood him, every page of his writings shows, me evidence that he is searching for Being in order to empower gentle forms of authority, in order to bring stability and enchantment to the world, in order to reassure people who doubt whether it is worthwhile to follow a policy of being polite and good. Perhaps I see evidence for this interpretation on every page because I am looking for it and want to see it. Someone else might read the same pages and find on them no evidence that Heidegger is promoting stability and enchantment. I propose to give a proof of the validity of my interpretation of Heideggers search for being, i.e. of his seeking, of his way as he himself calls it. And to submit the proof to a test. The proof will be that I will outline some of his main works by paraphrase and commentary in a way that will reveal his intentions. The pattern in his philosophical activity will reveal his intentions just as in everyday life we can tell what peoples intentions are by watching what they do. Sometimes indeed intentions are understood better by observers than by the actors whose intentions they are, as in Gustave Flauberts novel Madame Bovary the reader knows Madame Bovary is in love before she herself understands the meaning of her actions. The test of the proof is to ask you to try to verify it. You can read Heideggerian texts I do not mention, and read in detail texts I mention briefly, and check whether you see continuations of the pattern I describe. To the extent that you and others grasp the pattern of intention, and, discern it where I have not pointed it out, we can say my interpretation is correct (without necessarily claiming that for every text or set of texts there is one and only one correct interpretation). To the extent that readers cannot make sense of my paraphrases and comments, at all, and to the extent that my account of Heideggers meaning is contradicted by texts I dp, not mention, we can say thy interpretation is wrong. The Beginning of the Proof Sein und Zeit Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) is divided into 83 sections. The first section advocates explicitly taking up again the search for being pursued by Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas, and, denies that Being is simply the emptiest of concepts. The second section maintains that the very asking of the question about being is a mode of being of a certain being; the certain being is each of us herself or himself, named by Heidegger Dasein. Heidegger says it is a fact that Dasein already

has a vague, average, fluctuating, dim understanding of being even though this vague understanding may border on mere acquaintance with the word being. In the third section we are assured that being, if we could find it, would give us a trump card, outranking anything scientific research might tell us. The Being-question is the most basic question, and answers to it put new foundations under inquiries into more specific areas like history, nature, space, life, Dasein, and language. The news in the fourth section is even better: Dasein (thats us) has a higher rank than all other beings. Whenever a science studies entities other than Dasein it (the science) has its foundation in Daseins own structure. Heidegger quotes Aristotle with approval: he psuche ta onta pos estin, The soul is in a certain way all beings, since, 346 Letter 42 after all, it is the soul that senses and knows all beings. Karl Marx described religion in capitalist society as the soul of a soulless world. It would follow from this description that when you lose religion all you have left is a soulless world. But on Heideggers approach you need fear no such fate. With Heidegger we start with the soul; it is our way in, our access to anything and everything. Any world we may discover as we follow Heideggers way will not be soulless. The fifth section asserts that its relation to time is the meaning of the being of Dasein. What could such a strange assertion possibly mean? Heidegger explains that for many centuries Dasein has conceived itself as being at a junction where the timeless meets time. Thus the meanings of statements are said to be timeless, while particular statements are made by particular people at particular places and at particular times. Numerical relationships like 2 + 2 = 4 are timeless, but the applications of numbers are in time. God is eternal, but we live from our time of birth to our time of death. So we sometimes say, The meaning of human life is in its relationship to the eternal. However, all this is naive. What Heidegger proposes to do is to destroy such traditional and naive ways of talking about time and the timeless (The destruction of the history of ontology, is what he calls part of his project) and then to show that our relationship to time is still the key to meaning in our lives and the route to access to Being. Time is still the key when it is understood rightly instead of naively. In section six Heidegger drops some tantalizing hints about what he will regard as the right way to understand time, after he has demolished naivet and error. He says that Geschichtlichkeit signifies the Being-constitution of Daseins happening. What is Geschichtlichkeit? It comes from Geschichte which means history, or story. So one could say the Being-constitution of Daseins happening is history-like-ness or story-like-ness. Maybe this means humans are in time as participants in history. Maybe it means humans are storytellers. We shall see. The seventh section discusses the phenomenological method, on which I already wrote brief comments in Letters 11 and 41. The eighth section outlines the rest of Being and Time. The only parts ever published were: Part One: An interpretation of Dasein in terms of time, and an attempt to explain time rightly as a way of access to pursuing the question of Being. First Division of the First Part: the preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein (sections 9-44). Second division of the First Part: Dasein and time (sections 45-83). The Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein

Section nine develops the point that when we analyze Dasein we are ourselves the beings analyzed. When we say things about this kind of being, i.e. about Dasein, we are not saying what it is, as if it were a table, house, or tree. Instead we exhibit possible ways for it (i.e. for us) to be. We are unlike table, house, and tree because there are different ways for us to choose to be, and which way we will be is an issue for us. Obscure, isnt it? Maybe obscurity is unavoidable when you are trying to bend language to make printed words on a page do something words do not easily or clearly do. Namely: instead of giving language the familiar, easy task of referring to tables, houses, trees, Heidegger is bending it to make it refer to our own existence. Thus he says: we are not any kind of what, we are who. A reassuring thought for a hot muggy day: however bestial the angry motorist may seem, he or she is still a who, not a what. Not only that, but whoness begins our access to anything, to everything, to Being. Section ten and section eleven explain that our concrete analysis of our own existence is different from (and more basic than) anything that might be learned by students of anthropol347 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II ogy, psychology, or biology. The particular inquiries conducted in such scientific fields of study logically come after our basic analysis of the inquirer who is the asker of any question at all about anything. The inquirer is always Dasein. Thus we are again assured that we are on our way to getting some trump cards, toward learning things research cannot possibly refute. Actually some treasured trumps are already in our hands: a guarantee that the world is not soulless, a guarantee that whoness comes before whatness. (It should be mentioned that that the anthropology, psychology and biology discussed by Heidegger bear little resemblance to the studies we usually place under those headings in 198 5.) In sections 12 24, Heidegger unveils his notion of Being-in-the-world, a notion previously alluded to in Letters 40 and 41, where it was conveniently (but not quite accurately) merged with Husserls Lebenswelt and with the social and psychic understanding of the lived-worlds of cultures and individuals. Sections 12 and 13 elucidate Being-in as one aspect of Being-in-the-world. Bynowyou can guess that Heidegger denies that Dasein is in the world the way an object is in a container, and sure enough, just as you guessed, that is what he denies. Instead Daseins Being-in is in at and by in the manner of dwelling alongside, being familiar with, touching, being acquainted with. In other words, Daseins way of Being-in is personal; that of objects is impersonal. Heidegger derives the primordial human sense of in from the hypothetical archaic German verb innan = wohnen = to dwell. Innan was presumably related to the English word inn. The existence of innan was conjectured by Jakob Grimm. Grimm, followed by Heidegger, argued that the preposition in originally came from the verb innan. Here and elsewhere Heidegger uses etymologies to bring the reader back to ways of seeing things that are allegedly primordial and certainly prescientific. The way we relate to the world in knowing the world is, Heidegger points out, only one mode of Being-in, and indeed knowing is a secondary, derivative, deficient mode of Being-in-the-world. Since for the most part knowing has been our main example of Being-in, our tradition has led our understanding of our own Being astray. Sections 14 to 24 clarify Heideggers idea of the world aspect of Being-in-the-world. I will begin

my summary of these sections by discarding two ideas of world which the world, of Being-inthe-world decidedly is not. 1) When Jesus said, Not as the world gives, give I to you, the world whose shallow seductions Jesus called us away from was the world of inconstant givers and unreliable gifts; unlike Heideggers world it was a disappointing place defined in contrast with a better place. 2) Still less does Heideggers world refer to the modern concept of world explicated by Descartes and elaborated by Kant, the world as a set of points in n-dimensional space, governed by mathematical functions in the image of which Kant and others articulated modern societys morality, economics, politics, religion, agriculture, law, and logic. So much for what the world in Being-in-the-world is not. It is that wherein Dasein lives. It may be the public we-world, or it may be ones own closest environment. It is the wherein Dasein understands itself and its surroundings, as Dasein pursues its involvements in everyday activities. The world in Being-in-the-world is very practical; it is in the first place the tools or equipment in everyday use, the hammer for pounding nails, the shoes to wear, the house for dwelling, garments, the cupboard for dishes, doors, latches on doors, needles for sewing, clocks for telling time, roads, streets, bridges, buildings, signposts, boundary-stones, automobiles, traffic regulations, the wind in the sails.... 348 Letter 42 Equipment for activities in this everyday world where we do our Being-in-the-world always comes in wholes. It comes with all the pieces needed for the activity. For example, for Heideggers activity of writing Being and Time he had a whole set of equipment including inkstand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. And it always comes with meanings. One piece of equipment refers to all the others and they all refer to Dasein. The wherein where all this cross-referencing takes place is a world that belongs to Dasein. Only because meaning is thus primordially built into the lived-world is it possible for words to mean. Now you may not think it matters much for social life that instead of Descartes mathematical grids of points in space Heidegger declares the more primary reality (which even Descartes formulations grow out of and presuppose) to be a world that is colored, hard and soft, good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate, useful and useless, beautiful and ugly... a world where wholes and meanings are at least as fundamental as parts and things. But if you consider that this does not matter much for social life, you should reconsider, because society has always been a mirror of nature, and nature a mirror of society, and styles of talking, patterns in symbolic structures, once they get going in some realm of discourse regarded as fundamental tend to keep going and to govern the social construction of morality, economics, politics, religion, agriculture, law, and logic. Of course I do not pretend to know why patterns in cultural structures get started, nor why, once started, some ideas spread throughout a culture like a microorganism in a nutrient solution which multiplies until its food supply is exhausted, while other bright and beautiful ideas are born to bloom unseen, wasting their sweetness on the desert air. If I were a European or a Latin American I might believe that the main reason why social ideas gain currency is that they are effective promoters of the interests of the classes they serve, but since I am an United Statesian I am familiar with the spectacle of vast multitudes of people, from the richest to the poorest, blinded by their

own ideologies to the point where they act against their interests and ideals. I am more impressed than a European would be by the power of a cultural structure to dominate its users. However, unable as I am to account for the rise and fall of patterns in cultural structures, I do have reasons for believing that whether one way of thinking or another comes to prevail is a matter of great consequence, and that the contributions of philosophers like Descartes and Heidegger to the manufacture and dissemination of thought patterns are not matters of small consequence. Hedegger argues that ... the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words, and the consequences of his influence have not yet played themselves out. If we disregard our everyday concerned involvement with our world, we can, if we wish, discover and scientifically define pure objects as they are in themselves. But when this happens, Heidegger writes, the Nature which stirs and strives, which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanists plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the source which the geographer establishes for a river is not the springhead in the dale. In other words, the return from science to the world of everyday life is the way toward a mystical relationship with Being.* *Heidegger can be contrasted with Henri Bergson who wrote at about the same time for about the same audience. Bergson, who was a biologist, discovered wholeness, meaning, and purpose in nature. He was followed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and more recently by E. Jantsch and I. Prigogine, among others. Heidegger, on the contrary, bypassed science by finding meaning in concrete existence in ways presumably logically prior to science. The mainstream of 20th century theology (Rahner, Tillich, Bultmann etc.) has followed Heidegger or other writers like Gabriel Marcel or S. Kierkegaard who also found meaning in concrete existence in ways that permit one to avoid revising or reinterpreting the findings of scientific research. LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II In sections 25-27 Heidegger takes us out of the modern worldview and into a dissenting worldview. We are primordially, he says, in a world with other Daseins; we relate to the Daseins around us not so much by looking-at as by caring-for. Even if we give them the cold-as-ice treatment, we still relate to them as people; hence our attitude toward them is a kind of caring-for. Saying we have a kind of caring-for even towards someone we ice over is a typical Heideggerian insight, since Heidegger always sees the opening up of the dimension along which we can go one way or another. For example, there can be hot for the same reason there can be cold, namely because we sense things on a hot-cold dimension. Similarly, near and far go together because on the distance dimension something can be as near as 0 centimeters (i.e. here) or as far as any number of light years away. Similarly, it is possible for us to be indifferent to people because our primordial relatedness to other Daseins has a caring-for dimension on which we can score zero. According to Heidegger being alone is not fundamental. Being alone is a deficient mode of our fundamental way of being. Fundamentally, Daseins Being is being-with. Result: exit the modern worldview. Exit the isolated individual, the homo economicus who needs a social contract to come together with others to form a society. Exit the private subject with feelings no one else can understand. Since it makes being-with the fundamental human reality, the dissenting worldview Heidegger takes us into has potential for satisfying the tribal yearnings we inherit from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. And being-with could be a step toward a more feminine culture. What Heidegger mainly does in Being and Time, however, is to lament our being-with. The lamentable side of our beingwith, is that since we are from the beginning and always in the world with the others, the others

dominate us. Dasein most of the time is not its own self; it does what they want, judges as they judge, reads the newspapers they read, and rides on the bus with them indistinguishable from the other passengers, just one of the crowd. Heidegger distinguishes between the rare occasions when Dasein is its own authentic self, and the average everyday state of inauthenticity when Dasein merges into the mass as dasMan, one of them. Although Heidegger denies that in saying authentic being and inauthentic being are two different ways of being he means that one way is better than another, there is no record of any of his readers believing him, nor any record of anyone who when faced with the options as Heidegger poses them would choose an inauthentic life for herself or himself. Moreover, Being and Time does nothing new in ringing the bells for a paen of praise for the authentic individual. Especially since 1870, when the populace took over Paris briefly and ran the city as a commune, Europe was full of intellectuals who decried the psychology of the mob, and decried conformity, the anthill, the animal farm, the unsuccessful many, the resentful failures, envy, crowd hysteria, industrial cities, mediocrity, vulgarity and the like. From 1870 to 1930 everything happens as though the European educated classes, frightened by the specter of revolution, are conducting a decades-long literary contest to see which writer can formulate the best rationale for despising the masses. Being and Times authentic life, accessible only to the few, and accessible to the few precisely on the condition that they resolve to disassociate themselves from das Man, is similar to, for example, the life of the creative minority praised a few years earlier by Jose Ortega y Gassett in The Revolt of the Masses. Ortega laments everything democratic, and proposes to the reader that she or he can enter the aristocracy and leave the mass simply by performing an act of will. One need only reserve to hate oneself for being like other people, and to decide that insofar as it is within ones power one will become outstanding in one way or another. If in spite of ones efforts one fails to stand out from the crowd, ones membership in the noble minority is not cancelled; one is saved from being one of the masses by ones desires. 350 Letter 42 Now you might say and if you did say this I would not disagree with you that the Guatama Buddha was actually a nicer person than Martin Heidegger or Jose Ortega y Gassett, because when the Buddha had an opportunity to enter nirvana alone, Buddha shed a tear for humanity and turned himself around, returning to share our suffering until not just himself and his inner circle, not just the artists and intellectuals, but each and every person finds the way out of suffering. Actually I try to be a Buddha buddy myself, and when the beauty of the night sky reveals to me that in the depths of my being I am articulated stardust, I try to use this revelation given to me by the stars not to qualify as a member of the spiritual elite, but instead to evoke life in every person I meet. You are probably like me in this respect. Most of us in Canada, the USA, and Latin America in 1985 are driven to Heidegger only occasionally, on hot muggy days when in our despair we look for any way at all to build courtesy, or on days when people like Anne Marie insist that nobody can teach anybody anything, or when people like Herbert Marcuse propose to organize (i.e. to disorganize) the complex economic processes which produce and distribute our daily bread under the direct control of production by producers Most of the time we are secret agents of the Holy Spirit. But for Martin Heidegger himself, writing Being and Time in Southwest Germany in the 1920s the fight against levelling and for authentic individuality was the fight against disorder and disenchantment, for politeness and goodness. Heideggers dissenting worldview was a fashionable and credible dissenting worldview in his time and place and social circle. In sections 28-30 Heidegger introduces finding oneself in moods as part of a closer analysis of

Being-in. We find ourselves in good moods and bad moods, and often in a drab, evenly balanced lack of mood in which we become tired of life. Why Being is a burden for us in a drab mood we do not know and we cannot strictly speaking know anything of the sort because Knowing as a kind of Being-in is far too partial a disclosure of Daseins Being. In moods Dasein finds itself disclosed to itself prior to knowing and beyond knowings range of disclosure. Finding ourselves in fear is a state of mind more specific than a mood, but fear too shows the Being-in of Dasein in ways outside knowing. Heidegger analyzes fear as fear of particular dangers in section 30 with a view toward contrasting fear to the free-floating anxiety about nothing in particular which he will analyze in later sections. Having said a lot about finding oneself (Befindlichkeit), Heidegger turns in sections 31-34 to talk about standing outside oneself (Verstehen). He does a delicate balancing act between Befindlichkeit and Verstehen, balancing his focus in order to see Dasein steadily and whole. Befindlichkeit (finding oneself) and Verstehen (standing outside oneself) are equally primordial and each shines light on the Da of Dasein (the there of being-there) in a way the other casts into the shade. In Befindlichkeit (finding oneself) we find ourselves in a good mood, a bad mood, in a drab mood, in fear, or whatever. In Verstehen (standing beyond ourselves) we reach out from where we are to think of possibilities, understand others, propose projects, interpret what we see, speak. This equiprimordial balance of the here and beyond, such that we are where we are and at the same time we are beyond where we are, makes Heidegger say Dasein is openness (Erschlossenheit). The notion of human being as open there-being expresses our fundamental relatedness and fluidity. In sections 31-34, Heidegger delivers apart from his formal agenda, which is to continue to round out his phenomenology of Dasein some praise of the beautiful mysteries of life; some reassurance that because human nature is open therefore what appears to be a solid chunk of angry motorist is actually a vulnerable and malleable Dasein, a sunflower and not a locomotive; and some security. The security is delivered by demonstrating that Heideggers insights are trumps which win all arguments because only on the basis of Verstehen (which literally means standing outside oneself and specifically means understanding) is it possible to have speech and language without which nobody could make any arguments at all. 351 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Sections 35-38 tell more about the inauthentic life of das Man. Most of the content of sections 3538 is borrowed from the works of other writers, notably from the works of the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). 352 Letter 43 43 THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED or THE VIEW FROM THE BACK SEAT One can still find people, even in this day and age, who see the need for spiritual authority, which is to say, for the shaping of the will by culture, which is to say, for institutions. They can be found, for example, among the passengers riding bumpily in the back seats of buses in rural districts of the tropics, where the machete, a combination of long knife blade and hatchet which is both tool and weapon, is so habitually borne by the men that it appears to be an extension of the arm, a blade growing outwards beyond the wrist, coupled with flesh at the hand. When the bus stops to pick up

a new machete-bearing passenger, there is a sudden explosion of silence interrupting the constant clatter of rough road on ruined shock absorbers, and when the silence settles the buzz of insects becomes audible; and then the newcomer climbs aboard, and, as if by magic, the machete is detached from the arm and put under the drivers seat for safekeeping. The institution which consists of prescribing the keeping of the machetes under the seats of the drivers is a precaution taken in case the passengers become dangerous under A the influence of alcohol. There will be found among the passengers in the back seats some who will heartily approve of the institution just mentioned, and who will think to themselves such thoughts as, I hope each new, unknown arrival will prove to be a proper passenger, whose will has been shaped by the culture so that he will surrender his weapon voluntarily and behave in an orderly manner. People who are in a situation similar to the rider on a back seat of a country bus in the tropics, as well as those people who have come to understand that all of us are always in such a situation, should be encouraged by Heideggers argument in sections 39-44 of Being and Time, where Heidegger develops the concept that being-there is care. Translated back into German, being-there is care means Dasein ist Sorge. The reason why people should be encouraged to know that a distinguished philosopher has been able to make a somewhat persuasive case for saying beingthere is care is that looking at life through the lenses this phrase provides makes it easier to strengthen spiritual authority, which is to say the shaping of the will by culture, which is to say institutions. Easier, that is, than it is when life is viewed through the lenses of the dominant modern worldview. Philosophy, Wittgenstein said, leaves everything as it is, and of course in a sense Heidegger declaring that being-there is care leaves everything as it is. Naming Dasein care does not make anybody more caring, or less caring, nobody uncared for gets cared for, and nobody who suffers from the burden of too many cares has her or his cares lifted from her or him just because Martin Heidegger one winter day in 1926 put pen to paper and wrote Dasein ist Sorge in black ink. This metaphysical remark is in fact a bit of a play on words based on concepts Heidegger has developed previously: since Daseins Being-in-the-world relates to objects Dasein cares about (Besorge) and people Dasein cares for (Frsorge), if you then ask what the most comprehensive and fundamental name for Dasein is, equally applicable to its caring-about and its caring-for, the answer has got to be care. What Besorge and Frsorge have in common is Sorge. And of course Heidegger is opening up dimensions, setting up a framework of possibilities, so that caring-not-at-all, utter indifference, falls within the scope of care, as LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II 0 falls within the scope of arithmetic, and here (i.e. not any distance away) falls within the scope of space. On the other hand, God is love echoes in God is care, which in turn resembles Being is care, and since Dasein is our way of access to Being, the echo of God is love extends to Dasein is care. The rhetorical effectiveness of these echoes is not diminished by saying that for Heidegger Desein is care, is a purely formal proposition, which leaves everything as it is, which neither asserts nor denies any facts. Indeed its rhetorical effectiveness is enhanced because since it esserts no facts, no facts can refute it. Like Parmenides proposition Being is, Being-there is care is both inspirational and irrefutable. Inspirational, apparently irrefutable, and helpful. Helpful because it sends thinking in constructive directions, and jolts thinking out of ruts that are not-constructive-enough. My conviction that from the point of view of people in back seats, the style of talking which makes care language fundamental brings solace and hope, stems partly from my own extensive experience

riding in back seats. For many years I rode in back seats almost exclusively. Until I was two years old I rode mostly in the front seat in my mothers lap, but from the time I turned two until I got a drivers license at age 16 I did most of my travelling in the back seat. Two blobs of needy protoplasm occupied the front seats. Their discourse during our trips cohered with the usual Cartesian symbolic structures. For example, one blob would say, What time is it? to which the other would reply, Eight fifteen. By means of coded communications such as the exchange of messages I have just reported, the blobs organized the motion of the vehicle according to codes which defined locations in space and moments in time. Inter-blob relations in the front seat were governed to a considerable extent by the language of force, a language which, as every physicist knows, can often be expressed equivalently in the language of acceleration, which, in turn, amounts to language referring to locations in space at points in time. Voil the Cartesian coherence of the blob culture. Force language applied to interpersonal relations has three basic variations: Unequal forces: this is the language of dominance and submission. Equal force: the language of equality. No force: the language of freedom, i.e. of unforced agreements. Given these options, i.e. opening up the dimensions of the problem in this way, one naturally wants to be in control. In control one way or another, at least in control of oneself, either as dominator, as equal or free. But from the point of view of the person in the back seat being in control is not a real possibility and one wishes rather to be in good hands. Everything depends on the answer to the question, What makes hands good? They are our parents, I whisper to my brother, who is also in the back seat. They will take care of us. I hope what I am saying is true. Heidegger finds that the whole language of force is secondary, derived, partial, incomplete... and that the language of caring better represents the true womb and fundament of human existence. His approach is encouraging from the point of view of the people in backseat because it opens up a more comprehensive range of usable materials with which to construct institutions, which is to say, with which to construct the strength of the weak. One must distinguish, however, Heideggers universal labor as discoverer of possibility from what he himself did with the possibilities he opened up. Heidegger was more revivalist than a progressive, and he devotes most of the second half of Being and Time to using his insight to construct plausible secular interpretations of some great traditional religious emotions, including fear of death and the conquest of fear of death (sections 46 to 53), guilt (sections 54-60) and conscience (also sections 54-60). It is useful to think of the second half of Being and Time as proceeding on two levels at once 354 Letter 43 1) On the level of sentiment it is a tour de force of some great themes of stark German piety, a shivering aloneness before God, which, however, lacks God. Instead of God, the great theme is Self. Thus guilt consists of realizing that one has not authentically been ones own Self, and conscience calls one to be ones self. Wanting to be ones own authertic self is not the worst of ideals. Gandhi said that Truth is God, and he thought, not unreasonably, that an important part of Truth is being honest with oneself. This Gandhian ideal is no doubt furthered by trying to distinguish ones own authentic motives from the part one plays as an indistinguishable actor in a cast of thousands. Most people want to think of themselves as good, so if, following Heidegger, one resolves to take responsibility for choosing ones own

attitudes and emotions, it is likely that the naked, honest authentic self, the self that is ones own product and not the product of following whatever the crowd is doing, will be closer to ones best self than to ones worst self. And most people lie to themselves in the direction of praising themselves, so paying attention to ones feelings in an effort to distinguish them from those of das Man is likely to make one duly ashamed and repentant just by making it harder to lie to oneself as Augustine and all the writers in the spiritual tradition which Heidegger is re-issuing as a secular philosophy well knew. In many ways Heidegger links the basic dishonesty of hiding from oneself the fact that one is going to the with taking refuge in being one of the crowd instead of being ones own authentic self another creative reworking of a tradition which has always said memento mori, Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return. In anxiety (see section 40 and passim), a nameless and objectless fear of nothing in particular, one becomes aware that one has fallen into being one of them in the world, and in ones fallen state one is not-at-home (Unheimlich). Anxiety a keyword in mystic tradition and in Kierkegaards theology becomes in Heidegger a call to stop being inauthentic and to come home to authenticity. 2) On a second level, Heidegger makes his theoretical edifice ever more impregnable by moving to ever more basic, more comprehensive, more unified viewpoints. The preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein led to care as the great unifying, primordial, fundamental what-ever-it-is. But (see section 45), to grasp Dasein as a whole we must consider that Dasein stretches along in time from birth to death; hence without analyzing time we cannot envision the whole, and so we press on to an even greater, more unifying, more primordial, more fundamental horizon, namely Time, and beyond Time there beckons the even more primordial Being, which is, of course, like Quijotes Dulcinea, always sought and never found. Thus while Being and Time is on a sentimental level a trip for secular mystics, and a trip for religious mystics who sense that Heidegger is always groping toward, although never to, the Divine, it is on a logical level a series of attempts to move from the less fundamental to the more fundamental. And when, in later works, Heidegger arrives at the point of questioning the whole idea of what it means to be fundamental, he is not reversing himself, but rather continuing along the same way. It may be a good idea to illustrate these general remarks by analyzing in detail a single sentence chosen almost at random from sections 61-66 where Heidegger sums up what he has done so far and launches his study of time. Lets take: Daseins kind of Being thus demands that any ontological Interpretation which sets itself the goal of exhibiting the phenomena in their primordiality should capture the Being of this entity, in spite of this entitys own tendency to cover things up. 355 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Heidegger has put kind of Being and demands in italics. At first blush, it might seem strange that a kind of Being, that is to say a sort or classification of something, would figure as the noun (modified by a prepositional phrase) governing the verb demands. What right has a kind of Being to make a demand? We, however, are not at all suprised to find Being and kinds of Being making claims and demands, since we think the whole point of Heideggers enterprise is to establish mysterious Being and its somewhat less mysterious lieutenants as commanding authorities. We remember that Being is traditionally associated with God the Father, and since we

have learned from studies of animal behavior that the command Dont! is more basic and primitive than the more intellectual not,* we expect Heideggers studies to tend toward discovering a primordial demand Do! behind the more intellectual is. Skipping for the moment the part of the sentence Heidegger did not italicize we jump ahead to find out what it is that the kind of Being demands. Again in italics we read that a satisfactory interpretation should, ... capture the Being of this entity... Here the entity in question is Dasein, i.e. ourselves. The Being in question is authentic Being. The demand is therefore for authenticity. In other words, sentimentally speaking, the Father is demanding that we come clean. This demand is made, Heidegger continues, still in italics, in spite of this entitys own tendency to cover things up. Thus our inauthenticity is our own fault; it is our primordial guilt. Our primordial guilt is, somewhat paradoxically, a guilt we cannot avoid, since falling into the they is the natural, normal, usual state of Dasein. Having led us into the everyday world (i.e. as opposed to the scientistic world of points in space typical of Cartesian-Newtonian modern culture), Heidegger then leads us out of the everyday world (i.e. out of the public world of das Man, the they) and toward a resolute anticipation of a lonely death this resolute attitude of consciously living with ones own private fate (freedom towards death) is the closest Being and Time comes to a concept of salvation. To be authentically resolute in this way is a demand of a kind of Being. The demand might be briefly paraphrased as, Be yourself! Plato, on the other hand, could more nearly be paraphrased as demanding, Serve the group! Returning now to the phrase not italicized in the middle of the sentence, we will find that although, in contrast to Plato, Heideggers ethic reflects the ideological needs of European capitalism in the 1920s, Heideggers procedures as a philosopher remain in the tradition of metaphysical construction which Plato (with help from his predecessors) founded. The unitalicized middle part of the sentence reads, ... any ontological interpretation which sets itself the goal of exhibiting the phenomena in their primordiality.... Ontological interpretation is what Heidegger is doing. That is to say, he is telling us a story about Being. Presumably the number of possible stories about Being is fairly large, and among them only some ... set themselves the goal of exhibiting the phenomena in their primordiality.... What Heidegger is stating is that to qualify as an ontological interpretation which sets itself the goal of exhibiting the phenomena in their primordiality, it is necessary (demanded) to capture the Being of this entity. This statement is impeccable. As soon as the reader catches on to the implicit rules which govern Heideggers use of words like primordiality, the reader sees that within Heideggers system this statement in its context cannot possibly be false. Heideggers vocabulary, like Platos, is constructed in such a way that its constituent terms form a symbolic structure with interlocking parts, so that statements like the one we are looking at are true by definition. Like Plato, Heidegger devises and tries to justify a code in which the must of logical necessity (presumably reflecting a must found in the things themselves) certifies the validity of metaphysical sentences of whose rhetorical force the authors and their publics approve. * Bateson, Gregory, Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballantine, 1972, pp. 53-56. 356 Letter 43 In the next section, Section 67, Heidegger recalls some of the basic points he has already made. His initial investigation of Being-in-the-world clarified what it means to be a world for Dasein. In

any lived world, meaning and understanding are linked; understanding is itself a feature of the fundamental openness (Erschlossenheit) of Dasein. Further, the meaningfulness of a world includes understandings projection into the future. For example, in the context of ones ongoing life-world,* one understands the meaning of a rain cloud by interpreting what is seen as a rain cloud, and by projecting into the future that it may rain.** And through the same analysis of Being-in-the world, openness, care, resolute anticipation of death etc. we are led to see Daseins potential for true Being. Section 68 treats of time as it relates to the basis of Daseins care according to four aspects: (1) understanding (2) finding oneself (Befindlichkeit), (3) falling into inauthenticity, and (4) speech. Understanding is primarily the projection of future possibilities. The existentially basic character of finding oneself in a mood is to be brought back to something one has been in the past. Falling into inauthenticity is mainly getting taken along by the they of the present. Language has all three: future, past, and present tenses, and indeed the unity of care (Daseins basic structure) is such that not only language but each of the four aspects involves all three ecstasies of time, i.e. future, past, and present. The preceding brief remarks about section 68 (and similar ones which might be made about sections 69, 70, and 71) are (or might be) misleading because they give the impression that Heidegger has nothing to add to what we already understand by future, past, and present. Actually, though, in looking at how Being-in-the-world etc. relate to time, he achieves interesting insights into time, as well as achieving an ever more thorough weaving-together of time, care, openness, Dasein, and other key terms of his vocabulary. Example of insight: if you approach your moods by thinking of them as bringing you back to a having-been, your approach discloses something about what it means to have been, about time past, as well as something about moods. Example of weaving-together: at the beginning of section 70, Heidegger expresses the worry that he is going to be frustrated in proving time to be at the basis of Daseins Being, because What about space? We know that Dasein functions in space because space was part of the earlier fundamental analysis of Dasein that Heidegger already carried out. But how can time be the basis of space? And if it cant be, then we will have two basic words, space and time, instead of one, and we-will fail to get the wonderful unity that allows us to see all particular problems as logicallynsubsequent to one general problem concerning which we are the recognized experts. The expression of worry at the beginning of section 70 is, however, rhetorical, since Heidegger soon proves to his own satisfaction that only on the basis of time-ness (Zeitlichkeit) is it possible for Dasein to break into space. I wont say how he proved it. All our efforts Heidegger says at the beginning of section 72, ...serve the one aim of finding a possibility of answering the question of the meaning of Being. He then returns to the theme of Geschichtlichkeit (story-ness) and comes in section 72 and in the following five sections as close as he ever will to answering his one question. You will remember that in section 6 he had said that Geschictlichkeit (story-ness) was the being-constitution of Daseins happening (that is to say, of Daseins Geschehen). It should also be mentioned that in 1892 Hartnack had published Der Sogennante Historische Jesu und der Geschichtliche Christus, a book which expressed the idea that the real Christ, the one we worship, is the Geschichtliche one, the one in the story. Now, after all his efforts, Heidegger is able to provide a supporting echo for theologians like * Husserls phrase, not Heideggers. ** my example, not Heideggers.

357 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Hartnack and for historians like Wilhelm Dilthey who find stories to be at the heart of human existence. The conclusion of all Heideggers labors so far is that the real Dasein, the one we are, is Geschichtliche. Daseins Being as care has been shown to be fundamentally a participation in authentic time. For one thing to focus for example on the understanding aspect of care care is understanding, and understanding always begins with interpretation. Even simple seeing is seeing as. But things are seen as (e.g. the rain cloud is seen as a rain cloud, the hammer is seen as a hammer) primarily because they relate to a future which may turn out well or badly (e.g. it may rain, the hammer may turn out to be defective and unusable). In the light of such considerations, Heidegger calls die movement of concern-full, care-full, involved-with-things, involved-with-people human existence, as it stretches along from past to future, Daseins Geschehen. The word Geschehen conveys the idea that our happening is our story-ing. Heidegger is able to say that Dasein is Geschichtliche, that the human way of being is to exist as a self-interpretation in a context of interpretations, as a story among stories. If anyone wonder whether the proper translation of Geschichte (which means both story and history) in this context might be history instead of story, Heidegger makes it clear that the proper English word is story by contrasting Geschichte with Historic. In general support of Dilthey, he argues that only because our everyday existence is Geschichtliche (story-like) is it possible for us to form the more abstract concept of Historie and to participate in world history. Heidegger has thus kept his promise to show how time can still be the key to human selfunderstanding even when the traditional doctrine of eternal time is destroyed. The traditional function of eternity, for example the timeless ideas of justice and courage in Plato, was to help people to identify with the permanent values of the society, to resist the temptation to run away in battle (that is one of Platos examples of not being ruled by the logos) and to resist other temptations to choose the personal pleasure of the moment over societys long term interests. Now we can see that stories can have the same function even when they do not depend on identifying Being with a timeless eternity. And our own identity is so tightly identified with story-ness that it becomes inappropriate to speak disparagingly of a mere story. Section 77 is devoted mostly to quoting in a most admiring manner the ideas of a certain Count Yorck of Wartenburg, as expressed in the Counts letters to the historian Wilhelm Dilthey. Count Yorck wrote to Professor Dilthey for example, ...And then I enjoy being still and alone with myself and communing with the spirit of Geschichte. This spirit is one who did not appear to Faust in his study, or to Master Goethe either. But they would have felt no alarm in making way for him, however serious and demanding such a ghost might be. For he is brotherly, akin to us in another and deeper sense than are the denizens of bush and field. These exertions are like Jacobs wrestling a sure profit for the wrestler himself. Indeed this is what matters first of all. And: ... in view of the inner Geschichtlichkeit of self-consciousness, a method that is divorced from history is methodologically inadequate. Just as physiology cannot be studied in abstraction from physics, neither can philosophy from Geschichtlichkeit... Human conduct and Geschichtlichkeit are like breathing and atmospheric pressure... More from Count Yorck: To dissolve elemental public opinion, and, as far as possible, to make possible the molding of individuality in seeing and looking, would be pedagogical tasks for the state. Then, instead of a so-called public conscience instead of this radical externalization individual consciences, that is to say, consciences, would again become powerful. Voil tout! Joy

in the back seat. 358 Letter 43 The last section of Being and Time (sections 78-83) are devoted to trying to show that Heideggers approach to time, because it is more comprehensive and fundamental, is able to give a satisfactory account of other peoples approaches to time. Similarly, I have been trying to show that an ecological philosophy which regards philosophy as cultural action and culture as the symbolic structures of human groups needing to survive in the physical world, because it is more complete and fundamental, is able to give a satisfactory account of Heideggers philosophy. The functional analysis is mine, not Heideggers. 359 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II

360 Letter 44 44 THE GENERAL FORM OF THE PROBLEM OF PEACE (and HOW WE CAN WORK FOR PEACE) Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. Romans 12:2 I hope you will not feel that you are wasting your time reading this letter. I will try to make it interesting and informative and not too hard to follow, but I must admit that it will not bear the characteristic marks of a paper it is worth your time to read. It is not a contribution to the science of peace as the phrase peace science is usually understood, and it is not a scholarly review of the vast literature on peace, and it is not good journalism. It is not solid or well written. It is not high enough quality work to be approved by an editor or a referee and then published in an academic journal, and then sit forever on the shelves of standard reference libraries with the status of an authorized part of the body of human knowledge. Nor would you want to recommend this letter to

a friend for an evenings entertainment. If this were a chapter in a textbook called Introduction to the Science of Peace, you could take a test on it after you read it and get a grade on the test, and the grade would count toward a diploma which would qualify you for employment as a peacemaker or as some sort of conflict resolver. If this were an appendix added to the Bible, then you could read it in your wheelchair at the Senior Citizens Home and it would help you to get in touch with Eternity. As it is, however, these lines can claim a portion of your time and attention only because they tell the truth about how peace can be achieved and what you can do to work for it. Do you rally want to know the truth about peace? Probably not. Most people would rather not know. And even if you care to know the truth about peace you probably would not expect to find the truth in a paper like this one which deliberately disregards most of peace science and peace scholarship. Consequently you will probably not think this little essay to be a likely place to look for truth even if, as I have just supposed, you are one of the few people who care about truth. Perhaps I should mention, in order to help you to understand my attitude, that I come from a conceited family. We were poor and poorly educated. We had no claim to distinction and no influence on anyone but ourselves. Nevertheless, it was a family axiom, believed on the basis of no evidence whatever, that no one outside our family knew how to live. Whatever the rest of the world did or believed we regarded as foolishness, and the rest of the worlds indifference to our opinions about it we regarded as proof of its foolishness. The foregoing fact about my family is the first of several autobiographical details which I need to mention in order to explain the truth about peace. To marshal the facts and the arguments necessary to persuade you that peace can be achieved by and only by cultural action, and even just to elucidate what I mean by this proposition, I need to retrace certain steps of my personal life, so that you will have information about how I came to believe what I believe which will help you to decide whether you are going to believe it too. In particular I need to trace the 361 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II development in my mind of certain thoughts which began when I was in 7th grade, and which I have not previously had occasion to tell you about. The town where I pursued the academic studies corresponding to the seventh year of the official curriculum of the State of California housed at the time slightly over 20,000 souls. It was a division point on two major railways, the Union Pacific and the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe. There was a military base nearby. The population of the town appeared, from the point of view of a male seventh grader whose consciousness was formed by a family that was sentimental, pious, and, as my previous comment about our conceit implied, somewhat deranged, to consist of two groups. The first group I defined, following the local nomenclature, as the hoods. Hoods is an abbreviation for hoodlums, a word originally used in San Francisco to denote gangs of toughs employed to beat up the Chinese. In our town hoods referred to individuals and groups who exuded an aura of violence, violence was their style. The hoods enjoyed violent films at the movies. They enjoyed vehicles which made loud noises: automobiles, motorcycles, trucks, and vans. Their casual conversation featured hyperbolic threats and non-verbal sounds which simulated crashes and explosions. They liked guns. Military stories, uniforms, and weapons fascinated them. I did not understand the hoods. They did not understand me or at least they did not understand me as I understood myself. They may have understood the version of me which appeared to them in their world. I never got to know them well enough to acquire any clues concerning what they

thought of me. Apart from the hoods the population of the town consisted of ordinary people. The ordinary people owned cars and nouses. They wore clothes. They ate meals. A good deal of the time they washed things washed the cars, the houses, the clothes, the dishes. They did a lot of talking, saying things like How do you like your new car? and Im going to wash my windows (meaning to wash the windows of the house), and I got this dress at half price, and Whats for supper? ;, I have never understood ordinary people. They have always been a mystery to me. On the other hand, I am quite aware that there cannot be peace unless ordinary people cooperate with peace in some way, even though I have no intuitive grasp of why they do not all die of boredom. Now as you may well imagine under normal circumstances it would have been psychologi-, cally impossible for a male 7th grader in a town whose population consisted of hoods and/ ordinary people persistently to maintain an independent mind aloof from the entirety of the influences of the environment. The reasons why I survived as an island of fragmented consciousness in a sea of hoods and ordinary people were two: first, as I already mentioned, my family had an unusual attitude toward the rest of the world; and, second, at the time I was involved in an intense prayer relationship with the Virgin Mary. These unusual circumstances explain why my mind was not absorbed into the common consciousness typical of the; environment. You may be thinking that my analysis in terms of two types of person, hoods and ordinary people, is not sufficiently scientific. From a sociological point of view, it might seem to be more scientific to analyze the population of a small town in southern California according to social class or socioeconomic status or ethnicity instead of dividing it as I have done into hoods and ordinary people. But from my point of view I am telling it like it was, not like it wasnt. My choices were: be a hood, be an ordinary person, or be an isolate. I chose to be an isolate. So there I was walking around the streets of the town as an isolate, with nobody to talk to until I met Carlos. Carlos said to me, Look, kid, you got hands. You got legs and feet. You got lungs in your body. So breathe lad, breathe! Make it! Make it! Carlos was a part time kitchen 362 Letter 44 helper at the military base. On the side he pushed marijuana. He and I used to lie under the bridge by the railway tracks and drink chocolate milk. Sometimes my brother and I would set an alarm clock for 2:30 a.m., putting it under a pillow so it would not make too much noise, and then get up when it rang and leave the house very quietly and go wake up Carlos and the three of us went to the cemetery in the wee hours to smell the flowers on the graves and to climb the trees. Carlos was the first peace-type person I ever met, except for my family and the Virgin Mary. He wore a peace pin even though he worked at a military base. He was not competitive or aggressive and he had a deep conviction that all is one, as if the umbilical cord that tied him to his mother had never been severed, and as if the news had never reached him that in about 2000 B.C. the agricultural revolution had destroyed the old egalitarian hunting and gathering brotherhoods and sisterhoods. Carlos would have gone to peace demonstrations if there had been any in our town, but in our town there were not any. He ran his marijuana business more according to the principles of share and share alike than according to the principles of capitalist accounting. Now you may think that it is unfair to the peace movement to identify a substance abuser as the first peace-type person I met. You may even think I am unfairly implying that the peace movement consists typically or primarily of deviants. You might call to my attention Martin Hoffman s research at the University of Michigan which shows that healthy and successful people on the

whole take more interest in public issues than do sick personalities, because the sick personalities are so absorbed in trying to cope with their own problems that they are unable to take a strong interest in other peoples problems. On the other hand, if one assumes that the people who spend time thinking about nuclear holocaust and the people in the peace movement are to a considerable extent the same people, then it is reasonable to suppose that the peace people or at least some of them would be driven to drink or to something worse. Further, behavioral biology teaches us that humans, like many other animals, are regulated by hormones usually associated with aggressive behavior, which on the whole occur in larger doses in males than in females. By a peace-type person I mean someone who is unusually non-aggressive, and hence in a certain respect deviant or at least different from the average person, either because the aggressive hormones are present in smaller amounts, or because the person is abnormally inhibited, or because the persons history or cultural milieu have taught her or him to interpret her or his aggressive impulses in such a way that they are channeled into peaceful pursuits such ire, for example, struggling to build a better world, or, for another example, carrying the Cross. Systematic studies and my own experience both suggest that the peace movement is a motley crew, consisting partly of unusually intelligent and healthy individuals who are able to see and to respond to the gaping chasms opening beneath the surface of everyday life, and partly of misfits. The peace movement is also motley in the respect that some of its leaders and members are close to elite decision-making circles, while most are not. Now you might object also against the general trend and drift of what I am saying, that whether there will be peace or a world government capable of assigning war to the scrapheap of obsolete institutions of interest only to antiquarians does not depend on what happens in small towns in southern California. Foreign policy, you might say, is decided by elites in Washington, New York, Moscow, Peking, and other world capitals, and the elites who do the deciding are so skillful in the techniques of manipulating the masses that the masses will inevitably cooperate with whatever the elites decide. As you know I do not have any great expectations that the world will ever be an ensemble of egalitarian democracies. On the other hand, I do not believe it is or ever will be governed 363 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II by elites. I think it is governed mainly by natural processes, the wind, the soil, the rain, plant and animal metabolisms, hormones... and included in the natural processes are symbolic processes, languages, institutional structures, dreams, symbols.... The general form of the problem of peace is not to mobilize the masses to demand peace, as if the masses could exert control over events if only they would make their demands forcefully enough. It is not to give scholarly advice to dictators, presidents, oil tycoons, generals, and famous celebrities, as if historical events could be controlled by key decision-makers briefed by graduates of peace studies programs on how to apply the findings of peace science. The general form of the problem of peace is to adjust the existing cultural structures so that world law will be obeyed. I do not want to contradict people who say things like, The elites make the foreign policy decisions and they are by and large skillful in getting the mass cooperation they need to carry them out. Such statements are true enough, provided they are understood in their contexts, and provided that it is understood that the elites are themselves limited by natural and social circumstances; indeed their options are often few. It is especially important to note that they are limited by their own minds. Here as elsewhere we should adopt the both/and approach, rather than the either/or approach. So I do not want to deny the findings of researchers who have traced historically and

with the tools of social science the ways that elites have made decisions about peace and war, and will no doubt continue to do so. What I want to do is to refocus the activity called making decisions so that it will be seen as an activity structured by the logic used to make them. Cultural action is the restructuring of the logics. Foreign policy elites, like everyone else, are guided by their own mental structures. And furthermore, like most loosely knit groups, the elites are divided among themselves indeed an elite is often so loosely knit that it is not a group at all, the word elite being simply a label social scientists attach to somewhat amorphous sets of people who can be identified as relatively active in decision-making processes. Caesarism is not uncommon; I mean it is not uncommon for a part of the elite to seek to become dominant as Julius Caesar became emperor of Rome, through (or partly through) mobilizing a considerable portion of the non-elite to support his cause. That is what the peace movement is. It is Caesarism, although it is Caesarism with a difference inasmuch as it seeks not its own power but the power of ideas capable of organizing the world for peace, and inasmuch as it empowers the masses as well as leading them. You may think I am contradicting myself because I am in favor of the empowerment of victims of all kinds, but at the same time I dont expect the role of elites in decision-making ever to cease to exist but I dont think Im contradicting myself; I think Im just trying to see the whole picture. The peace movement proposes a series of alternative logics for making decisions, logics which it hopes will crystallize to form a new dominant rationality or rather a new constellation of cultural forms, made up of existing cultural structures transformed and renovated so as to be capable of dealing with the circumstance that nuclear weapons have been invented. The new logic will become dominant partly because the people who are now foreign policy elite decision makers will come to appreciate its wisdom, and partly because the peace movement will be skillful in getting the cooperation of ordinary people in establishing the power of its ideas. (Sometimes I use the singular logic because I am basically talking about the proposition that it is rational to obey international law, which is a rather simple and straightforward criterion for making decisions. Sometimes I use the plural logics because the context of public sentiment and opinion which will permit the enforcement of world law will be strengthened by symbolic structures from many traditions and from many elements of culture.) 364 Letter 44 Later in life I lived in other towns and met other peace-type people besides Carlos and the Virgin Mary. Peace-type people are not a large proportion of the population, but it is easy to find considerable numbers of us if you know where to look. You have to look in coffeehouses, natural food stores, child care cooperatives, graduate schools, libraries, church basements, Friends meetings, human relations workshops, adult education classes, art galleries, organic farms, battered womens shelters, wilderness camps, soup kitchens, mental hospitals, handicraft studios, drug abuse counseling centers, bicycle repair shops and places of that sort. There are people who because of one theoretical prejudice or another do not believe we exist, in spite of our considerable numbers. Economists, for example. In fact not only do we exist but we are the only people who sincerely want peace. Other people will say they are in favor of peace but their hearts are not in it. They the majority are like the Greeks who listen to The Iliad over and over again. They agree in moments of reflection that war is evil, but still they are fascinated by its horror. They love the excitement of war. They especially love wars or military operations when their side wins. Do peace-types deep in their secret hearts love violence too? I suppose so but I wont try to

analyze the twists and turns by which some temperaments come to be non-aggressive, nor will I speculate that perhaps non-aggressive behavior only occurs because they (i.e. we) fear our own potential for violence. Now that I have lived in many towns and cities, some in poverty areas, some in war zones, in seven countries on three continents, and now that I have read many books on anthropology and other subjects, I realize that the two or three types I identified in my youth, hoods, ordinary people, and peace types, do not exhaust the list of principal types of human beings to be found on this planet. However, I still bear in mind the nomenclature I used in 7th grade because the hood symbolizes for me the human love of violence, which appears to be a normal tendency of the species with a strong biological basis, and the ordinary person symbolizes for me the love of routine, the acceptance of the culturally given as if it were naturally given, the power of custom and convention, which also appear to constitute a normal tendency of the species with a strong biological basis. Peace types symbolizes a fairly common sort of personality, fostered in a few cultures, and liable to appear in small numbers anywhere, namely the type prone to be unusually cooperative. Now, as I said earlier, the general form of the problem of peace is to adjust the symbolic structures so that world law will be obeyed. A law against war is not needed international law as found in treaties and charters has already made war illegal. Civil war is by definition illegal. Covert operations or overt operations to overthrow foreign governments are illegal too. We even have in the United Nations the forms of a world legislature and executive and we have a World Court at The Hague in Holland. And, furthermore, we already have a near-consensus on the most important substantive issues that produce international armed conflict in the New International Economic Order. The New International Economic Order is a near-consensus and not a consensus because a handful of rich nations oppose it, notably the United States, Japan, and Great Britain. So the problem is obedience. That is to say, obedience is the problem according to the way I am defining the problem; and you, since you are probably a moderately skeptical person, a person who does not believe everything she or he reads or hears, are probably wondering why idefine the problem as I do and whether there is any good reason why my way of defining the problem should commend itself to the mind of anyone else. You probably thought it was pretty outrageous when I said that only peace-type people have their hearts in it when they say they want peace, because you thought I could not possibly know about the sincerity or insincerity of millions of people I have never met. And then you probably tried to think of an example of a peace-type person who did not sincerely want peace. Or of a person who did sincerely want 365 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II peace, in the sense that her or his sentiments yearned for peace, who was not a peace-type person. And then you probably realized that by my definition all and only peace-type people have their hearts committed to peace. So then instead of wondering how I can pretend to know about the sincerity or insincerity of millions of people I have never met, you began to wonder why I define the problem as I do. Of course you already know something of the history of my thinking, since you know that as I grew up I came to see the population as divided into four kinds of people: 1) The elites in the worlds major capitals, who actually make war-peace decisions, according to their logic. 2) The hoods, whose daily attitudes predispose them to support belligerence. 3) The ordinary people, who do not focus on global issues much, and whose attitudes are well known to the elites, so that the elites can usually persuade them to support whatever they

decide, and 4) the peace people, whose opposition to war is both intellectual and a matter of temperament. Given the above way of seeing things, the problem of peace becomes the problem of how the fragment of (1), i.e. of the foreign policy elite, which leads the peace movement, can persuade the rest of (1) to change its logic, with the support of (4), and with some support or at least not irresistible opposition from (2) and (3). Now in general you probably want to know why this way of defining the problem is better than any other way. And in particular you probably especially want to know just exactly what is wrong with the symbolic structures, i.e. with the logic, of the elites in the worlds major capitals. And you probably want to know just exactly what change in logic the peace movement should be advocating. I will tell you the answers to these questions. You see I am telling you everything. I am keeping no secrets. I am raising the questions one by one and answering them, and if you have the patience to read all of this then sooner or later I will answer all the questions I think you have. Now concerning the question why the logic of the foreign policy elites leads to war, I should first say that of course there are many causes of war. Weapons are a cause of war inasmuch as fear and tension induced by arms races produce escalation. Social change is a cause of war inasmuch as rebels who want a better society come into conflict with entrenched vested, interests and the conflict becomes so intense that neither side feels it can afford to play the game according to the rules of democracy and legality. Vengeance, racism, ethnic conflict, desire for gain, praise of military glory, personal ambition, the assumption that war is a natural part of human nature, the existence of a technical-military complex, spending on weapons to create jobs, exporting arms, religious fanaticism, the political strategy of becoming popular at home by winning victories abroad, pride, pleasure in military adventure, hunger, sex (as in the case of Helen of Troy), fear that someone else will attack you if you do not attack first, class conflict, disputes over territory and territorial boundaries, colonialism and revolts against colonialism, imperialism and revolts against imperialism, struggles for the control of raw materials, struggles to control markets, economic policies which increase aggregate demand through large arms budgets... all these and others are causes of war and there are plausible theories systematizing knowledge of many of them. So why do I say that logic is the cause of war? To be more explicit: why do I say that structural changes in our cultural coding, which modify how we act, how we think, how we are organized, and how we view ourselves all of these changes going together are indispensable to peace? 366 Letter 44 It is because the only way to peace is world law. War has many causes but only one cure. So in a certain sense the cause of war is what prevents the cure. And in this sense the cause of war is a certain logic, a certain view of what it is to be rational, also known as irrational rationality. It is a logic which prevents the emergence of law. Law to use a standard definition is the union of primary and secondary rules. The primary rules provide a framework for organizing orderly behavior, and the secondary rules answer such questions as: 1) Who makes the primary rules? 2) How are the rules changed? 3) Who interprets the rules and applies them in particular cases? Now what law needs above all else is confidence that it itself, the law, will be obeyed. A police force can be organized only if the law itself has enough prestige that the populace believes and the

police themselves believe that it will be a real police force i.e. one that will enforce the law instead of plundering, working for whoever pays the highest bribes, persecuting personal enemies, and so on. Now there is a certain logic which implies that we should not have confidence that the law will be obeyed. It happens to be the dominant logic of western economic society, and of the world, although, as I shall mention later, when it is seen in a correct light it proves to be not entirely dominant. Simply the logic is this: X will not obey the law if it is not in the interest of X to do so. This is a particular form of the general logic: it is not logical for X to act contrary to the self-interest of X. (I had the dominance of this sort of thinking in mind when I said that economists have theoretical prejudices against recognizing the existence of peace people since economics postulates the Rational Economic Man or its equivalent, and peace people are not rational economic men.) It follows that any givenX (for example the Soviet Union, or for example the United States) cannot be relied on to obey any given law (for example, the international legal obligations stated in disarmament treaties, for another example the law against interfering with a third world countrys choice of economic system.)** The logic of the peace movement is action from principle, based on such insights as that there is no safety for anybody until the norms (or rules, or whatever you want to say) attain enough prestige to make world law enforceable. S Peace movement logic is not new. It is a generic term for many kinds of symbolic structure which have permitted humans to become cultural animals in the first place, which have facilitated the organization of all societies including western economic society (Kants achievement was to keep the framework of economic logic intact, while bounding it with categorical imperatives enough to define rational conduct in such a way that the minimum rules necessary to playing the economic game are not themselves broken down by self-interest). Action from principle has been promoted in one way or another by all major philosophers.*** It is the currently dominant I mean practically dominant, since intellectual criticism has already demolished his domination several times over on an intellectual level rational economic The unreliability of rational actors following the dominant western logic is expressed in game theory by the prisoners dilemma. Anatol Rapoport has expressed this unreliability in saying that peace cannot be produced by strategic thinking. Albert Einstein made n similar point when he said everyone knows dial power politics sooner or later leads to war. * With the possible exceptions of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida. Even David Hume, the arch-skeptic, advocated adhering to traditional convention in practice. 367 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II man, the profit maximizer, the man whose logic is self-interest, which is a peculiar aberration of human nature. Now you have probably noticed a while back that I did not express any enthusiasm for what generally goes under the name of peace research, and that I have been deliberately pursuing peace by writing a long-winded, rambling, somewhat whimsical and autobiographical essay in a somewhat popular style, instead of putting my thoughts in the form of a contribution to knowledge, and publishing them in a peace research journal. You may have wondered why I consider the whole style and demeanor of peace science to be unproductive, or at least less productive than cultural action, and you may have wondered whether I was ever going to offer any justification for

my somewhat sectarian and splinter-group attitude toward certain of my brothers and sisters in the peace movement. My problem with most of peace science is that it has been unable to distance itself from the cultural codings of the social formations that need to be transformed so much so that it reinforces war logic. Take for example the book Every War Must End by Fred Ikle, once head of the Rand Corporation. It is one of the best books in peace research clear, historically accurate, well argued, logical. It is its logic that is its downfall. The logic is suggested by the title. The reason why every war must end is that sooner or later one party or the other (or both parties) has no reasonable prospect of getting a better deal by continuing hostilities. Rational economic actors stop fighting at a certain point or else they are illogical. Unfortunately the same logic implies that rational economic actors start fighting at a certain point or else they are illogical. And consequently they cannot in principle be relied on to obey laws, i.e. they will (on this logic) obey laws if and only if they cannot get a better deal by disobeying them. I have shown in previous letters and will not reiterate now that the interlocking cultural structures of modern society form a pattern in which the discourses of nation state, economics, science, rights, and war complement each other. So you can well imagine that the frequent use of the model of the rational economic actor in peace research is only one of the respects in which peace research mirrors and thus reinforces the symbolic structures which need to be transformed. Now let me say that in spite of its limitations peace science, even in its most benighted forms, has a contribution to make to cultural action. Im sorry to be confusing. Reality is confusing and it takes many ifs, ands, and buts to sort it out. I know you have a bipolar mind; so do I. All humans do. A bipolar mind thinks there are two ways, a right way and a wrong. But reality is not right way/wrong way. Reality is both/and. Some people say women are less bipolar than men in their thinking, and although I have had no personal experience of being a woman, at least none in this incarnation, I do not doubt that it is true that women are less bipolar. Anyway to get back to peace research: peace science is itself a form of cultural action. Science is a powerful myth in our society. The university is a powerful institution. The rational economic actor is a powerful model of human nature. Therefore, when peace dresses itself up in the costumes of the local peasantry (i.e. the costumes of our society), and says, I am scientific, I am a legitimate academic discipline, I am constantly in the self-interest of every actor, i.e. of every person, every nation, every multinational and transnational organization, then the local peasantry will give a standing ovation to peace. Because peace had the decency to dress in the local costume and to speak a language the peasants understand. Ikles book Every War Must End was a splendid piece of cultural action. Its tacit message at the time of its publication was, And in particular it is time for the Vietnam War to end. Ikles book was among the influences which brought the Vietnam War to an end, and it was able to have the influence it had precisely because it used a logic congenial to foreign policy elites and to ordinary people. It was a logic of limited adequacy; it is ultimately a logic which implies the 368 Letter 44 extinction of homo sapiens. But the book was useful in its context. You are probably saying to yourself at this point, OK, I admit that I am a peasant. I admit that I was brought up in a tribe of clowns whose local superstition is that humans act from self interest. But, you are probably thinking, I am finding it difficult to shake off the mental habits I learned as a child. I cant help thinking its true that give or take a few exceptions humans do act from self-

interest. Conflict for the control of scarce resources is a fact of nature, a principle of ecology. It is a deduction from the natural sciences that every species and every individual is in competition for the means of survival. Genetic strains who win the competition reproduce and those who lose become extinct. So humans must be genetically coded by millions of years of natural selection, since pre-hominid times, since pre-reptile times, to act from self interest. In fact, you may think, it is logically necessary that humans act from self interest, since the best evidence that an act was in a persons interest, or at least that the person thought it was in her or his interest, is that the person did the act. However, if you think this, you will probably not mention it as an objection to my argument, since if it is true it only proves my point that logic is a cause of war and that the logic we are using programs us to self-destruct. Furthermore, you are probably thinking, the particular cultural formation I grew up in, namely modern economic society, for the most part dominates the globe in 1985, and to the extent it does not dominate the globe, the other cultural formations are on the whole even less law-abiding than modern economic society is. So if I should march to the beat of a different drummer, as Henry Thoreau recommended, I would not get much understanding or sympathetic response from the rest of the world. And if my country should adopt the logic that is it rational to obey international law, it might find itself out of phase with the cultural evolution the rest of the world, so that before world law becomes generally enforceable, my country would be destroyed by some other country whose strategic doctrines imply that it would be a smart move to lay a million megatons of nuclear explosive on us at some given point in time, i.e., at some point where they figure they have more to gain than to lose by nuking us. Actually you may not be thinking any of the thoughts above, but you may be thinking someone else would make those arguments and you may be wondering how to answer them. In any case, whoever is or may be thinking the thoughts above, I believe they are true. I even believe the success of economic society in harnessing human energy for the purposes of agriculture, industry and commerce is partly due to the conformity of economic societys structure to human biologically-given tendencies. In other words, I think competitive institutions and their logics harness some major hormones. It follows from the above that the survival of the human species is not likely. The probability of extinction follows from these premises: 1) The dominant logic makes war rational, and 2) Our cultural forms, which include the dominant logic, are of a sort creatures with our biological makeup are likely to have and therefore they are hard norms to change, and 3) Contemporary war technology is very effective, and will continue indefinitely to get more effective. Nevertheless, the situation is not quite hopeless. The reason it is not hopeless is that humans are fundamentally creatures whose biological behavior-guiding mechanisms are complemented and completed by cultural structures. Cultural structures can be changed by cultural action. The logic of economic society is only one of many rationalities which exist, have existed, or might exist. It is not an unlikely logic for humans to have, but it is not inevitable either. In fact in certain respects it is not the dominant logic of adult males, much less of females, in our society. There are marry reasons to believe that ordinary people are first and foremost conventional. As Clifford Geertz says, culture is the adaptation of homo sapiens to its ecological niche. Culture = convention. 369 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II I am glad that Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, and their co-workers at Harvard have done

systematic interviews with samples consisting of thousands of people and have learned the structure of the thought of the ordinary American adult. As I said earlier, I do not have an intuitive grasp of the mind of the ordinary person, so I needed someone to research the subject for me. Although his research is not impeccable in all respects, Kohlberg has established that the structure of the mind of the adult American male is not so much governed by profit-maximizing as it is governed by law and order. Law and order is therefore a good slogan for the peace movement. It connects the condition for a viable world, i.e. world law, with the conventional structures of reasoning that most adult males in the U.S.A. actually employ. Carlos will be unhappy because he has to give up his illegal business in order to be really in the peace movement but that is the way it is. Law and order is a growth point. Cooperation is a good slogan too, and one which appears to be more central to the thinking of most adult women than is law and order, as Carol Gilligans studies suggest. (Kohlbergs research was initially done on men however he and his co-workers, some of whom were women, have found law and order structures in women too.) Of course there is a large problem here. An immense problem. The problem. It is that in the context of the particular time and place where the typical, ordinary, conventional American male endorses law and order, the phrase refers to the particular laws and the particular order of a capitalistic and militaristic society. To look on the bright side of this immense problem: now that we know it is the problem we know how we can work for peace. Our task is to transmit peace messages that educate the elites and the ordinary people of the U.S.A. and other rich nations so that they will understand what kind of law and order the rest of the world can live with. And when they have understood and accepted enough peace messages we will have created a peaceful cultural coding. The context in which world law can be enforced will have been established. We can work for peace by creating the condition which will make peace possible. In a word: obedience. In ten words: solidary structures in whose spaces obedience can reasonably be expected. So, you see although it might seem that this letter has been drifting away from Heidegger, actually it has been drifting toward Heidegger. Heidegger, with all his faults, has understood that disobedience is at the core of modernity, and that unnamable spiritual authority provides a way, perhaps a necessary part of any feasible way, to tame our wildness. 370 Letter 45 45 MESSAGES or A MORNING WALK ...the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 67 Sometimes on a Saturday night I stay upstairs in my bedroom and think about how to solve the worlds problems while other people are having a party downstairs. Downstairs people are witty, relaxed, amused, happy. Upstairs I am thinking that since the worlds problems are those of a globally interconnected world system, and since the place where I am is here, it is necessary, in order to contribute to solving the worlds problems, to decide what to do here to transform global

structures. My next thought is that in order to do anything at all here in the town where I am, I need to communicate with the local people in terms they understand; so I need to know the themes in local culture which may lead toward the building of beautiful and viable social structures. In my mind I list some sets of themes: a. Family. b. Sports. This is a sports-minded community, where peoples tribal need to live for some cause beyond the self normally is satisfied by identifying with a team and its fans. c. The High School. This institution unites the community more than any other, especially through athletics. When the basketball team is at a tense moment of a close game, the whole town breathes with one breath. d. Churches. People of all social classes identify with churches; they make friends through church social activities, and they find and keep jobs through church connections. e. Television. Strangers can talk to one another because they know the same celebrities through TV. f. Money. Uncertainties concerning it make almost everyone anxious. g. Cancer and other diseases worry many people, and can lead to an ecological awareness of the need for a clean environment. h. Houses. People put a lot of themselves into maintaining and improving their homes and gardens. In the local dialect the ensemble of home and yard is frequently called the place. One says, for example, I spent Saturday working around the place. A really useful social science, I am thinking, would be a clearinghouse for cultural activists; it would be a communication system for sharing experiences of transformational work with existing cultural themes. 371 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II A little after 2 a.m. the party ends downstairs and a young lady comes up to my bedroom to say she hopes the party did not keep me from sleeping. Not at all, I reply, I didnt want to sleep anyway. The next morning I leave the house fairly early and amble away on foot in the general direction of downtown, through the wet leaves and lukewarm breezes of a rainy day in Indian summer. I think to myself that I must have made a bad impression by meditating alone instead of joining the party last night. It would not be the first time I made a bad impression. People frequently get a bad impression of what I do and why I do it. When I was a lad I never did learn how to make a good impression on people. My parents had no charm; neither did I. For this reason I decided at a fairly early age, at 13 if I remember correctly, that since I was destined to fail at making good impressions I would adopt the policy of really being good. Maybe some day somebody would discover that I really was good, in spite of the bad impressions I was always making. Or if nobody ever did, at least Iwould have the satisfaction of being forgiven by Jesus and by a few other divine persons with whom I was in the habit of communing. A fewyears later, at age 16, when I had a drivers license, I used to drive Alfred, my 1941 Chevrolet, down Highway 99 to the Richardson Hatchery in Yucaipa, where I had a job sorting eggs, singing to myself as I drove: I am everybodys buddy, Everybodys little friend, I am everybodys buddy,

Ill stick with yall to the end. The lyrics of the song were literally mendacious because it was not true that everybody was my buddy; in fact scarcely anyone was. However, my song was figuratively honest inasmuch as it was my intention that I would be friend to all, the foe, the friendless, without expecting anyone to be a friend to me. As I was ruminating on these memories while walking along the sidewalk amid the swirl of rain and autumn leaves, I thought about ideas and energy. Anthony Wilden in his book SyrfCTZ and Structure suggests that science is coming to recognize two broad categories of explanation, 1) meaning explanations, and 2) energy-explanations. As applied to the problem of h6w to transform the structures of the modern world, Wildens thought can be expressed as follows: 1. We need to work with the meanings existing in the culture, i.e. with the commonsense world described in commonsense terms, and to transform the existing meanings into functional meanings. In other words, we need ideas that will work, and the only place the ideas that will work can come from is the stock of ideas we have. (Gramsci would say: commonsense must become good sense.) 2. The ideas need to have energy behind them. Fear, lust, love, hate, hunger, pride, desire... are among the passions that motivate metabolic energy for action. They put the music to the words. Then we will say, following Wilden, that the explanations of our success in transforming the structures of the modern world lie partly in our nurturing of growth points where meanings are changing, and partly in the flows of energy we have inspired and organized. Five British psychologists (who happen to be three white women and two black men) made a similar point in their book Changing the Subject. As they put it: all of our speech follows organized and rule-regulated patterns called discourses. Which discourses a person or group I uses depends on their investments in the discourses, i.e. on the power or pleasure or security or whatever that the person or group derives from participating in the discourse and the practices that go with it. In other words we are hooked on our discourses as Freud thought we were hooked on the sources of our pleasures. 372 Letter 45 Social change consists in changing discourses, practices governed by discourses, and, necessarily changing the investments that people have in discourses. We realize, of course, that among the human practices and social relationships to be changed there figure prominently money, property, economic enterprises devoted to producing the necessities and amenities of life, and military organizations. These are, so to speak, the hard shell of social life where irrational rationality reigns; from the shell the hardness penetrates inward to toughen and embitter families and friendships. Like all institutions, the institutions of the hard shell are congeries of rules; they are social practices governed by discourses. Social practices are, of course, imperfectly governed. More-or-less unbridled more-or-vlesshormonally-guided behaviors have a way of shattering the rule books. If the rules enshrined in the law books are, as the one-time dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pond, used to say, societys ideal image of itself, then the real society lies somewhere between the ideal image of the lawabiding citizen and the bloody knife. If we were middle-wing extremists we would find the answer to societys problems in better compliance with societys ideal norms: equal rights for all as the law provides, etc. etc. But since we are not middlewing extremists we realize that we need not only better compliance but also better ideal norms (better discourses, better rules, better rationalities,

better practices, better conventions). And we must also mention another detail which is not slight: we also need more beautiful expressions of our primal animality. Aiiiiieeee-yaaiiy! I expressed my primal animality by shouting aiiiiieeee-yaaiiy to the red and yellow leaves. I walked into a low rent district. Loser country. Three-story box like apartment buildings tin faded brick lined the boulevard. The apartments had balconies with balustrades of faded wood. Through the half-sized window of a basement apartment I inadvertently caught a glimpse of a man shaving. It was not that I wanted to watch a man shaving; it was that the motion of the razor in the foam caught my eye and I could not help noticing what was happening. I belong here, I thought to myself. My partly-paid-for house on the other side of 16th street, in winner country, is a luxury I cannot afford. It is true that as long as I have a good job I can afford to live like a winner, but who knows when I will lose the job? God knows I dont deserve my pay, any more than I deserve the precious pre-Cambrian hydrocarbons I use to heat my partly-paid-for single-family-dwelling. I would be less of a burden on the economic system and the ecosystem if I lived here where Sunday morning finds wet beer cans on the wet sidewalks, here where Sunday morning also finds on the sidewalk the occasional wet empty wine bottle, decorated by a.stray wet leaf which adheres to the bottle because both the bottle and the leaf are wet.. I drop in at St. Marys Catholic Church for holy Eucharist with Father Dooley, a white-haired octogenarian wearing a white vestment on which the word Peace is embroidered in green and blue threads in seven languages. Take this bread and take this wine, which earth has given and human hands have made. Lord, I am not worthy to receive thee, but only say the word and I shall be healed. Father Dooleys sermon criticizes the church that feeds him, by calling attention to the fact that it is a sexist organization, and as if that were not already more truth than his poor and aging congregation could readily assimilate, he proceeds to criticize his native land, or its government anyway, by calling attention to the fact that the working people of Latin America have no good reason to forgive us. Father Dooley never gives up. If Dooley is one of the people under Jesuss influence, then Jesuss influence is not as bad as some people say it is. After Mass I want to visit a prisoner, so I amble toward the jail, which is closed because it is not yet one oclock and the visiting hours are between one oclock and three thirty; so I spend some time in the police station waiting for the jail to open. A pudgy lady with glasses and fuzzy hair, in an unbuttoned raincoat a size too small for her, appears, her flabby flesh flopping over 373 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II the beltless beltline of her purple pants. She wears tennis shoes. Several steps behind comes a beautiful young lady in an unbuttoned raincoat two sizes too large for her, with dark eyes, long hair; she has strikingly white skin. The first of the two ladies addresses a short thin desk officer in a dark blue uniform and well-polished black shoes; he wears his tightly groomed auburn hair with sideburns and a mustache. The lady in the too-small raincoat says that the lady in the too-large raincoat will not behave at all. The lady in the too-small raincoat needs to see the juvenile probation officer because she needs to tell the juvenile probation officer that her daughter will not behave. The desk officer steps out from behind the desk, lights a cigarette and proceeds to provide informal counsel for the two ladies while the three of them stand there on the polished floor of the entrance lobby of the police station beside the glassed-in display cases, which display official announcements, while they wait for the arrival of the juvenile probation officer. You can git yurself a poseetion in the Guard, he says, flicking his cigarette and gazing at the young lady with candor, But youve got to clean up your act.

Them dogs can smell anything, he says, referring to the armys specially trained animals used to detect drugs. And they run a urine analysis too. The last bunch of recruits we had, 19 of them washed out for drugs. That was over a third. The urine analysis picks up any marihuana you had in the last six months. Hashish 90 days. LSD it dont detect. The young lady in the too-large raincoat perks up slightly at what he said about LSD. But she says nothing. It dont detect LSD? asks the lady in the too-small raincoat. I dont know why it dont get LSD. It gets marihuana up to six months. Turning to her daughter, the lady in the too-small raincoat says, I hope I dont see them wheels spinnin in that brain. Thats why I hate workin rock concerts, continues the policeman. Im afraid Ill come out positive just from breathing the stuff and Ill be discharged. After expounding sufficiently on the difficulty and challenge of getting into the National Guard, the rigors of basic training, the need to stay drug-free for six months before induction, the man with the well polished black shoes expounds on the advantages. I been in 19 years, he says, two on active duty in the Army and 17 in the National Guard. Anymore the women and the men do pretty much the same. Bivouac every two months in Michigan. The upper peninsula. You ever been up there? The young lady in the too-large raincoat makes no response at all to this question. She is ignoring him. The short thin man puffed his cigarette and continued, Its beeyootiful up there, he says.; Of course me, I been in 19 years, I work weekends as a trainer. I train pilots how to fly attack, helicopters at night. I get $380 a weekend. Why, I draw more pay on weekend Guard duty than I get from my regular police work. Then again, he goes on, your buddies in the Guard, thats who gets you a job on the outside. Its like a club. The young lady in the too-large raincoat listened to all of this with silent contempt, her, eyes sullen and haughtily seductive, as if the two of them, mother and policeman, were only two more of the adults she had to put up with in life, two more adults haranguing her to go straight, always thinking of reasons why she should not have fun. As if she knew that this tobacco-puffing policeman, apparently so serene, wanted nothing more than a night in bed with a girl like her and would do anything to get it, as if she were determined not to be impressed by talk of $380 and bivouacs in northern Michigan, as if she wanted to say of her mother what Dorine says of Aunt Orante in Molieres Tartuffe: 374 Letter 45 Oh, yes, shes strict, devout, and has no taint Of worldliness; in short, she seems a saint. But it was time which taught her that disguise; Shes thus because she cant be otherwise. So long as her attractions could enthrall, She flounced and flirted and enjoyed it all, But now that theyre no longer what they were She quits a world which fast is quitting her, And wears a veil of virtue to conceal Her bankrupt beauty and her lost appeal. Thats what becomes of old coquettes today:

Distressed when all their lovers fall away, They see no recourse but to play the prude, And so confer a style on solitude. Thereafter, theyre severe with everyone, Condemning all our actions, pardoning none, And claiming to be pure, austere, and zealous When, if the truth were known, theyre merely jealous, And cannot bear to see another know The pleasures time has forced them to forgo. A shapely young lady in a dark blue uniform appears in the well-lit lobby with its well-polished floor and says, Hi! Im Cathy. Im your juvenile probation officer. The three ladies retire to converse in a private room; the man with the auburn mustache extinguishes his cigarette and retires behind his desk; and I rise from the seat where I had been sitting as inconspicuously as possible and retire to the jailhouse, which is now open to visitors. My journey on foot from the police station lobby to the jail is by way of straight-edged concrete tunnels, as if I were entering an underground fortress. Concrete to the right of me, concrete to the left, concrete ahead and behind, concrete above and below The concrete is punctuated by several steel doors which are opened and shut by uniformed sentries who are, for the most part, smoking cigarettes, under the very nose, so to speak, of signs which say (peremptorily but ineffectually: No Smoking. Up three flights of concrete and steel stairs I find a concrete and steel row of cells for solitary confinement, decorated or rather not-decorated in the same plain rectangular concrete and steel style as the tunnels and stairways, as if the aim of the architect were to illustrate the philosophy of Immanuel Kant for the prisoners, demonstrating to them the unalterable rigidity df the limits to the realm of freedom which are imposed by the law. The realm of freedom is rigidly confined (for the prisoners) to enough space for a few up, down, and sideways movements within the limits of a small portion of Cartesian space known as a cell. So there he is! I have wanted to meet him and talk to him for so many years and now there he is in the flesh, sitting on the bed in his cell intently reading a copy of Letters from Qubec fifty years after his death at the Quisisana clinic in Rome. Never have I been so grateful to my imagination for providing me with opportunities for dialogue which I could never enjoy if my experience were confined to reality. Antonio Gramsci was born in the year 1891 to a poor family in a poor village on the island of Sardinia, itself one of the poorest and most exploited parts of the then recently established Republic of Italy. I began work when I was eleven, Gramsci later wrote, earning nine lire a month (which meant one kilo of bread a day) for ten hours work a day, including Sundays, and spent them in shifting registers weighing more than myself; many nights I cried secretly 375 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II because my whole body was in pain. Due to an accident in infancy that was not properly treated, Gramsci was a hunchback, and partly because of his deformity he was ostracized and picked on by the other children his own age. But he did find ways to interrupt his life as a worker often enough to get through school, largely because of his mothers sacrifices. And he did so well in the school examinations that he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Turin on the mainland of Italy.

In Turin the young hunchback from Sardinia suffered from cold and hunger he could often afford only one meal a day, consisting of pasta, two eggs, and a piece of bread. Young Gramsci made himself useful to one of his professors by providing information for the professors research on the dialects spoken in Sardinia, and for a while the young Sardinian intended to follow in his professors footsteps by pursuing an academic career in linguistics. However, academic life could not compete for young Antonios time and energy with his deep urge to contribute to revolutionizing the social order under which he, his family, his class, and his island suffered. Gramsci entered politics by way of political journalism as a writer for socialist newspapers. In 1917, when he was 26, the Socialists of Turin elected him their secretary. There followed for Gramsci an intense 9-year career as an agitator and organizer, during a period of history when it often appeared that Italian capitalism was on the verge of collapse. As it turned out, Italian democracy collapsed but Italian capitalism did not, and in 1926 Gramsci, who was by then a Socialist member of parliament, was arrested by agents of the Fascist government headed by Benito Mussolini. Gramscis philosophy was written on scraps of paper in the prison at Turi di Bari and smuggled out by his visitors such as, for example, the economist Piero Sraffa, an old friend from his early days as a political journalist in Turin, who brought him books to read. He called his philosophy the philosophy of practice, because it was not safe to call it Marxism. Gramsci was systematically mistreated in prison on orders from Mussolini himself: From the first his health deteriorated. He wrote only during occasional respites between bouts of multiple illnesses. After ten years of prison he was released as he was about to die there, and he did die soon after at the Quisisana Clinic. St. Peter was confused when Gramsci presented himself for judgment at the pearly gates. Not knowing whether to send such a man who had led such a life to Heaven or to Hell, he decided to give himself a century or two to think the case over, and for the meantime he sent Gramsci to Anytown, Indiana, where he has continued to live fictitiously in the city jail. I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you, Signor! I say. You cannot imagine how much people complain about me. You cannot imagine how much I need someone to talk to, just to talk to. Just to talk to someone who knows about suffering, just to be understood once before I die. I came to the jail because I wanted to find you, and I know that you will understand me if anyone will. Complaints? Gramsci questions, pursing his mouth and raising his eyebrow. They complain about me terribly, I say, They say Letters from Qubec is written neither for the professional philosopher nor for the beginning student of philosophy. It is too breezy and personal to be a contribution to the field so they say and it cannot be a textbook for beginners because it introduces new interpretations and ideas. They think the issues in philosophy should be hammered out amongst professionals in sober, objective articles in academic journals, and that the access of beginners to the field should be by way of sober, objective textbooks which reflect the currentstate-of-scholarship. They say I am lowering the standards of the profession by calling what I write philosophy. According to them, my writing is not philosophy. If they find a passage hard to understand, then they say it is not philosophy 376 Letter 45 because they do not understand it. If they find a passage easy to understand, then they say it is not philosophy because ordinary people do understand it. They disagree with me about the place, the cast of characters, and the function of philosophy about where philosophy is done, who does it, and what purposes a philosophy book should serve. They express their disagreement rudely. The whole situation is getting me down it is raising my blood pressure and lowering my self-

esteem. On the contrary, said Gramsci, The widespread prejudice* that philosophy is something which is very difficult because it is the intellectual activity of a specific category of specialist scholars or of professional and systematic philosophers must be destroyed. To do this we must first show that all men are philosophers, defining the limitations of this spontaneous philosophy, possessed by everyone, that is, of the philosophy which is contained in: i language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not simply and solely of words grammatically void of content: ii common sense and good sense: iii popular religion and therefore also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of perceiving and acting which make up what is generally called folklore Having shown that everyone is a philosopher, even if in his own way, unconsciously (because even in the smallest manifestation of any intellectual activity language is contained a definite conception of the world, we pass to the second stage, the stage of criticism and awareness. We pass to the question: is it preferable to think without having critical awareness, in a disjointed and irregular way, in other words to participate in a conception of the world imposed mechanically by external environment, that is. by one of the many social groups in which everyone is automatically involved from the time he enters the conscious world (this might be ones own village or province, might have its origin in the parish and the intellectual activity of the curate or of the patriarchal old man whose wisdom is law, of the crone who has inherited the knowledge of the witches or of the puny intellectual soured by his own stupidities and impotence): or is it preferable to work out ones own conception of the world consciously and critically, and so out of this work of ones own brain to choose ones own sphere of activity, to participate actively in making the history of the world, and not simply to accept passively and without care the imprint of ones own personality from outside? Note, however! Gramsci continues, that for his own conception of the world a man always belongs to a certain grouping, and precisely to that of all the social elements who share the same ways of thinking and working. He is a conformist to some conformity, he is always man-mass or man-collective. The question is this: of what historical type is the conformity, the man-mass, of which he is a part?... It sounds to me, I interrupt, as though your conception of philosophy is quite close to my own, but quite different from that of people like Martin Heidegger. Heidegger uses philosophy to inspire us to be authentic individuals, and to be authentic is precisely not to be man-mass or mancollective. You, on the other hand, think people will always conform to mass-conformity of some type, and the important decision a person must make is not whether to be an authentic one-of-akind individual which is not possible and if it were possible would not be desirable but rather what type of person one will be. The types are given by history, by social context, and what one can choose is to be the type of person who participates actively with others in making the history of the world. *The parts of the text that are underlined are quotations from Gramscis Prison Notebooks. 377 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II I never read Martin Heideggers books, Gramsci replies, and he never read mine. We lived at the same time on the same continent, but we traveled in different circles, read different books, and wrote for different audiences for different purposes. Heideggers public was the disaffected youth

of comfortable classes and nations, the artistic children of wealthy parents who read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard over cups of cappuccino the prophets of creativity and sincerity who despised the bourgeois world because of its complacency and hypocrisy. Heidegger as a youth adored the German expressionist painters who brought feeling and color to life; he loved to read the poets Rilke,*Trakl, and Holderlin, the poets of glorified loneliness. Yet when you urge us to choose responsibly what type of contribution we are going to make to history, I say, the sharp contrast of your ideal with Heideggers radikabten individualitat (most radical individuality) is not an accident. His philosophical work systematized common notions current in his social circle, while you carried forward the articulation of the ideology of the working class. As you yourself reflect your own social circle, Gramsci says. If I may take the liberty of describing Letters from Qubec, I would call it a disconnected and queer book of philosophy, which reflects, in its own way, the working class background of its author, an author who is, however, not from a European or a third world working class but from the American working class. The author speaks for the dregs of the California proletariat a working class that is by international standards extraordinarily fragmented and deluded. When a persons conception of the world is not critical and coherent, but haphazard and disconnected he belongs simultaneously to a multiplicity of men-masses, his own personality is made up in a queer way. It contains elements of the cave-man and principles of the most modern and advanced learning, shabby, local prejudices of all past historical phases and intuitions of a future philosophy of the human race united all over the world. What you need to do, and have only very imperfectly done, is to subject your fragmented conception of the world to criticism. Criticizing ones own conception of the world means, therefore, to make it coherent and unified and to raise it to the point reached by the most advanced modern thought. It also means criticizing all hitherto existing philosophy insofar as it has left layers incorporated into the popular philosophy. The beginning of the critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, that is, a know thyself as the product of the historical process which has left you an infinity of traces gathered together without the advantage of an inventory. First of all it is necessary to compile such an inventory. You are quite right to study philosophy historically, Gramsci said, Philosophy cannot be separated from the history of philosophy nor culture from the history of culture. In the most immediate and pertinent sense one cannot be a philosopher, that is, have a critically coherent conception of the world, without being aware of its history, of the phases of development it represents. The creation of a new culture does not only mean individually making some original discoveries. It means also and especially the critical propagation of truths already discovered, socializing them so to speak, and so making them become a basis for live action, an element of coordination and of intellectual and moral order. The leading of a mass of men to think coherently and in a unitary way about present-day reality is a philosophical fact of much greater importance and originality than the discovery by a philosophical genius of a new truth, which remains the inheritance of small groups of intellectuals. In other words, I said you are calling on philosophers to play a role in the creation of a new intellectual and moral order, and this task calls for a style of philosophy that is akin to political journalism and to the practice of group dynamics. The new moral order must be built by and with the masses rather than without them and for them. As you say in your Prison

* Rainer Maria Rilke. 378 Letter 45 Notebooks the great historical example of intellectual and moral reform was the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation is an example to be followed because it understood thinking as a mass phenomenon existing in the practices and attitudes of the whole society; it was the intellectual and moral reform of a form of life. The philosophy of praxis, Gramsci explains, does not seek to sustain the simple people in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but instead to lead them to a higher view of life. If it asserts the need for contact between the intellectuals and the simple people it does so, not in order to limit scientific activity and maintain unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to build an intellectual-moral bloc which makes politically possible the intellectual progress of the masses... The intellectuals to which you refer are, I remark, the organic intellectuals; they are people who echo the words of the American socialist Eugene Debs, who said I want to rise with the ranks, not from the ranks, and yet the people you refer to are already distinct from the ranks just because they are intellectuals. I wish you would say a bit more about what you mean by an intellectual. Every person. Gramsci continued, outside his or her own job develops some intellectual activity: he or she is. in other words, a philosopher. an artist, a person of taste, he or she shares a conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and so contributes toward maintaining or changing a conception of the world, that is, towards encouraging new modes of thought. The problem of creating a new class of intellectuals consists, therefore, in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity which exists at a certain stage of development in everyone, changing its relation with the muscular-nervous effort towards a new equilibrium and assuring that muscularnervous effort itself, insofar as it is a general practical activity which is perpetually changing the physical and social world, shall become the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world... How do you relate the new conception of the world to new economic structures? I ask. Can there be a cultural reform and an uplifting of the civilization of the depressed strata of society without there first being an economic reform and a change in their social position and place in Intellectual and moral reform must be tied to a programme of economic reform: moreover, the programme of economic reform is precisely the concrete way in which every intellectual and moral reform is presented. Moreover, before there can be change there must be a will to change. Unless wills are united, talk of reform is merely Utopian dreaming. Do you mean,I ask, that the new conception of the world is going to organize a great collective will, and the collective will in turn is going to bring about economic reform? The formation of a collective will of the people is partly the cause, partly the consequence, of a program of economic reform. All history since 1815 shows the efforts of the traditional classes to prevent the formation of a collective will of this kind. I ask Signor Gramsci if he would be so kind as to summarize in schematic form his view of the relationship between the culture of the ruling (i.e. property-owning) classes and the culture of the subordinate (i.e.. working) classes and of the role of intellectuals in transforming the culture of the subordinate classes in order to create a collective will of the people capable of ending oppression and exploitation.

Signor Gramsci obligingly draws a diagram* on a piece of paper for me. The diagram shows that the culture of the subordinate classes has both negative and positive characteristics. On the negative side, it is uncritical, fragmented, and incoherent. On the positive side, it tends to be progressive because it tends to express the concerns and interests of the masses. After Juan Eduardo Garcia-Huidobro, En Torne al Marxismo, Mmsajc (Santiago, Chile) No. 285 Diciembre 1979, p. 833. 379 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Negative Positive The culture of Uncritical the subordinate Fragmented classes Incoherent The ruling culture Reactionary Confined to small groups Progressive Belonging to the masses Critical Unified Elaborated

The culture of the ruling class also has both negative and positive characteristics. On the negative side, it is confined to small groups and tends to further their interests. It has the positive characteristics of being refined by the formal procedures of critical thinking (such as the scientific method) and of having the coherence, unity, and elaboration which permit the elite to govern nations and to manage vast enterprises. The needed intellectual and moral reform consists of combining the positive features of both types of culture; thus producing a mass culture which is critical, coherent, unified, elaborated, and progressive. The reform will create, so to speak, a new cultural hegemony. When Gramsci is done explaining his diagram, I thank him profusely. I am so glad I came to see you, I say, You are somebody I can talk to, really talk to. You know I needed to talk to someone, just to talk, just to make contact with someone who understands that philosophy happens in hearts and souls all across America and around the world, in airports and bedrooms, in the cheap magazines sitting on low tables in dentists waiting rooms and in the graffiti written on the walls of factory washrooms, everywhere, everywhere, everybody, everybody. You are a person who understands that the purpose of a philosophy bookisnotto defend a thesis as an army defends a territory, as if the fate of the earth depended on philosophers compelling other philosophers by the force of logic to recite certain sentences. You understand thank God somebody understands that the fate of the earth depends on solidarity, and that philosophys task is democratic and constructive. Philosophy repairs and coordinates the many fibres of the many threads of solidarity; the many strands of caring communication, the many words in many languages, in many traditions, spoken around many supper tables ringed by children and adults, broadcast on many television programs. Humans are held together, insofar as we are held together at all, by a great global tapestry of signals and signs, a text always woven and rewoven, a mosaic of codes, a montage of symbols, a pastiche of images. Philosophys task is to meet each person where she or he is, at her or his specific point in the global mosaic, and to help that persons to develop, to tease out emotional investments in ideas, to invite contributions, to extend what is best in common notions, to suggest beautiful visions, to welcome every soul to communion, to open paths to harmony

without violating each groups and each individuals sense of integrity and self-esteem. The love of wisdom is in the pattern of the threads; each of us is only a bit of local chatter, a fibre in the text. After saying a fibre in the text I look out through the little window of the cell and fall silent. I stay silent. No doubt my silence is making a bad impression on Signor Gramsci, especially since I told him I wanted to talk just before I stopped talking. Maybe subconsciously I am intentionally making a bad impression because I was afraid I was making too good an impression and now I feel a need to be obnoxious in order to protect Signor Gramsci against the error of admiring 380 Letter 45 me. Maybe I say I want to talk and then do not talk because I was born under Gemini, the sign of the twins. However, I really do not know why I am preoccupied by staring at nothing. I wish I could understand myself. The window opens onto an empty space between cement walls. Above there is a gray sky and below there are patches of pavement, a few pieces of miscellaneous trash, and a small sweet gum tree, its leaves yellow. I am worried that Gramscis philosophy is too cerebral, but I dismiss the worry because he himself remarks in his Prison Notebooks that fascism took power in Italy by mobilizing the primitive love of violence latent in many individuals of all social classes, and surely Gramsci already realizes, without me having to tell him so, that as long as fascism is driven by the energy of primitive passions while socialism appeals only to cold reason, socialism will lose and lose, over and over, in any conflict between the two. As I am in the process of dismissing my worry, my gaze comes to focus less on the nothing and more on the small sweet gum tree, its leaves yellow. Now I fear that Gramscis philosophy is too divisive, inasfar as it suggests that the dominant irrational rationality serves the interests of the capitalist class. I fear there is some danger that capitalists will believe it is their historical role to defend injustice and disorder if scholars instruct them that such is their role and such are their interests, while the truth is, of course, that our form of life is not now viable for anybody. The yellow leaves on the sweet gum tree are almost perfectly round. Could it be that in spite of its high level of generality, Gramscis philosophy is too narrow, too much a reflection on the defeat of the proletariat in the 1920s in Italy, and not versatile enough to be our only guide in coping with racism, sexism, the destruction of the environment, insanity, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, spiritual despair... ? I would prefer to say that Marxism is a special case of the philosophy of cultural action, as Newtons physics is a special case of Einsteins physics. The general problem is to organize human culture so that humanity can survive with beauty and with solidarity in harmony with the earth community of which our species is a member; Marxism considers mainly a special form of the general problem, namely the criticism and abolition of exploitative economic institutions. The leaves of the sweet gum are so bright they seem phosphorescent; I formulate the hypothesis that light waves bend towards sweet gum trees wearing autumn foliage, so that the intensity of solar radiation which falls upon the tree, which the tree then transmits, is greater than the intensity of solar radiation falling on the surrounding territory. Probably, I think to myself, somebody ought to tell Signor Gramsci that his philosophy lends itself to interpretations which are too naive inasfar as his theory of cultural hegemony overlooks the homeostatic character of capitalism, its built-in defense mechanisms which cause it to stabilize and to reassert itself when it is challenged. For example, capitalism defend itself by capital flight,* and generally, by the tendency of production to slow down when wages are raised at the expense of profits. No one should be surprised when socialist measures, whether reformist or revolutionary, are followed by a shortage of soap, the disappearance of matches and toilet paper, a

black market for cooking oil, and lines a block long for bread and no one should be surprised when these and the like hardships lead to pressure to bring capitalism back; nor should anyone be surprised when partly as a result of such pressure capitalism comes back, reasserting itself, stabilizing itself, for reasons different from and additional to whatever military force or cultural hegemony it may possess. No doubt Signor Gramsci would reply that it is just because such hardships must be faced that his theory calling for a new intellectual-moral bloc is a good theory, since if the new intellectual-moral bloc existed, then people would endure the rationing of eggs without complaining because intellectually they would understand why shortages will necessarily occur and morally they would be committed to making whatever sacrifices are needed to build a new * Capital flight: capital leaving a territory. For example, when a socialist government is elected, owners of capital may transfer funds out of the country and into Swiss banks. 381 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II society. The sweet gum tree is glowing. Is Gramsci too optimistic? Does he underestimate the difficulties of transforming the old cultural structures and creating new ones? Does he realize how much care for sacred symbols is needed just to maintain the level of civilization we have, to avoid sliding back into something worse even without trying to move forward to something better? He probably does. He is probably quite aware of the difficulties his philosophy proposes to overcome, especially since he has had fifty posthumous years to sit in the Anytown jail and think, and an additional half century of history to think about. After watching me look out the window for a long time, Gramsci politely invites me to share with him my opinion of his philosophy. Oh, I really have nothing to say, I reply, nothingyou dont already know. Anyway, I continue, the most important question aboutyou is whether you are going to Heaven or to Hell, and I already know the answers. I would have thought, Gramsci says, that no question could be less important. What do you mean? My meaning is not new, I say. In a famous 14th century French love story, the handsome young prince Aucassin tells who is going to Heaven and who is going to Hell, and he also tells where he himself wants to go. Aucassin says, ...to Heaven go only such people as I shall tell you of: the old priests, the old cripples and maimed ones who, all night and all day, drag themselves before the altars and in the old crypts, and those who wear old worn-out clothes and are dressed in tattered rags, who are naked and without shoes and stockings, and dying of hunger and thirst and of cold and of misery. These go to Heaven. I have nothing to do with them. But to Hell I wish indeed to go; for to Hell go the handsome clerics, and the fine knights who have died in the tourneys and in great wars, and the good soldiers and the brave men, with them I do wish to go. There, also, go the fair and courteous ladies who have two or three lovers besides their husbands. And there go the gold and silver and miniver and gray furs. There, also, go the harpers and the jongleurs, and the kings of the world. With them I do wish to go.* Now tell me, Signor Gramsci, I ask, Where do you wish to go? Tell me the truth. In the new society we are going to build, said Gramsci, Heaven will be deserted, a ghost town, because all of the lands of people who need to go there will no longer exist. However, he said, as long as they do exist I want to be with them, wherever they are. With all my heart and soul, he added.

* Aucassin and Nicolette tr. by E.F. Moyer and C.D. Eldridge, The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Norton, New York, 1979. p. 830. 382 Letter 46 46 THE GREAT MIRROR in the Inner, Inner, Inner Circle The owners of the gym where I am a member have a no nonsense approach to management. The manager must make money for the owners by selling memberships, or else the manager is fired and replaced. The managers who work in this rather unstable system require each staff member under them to perform according to objectively measured criteria, or else get out. This is scientific management, in its simplest form. For example, at the beginning of each aerobics workout, the manager appears with a clipboard and notes on a chart the number of men the workout has attracted. (The workouts I attend are for males; I dont know what the womens workouts are like.) It used to be that aerobics were led sometimes by men and sometimes by women. As time went by all the men and older women were eliminated, and now the aerobics leaders are all young women. Management keeps six or seven of them on the roster as part-time help, and gives more work to those whose performance, quantitatively evaluated, is superior. The young women who lead aerobics have taken to wearing skin tight costumes, and some artificially augment the size of their breasts, in order to improve their silhouettes when they lie down to lead us in working abs (in exercising the abdominal muscles). One young woman recently began to wear glistening body-huggies silver from the vagina up and black from the vagina down, which bear exactly over the vagina an embroidered red rose. We have been seeing more of her. She used to be a second-string trainee, but now she has become one of the two or three who are offered work most often. Let me note that neither the women or the men make any remarks with sexual allusions. On a conscious, verbal level our workouts are physical culture. This sort ofdecalage (slippage) between conscious awareness and the facts objectively recorded is the type of consideration which lends credence to positions that hold that real social science does not investigate what goes on subjectively in peoples minds, but rather facts unknown to the actors but known through objective study to the scientists who study the actors. Enter sociology and economics modeled on physics. Exit the study of symbolic structures, since anything having to do with symbols is thought to be tainted with subjectivity, and subjectivity is a no-no. I, on the other hand, hold that basic cultural structures are at work here. Of course, male hormones have something to do with it. But so does the free market system, and the system is built of culturally constructed symbols. Indeed this aerobics example shows a number of typical features of our social organization: pseudo-science, management, rationality, the market, competition among sellers of labor-power, freedom to choose. What I mostly want to expose and see through in this letter is the pseudo-science that is endemic to our culture because it fits so many of our basic thought-categories so well, the quantitative, supposedly objective social physics (to use the phrase of one of its founders, Auguste Comte). But I do not mean to endorse a too easy study-the-minds-of-the-actors social 383 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II science, of a kind which sometimes sends people back to social physics because they find that the studiers of subjective minds are not providing any real knowledge. Consider, to continue a bit with

a similar theme, two recent attempts to understand the rise of pornography in American life. One (Barbara Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men)* tells a story according to which men turned to pornography because it was a source of sexual satisfaction cheaper and less burdensome than marriage. Another (by Alan Soble)** finds on the contrary that women rejected men as part of the rising tide of feminism and womens consciousness, and that men, in self-defense, turned to pornography. Now one might suspect after thinking about two such plausible but mutually contradictory attempts to explain the same phenomenon, that attempts to achieve understanding by asking what motives people have in mind when they do what they do, are inherently hopeless, and one might be tempted to conclude that if we are ever going to understand human conduct we will have to go back to quantitative, objective, social physics. But I do not propose to react that way; instead I propose to take the interpretation of culture to a deeper level. What I want to argue in general is that we can get an objective (really scientific as distinct from pseudo-scientific) understanding of conduct with the help of an understanding of our societys basic cultural structures. They are culturally constructed but not necessarily conscious or tidy. Im inclined to think that both of the stories just mentioned tell part of the truth about the rise of pornography, but even more inclined to see a tendency at work which is more basic the one I noticed in my aerobics class, which is the same one Alexis de Tocqueville called attention to when he wrote in Democracy In America: Individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life, but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. However, this general argument that the individualist structure is more basic than either mens desire to get the most fun with the least commitment or the changes wrought by womens liberation is not the main point of this particular letter. The main point of this letter is to show and unmask the collusion between our basic structure and so-called no-nonsense, objective, quantitative, science. I want to attack the view which says: We are not interpreting any culture. We are stating basic logic, which provides the canon for science, in some of its everyday forms, as at the gym, and in some of its sophisticated forms. Far from being an alternative to trying to understand the cultural structures which form our minds, such a view is itself a manifestation of the cultural form we inhabit. It is a part of our culture which needs to be reformed, and in its unreformed state it works to obstruct other needed reforms. But before I try to illuminate and expose by putting in context certain influential doctrines which claim to be fundamental logic, I need to do a little better job of explaining to you what I take to be the basic structure of the context, yclept individualism. To that end I will offer an example different from my aerobics class, and different from pornography: the evolution of the modern business corporation. I do not remember when I first began to be conscious of cultural structures. I do remember being aware of them in law school, as I studied the evolution of Anglo-American property, contract, and corporation law. Their history shows the interplay of superficial and basic * Barbara Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984. ** Alan Soble, Pornography, Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Both Ehrenreich and Soble consider many non-subjective dimensions of the problems they address, and I do not wish to denigrate either book, but only to use an aspect of them to illustrate my point. Robert Bellah et al identify four strands of individualist thought in American culture: religious, civic, expressive, and utilitarian. I want to call all these less basic than the individualism of our

logic and of our legal institutions. Habits of the Heart. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1985. 384 Letter 46 symbolic structures. Over and over I noted a struggle back and forth at the superficial level of rhetoric and legal principle, while all the while the eventual outcome of the struggle was determined in advance by deeper structures of which the judges and lawyers were only half aware. For instance, although the corporation was originally a body politic created by law for public purposes, in a market economy where individuals and firms compete and accumulate capital, it or something like it was destined to become an instrument of private gain which would bend public purpose to its economic interests. The first entities granted corporate charters were eleemosynary: universities, churches, municipalities. Even in the first part of the 19th century most companies granted corporate status by law had public or semi-public purposes, such as the building of roads, canals, and bridges. Then step by step general laws permitting anyone to incorporate without a special act of the legislature and for any purpose, were passed by state after state. In 1888 New Jersey authorized the holding company. (A holding company is a corporation whose business it is to own other corporations.) Other states followed. After World War n the age of conglomerates began. (A conglomerate is a corporation composed of separate divisions, which operate different businesses under the same ownership. Separate divisions of the corporation may produce such diverse goods and services as phonograph records, cake mixes, insecticides, and insurance in many states and countries.) What I noticed about the evolution of the corporation was its inevitability, given certain basic symbolic structures. I noticed the Futility of trying to stop it by, for example, trying to pass a law prohibiting corporate diversification or prohibiting overseas investments. In a market economy divided into different states, or a global economy divided into different nations, the laws will sooner or later follow efficiency in profit-making. The most profitable way to do business will sooner or later be legalized somewhere, and capital will flow there until other jurisdictions follow suit in order to make themselves similarly attractive to business. The contemporary spectacle of third world dictators vying with each other to entice multinational conglomerates to invest in their countries, by offering lower taxes, lower wages, better labor discipline...etc. is the working out of implications inherent in the basic structures from the beginning. You have just read another example of individualistic structures at work. Now it would be reasonable to suppose that if our basic social structure is as important as I am showing it to be by my examples, then we will not be able to be effective in changing our institutions unless we understand it. And, by the same token, it is reasonable to suppose that insofar as our institutions have equipped themselves to persist in time by resisting change, they will include a logic (that is to say, a logic will be part of our institutions) which prevents us from understanding our basic social structure. Question: Do you mean to say that a prevailing ideology is likely to provide an image of science that keeps the basic structures invisible? And do you suppose that most of the individuals living in a society where such an ideology rules might take the prevailing image of science for granted and never think of questioning it? Answer: Evidently. Ecology shows that when organisms achieve a method for gaining control of scarce resources, the method persists. In the case of a feline species with an unusually effective claw, the persistence of the claw is genetically coded. In the case of a social class with an unusually effective (for them) image of the scientific method, the persistence of the image is

culturally transmitted. Neither the cats nor the humans know how the method for gaining control of resources began, nor how it works, even though it does work, and even though it contributes to keeping them well fed while others are hungry. On an everyday level, we have what is sometimes called false consciousness; the belief of the gym owners that their management technique is scientific and rational is an example. On 385 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II a more sophisticated level, in academic circles, we have a so-called scientific method, which employs a logic of disunity. Structures are invisible because the method sees each actor as independent of every other. Even when the actors are conceived as taking each others strategies into account there is still a low level of consciousness, a taking for granted of social structures as if they were natural. The mechanical logic of independent facts imposes a style on research: forces and factors which cause trends this way and that way are seen, but the contexts and structures, within which all of the impacting of forces and factors on each other takes place, are not seen. All of the above is prologue to the story of a meaningful encounter. The encounter of a reader with a book. I was the reader. , The book was the most influential philosophical work written in the beginningyears of the 2 Oth century, except perhaps for Martin Heideggers Being and Time. By itself, of course, the book had no meaning. A book, by itself, consists of sheets of bleached cellulose fibers marked with ferrous sulfate in a slightly acidic water solution. The meanings are in the encounter between the mind of the writer, which is a product of the authors time and place, and the mind of the reader, which is a product of the readeris time and place, through the medium of the book. You already know something about the preconceptions this readers mind brought to the book. It remains to consider the mind of the writer and its context: the engineering school in Switzerland where the writer and Albert Einstein, among others, studied theoretical physics, Vienna at the turn of the century, Ludwig Wittgensteins family and friends, his wealth, his passion for classical music, his homosexuality, his life as a soldier in the army of the AustroHungarian Empire during World War I, the ideas of his mentors Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, the suicides of several of his brothers, and Count Leo Tolstoys book The Gospel in Sne/which, Wittgenstein said, saved his life. And let us not in this panorama of context forget the contexts hub and focus, the text. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus consists mainly of six propositions* plus extensive commentaries on each of the six. The six are: 1. The world is all the facts. 2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. 3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought. 4. The thought is the significant proposition. 5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. 6. The general form of truth-function is: [p, e, N(e)] This is the general form of proposition. In other words, the world consists of separate facts, each independent of the other. We build up general propositions.by combining separate propositions, each of which represents its separate fact. The technical symbolism [p, e, N(e)] in proposition 6 represents Wittgensteins method for

building up general propositions by combining what he calls elementary propositions. Think * Commentarists differ concerning which propositions in the Tractatus are most basic. Here I identify the six basic propositions following Wittgensteins own opinion as expressed in his numbering system. 386 Letter 46 of it this way: the world is represented by an enormous sieve consisting of wire mesh with tiny holes in it. In each hole there is a light, which can be either on or off. Now if we possessed the totality of human knowledge, i.e. all science, i.e. all true propositions [p, e, N(e)], what we would know is which lights are on and which lights are off. Where I have spoken of a giant sieve with a tiny lightbulb in each opening, Wittgenstein himself uses different figures of speech: an infinitely fine network, the giant mirror. His commentator Max Black speaks of a mosaic of atomic facts. Another commentator, Elizabeth Anscombe, interprets Wittgensteins giant mirror image as representing ...the mirror of language, whose logical character makes it reflect the world and makes its individual sentences say that such-andsuch is the case. Whatever image one uses, it is clear that according to the Tractatus the business of language is to picture facts. Apart from picturing facts there is nothing more for language to say. The six main propositions are followed by a seventh, which unlike the others stands alone at the end of the book with no commentary: 7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Taken alone, this proposition is trivial and true. It is what the Spanish call a parrots truth; it reports the same thing twice. It might as well be written: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot speak. Or: Whereof one must be silent, thereof one must be silent. Taken in context, proposition 7 is not trivial but it appears to be false. It asserts that the picturing of facts analyzed in propositions 1-6 represents all language can say. (No! No! and No! Language is not at all silent when its work is different from fact-picturing. It is used to buy, to sell, to sing, to command, to love, to inspire, to promise, to make friends, to amuse, to deliberate, to decide, to encourage, to evaluate, to console. Language functions not solely, and not even mainly, to picture facts.*) When I first encountered the Tractatus my reaction was to regard it as an ingenious concatanation of absurdities. The world is certainly not a set of atomic facts, each independent of the others. On the contrary, everything depends on everything else. Among the detailed comments Wittgenstein makes on his major propositions one finds such apparently false remarks as the following ones:** 1.21 Any fact can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same. [On the contrary, if a planet should change its orbit every other planet in the solar system would change its orbit too; if an ocean current changes direction in the south Pacific, the weather changes everywhere in the world.] 5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus. [It is far more superstitious to believe that if we continue on our present course the human race and the ecosystem can survive. Present trends permit us to infer a disastrous future.]

* If Wittgenstein replies that he recognizes all functions of language but only maintains that none of them save picturing facts counts as saying, or speaking, then his proposition reverts from falsity to triviality, becoming the expression of one parrots opinion concerning the proper ambit of the verb to say, or to speak. ** Before each of the remarks cited below I have put the number which locates it in Wittgensteins numbering system, and after it I have put my owhopinion in brackets. Wittgenstein does not deny the claims I make in brackets. His proposition 1.21 is supposed to be logically true, even though it may turn out to be an empirical finding of science that nothing changes while leaving everything else the same. My opinion is not that Wittgenstein can be refuted, but that the approach of the Tractatus is at first glance preposterous and on further examination wrongheaded. 387 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II 6.36311 That the sun will rise tomorrow is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise. [The sun is the main source of the earths energy, either directly or through stored fossil fuels. The life forms that arise on the earth depend on the sun, and on the wise use of the energy it provides. So do the social practices known as posing an hypothesis and knowing.] 6.431 As in death, too, the world does not change, but ceases. [In death I cease, and there is a slight change in the world, namely my death.] 3.02 What is thinkable is also possible. [Thinking has no such power to define the possible; we can think many things in imagination which cannot happen in real life. Conversely, many things are possible which are beyond the power of human comprehension.] 3.25 A sentence has one and only one complete analysis. [A sentence has no complete analysis and many different interpretations.] 4.1122 The Darwinian theory has no more to do with philosophy than has any other hypothesis of natural science. [Philosophies evolve, compete, and contribute to survival or to failure as do other features of the behavior of organisms. Philosophy has no privileged vantage point from which to look down on the D arwinian theory and call it an hypothesis.] ? 4.116 Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. [No! People find clear what they are accustomed to hearing. Consequently, only established, dominant modes of thought can be clear. Attempts to activate the consciousness of the oppressed and to organize a program to promote their interests will always be unclear. New ideas are always unclear.] Wittgensteins Tractatus is a seductive and dangerous book. It is seductive because it radiates the aura of prestige which surrounds all books so technical and difficult that only people with intelligence and leisure can ever hope to master them. It is seductive because the reader comes to believe that all its propositions would be self-evidently true if they could be righdy understood. However preposterous a proposition may appear when quoted out of context, as I have done above, when one appreciates the propositions place in Wittgensteins overall scheme one usually sees that it is exacdy what must be said to make the overall scheme cohere. Consequently, one comes to believe that if one could achieve insight into each of the interrelated propositions and commentaries, and on occasion save Wittgenstein from himself by amending his work to correct his errors, then there would be a remarkable coherence, and a.remarkable coherence easily passes itself off as a series of self-evident truths.

The Tractatus is seductive, moreover, because it appears to be an innocent book, preoccupied by pure problems, which, like pure music, reflect no eardilyxealities and have no practical applications. Devotion to the interpretation of the Tractatus appears to be a passiorf for pure souls who, emulating a certain image of Aristotle, have fallen in love with the life of the mind for its own sake. It is seductive because the activity of reading Wittgenstein over and over, and trying to get the right answers to the questions the Tractatus addresses, can become an obsession like playing Dungeons and Dragons and it can become a rewarding professional specialty which can earn one a paid position as a philosophy teacher, and it can become a rite of initiation which gives one a social identity as a member of a likeminded coterie; puzzling over the Tractatus can become a rather pleasant and rather secure way of life, which does not seem to do anyone any harm even though one might be hard pressed to identify any tangible way in which it does anyone any good, until one realizes one fine day that in the process of enjoying a way of life one has become immersed in a worldview, and the worldview which seeps into every pore of the brain from the Tractatus is one which makes the basic structure of 20th century global society 388 Letter 46 necessary and unquestionable. Necessary because all reality and all talk about reality is and can only be individual. Unquestionable because the philosophies which might comprehend the global economy of which we are the victims, criticize it, and organize alternative social projects through unifying symbolisms,* are ruled out banished from what can be said, banished from what can be shown. Banished altogether. Therein lies the danger. Wittgensteins labors as a composer of metaphysical texts are generally similar to diose of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Marx, Heidegger, and the other great philosophers. He served his time, place, and group by bringing together diverse languages to construct more functional codes, by working with existing elements in the culture, combining and harmonizing the existing symbolisms to produce new rationalities. Wittgenstein made his own a project already begun by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, which amounted, generally speaking, to doing the sort of thing philosophers have always done. Plato brought craft expertise and government together; Aristotle proposed categories for science which also served metaphysics; Aquinas unified religion and Aristotelian science; Descartes unified algebra and geometry and went on to include matter, mind, and God in his system; Kant brought nature and ethics into harmony; Marx proposed a comprehensive social science which crosses all disciplinary boundaries; Heidegger pursued the ground of everything whatever, namely Being. And Wittgenstein in the Tractatus contributed to Freges and Russells program for unifying mathematics and logic. Frege started the project in his essay Function and Concept. Functions, Frege notes, are central to mathematics and science. We often have occasion to write equations of the form y = f(x), where y is a function of x. We draw graphs:

The Cartesian plane permits us to draw a picture of the functional relationship between x and y in whatever field mathematics is applied physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, psychology,... etc. When we speak of concepts, on the other hand, we are likely to suppose that we are dealing with realms beyond the reach of mathematics and science: thus we typically speak of political, religious, and social concepts. Frege proposes that concepts are functions. The following are selected quotations strung together from the text of Freges essay Function and Concept, with some explanatory remarks in brackets. My starting point is what is called in mathematics a function in using the word function we usually think of expressions in which a number is indefinitely indicated by the letter x, as for example: 2 times x3 + x.. * The kind of unifying symbolisms we need are, of course, the kind that respect and promote diversity. 389 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II We call x the argument of the function and in 2 times 13 + 1 2 times 43 + 4 2 times 53 + 5 we recognize the same function, but with different arguments, namely 1, 4, and 5. This permits us to see that the essence of the function resides in what is common to these expressions; namely in what there is in 2 times x3 + x besides the x. This we could also write in the following manner: 2 times ( )3 + ( ) The point is to show that the argument [i.e. whatever is put in the place x holds] does not belong to

the function. Instead the argument forms together with the function a complete whole; icfi, the function itself should be called incomplete, needing a complement, unsaturated.... Whefl I say for example, the function 2 times x3 + x, I do not consider x to be part of the function. This letter serves only to indicate the type of complement that is needed, since it allows one to recognize the places where... the argument should be put. The result of complementing the function with its argument is called the value of the function for that particular argument. For example, 3 is the value of the function 2 times x3 x for the argument 1, since 2 times 13 + 1 = 3..... I can speak, for example, of the function x2 = 1 where x represents(ns before) the argument. If we replace x successively by 1, 0, 1, 2 we get: (-1)2 = l 02 = 1 12 = 1 22 = 1 Of these equations the first and third are true, the others are false. Now I say the value of our function is a truth value, and I distinguish the truth value true from the truth value false.... Accordingly, for example 22 = 4 denotes the true, just as, for example 22 denotes 4. And 22 = 1 denotes the false. Accordingly... in (22 = 4) = (2 > 1) we have a correct equation. [Yes, Frege means what he says. The truth value of 2 = 4 is True and the truth value of 2 > 1 is True. Hence the equation says True = True, which is a correct equation.] ... This permits us to see immediately the intimate relation between what in logic we call a concept and what we call a function. In effect, we can affirm immediately that a concept is a function whose value is always a truth value.... In this way one can decompose for example the sentence 390 Letter 46 Caesar conquered Gaul into Caesar and conquered Gaul. The second part is not saturated, it has an empty space and only by filling it... can we get a complete sense. [conquered Gaul is a concept, which is a kind of function] In this case the argument is Caesar. [The argument Caesar complements the concept, in a way which yields the truth-value True.] Reducing concepts to functions exemplifies what Frege and Russell were doing when Wittgenstein became first their disciple and later their collaborator. Evidently, the successful completion of the Frege-Russell-Wittgenstein program would result in a tremendous simplification and unification of human symbolic functioning since all concepts could be dealt with mathematically (or to put the same thing conversely, all mathematics could be reduced to logic).* As for the refractory concepts which resist mathematical treatment, they may be just the concepts we dont want anyway, concerning which we would be delighted to find a pretext of calling them pseudo-concepts and filing them in trash cans. Wittgensteins metaphysical constructions were on the whole contributions to the project of

treating all thought, all language mathematically. They took place in a political context and had political consequences, as did those of Plato et al., and surely from the point of view of Wittgenstein and his fellow laborers in the philosophical vineyards the political consequences of their work were all to the good. They would surely be very surprised and would conceive of themselves as thoroughly misunderstood if they were to encounter someone like myself who, upon encountering them, finds their ideas preposterous and harmful. They are centrists. Political centrism could hardly be more explicit in Russell. Karl Popper, who was in some ways a fellow traveler with the unifiers of mathematical logic, has written several centrist polemical works, viz. The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. In Janik and Toulmins biographical study of Wittgenstein, Wittgensteins Vienna we learn some of the political and ethical motivations of the author of the Tractatus. Vienna was, in one word, corrupt. Ludwig Wittgenstein was, in a few words, a sensitive young man. The sensitive young man developed a passion for simple honesty and simple goodness. Viennese life was dominated by demagoguery and charlatanism, a situation which led several people before Wittgenstein to propose clarifications of thought and language, which would put our ideas once and for all on a sound, factual basis, and thus permit us to distinguish sense from nonsense. The spinners of great social theories of dubious scientific merit were rightists and leftists. Or to be more exact the centrists accused the rightists and leftists of spinning great theories of dubious merit, and the centrists prided themselves on the parsimony and sobriety of the scientific basis of their thinking. Wittgenstein was predisposed toward centrism and toward distrust of grandiose scientific theories before he came into contact with Russell and Frege. Janik and Toulmans biography shows that Russell and Freges project for unifying mathematics and logic gave him a tool for *One might raise the question whether it is inherent in mathematical thinking to link it with an individualist ontology as the Tractatus does, or whether one might carry out a project of extending the regions of thought which can be programmed mathematically in the service of a nonindividualistic worldview and for a non-individualistic politics. The economist Piero Sraffa, as will be seen in the next letter, is among those who have attempted the latter. 391 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II doing what his Viennese background had predisposed him to want to do, namely: to analyze language (and therefore thought) in a more or less mathematical way, providing a sound foundation for all legitimate thinking and a clear criterion for rejecting all pseudo-concepts. Karl Popper, a paragon of centrism and a sympathetic commentator on the Tractatus, described; what Wittgenstein was trying to do as follows: Wittgenstein tried to shew that all so-called philosophical or metaphysical propositions were in fact non-propositions or pseudopropositions: that they were senseless or meaningless. All genuine (or meaningful) propositions were truth-functions of the elementary or atomic propositions which described atomic facts, i.e. facts which can in principle be ascertained by observation. In other words, they were fully reducible to elementary or atomic propositions which were simple statements describing possible states of affairs, and which could be in principle established or rejected by observation. If we call a statement an observation statement not only if it states an actual observation but also if it states anything that may be observed, we shall have to say that every genuine proposition must be a truth-function of and therefore deducible from, observation statements. All other apparent propositions will be, in fact, nonsense; they will be meaningless pseudo-

propositions.* Thus the doctrines concerning logic and mathematics, which turn all sense into truth-functions, prove to have important consequences for everything, including politics. And not unintentionally. So what are we going to do with a philosopher who (like Wittgenstein and like Russell) cites Ockhams principle of parsimony as a guiding standard as if it required no justification? Or with a philosopher who (like Frege) takes it as a principle of scientific rigor that every concept must have an object? I suppose we will say that when we find the system of the Tractatus built up from the simplest possible objects represented by the simplest possible concepts, we are not surprised. Question: So are you saying that although you can understand where Wittgensteins motives come from, you are not the least bit tempted to agree with him, since you are trying to make basic social structures visible, and to transform them through more adequate cultural codings, and he has constructed a metaphysics with ends-in-view different from yours? Answer: I dont even know what it would mean to agree or to disagree with a book that presents no evidence and-has practically no argument. The Tractatus consists almost entirely of dogmatic assertions. Question: Wittgenstein admits that on his own criteria his bookis meaningless, but he says it shows some things that cannot be said, about, for example, the relation of language to the world. Answer: It shows some prejudices, about, for example, the relation of language to the world, which were shared by Wittgenstein and his friends, but which I do not share. I do not, for example, share their prejudice that the relation of language to the world is such that everything that can be said at all can be said clearly. Question: However, as you said, philosophy in general consists of generalities which go beyond the evidence. So when you complain that Wittgensteins conclusions merely reflect the prejudices he started with, that he seduces the reader into regarding the coherence of the system as evidence of its truth, that his book consists mainly of dogmatic assertions, you are making complaints you could make against any other philosopher. You go out of your way to be generous to, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas, but when you get to Wittgenstein social * British Philosophy in Mid-Century, Allen and Unwin, 1957, pp. 163-164, quoted in G.E.M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgensteins Tractatus (London: Hutchinson University Library 1959), p. 25. 392 Letter 46 construction gets renamed dogmatism and you are against it instead of for it. No doubt the reason for this disparity is that Thomass philosophical project was collectivist and emotionally comforting, while Wittgensteins was individualistic and lonely. I, myself, however, am a centrist in politics and I fear mass movements moblized by heavenly interpretations of desire, so I would rather live in a Tractarian world than in a medieval one. Answer: Youre not unusual. Millions of people have been charmed by the cosmovision of the Tractatus, in which the necessary logical structure of the world shows the ethics of autonomy writ large. Question: And yet you would rather we were charmed by Saint Thomas? Answer: It would be more conducive to the survival of homo sapiens and to the survival of the planet, the other animals, the earth, the skies, and the waters. Question: So you think we need another Inquisition? Another Hundred Years War? Answer: No, but appreciating the creativity of our own culture in its medieval period on its native

European soil helps us to appreciate the precious socially constructed worlds of native peoples everywhere. It helps us to resist the dogmas of books like the Tractatus which say The world is all the facts. This may be the time and the place to consider again the influential works of another Viennese writer of the same period and of somewhat similar philosophical views, but Popper opposes early Wittgenstein and logical positivism on issues Popper regards as central, who, unlike Wittgenstein, wrote books in which social science and social problems occupy the focus-of attention in. the foreground. In his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, the writer in question argues against certain kinds of theories which he accuses of acquiring a spurious plausibility by palming offfallacies as if they were logically valid. The theories he mainly argues against are Marxist and Freudian, but he also targets several other sets of general ideas including the philosophies of Plato and Hegel, and the social theories of a group of mainly German writers collectively called historicists. Marx, Freud, Plato, Hegel, historicists generally, and whoever goes in for spinning large fallacious theories are all regarded by the author in question as enemies of the open society, and he tries to persuade the reader to take a similarly dim view of such theory-spinners. The principal argument of the writer in question is that it is a fallacy to accept any theory which can be, as we loosely say in popular speech, backed up by facts because there is no end to the number of theories, or stories, which can be told and backed up by facts. This principal argument can be illustrated as follows: Suppose we know there is high unemployment in Liverpool. Then we can make up a theory from which it can be deduced that there is high unemployment in Liverpool, We will then (fallaciously) compare our theory with the facts and say (fallaciously) see my theory is proven by the facts. The problem with such ideas is that any number of other theories can also be spun, from which the known facts can be deduced, and their authors can also point to all the facts as evidence for their (quite different) theories. A similar point can be made schematically: given q then if p then q is always true regardless of what p is. Hence to claim q as evidence for if p then q is a fallacy. According to the author in question, Marx, Freud, and many others are guilty of such fallacies. Their disciples are closed-minded, and their closed-mindedness leads to closed 393 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II societies, because everything they see confirms what they already believe. Their theories are such that the known facts can be deduced from them, and they (fallaciously) take the facts to be support for their theories. The correct way to build science, the way which the author in question regards as open minded, and which he associates with the friends of the open society, is different. It consists of avoiding general theories and concentrating on hypotheses that are testable. To be testable, an hypothesis must be falsifiable. That means it has to run the risk of being false. The experimenter must say: if such and such prediction turns out to be wrong, then my hypothesis is false. Theories so general and so amorphous that all known facts confirm them are ruled out as fallacious, i.e. irrational. Hypotheses so specific that it can be clearly stated which facts would prove them false are ruled in as testable, i.e. rational. Schematically: Suppose we hypothesize: if p then q where q may or may not be true. Then not-q implies not-p. And, consequently if it turns out that p is true and q is false, then our hypothesis if p then q is false.

The author in question emphasizes that this result is good, not bad. We have succeeded in stating an hypothesis that is testable, because falsifiable. The reader will readily discern that the writer in question produced a great philosophical achievement. Like Plato, Aquinas, Kant, and others, he brought the very definition of rationality into accord with social needs. Not with all needs and not with needs seen from every point of view but with the needs of his social class as seen from a particular point of view. In the case of the writer in question it was the point of view of liberal, scientifically-minded managerial elites. Rationality, i.e. science, was defined so that the only legitimate form of social change was piecemeal social engineering, the systematic and gradual extension of working hypotheses tested in pilot projects. Revolutionary change, whether of the left or the right, was necessarily irrational, since it changed so many variables at once that it was impossible to tell which hypotheses were being falsified and which were escaping falsification. Suppose, on the other hand, that one is convinced that the basic cultural structures of economic society need to be transformed. Then it will not be good news that science and logic have come down decisively on the side of centrism and have succeeded in making it obligatory to define the scientific method in a way which makes the basic cultural structures of economic society invisible, and obligatory to condemn as unscientific speculation all intellectual efforts capable of understanding and transforming the existing global system. From this latter point of view what appeared to Frege, Russell, the author of the Tractatus, and Popper to be serious philosophical work on the basic problems of logic, with social implications all to the good, appears instead to be the symbolic labor of the priesthood in the inner inner circle of a culture programmed to destroy itself and the ecosystem. Fortunately for the left and the right, and for those who are trying to transcend the left-center-right trichotomy, the views of the writer in question on philosophy and on science are questionable, For one thing the rule against general theories confirmed by all the evidence and not testable by any experiment that would submit it to the risk of falsification would rule out a. the theory of evolution b. the atomic theory of the elements c. Newtons mechanics* and hence make biology, chemistry, and physics unintelligible. For another thing, the rule in * Which was not falsified by a test when the advance of the perihelion was observed, but rather shown to be less generally applicable than Einsteins theory. In general, established theories are modified by new evidence, instead of being abandoned because they have failed a test. 394 Letter 46 favor of small hypotheses such as if p then q which can be falsified by showing that p happened and q did not is in practice of very limited application. If the hypothesis being tested alleges that p produces q and it turns out p is tried and q does not result, then p produces q has not been disproved. What has been disproved is the hypothesis that the tendency of p to produce q is so powerful that q will be produced by p under any and all circumstances an hypothesis so extreme that normally no one would hold it. Indeed in practice everything depends on everything else, so that, for example, if one tries to eliminate poverty in a rural village in Brazil, one is more likely to succeed with an integrated rural development program than by focalismo, and if one wants to be healthy one is more likely to succeed with properly coordinated and proportioned diet, exercise, mental attitude, relaxation, and total lifestyle than by piecemeal medical engineering. In short, the

logic of the writer in question would describe science only in a world where every fact is independent of every other fact, i.e. in a world where the logic of the Tractatus applies. So the celebrated centrist ideological tour deforce of the writer in question is best viewed not as a personal achievement but as the achievement of a generation of Viennese intellectuals and their collaborators in other countries, and the ultimate failure of their project is best regarded as a joint failure. The writer in question is, of course, Sir Karl Popper. He is called Sir because he emigrated to England and was there knighted by the Queen in recognition of his philosophical services. He became in due course quite aware of the objection to the logic of The Open Society and Its Enemies mentioned above, and he spent his later years amending his philosophy to make it acceptable to his critics with the result that his doctrines lost their simplicity and their ideological bite and became politically acceptable to anyone left, right or center except for those people, if there are any, who would deny that scientists should criticize their own and each others theories with argument and with evidence. Meanwhile, back in Vienna, after World War I and the collapse of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian empire, the centrists came to power. Austria became a liberal democracy. A new school of philosophy was founded in Vienna, known as the Vienna Circle; their doctrines came to be called logical positivism. The new breed of philosophers worked hand in glove with the new breed of kings, i.e. the politicians and civil servants. The new kings were ardent democrats and competent technocrats. The new philosophers used logical analysis to demolish the premises of the enemies, i.e. of the enemies of democracy and technocracy. The Tractatus became known as the Bible of logical positivism.* The longs built a democratic welfare state, while their allied philosophers demolished nonsense left and nonsense right that is to say, they demolished nonsense until Hitler annexed Austria, and then nonsense demolished them.** Seen in retrospect, Tractatian philosophy expressed the complacency of the scientifically-minded liberal upper classes of late 19th and early 20th century Europe. Their ethnocentricity. Their inability to comprehend the gathering storm. 395 396 Letter 47 47 GINETTA AND ANGELETTI In Italy we had the first experience with fascism. The fascists organized after the strikes of 1919 and took state power in 192 3. They imposed their form of organization on us and ruled until 1943, although for the last few years they had no real power because they were puppets of the Germans. As a result, we Italians learned some political lessons earlier and better we are more advanced because we suffered sooner and longer. My own view, I replied, is that fascism is the inevitable consequence of the basic structure of economic society. It happened in Italy first, then in Germany, Spain, and in varying degrees in many European, Asian, Latin American, and African nations. Among the continents, only Australia and English-speaking North America have so far been spared fascist experiences, and it is only a matter of time until every nation has its turn to suffer unless the basic structures are transformed. Since she was concerned that I was using the word fascism too loosely, she explained the origin of the term. Mussolini called his terror squads fasci di combattimento, which means bundles of

fight. Fasci are literally bundles of sticks, used since Roman times as symbols of military authority. The word fascist has been extended to apply loosely, perhaps too loosely, to many governments which resemble Mussolinis Italian government of192 3-1943, as you say in varying degrees. Fascism is a useful term, I said, for describing an almost inevitable response to a structural fact. The fact is that in economic society some people own the means of production; others do not. The core value of economic society is freedom, which implies that neither group, neither owners nor non-owners, is obliged to produce. Owners may, in general, do what they want with their property, including locking out workers, shutting down the factories, moving their capital to another place, converting productive acres into leisure farms, or abandoning assets to disuse. Workers in principle can decline to work. Sooner or later, for some reason or other, property owners will tend to decline to invest, and in general to decline to use their property productively. Sooner or later, for one reason or another, workers will tend to strike. It is almost inevitable, I went on, that at some point the exercise of the rights of owners and workers, and the struggle between them conducted more or less according to the laws of freedom, will lead to disorder and misery. The almost inevitable response is that armed men will impose order by force with the proclaimed purposes of destroying divisive elements and of obliging owners and workers to collaborate in order to produce. A short quotation from Mussolini will illustrate my point. In 1923, just before the March on Rome which brought him to power, the United States ambassador to Italy asked him what his program was. Mussolini replied in three words,Work and discipline. It is useful, I continued, to use the term fascism to refer to the abrogation of democratic freedoms and the imposition of a dictatorship of the right, i.e. a dictatorship that defends property and disciplines labor. Ginetta fished some books from her briefcase. In Italy, she said, still determined to make me pay attention to her countrys historical experience, we were doing things before 1920 that are considered innovations in many places today. Listen to this account of peasant organization 397 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II back then in the province of Emilia Romagna, It is similar to what Frances Moore Lapp and Joseph Collins are recommending in 1986: ...cooperatives bought or leased derelict land, drained and improved it, then cultivated it as a business enterprise, sometimes subletting plots to their members, sometimes managing a large estate as a collective farm....The fair distribution of work was enforced through the unions labour exchanges....By 1914 there were large areas of Emilia and lower Lombardy where, with the tolerance of the government, the labour movement had created oases of socialism within capitalist society. That was written by a British historian. Others saw the same facts differently. For example a profascist history published in Rome in 1934 says In the north were invasions of farms, councils of pasture lands, led and inspired by the popolari,* but also looked upon with a joyous eye by the socialists who saw in the army of peasants raised up by the popolari* more material for socialism... The lowlands of Ferrara and Bologna were the worst, being reclaimed and populated by the braccianti** who were not in any way native to the land, being constructors not cultivators of the land. There life was made impossible for the proprietors, they themselves, their beasts and their crops were surrounded, spied on, and menaced. The fascists took power by simple violence, she went on. They beat up the opposition, left, center, and progressive Catholic. They killed many of us. They physically destroyed the buildings

and equipment of trade unions, political parties, progressive church social programs and cooperatives. I interjected the comment that Gramsci had been surprised by the success of fascist violence. He complained that the bourgeoisie had failed to perform its historical task training citizens to be lawabiding. Violence, Ginetta continued, had a strong emotional appeal for young men of all social classes. The fascist gangs were commonly led by ex-officers of the Italian army of World War I, and composed of youths from all lands of backgrounds. Here is a description of them from the same profascist source I just quoted: Audacious and impetuous, they would not be trifled with by the enemy and faced death with indifference. Such was the character of this militia, me ne frego, that is, I dont care a damn, is the motto that is vulgarly, but effectively expressive of their state of mind. The fascination of their fighting spirit, their songs, their courage and gallant spirit of sacrifice, their religious customs when recalling the names of their fallen comrades had an enormous effect on the youth of the country who did not always stop to enquire into the ultimate aim of all this. The adventure itself and action for actions sake was enough for the very young who had grown up far from the sound of war and had come to conceive it and desire it as a great game, and not having been able to take part in it, now tried to create it where and how they could. From this historical experience, Ginetta said, Italy has learned some lesons. One is that every mentally sick young man is a potential fascist. Young people need fun, dreams, inspiration, love, music, dance, unity like a tribe, soccer, swimming, volunteer labor for ideals. Fill their heeds with healthy relationship, construction, outdoor excitement. Then fascism will bore them. * popolari: progressive Christians, forerunners of Christian Democracy. ** braccianti: propertyless workers without steady employment. 398 Letter 47 Two, she continued, we learned to fear the right wing. One reason why socialists, Christians, liberal democrats, and democratic conservatives could not build a coalition against fascism was that they did not believe fascism could happen. After all, the fascists had no coherent political philosophy, they had not spelled out a detailed program, they did not represent a numerically large social class, their leaders did not include the prestigious statesmen who had traditionally represented the economic interests of commerce and industry. A bunch of clowns! Right wing nuts! That is what we thought. After twenty years of repression we thought differently. Three, we learned a weakness of fascism. In their accounts of themselves they conceal the sources of their funding. They would have us believe they are magic a vast paramilitary and propaganda effort with no visible means of support. Their secrecy tells us that public knowledge of the facts would have damaged them. Four, we learned not to be distracted by the tactical versatility of the fascists. They advocated womens rights, then labor rights, they were anti-clerical and they restored the crucifixes to the walls of school rooms; they were passionately in favor of the annexation by Italy of a city in Dalmatia called Fiuma. When the anti-fascists proposed legislation to curb fascist activity, the fascists in parliament confused everyone by voting in favor of it. They were for moral purity or against it, indulgent of corruption or severe. In power the fascists named as Minister of Education a philosopher who argued that there are seven kinds of being. In Germany the fascists were notorious for anti-semitism, but in Italy they were as a matter of fact anti-Aryan, inasmuch as they persecuted

the German minority in northernmost Italy. The fascists were at one time or another on most sides of most issues. What she is really saying, I thought to myself, is that reality and appearance are fundamentally, philosophically, distinct. Reality is the drive for power. The appearance is contrived by the fascists themselves who made speeches and published newspapers in 1919-23 designed to make themselves appear in whatever light would help them gain power. Reality = struggle for power. Appearance = ideological tactics = rhetoric. Here as usual rationality follows metaphysics, that is to say the method for understanding reality (scientific rationality) and the method for deciding how to act on reality (practical rationality) flow from a general conception of what reality is. If Ginetta is right, and if her philosophy can be generalized to other times and places, then whenever the right makes an issue out of some topic of their own choosing, such as fluorinating drinking water to prevent cavities, or abortion, or parole for drug dealers, we should not be distracted by the issue itself. The real question is power. The apparent issue is only a tactic. The same analysis would apply to non-rightwing groups who seek power and who fabricate their public poses in order to get it. Five, Ginetta continued. She was telling me her opinions about Italian fascism in numerical order. She had arrived at five. We learned not to be intransigent when we have no power. The majority of socialists were intransigent in 1919-23. They would not cooperate with bourgeois liberals. They did not want reform. Only revolution. Now. When the revolution came, she said, the intransigent socialists collapsed like a house of cards. For years they had been advocating going out into the streets to fight. But in 1921 when street fighting began, it became clear, as it should have been clear from the start, that the fascists had more vehicles to mobilize their combatants, more experienced fighters, better weapons, and a more aggressive spirit. Ginettas husband had been sitting nearby as I conversed with his wife, listening to one of my tape recordings of Violeta Parra on my Walkman and trying out some strums and fingerings his guitar. As Ginetta told of the collapse of the Italian left in 1923, Angeletti put aside the music and moved to participate in the conversation, since he perceived that we were beginning 399 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Letter47 to discuss a question of perennial interest to leftists the world over, namely, why it is that when push comes to shove the left loses and the right wins. The army was decisive in Italy, said Angeletti. La voil! I exclaimed, which, loosely translated, means Thats it! What I meant to express, although in my usual inarticulate way I said just a wee part of what I meant, leaving unsaid the whole frame of reference out of which I spoke, as an iceberg shows only a visible of leaving 9/10 of itself under water, was And not only in Italy! In the years preceding World War I, Angeletti said, Italy was an ally of Germany and the army was trained with the expectation of fighting on Germanys side. When the war began, the civilian political leaders first declared Italy neutral and then declared war against Germany. The army was not spectacularly successful in the war, and it fought without the solid support of the civilians, since many, including the socialists, were against any participation in the war, and many more had a defeatist attitude, especially after the-army lost the battle of Caporetto. Nevertheless, when the war ended, Italy found itself on the winning side. The fascist appeal to the soldiers and ex-soldiers was astute. They played on the bitterness the army felt over having been manipulated and betrayed

by civilians, especially by socialists. They glorified Italys contribution to the allied victory, and insisted that Italy demand its share and more of the spoil of war. They advocated attacks on Albanians, Greeks, Turks, and others they thought Italians could easily defeat. Fascism stood for strength and patriotism. In any country in the world it would be easy for a few rebels with money and imagination to organize gangs of ex-soldiers and angry young men to burn down buildings and beat people up if only the army would stand aside and let them get away with it. In Italy the army not just stand aside. It found a hundred scarcely concealed ways to intervene on the side of the rebels. When the fascists marched on Rome, the troops were mobilized to defend the city. Everyone knew that the attackers and the defenders sympathized with each other and were not going to fight. Rome fell without a shot being fired. Mussolini was made Prime Minister, and 70,000 blackshirted fascists paraded into the eternal city, where they passed in review before the King, the new Prime Minister, and military brass. From this experience we learned to focus our educational work on the army, its officers and recruits, Angeletti concluded. Six, said Ginetta. He added: The left should be superpatriotic, not antipatriotic. We stand for Italy, against all imperialisms. Seven, she said. Histories of many countries, she went on, show that progressive ideas among army officers are found where the whole population is permeated by progressive ideas. The military problem and the cultural problem are not separate. Gramsci emphasized the cultural problem, I put in, for a slightly different reason. He recognized that working class culture is subordinate culture. A moral and intellectual reform is needed to empower the subordinate classes to govern. That is lesson eight, said Ginetta. As long as working people only know how to play subordinate roles, they will play only subordinate roles. Out the window I saw a great white Lufthansa airplane rise from the runway and take flight toward Hamburg. I imagined it was a swan. Of all the swans in the world it was the largest and the one most confident in the power of its technology. We were having our conversation in the second story departure lounge of Juan Santa Maria International Airport, which is located in Latin America, next door to a beanfield, not far from the city of Alajuela. Ordinarily one does not discuss fascism with a professor of history from the University of Parma, who is small and thin and wears glasses, and her husband who is large and portly and wears a beard, 400 in an airport in Latin America. It happens only occasionally. A servant wearing a moustache brought us small cups of strong coffee. I supposed I should be agreeing wholeheartedly with the conclusions we were drawing about how to stop fascism. Instead, I found myself agreeing halfheartedly. The turns our discussion was taking were leading to an antifascism too singleminded, too hostile... As I sat in the departure lounge I wished there could be such a thing as a Politics of Kindness. Politics is the essence of policy, the architecture of human relations. I wanted it to bring out the best in people, to guide our global village toward the Good, which equals Beauty, which equals Helping Each Other Survive. Solidarity when? I asked myself Why must we always destroy some person or group before the world will be safe for solidarity? How would Gandhi fight fascism? How would Martin Luther King Jr.? The uselessness of my thoughts oppressed me. Ginetta and Angeletti were not ready to hear about

salvation. Whatever I might mean to say, they would hear the hammers of the fascists nailing crucifixes to the walls of classrooms. They would hear paternalism. Ginetta, being an historian, would hear the tread of the Russian troops sent by Czar Nicholas I in 1848 to stamp out democracy in Central Europe, in the name of Gods Love. I need to express my thoughts in a language they will understand. Moreover, finding a way to make sense to them would be a way to reassure myself that a Politics of Kindness really does make sense. If it does. Sometimes I fear that I am a victim of sentimental illusions. Sometimes I am afraid that I only appear to exist. If the truth were told it would be revealed that in truth am a nothing, a nonexistence. Maybe the only real people are the fighters. The lovers are only dreams in the mind of God. And if there is no God, then there is not even a Mind for lovers to be dreams in. Or maybe being in love is not quite nothing, but a faded shred of existence teetering on the brink of nonexistence; lovers are misfits who exist only because of an oversight of the Destroyers; misfits thrown into some little corner of the world as fasci di simpatia. bundles of good intentions, so distant from anything that matters, so irrelevant to real reality, that History, which ordinarily would not allow anything so Powerless to exist, has forgotten us. If I could find a way to articulate my misgivings about Ginetta and Angelettis way of interpreting history, in terms intelligible to them, then I could enter into dialogue with them. A dialogue with them would help me to give my beliefs a tangible form, and to test their validity. After several moments of reflection, punctuated by five tiny sips of strong coffee, I found a promising approach to introducing my misgivings into the conversation. But, but, I demurred, we have not yet discovered the most important of the causes of fascism. What is the most important cause? Let us listen to Mussolini, I said. He said many times that nobody would invest in Italy while it was in the state to which democratic governments had allowed it to decline, that only strong government could restore the confidence of business. When Mussolini presented himself to King Humbert, as the newly chosen prime minister, he announced that here at last, in his person, was a real government, a government with force. He did indeed say such things many times, replied Ginetta. But Mussolini said many things many times. He frequently said things he did not mean. As to saying ltaly needed a strong government which was what he said most often the idea of force does not in itself imply that the force is to be used for any particular purpose, such as the purpose you suggest, creating a favorable investment climate. Why do you single out this economic motive as the most important cause of fascism? Ecology provides the canon for interpreting the social text, I said, The basic structures of any life-form organize the life-forms means for surviving in the environment. That is why 401 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Letter 47 they are called basic. In our life-form, economic society, the basic needs are met mainly by producing goods for the market. The production process starts with someone invests money. What do you mean by investing? Advancing money for producing goods or services, with the expectation of making a profit.* So when investor confidence, thus broadly conceived, is low, goods and services do not get produced; workers are unemployed, peoples needs are not met. The system is in crisis, but it has ways of coping with crisis. Like any structure which tends to persist over long periods, the symbolic structure of economic society has built-in defenses. One of the defenses is fascism.

How is fascism a defense of economic society? It keeps its structures the same, and restores them when they have been modified, defending property and disciplining workers. Why do you say this defense is built-in? Because it is almost inevitable that the system will defend itself in this way when challenged. Progressive politics (or perhaps something else) leads to a decline in investor confidence, which leads to diminished productive activity, which leads to suffering, which leads to restoration of the conditions under which the system is able to work (i.e. the conditions for the continued accumulation of capital). When the latter is done by force and includes suspending democratic freedoms it is called fascism. You seem to be saying that when and where the system functions it tends toward democracy, but when and where the conditions for its functioning break down, the system restores itself in whatever way it must to make itself work often with violence and repression. So do you expect economic society to go on oscillating between its democratic and its fascist forms until the ecosystem crashes, or until nuclear war turns us all to dust and ashes? No. Why not? It is possible to build other systems, which will have their own self-defending structures. How? Encourage the growth points that already exist. What is a growth point? It is a point where the existing symbolic structures are being modified in a beautiful and viable direction, where there is some energy available so that cultural action to encourage the change of meanings will produce new meanings with vitality. The process is similar to the production of a new natural species: the new meanings (i.e. the new genetic code, but in the case of societies it is a new cultural code) will survive and reproduce only where there is an energy niche the new meanings can occupy. Your remarks are somewhat abstract. Can you give me an example? In May 1968 there were major youth riots in France. Jean-Paul Sartres analysis of them used an old-fashioned metaphysical language, but it was insightful. Sartre contrasted the universal and the particular. The frustration of youth was a yearning for the universal, disappointed by the particular. What was the universal? The students in the universities were learning medicine in order to produce health. They studied agronomy to grow wheat to feed people. They studied engineering to build machines, or electronic devices, or bridges, or water-supply systems....They studied pedagogy to help children learn, psychology and sociology to improve human relations, economics to organize productive and distributive processes, law to resolve conflicts, etc. What was the particular? 402 Whenever they encountered the world outside the university, they learned that society is a fraud. Economic society does not have among its objectives health, or meeting human needs of any kind. The graduate is lucky to get a job at all, and can get one only by putting her or his universal knowledge at the service of somebodys particular interests. You work for pay, or you dont work. The 1968 student revolts were an example of an attempt to modify the existing cultural structure; the students wanted economic reality to conform to the ideals they had been taught.

So you think there was energy in the student revolt partly because many people want a life of useful service? The need to participate in constructive human relationships is built into our emotional structure, since time immemorial, since hominization. What about the cadets in the military academies? They are humans like the rest. When economic society is functioning normally, they can accept the dictum of its classic philosopher, Kant, that military glory consists not in willingness to kill but in willingness to die if necessary to defend the law. And when economic society does not function normally, they impose fascism on one country after another. Right? They are, of course, selfish, proud, poorly informed, and excitable just like doctors, teachers, waitresses... and everyone else. But when they act according to their ideals, their best selves, they are very reluctant to impose fascism, and they do not call it fascism because the last people they want to identify with are Mussolini and Hitler. They act for the good of the country. Because they see no alternative. Because they believe that as soon as the divisive elements are destroyed the society will function normally. So is the alternative to fascism student revolt? It is production. Do you mean that if we all get busy and produce anything at all, we will not need to worry about fascism? A better society, I answered, reorients the direction of production, It produces what is needed and what is in harmony with sustainable natural cycles, the restoration of the soil, of the water, and of the atmosphere. So you are saying, Ginetta surmised, that fascists will take control where non-fascists do not succeed in maintaining a satisfactory volume and direction of production. Of course we know why they want to take control: it is because they want to defend class interests; the question is whether they will find circumstances that will enable them to succeed, and your answer is that they will succeed where there is chaos in production. I suppose you know that fascists often make propaganda to create the appearance that there is chaos in production, and sabotage production deliberately, in order to have a pretext to take control you must know because the classic case was Chile. A mistake we made in Italy, broke in Angeletti, was to call a general strike to keep fascism from coming to power. How absurd! Since the working class had improved wages substantially by strikes from 1901 onward, the strike had come to be our favorite, almost our only, weapon. When fascism became a threat, we struck to save democracy. Fascist para-military blackshirts, with the connivance of the army, broke the strike, and then they appeared before the public as saviors. Mussolini was able to say, in effect, See! The anti-patriots tried to shut down the country. The democratic politicians, weak and vacillating as usual, could not stop them. But we fascists did stop them by force! Nine, said Ginetta. We the people must develop all the power we can to start production, to influence its direction, to keep it going. We must not rely exclusively on the power to stop production. 403 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II I gave them a hug and a kiss because it was time for them to board Alitalia Flight 712 to Lisboa and Milano. I carried Angelettis guitar to the gate while he carried most of the suitcases.

What really interested Marx, said Ginetta, as she walked to the gate, was overall reorganization not the isolated exception to the dominant social relations, but the transformative movement of the whole society. As you know, I said, overall reorganization was a practical problem for Italian workers between 1919 and 1923. As you know, the workers took control of many factories and farms. The high point of worker control was the occupation of the automobile works at Turin in 1920. We ran the assembly lines very well, said Angeletti. It was an exemplary case of successful management of industry by the workers. The fascists say you were hopelessly incompetent. They say it was an exemplary case of chaos. They lie! exclaimed Angeletti, dropping the suitcases and clenching his fists. In any case, I went on, speaking rapidly, the workers could make cars only until the raw materials ran out, and after they made them they could not sell them, which was an immediate practical problem because even though the workers had occupied the factory, the owners still controlled the inputs and the network for distributing the outputs, and the situation also posed the theoretical problem whether a socialist society is even possible because even supposing that the workers took control of the sources of raw materials and took control of marketing, then what would they do with them? If the worker controlled factory bought coal from the worker controlled mine in the usual capitalist way etc. etc. then all the worker-controlled institutions would be buying and selling from each other in a market, just like capitalists. So the new institutions would be worker-controlled on the inside and market-governed on the outside. And if historical experience is any guide their internal organization would gradually adapt itself to the requirements of the market governed external environment, and the workers gains would be eroded. We want to see an overall economy that is mixed, said Ginetta, where planning processes give us a feasible strategy for the long-term future and a certain degree of stability, a certain degree of relevance of ethical criteria to economic decisions, an atmosphere encouraging experiments with diverse types of enterprise, efficient markets with not instead of solidarity. The theoretical problem was that we could not build such an economy until we could imagine a way to organize it. As you know, I went on, the workers who occupied the factories at Turin had a newspaper, called Ordine Nuovo (New Order), and the newspaper had an editor, whose name was Antonio Gramsci, and the editor had a friend who was an economist called Piero Sraffa. Antonios friend Piero was outside Italy when the fascists took state power. He stayedout, dedicating himself to the theoretical problems of economics at Cambridge University in England. Pieros friend Antonio was also outside Italy at the time of the March on Rome, but he went back to organize resistance. Antonio ended up in jail, where he suffered special humiliations ordered by Mussolini himself; still he was able to read the theoretical books his friend Piero sent him; he even carried on a clandestine correspondence from his jail cell with the leaders of Soviet Russia, using Piero as his go-between. While Antonio suffered in prison, secretly composing the classic texts of cultural Marxism, Piero, as you may know, became the worlds leading scholarly authority on classical economic theory. He prepared a complete edition of the works of the most thorough of the classical theorists, David Ricardo, which, as one historian of economics put it, breathes precision. Piero Sraffa also became a major theoretical economist in his own right. We know, said Ginetta. Sraffas work is decisive. She wrote out the simple model with which Sraffa begins his book on economic theory on the back of her boarding pass. 404

Letter 47 280 qr. wheat + 12 t. iron 400 qr. wheat 120 qr. wheat + 8 t. iron 201 t. iron This model represents a simple economy which produces two products for subsistence. It models a years operations. The two products are called wheat and iron. Now notice that in the vertical columns 280 + 120 = 400, and 12 + 8 = 20. I know, I said. The meaning of the first line, she said, is that it takes inputs of 280 quarters wheat and 12 tons iron to produce as output 400 quarters wheat. We can think of the 280 wheat partly as seed, partly as food for the workers; we can think of the 12 iron as tools. It takes that much wheat and iron to produce that much wheat. How do we know? Because agronomists and engineers tell us. The second line expresses another bit of technical information: it takes 120 wheat and 8 iron to make 20 iron. In this subsistence model, the output of a years operations equals the necessary inputs for the next years operations. Nothing is added by production to the possessions of society The economy just reproduces itself. A cycle. Year after year. As you pointed out, I said, the output 400, equals the next years inputs 280 + 120. And the output 20 = 12 + 8. Yes, she said, this model uses only lower mathematics. But suppose there is a surplus suppose that at the end of a years operations the output exceeds what needs to be thrown back into the system to keep it going. OK, lets suppose that. Then somehow somebody has to decide what to do with the surplus. Will it be used for extra consumption, and, if so, for whose consumption? Or will it, or part of it, be used to expand the productive capacity of the system, by digging wells to irrigate land or opening new iron mines, or something of the sort? Yes, somebody will have to decide those things somehow. And suppose that instead of two outputs, wheat and iron, the model represents three, or four, or a thousand, or seven thousand, and for each output there is a specified series of inputs. The mathematics would be more difficult, I said. A team of economists led by Wassily Leontiev, she said, using methods pioneered by Sraffa, has recently prepared for the United Nations an input output model of the economy of entire world. Many national economies, in countries of all political hues, are now planned, guided, or described using Sraffa-type techniques. So the theoretical work of Antonios friend Piero turned out to be of a kind which has great practical significance, I said. Angeletti picked up the suitcases. And great political significance, Ginetta continued. The kind of work done by Sraffa shows us how to imagine an economy as a physical process. The information needed to organize an economy can be supplied to a great extent by engineers and other specialists, from their knowledge of the inputs needed to produce given outputs. Assigning the surplus to capitalists, when there is a surplus, as the incentive to persuade them to permit the productive use of their property is not necessary. The existence of an underclass of beggars,thieves, prostitutes, pimps, mental patients, drug addicts, plus the police, the social workers, and the therapists who protect the rest of society from the underclass is not necessary. What is necessary is that societys productive system perform physically the tomato plant, for example, needs water,

nitrogen, sunlight, etc. at the right time and in the right amounts. The truck that moves the tomatoes to the consumer has got to have tires, gasoline, a motor, and a driver. 405 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II On the other hand, I said, while we are criticizing fascists and democratic conservatives for confusing their preferred system of social relations with the physical requirements of production, we must remember to criticize liberals and radicals if they condemn the existing structures without offering constructive alternatives in the field of production, or if they propose a productive alternative that is theoretically possible in a distant future, but right now. Now is the time for us to go through the gate, said Ginetta. But I still had one more thing to say. I hope you did not misunderstand what I said about the student revolts of 1968. You were perfectly clear, said Ginetta. You meant it is not necessary for humans to pattern their personalities after the ideal-type of modern rational economic man. Sraffa shows in an especially clear way that economics can be weaned from the culture that bred it. No cultural form is essential to the operation of complex production and distribution process. As long as people contribute the necessary input to the function, there is space for infinite kinds of personality. Functional cooperation, cultural diversity. Different languages. Dances. Hobby animals. Duck clubs. Musics. Families; Prayers. Surfs. Costumes. Philosophical speculations. Garden city. You have it. Angeletti put down the suitcases and gave me a great bear-hug. Ginetta gave me a little weasel hug. I felt loved. They seemed like old friends to me as they crossed the tarmac toward the waiting #11 airship with green and red trim, the towering bulk of Angeletti, the thin wisp of Ginetta wondered whether, a few minutes ago when I was worrying about how to communicate with them, they had been groping for a way to communicate with me. Why had I suspected them of being singleminded and hostile? Now I felt guilty for having attributed to them a narrowness and ill-will they probably never had. In any case, there they went, walking across the tarmac toward the airship. We had met a few days earlier in Alajuela. She was there to speak at an international conference, and he was there to be with her, but he was attracted to me by my tape The Silver Record of Folk Music by Violeta Parra, which he borrowed and listened to frequently for several days. We met at a second-rank hotel with overstaffed chairs, with a rail-wall blowup of a black-and-white photograph of a Swiss alp, with no swimming pool. Angeletti asked me if I had ever actually met Violeta. Actually, I had. Violeta used to have a big tent with a dirt floor at a place in Chile called The Queen. She was not singing on the day we visited her tent, because she was sad, but she served her guests meat pies and red wine in the oldfashioned Chilean way, and the rest of the Parra family was singing, and Violeta introduced them and made comments. She said, La propaganda de boca en boca es la major, which means word-of-mouth advertising is best, and la raiz de todo esta en el pueblo, which means, The root of everything is in the people. This heroic woman made it her business to save Chilean folk music when it was in danger of being forgotten because most musicians wanted to be international, up-to-date, or high class. She went into the country districts, the slums, the hills, and the remote mining camps of the desert, to find the grandmothers and grandfathers so she could learn their music before they died. Now that the dark night of fascism has fallen over Chile, her work has proven to be more important than she ever dreamed it would be. Tape recordings of Violeta singing the old songs are among the main inspirations which keep alive the spirit of the people in difficult times.

406 Letter 48 48 WHO WILL BE THE LAST METAPHYSICIAN? The Lord sends His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust (This letter begins with several remarks concerning my trip to the hospital, which may seem to be an unnecessary preamble, since it is the conversation of the elderly patient whom I visited, and not my means of transportation to the visit, which is the principal subject to be ied. It happens, however, that some thoughts prompted by my bus ride provide the perfect setting for the old mans gems of wisdom. If my manner of beginning seems to be an excessive circumlocution, please remember as you follow my detour the words of the great American poet Walt Whitman, I teach you straying, but you cannot stray from me. I will whisper in your ear until you understand my words.) First I need to explain that ram was pouring heavily from the low sky, in sheets, and the windshield wipers on the bus were plowing the water with a steady, reliable rhythm, THUD as the wiper blade hit its outer limit, CLICK as it returned to the base of its arc. THUD... CLICK, THUD... CLICK, THUD... CLICK... Second you have to understand that I adore public transportation systems. I love it that all kinds of people who would ordinarily pass each other like distant ships in the night, come close to each other as passengers on buses and, whether they know it or not, exchange water vapor, exchange fragrant essences, exchange germs and antibodies. Sometimes the passengers smile and chat, especially when the women wear My Sin and the men wear musk. Many a dull day has been transformed into a giggly day by a joke heard on the morning bus. Many a student has passed mathematics because and only because a friend explained a formula on the bus on the way to the test. Many a shopper has been led to an important bargain by a hint from someone who just happened to sit in the next seat. Most of all I like the days when nobody says anything and everyone is riding together silently, enjoying a certain mutual interest in transportation the friendship of travellers, Aristotle would call it. Nobody says a word; each respects the others aloneness and shares the others ride. The companionship of cooperative silence makes the Rush Hour into the Hour of Rest between the factory and the kitchen comes the cocoon of pleasure, on the bus. Well, obviously, I was having a wonderful time. Two things I love are bus rides and rain, so a ride in a downpour me colmo de dicha. as we say in Spanish, which means, wrongly translated, filled my beehive with honey. I was doing my One Fantasy, which consists of looking at each passenger in turn and imagining how each looked and acted at Age One, while the rain mizzled and swished our vehicle as if it were a babe in its arms. The wipers were still saying THUD... CLICK regularly over and over as they did their work; the headlights pierced the mists; the powerful motor moved us all. Surely the machinery was taking good care of us; surely the driver was sober and experienced. Everything was working as it should and soon each of us would arrive safely at her or his destination, just as Adam Smith had thought, about two 407 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II centuries earlier, that the economy would work like a great machine to bring to each of us her or his daily bread. Of course Adam Smith did not, any more than did Immanuel Kant, invent

economic society. These cultural workers reflected in their books the cultural structures which were already in place, and had only to be expressed in a systematic order in a text, that is, unified by philosophy. Machines were already the basis of industry; mechanics was already the marvel of the intellect; the rights of man were already conceived by analogy to mechanical powers; government was social machinery (with three powers, the executive, legislative, and judicial, charged respectively with implementing, making, and interpreting laws, the laws themselves being conceived as parallel to the laws of nature); and under all were the moral laws, the laws of freedom as Kant called them, guaranteeing the legitimacy of the principal parts of the social machinery, property and contract, which are so much taken for granted in social life that they seem to be as natural as the rain. I asked myself whether my babies (I was then riding in a bus full of one-yearolds) would necessarily, because of some feature of their genetic coding or of their physical environment, grow up to live in a world where powerful motors carried them, and windshield wipers moved the rain from their paths THUD.... CLICK, THUD... CLICK, THUD... CLICK, and where the freedom of a person to do as she or he pleases with her his property, unless the law stipulates otherwise, would be considered a fact of nature. Nothing in their baby faces revealed the slightest inclination in that direction. Their infantile malleability supported rather the opinion of the anthropologists and of Piero Sraffa, that infinitely many cultural systems are physically viable. The machinery of any given technology has certain fixed requirements, but the humans who drive it can perform their parts with many different motives and mores. I reflected to myself, with my head only a few inches from the swirling rainwash and yet perfectly dry because of the intervening glass pane of the bus window, that even though infinitely many cultural systems are physically viable ours is not one of them, since; our cultural system is dilapidating the topsoil, the gene pool, the ozone layer, the tropical rain forests, the water table, and the air supply. And when the babies began to wail and to rage, as babies do (apparently for genetically coded reasons), I reflected that humans evolved to live in tribes more passionate than ours, so that even giving due credit to the talents of the bus driver even giving due credit to the fine engineers who designed the bus, and even giving credit to all the many achievements of our great society, our civilization is still, I thought to myself, in dreadful need of improvement, and in the long run probably not sufficiently emotionally satisfying to be spiritually viable. Either. Having thoroughly depressed myself by my gloomy thoughts during the latter part of what had started out to be a marvellous bus ride, I was in no mood to greet the earthworms who thronged the surface at the bus stop, where they had come for air because of the saturation of the lower regions. Lucky radiation-resistant creeps! I thought to myself, with a spirit corrupted by envy. I stared at the pitted indentations in the ground made by the raindrops as I walked under a black umbrella to the hospital entrance. A volunteer nursing assistant seated at a desk, wearing her name on a plastic tag, wearing gray hair straight and tinted slightly blue and wearing clear glasses over her beautiful gray eyes, gave me a yellow pass authorizing me to take the third elevator to Wing L-3, the geriatric ward.* I will begin, I said, as soon as I had greeted the patient, seated myself beside the bed, and plugged in the tape recorder, with the question everybody always asks. Why did you change your mind about your early classic work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and devote much * Wittgenstein entered a nursing home in Indiana in 1952, the year of his putative death, with the cooperation of his wealthy sister Margaret and Mrs. Bevan, the wife of his British doctor, both of whom sympathized with his desire to get away from philosophers. Exhumation of the corpse attributed to him will prove it to be a wax effigy. In 1982, at the age of 93, he was transferred to

the geriatric ward of Reid Memorial Hospital in Richmond, Indiana. 408 of the second of your two principal books, the Philosophical Investigations to refuting what you yourself had said earlier? In the first book you tried, successfully in your own opinion, to cure philosophy of metaphysics, and yet later you suspected yourself of having succumbed to that disease, and you prescribe a more radical therapy to root it out. I was never happy, he replied, to have written the Bible of Logical Positivism, as the Tractatus was called, in the first place because the book was misunderstood. I meant to show that once all possible statements of fact had been made, God, ethics, and beauty were still unsaid. Unsaid and unsayable, but infinitely more important than anything that can be said. I was a mystic, who had suppposedly written the Bible of the anti-mystics. Why didnt you tell them they were wrong? I chose to remain silent, and to be away from philosophers, especially from my so-called disciples. I took a course in elementary education and went out to the country to teach children in poor villages. For a while I worked as assistant gardener in a monastery and considered becoming a monk. I considered suicide, more than once. Several of the logical positivists I deliberately avoided. Once against my better judgment I accepted an invitation to speak to the local positivist club, otherwise known as the Vienna Circle. For my speech I read to them from the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore: Make of my life a hollow reed That Thou might fill with music. Of course they did not get the point. They were hopeless. Vulgar. Bad contacts, as Nietzsche would say. And yet, I said, half asking a question and half making a statement, you blamed yourself for the Tractatus. You did not just blame others for misinterpreting what you had written. I did not know what I was doing, he answered. One of the points I insist on in my later work is that a speaker or writer does not determine what the words she or he uses mean. The meaning of a book, and its use in its context, is likely to be quite different from what the writer intended. I spoke from experience, since the author had so little influence on the social significance of the Tractatus. How did you get involved in writing a book you did not believe in? I read Gottlob Freges Foundations of Arithmetic and it answered some needs for me. It spoke to my need to get to the bottom of things, to get my ideas clear needs many people have. It also spoke to a special Viennese need, to a concern common among Austrian intellectuals of my milieu, which was to find a systematic way to separate sense from nonsense, to deflate the nonsense that was rampant in the daily press, in politics, in pseudo-science, and in pseudo-art in Vienna while I was growing up. I contacted Freg and he sent me to study with Bertrand Russell. Soon the FregeRussell project of unifying mathematics and logic was my project too. I had my own motives, my mystical and Viennese motives, but nevertheless I added my projects to Russells desire to complete logic, as I said in my notebooks at the time, and what most struck me was that Russell was not doing it right. Shoddy work. His logic needed to make certain assumptions about matters of fact* but logic had to take care of itself; logic had to stand on its own. Logic had to show the logical form of any fact whatever. It could not, ought not, say anything at all about what the facts are. So I conceived the problem at the time. Why did I write the Tractatus? After castigating private meaning so thoroughly in the Philosophical Investigations I would be the last person in the world to claim to know what I

* The axiom of infinity, which Russells logic needed, postulated that in fact there is an infinite number of things. The Tractatus avoids making this empirical assumption at the base of mathematics, hence at the base of science, hence at the base of knowledge. 409 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II privately intended when I wrote the Tractatus. So lets just say I had several motives and I did write it, and then it went out into the world and had a career of its own. What it did partly with and partly without my consent was to carry forward the project of finding a solid foundation for logic and mathematics. I thought, and still think, that I carried it forward on the only possible basis: namely, supposing that there are simple facts for simple propositions to describe, and simple propositions to describe simple facts, at the base of the whole edifice of logic, hence at the base of language, hence at base of mathematics, hence at the base of science, hence at the base of knowledge. You still believe that? I asked. If your project is to find a foundation, then that is the way to do it. What I was doing in my early years what we were doing was to find a common foundation, i.e. to unify, i.e. to express in a systematic order in a text, some of the main symbolic structures of modern society. But I despise modern society! I always have. Sometimes I thought to myself that I would have been at home in Vienna in Schumanns time in the romantic revolt against modernism. My favorite composer was Schubert. Romantic to the core! In cementing the foundations of the logico-mathematical, implicitly mechanical, worldview of the late 19th century, building a springboard for the logical positivism of the early 20th century, I was an unwitting accomplice. You were not entirely unwitting, I said, and the mechanics was not entirely implicit. You deliberately made logical form analogous to the form given to the science of mechanics by the physicist Hertz, whose Principles of Mechanics you relied on. But he was a Kantian physicist! Not a mere mechanist. Hertz believed, like Kant, in the starry heavens above, the moral law within. I said I was a mystic, I meant in my own way of course, and as a mystic I wanted to delimit all knowledge all meaningful speech from the inside* to draw a boundary around what can be said from the inside of what can be said, and thus to save the unsayable, the beyond-all-speech. But I did not, I said I did not, I admitted I did not, see where logic and mathematics and mechanics fitted into the whole form of life of modern society. I did not see the full context at the time. I still dont. I think Piero Sraffa grasped the context better than I did. It was he who persuaded me to abandon the idea of logical form he knew at once that the whole idea was fishy. We were riding on a train, Piero and I, and he turned to me and made a gesture brushing the bottom of his chin with the back of his fingers a Neapolitan gesture of contempt and then demanded, What is the logical form of that? Sraffa was an economist, I said, and he knew perfectly well where logic, mathematics, and mechanics fit into the economic aspects of our form of life. He was in a sense an anti-economist, who provided an alternative to the logic of homo economicus which is woven into the warp and woof of modern cultural structures. His work shows that there is no necessary form of economic institutions, as your later work shows there is no foundation to logic and mathematics. Let us assume that Sraffa and your later workare right, i.e. there are no necessary foundations. Then it would stand to reason that if one were to suffer from the delusion that there were, and that one had found them, then the delusion one would suffer from would be ethnocentric. One or more features of the individualist style of economic society would appear to one to be necessary foundations of

any possible thought, and that is just the kind of delusion that you, Russell, Frege, the logical positivists, and pre-Sraffian economists did suffer from. But modern society is not my own! the old man shouted. I have always felt alienated in it, never at home. I was always the outsider so filthy rich I was tutored at home and not sent to school, with a distant father, a demanding mother who wanted us all to be musical geniuses, sexually different, the odd-man-out in the army trenches in World War I, a misfit in a poor village in rural Austria. Have you seen the sketch for a foreword I wrote in 1930? It can be considered an early draft of the preface to the Philosophical Investigations. He showed it to-me: 410 Letter 48 Sketch for a Foreword This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written. This is not, I believe, the spirit of the main current of European and American civilization. The spirit of this civilization makes itself manifest in the industry, architecture and music of our time, in its fascism and socialism, and it is alien and uncongenial to the author. This is not a value judgement. It is not, it is true, as though he accepted what nowadays passes for architecture as architecture or did not approach what is called modern music with the greatest suspicion though without understanding its language, but still, the disappearance of the arts does not justify judging disparagingly the human beings who make up this civilization. For in times like these, genuine strong characters simply leave the arts aside and turn to other things and somehow the worth of the individual man finds expression. Not, to be sure, in the way it would at a time of high culture. A culture is like a big organization which assigns each of its members a place where he can work in the spirit of the whole; and it is perfectly fair for his power to be measured by the contribution he succeeds in making to the whole enterprise. In an age without culture on the other hand forces become fragmented and the power of an individual man is used up in overcoming opposing forces and frictional resistances; it does not show in the distance he travels but perhaps only in the heat he generates in overcoming friction. But energy is still energy and even if the spectacle which our age affords us is not the formation of a great cultural work, with the best men contributing to the same great end, so much as the unimpressive spectacle of a crowd whose best members work for purely private ends, still we must not forget that the spectacle is not what matters. I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe. Your later work, I said, your recantation, so to speak, is often criticized as deliberately obscure, or praised as a therapy that cures the reader in ways plain words could not possibly achieve. You proceed by indirection, asking questions, giving examples, carrying on dialogues with imaginary interlocutors, criss-crossing the same territory approaching it from different directions you seem to take deliberate glee in violating your own earlier principle that whatever can be said can be said clearly, and the whole thing reminds me pardon me for saying so of my daughters philosophy class in Qubec, at a school where philosophy consists entirely of the study of St. Thomas Aquinas. One day the teacher used many examples from art and literature and my daughter, trying to congratulate him, told him after class that she had understood everything that

day. Mais, he answered, il faut que tu comprennes, mademoiselle, que tu ne comprends pas. (But it is necessary that you understand, miss, that you do not understand.) The professors attitude was, I think, quite appropriate for the teaching of Thomism, since the point of Thomist philosophy is to lead us toward God, and one thing it is necessary to understand about God is that we do not understand. Similarly, what we must above all understand about Heideggers Being, is that we do not understand it. So when you write your * The Sketch for a Foreword is in one of the many books put together by Wittgensteins literary executors from his notes. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value. Edited by G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. p. 6e. The sketch is literally an early draft of the foreword to the Philosophical Remarks. Oxford, Blackwell, 1975, and is a more distant ancestor of the preface which Wittgenstein himself prepared for the Philosophical Investigations. The earliest version is the most revealing; the latest version the most circumspect. 411 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Investigations so that they cannot in any ordinary way be understood, I suspect that in your own way you are leading the reader to God, or to Being. In my later work I show that there is no foundation, no ultimate description of the simple basic fact, he said. What we must accept is a form of life. If we want to know the correct name of something, if we want to identify our feelings, or to find out the right way to follow a rule in grammar or in mathematics, what we must always consult is usage, the form of life of our people in its physical context. We need in the end a command (Befehl) or instruction on how something is customarily done or what is customarily said (Rechtfertigung).* So I will admit to a certain similarity with Aquinas and Heidegger. We are all three on the side of authority. I would say, if I were not myself, and did not abhor generalizations as I do, prescription is as logically primitive as description, and a societys command structure is as basic as its technology. So your result is consciousness-raising, in the odd way in which reaction and revolution coincide. Modern society is consciousness-lowering because it seeks a foundational description, a fact which grounds the process of rational inquiry and therefore the fundamental precepts of a liberal social order. In the absence of an actual description, a foundational method for making descriptions will do. In truth, as rightists and leftists know and centrists are reluctant to admit, the social order has no rational ground its essential structure is authority, command. Wittgenstein nodded but did not comment, so I went on to my next point. But on the other hand, your work seems to be unaware of the social functions of philosophy, which perhaps explains why you abhor generalizations since traditionally philosophers have performed the useful social function of making generalizations that facilitate social organization. You say philosophy is a constant battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language. Language itself is the sly enemy who traps us again and again. The Philosophical Investigations is full of examples of the wiles of language. The superficial resemblance of a meaningless word-group to a meaningful sentence misleads us into thinking that the meaningless word-group, makes sense. An utterance which sounds like a description is taken to be a description of something, even when its actual use is not describing and even when there is really nothing there to be described. Language itself entices us to posit nonexistent entities, by using expressions superficially similar to ones that refer to entities when there are none to refer to. When the same term is used in different contexts, the words themselves make it easy to fall into the mistake of supposing there is some common essence which is identified each time the term is used.**

But, I continued, there is another way to look at language. Language has always been primarily concerned with interpersonal relations, and never was exclusively or mainly an instrument for making references to the essences of things. The so-called errors you unmask are not just mistakes; they are resources for social organization. Language evolved as part of culture with a built-in tendency to blend one thing with another, to extend metaphors and metonyms, to blur distinctions, to connect, unify, mystify. This tendency has uses, and philosophers are among those who use it. The uses of metaphysics are not apparent to you because when you did metaphysics yourself, back in your Tractatus days, you were not aware that you were strengthening the authority of symbolic structures. The social function of your work was invisible to you; so it seemed to you later, when you recanted, that earlier you had been misled by language for no particular reason except that language is by nature sly. But in spite * See for example in a German edition, Investigations 206, 212, 217, 261, 265, 267. cf. Kultur ist eine Ordensregel. Culture and Value, p. 83. ** See Garth Hallett, S.J., A Companion to Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977. p. 28. 412 Letter 48 of your inability as a youth to command a clear view of the context of your work, the construction of unifying symbols, which you yourself were unwittingly doing, is something which humans by nature do. The specific difference of our species, the possession of language, facilitates this activity. Seen in this light, the last metaphysician will be the last human being, and the last human being will be the last metaphysician. Wittgenstein did not reply because he had gone to sleep, as the elderly often do. While I waited for him to wake up I stood in the doorway of his room and watched some of the other patients on the geriatric ward a tall, thin, emaciated lady talking to herself; another lady, shorter, with misshapen neck muscles absorbed in gazing at her fingernails; a man in a wheelchair unbuttoning his black rubber pants. A nurse says to him, Button your pants up, Charlie. You dont unbutton your pants in front of the ladies. Still another lady, also in a wheelchair, bumps into Charlie from behind. She says Ha! I was in back of you! and they laugh together. Wittgensteins eyes were still closed when I tired of watching the other patients and turned to the window to watch the ram pouring down from the skies. If you have done much watching of rain you will know that out of the humid spaces among the curtains of water images appear, and that the rain sounds bring words to accompany the images. The first image that came to me showed the beautiful gray eyes of the volunteer nursing assistant at the pass desk downstairs. The words with the image were from Shakespeares Merchant of Venice: The quality of mercy is not strained It falleth as the gentle rain from heaven I think the reason these particular lines came to me was that Wittgenstein had reminded me of the need for mercy. The emphasis on command carried as a corollary the need for kindness; it dissolved my, already weak confidence in technological fixes independent of goodwill. The gray haired lady with gray eyes was a volunteer helper, a symbol of mercy, a pretty mother. My next image was Ludwig Wittgenstein, age 2 3, arriving at midnight at Bertrand Russells rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, announcing that when he left he would commit suicide, and then pacing the floor silently, intently, for two hours. The words were: Blessed are they that mourn

For they shall be comforted Of course I do not know exactly why these words came to me out of the ram, but I think it was because Wittgenstein struck me above all as a very lonely person, and the Beatitudes promise comfort to the lonely. Since Wittgenstein continued to sleep, after watching the rain out the window for a while longer I left and went home. 413

414 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II THE BELOVED COMMUNITY Dr. King chose the words, the beloved community, to name the goal he was striving forl It is the name of the ideal he gave us.

This essay is about Dr. Kings quest for the words he needed to express his meaning, and about why he chose the phrase the beloved community. Although not altogether new, it was largely an unknown phrase for most Americans until Dr. King used it in the original statement of purpose of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. He wrote then, The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the beloved community in America. The words the beloved community remained prominent in Dr. Kings teachings in the years leading up to the Poor Peoples Crusade of 1968. We are still struggling today, building on the legacy Dr. King left us, to make these words meaningful, and to make the ideal for which they stand a reality. What The Beloved Community Means in Practice I want to spell out a few but not too many details of what I take the beloved community to mean in the world around me in the USA in 1987.1 mention some practical activities before discussing the history of the concept in Dr. Kings life and thought partly for the reason that I think the first question for each of us is what we can do to fulfill Dr. Kings dream in the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves, here and now. And also because I believe that spelling out part of the practical context will to some extent protect us against the misuse of the concept. I live in a small town in Indiana where there are several churches and church agencies which stand ready to help anyone in need. Jesus cares for you and so do we, says a sign on West Side Methodist, and it gives a phone number to call. You can also turn to Salvation Army, Shiloh Baptist, Hands Reaching Out Mission (sponsored by the Church of the Nazarene), True Love Outreach, St. Marys, Circle You Help Out Center, Food Bank, and others. The large trash bins behind markets where poor people sometimes search for food have signs on them saying, Considering suicide? We can help, giving a name and address. There are enough things in our town to take care of everyone. If you went from house to house collecting the extra things that people have but do not need, you would collect enough to meet the needs of those who are without. And there are enough heated rooms to give every person a warm place to sleep. Some people have given themselves the work of beginning to do some of the necessary collecting, organizing, and redistributing. And counseling. People need someone to talk to even more than they need food. And people need something to do as is provided, for example, in the bakeries organized by the Church of the Savior in Washington D.C., where people get not only their daily bread, but also a meaningful role in producing the bread. Those who are reaching out to help, in our town and in others, are mostly unpaid volunteers. Some of them are paid staff members of public and private agencies, who, even * This letter is revised version of a talk given at a symposium on Martin Luther King Jr. at Earlham College. 415 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II though they are paid, put in extra hours far beyond what their contracts require of them. Many are poor themselves, but not too poor to give. They are black, white, and of other racial and ethnic groups. Their ethic of service to others, which they put into practice, reminds us that, as Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement said, There is no shortage of work in this world only a shortage of pay. In Dr. Kings vision we can relate to each other as brothers and sisters in a family. We do not need

to define our relationships primarily in terms of money and profit. The people I am talking about, who are living the dream day by day, are showing, in practice, that money does not need to be the only or the main power that organizes cooperation to attend to and respond to the needs of each person. To provide housing you do not need a lot of money. What is mostly needed is for people who need housing to get together with volunteers (such as, for example, former president Jimmy Carter) to put on their overalls, pick up their tools, and build. You do not need a lot of money to produce food either, as you can see, for example, in a town near ours and in other towns across America, where farmers donate plots of land, welfare clients donate labor, church members provide seeds and tools, the county agent provides free advice, and community gardens get planted, tilled, and harvested. I could cite other examples to show that community health care is possible. In a residence which takes in homeless people from the streets, where lam sometimes a volunteer, it is clear that money is not what is mainly necessary. What is mainly necessary is to cook and serve the food, to wash the dishes, to launder the sheets, to clean the rooms, to mediate fights when they break out, to counsel substance abusers, to sing, and to pray. It would be naive, of course, to expect private agencies to provide all necessary human services without the collaboration of governments (local, state, national, and international) which run programs of their own, and which above all create an environment where the grassroots efforts of people to work together for their own and their neighbors good are supported. And it would be unjust to expect the disinherited to solve their own problems by themselves, without access to the resources which nature and the labor of past generations have provided. The ideal of beloved community requires a shift of budget priorities toward social programs; it requires a more just distribution of property; it requires economic power for the people; but it requires more than these because it sets a standard for human relationships that is more than economic. I am trying to emphasize with my practical examples that we see around us every day instances of human caring that already are, to use Dr. Kings phrase, more person-centered than property-centered. I have given some practical examples before discussing the concept of beloved community also for another reason, which I have not yet mentioned. It is that I think we should ask ourselves, What good things are happening, and how can we contribute to them? It is in the context of this question that I would ask, How can we use Kings concept of beloved community to strengthen the good that is already at work among us? By starting with the good works that already are being done, we can take heart form the good news that the building of the beloved community is an effective revolution, which is building the new society in the shell of the old. When you act from love you perform a revolutionary act because you violate the first rule of the system, which is: look out first, last, and always for Number One. Gandhi endorsed such a revolutionary strategy when he wrote, Socialism begins with the first convert. When one person begins to live for others, socialism has begun and the power structure has already lost a part of its dominion. On the day when caring communities become able to meet the basic needs of each family and of each individual, then the rules of the old system will not be governing our practices, and, consequently, the system will have been transformed. 416 Letter 49 How Dr. King Chose the Phrase The Beloved Community There are, at least, two ways to begin a consideration of how the idea of beloved community rose

to prominence in Dr. Kings thought. One way would be to consider a young seminary and university student named Martin King, who had grown up in black churches in Georgia, who was looking for ways to serve his people, and at the same time looking for ways to reconcile the warmth and fire of religion as he knew it with the cold facts as recognized by dispassionate science and scholarship; and to consider how he found what he was looking for in a set of philosophical ideas. A second way would be to consider the late years of Kings life, when he was already, as A. Philip Randolph called him, the moral leader of the nation, when one of the philosophical ideas he had learned as a student, that of beloved community, proved to be every day more useful in practice. I will begin the second way. In June of 1966 James Meredith, the first black successfully to break the color bar and enroll at the University of Mississippi, started a one person freedom march through that state. On the second day of his march he was shot from ambush but not killed. While Meredith was hospitalized, civil rights leaders from around the country came to Mississippi to continue what Meredith had begun, starting from the point where he was ambushed. Dr. King was among them. Although the marchers (later joined by Meredith himself when he was released from the hospital) succeeded in completing the march through Mississippi which Meredith had originally planned, the result was disappointing. Conflicts within the movement became painfully evident. Some marchers chanted the slogan, Black power! Those close to Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were not enthusiastic about Black power! They chanted instead, Freedom now! Dr. King did not reject the idea of black power. He did not, on the whole, reject any ideas; his usual practice was to appreciate every viewpoint and every idea, and (like the German philosopher Hegel whose method he had studied) to combine the complementary truths from apparently opposing viewpoints into a comprehensive synthesis which would recognize the merits and surpass the limitations of each partial and one-sided position. So it was with black power. Black power was not wrong, but it needed to be regarded as a part of a more comprehensive philosophy. At a mass meeting during the Meredith march at Yazoo City, Mississippi, in front of a crowddivided by competitive shouting of Black Power! and Freedom Now! King said, Im not interested in power for powers sake, but Im interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good. That is what we are trying to do in America. A few days later, when pressed by reporters to explain whether he and the black power advocate Stokely Carmichael meant the same thing when they used the word power, King answered as follows: When I talk about power and the need for power, Im talking in terms of the need for power to bring about the political and economic change necessary to make the good life a reality. I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end or that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community. Thus King did not reject the concept that power is necessary, but he found that his aims were more accurately expressed by the phrase, the beloved community. 417 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II On the other hand, King might have replied to the reporters by emphasizing the concept of freedom, as his followers on the Meredith march were doing, and as he himself often did, for example, in the stirring climax of the I Have a Dream speech he had given in Washington, D.C. three years earlier, when he quoted from a hymn the line, Free at last! Free at last!

The concept of freedom plays a central role in Kings philosophy and practice. He identified himself philosophically as a personalist, a school of thought to which he was introduced by his seminary mentor Professor George W. Davis, and which he pursued by studying with several famous Boston University personalists, under whose direction he earned his doctorate. According to personalist doctrines, freedom is an essential part of what it means to be a human person. To achieve full personhood, to gain respect for ones dignity as a human being, and to be free, are, in important ways, three equivalent ways to say the same thing. Although freedom could legitimately be called a one-word summary of Dr. Kings ideal, it is a word notoriously subject to one-sided and misleading interpretations. Whenever King explained what he meant by freedom he was careful to explain that he did not mean irresponsible individualism. Kings mentor, Professor Davis, had argued to the contrary that the real meaning of freedom is nearly the opposite of irresponsible individualism. Davis argued, in terms foreshadowing Kings later thought, that the progress of freedom in history goes together with inner moral control. The free personality does not need external coercive control because it has internalized the moral norm. In a free society, on Davis view, nobody would suffer discrimination or abandonment, because freedom does not include permission to discriminate or to abandon those in need; it does include responsible services to others. Davis cited the essay, On the Freedom of a Christian, written in 1522 by the Martin Luther after whom King was named: The Christian is a perfectly free servant of all. For King, as for Davis and for Luther, to be free is to be morally responsible self-conscious and self-directing, but not self-centered. The concept of responsible freedom espoused by Dr. King and his philosophical mentors might not, however, have been fully appreciated by the people who were chanting Freedom Now! and in any case it is not clear that a personalist concept of responsible freedom represents the mainstream of concepts of freedom as they are understood in modern occidental philosophy and political theory. It was advisable, therefore, to qualify the emphasis on freedom with an emphasis on love and community. Dr. King achieved the necessary balance by choosing the phrase the beloved community. In Chicago, later in the same year 1966, where King was combating the evils of slum and ghetto housing conditions, the concept of beloved community served to emphasize that even though the marches and demonstrations were deliberately creating tension in order to expose evils, the ultimate goal of the movement was not discord but harmony. Dr. King said in impromptu remarks before a tense meeting of Chicago civic leaders, There comes a time when we move from protest to reconciliation and we have been misinterpreted by the press and by the political leaders of this town as to our motives and our goals, but let me say once again that it isour purpose, our single purpose to create the beloved community. We seek only to make possible a city where men can live together as brothers. The Origins of the Concept It is likely that King first encountered the phrase beloved community while studying under the personalist theologian L. Harold DeWolf at Boston University. The recommended reading for DeWolfs courses included The Problem of Christianity by the American philosopher, Josiah Royce. In that book Royce stated, The principle of principles of all Christian morals; remains this: Since you cannot find the universal and beloved community, create it. 418 Letter 49

In order to understand why Royce drew the conclusion that universal and beloved community is the principle of principles, it helps to ask, What is the question to which beloved community is the answer? Or, even better, What is the philosophical problem, to which beloved community is the solution? Royces problem with Christianity, which is reflected in his title The Problem of Christianity, is the same problem which has preoccupied many thinkers in the past several centuries. It is that Christianity is in several respects difficult to harmonize with the beliefs and values of modernity. Modernity is scientific, and moreover, as Royce notes, we moderns ...speak of personal moral independence as if it were our characteristic spiritual ideal. Here I will consider only a few aspects of reconciling the modern ideal of personal moral independence with religion, leaving to one side questions having to do with the relationship of religion to science. The moral aspect of Royces problem is the same as the central problem posed in his youth by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, whom King also studied, and to whose thought Royces is in many ways similar. The spirit of the modern world is freedom, and yet, as young Hegel noted to his consternation, Jesus, with whom some people in the modern world are reluctant to sever ties, gives us ethical commands. The ethical commands, as Jesus concisely summarized them, are two: (1) Love the Lord thy God, and (2) Love thy neighbor as thyself. We have already seen how King and his mentors, the personalists at Crozer Seminary and Boston University, labored to define freedom to make it very nearly equivalent to responsibility. They worked with the ideal of the existing culture as they found it, seeking to enhance its value as a force for good while diminishing the errors and excesses to which it was prone. A similar set of problems, which might be said to center on the question how it is possible to be free and to obey the divine command of love at the same time, preoccupied a number of the thinkers King studied. Reinhold Niebuhr discussed the dilemma of freedom vs. security, and regarded the interpretation of the Christian ideal of love in terms of an ethic of social solidarity to be both necessary and dangerous. For Immanuel Kant, a philosopher quoted by King and by his teachers, part of the solution to the problem is: So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end, never as a means only. According to Kants well-known formula, we express our respect for the moral law by respecting each person as an end, as an independent rational will, endowed with a dignity beyond price. In other words, the person essentially is, and morally ought to be treated as, free. For Hegel the solution is to identify with the whole. The whole is the truth. The whole must be free, since there is nothing outside it to command it or to oblige it. And yet no conception lends itself less to a petty self-centered individualism. A defect of Hegels view is that it lends itself to the attitude that whatever is, is good, since everything is part of the whole, and since the events of the history are the development of the whole in time, it becomes easy to see even the worst crimes as inevitable parts of a cosmic process, as small when the context in which they are seen is made big enough, and even as sacred when the total process of which they are a part inspires us with religious awe. It is against this background that we can understand Josiah Royces principle of principles. Royces principle preserves what is most vital in Christianity and in other religions, while malting it compatible with the lights of modernity. It emphasizes particularly the practice of the early Christian communities, as expressed and justified in the Pauline epistles, and affirms the principle of that practice to be of universal validity for all humanity. Royces principle is an improvement on Kant because in place of the comparatively lifeless motive of pure respect for the moral law,

Royces ideal encourages us to act from love. The beloved community is an improvement on any parochial view because it prescribes a universal community a point Dr. King emphasized when he steadfastly maintained, in spite of the 419 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II withering scorn of his enemies and the misgivings of his friends, that it is just as evil to kill Vietnamese as it is to kill Americans. Royces principle is an improvement on Hegel because it explicitly states that we are not to accept the crimes of history as we find them, but rather to 4 create the beloved community where it does not exist. Dr. Kings use of the phrase beloved community, is, moreover, an improvement on Royce. When King speaks the phrase beloved community, the phrase must be heard in the context of Kings personalism. Royce was not a personalist; his concern was rather to show that the vitality of Christianity is not so much in a Person, Jesus, as it is in the community. Royce emphasizes loyalty to the community without Kings compensating insistence on the personal character of the divine and the divine character of the person. King showed that he had understood Royce every time he declared that when a black person or a poor person achieves recognition of her or his rights, or satisfaction of her or his needs, it is not the individual person alone who benefits, but rather it is the soul of the nation that is redeemed. King modified Royce in conceiving community always as a community of persons. For King the ethic of love is an ethic of freedom, because it is by behaving in a morally responsible way that we use and demonstrate freedom. Building a beloved community where people feel that their freedom is realized, not stymied, by serving others, requires a strengthening of hearts, to use Royces phrase. It is not just a matter of obliging taxpayers to pay for anti poverty programs, it is much more a matter of taxpayers making their contributions out of a spirit of loyalty to the community. It is not just a matter of finding the money to pay civil servants to deliver human services, it is much more a matter of forming a spirit of service among both paid and volunteer staff, a spirit which loves and cares for each welfare client, each person with drug or alcohol problems, and each person of any kind, as a unique individual. Nevertheless, some people will object that the concept beloved community is only a philosophical solution to a philosophical problem. Love sounds good in theory, some sisters and brothers will say, but in practice God does not control anything. Others will raise the related objection, How can we use a Christian ethic in a country where many people do not have Christian faith? What about the Jews, the ethical humanists, the Muslims, the scattering of Buddhists and Hindus in Americas diverse population, and the agnostics and atheists? The Practicality of the Ideal of Beloved Community And yet the ideal of beloved community was prominent in Dr. Kings thought precisely during the time when his practical experience was making him more and more aware of the realities of American life. Dr. King often said that the struggle for economic justice would be much more difficult than the struggle for civil rights. It does not really cost white people anything when a black person sits next to them at a lunch counter or on a bus. On the other hand, to make sure every person as an opportunity to play a useful role in life, and adequate food, shelter, clothing, and medical care will impose on the middle and upper classes a material cost. Kings observations are even more true today than they were when he made them. In Kings times

the general trend of the economy was upward toward prosperity, leaving a numerous minority stranded in poverty. Since Kings times, due to a number of causes, at least some of which appear to be irreversible, the material prosperity of the majority has slipped, and it will probably slip more. Even if we postulate an America capable of making peace with the rest of the world and a reordering of budget priorities facilitated by reversing the arms race, the price of keeping faith with sisters and brothers in need will be the sacrifice of at least some of the; superfluities of the affluent. 420 Letter 49 And the fulfillment of the dream will also demand a moral cost. We must revise and reinterpret our principles. Freedoms and rights need to be balanced with responsibilities and duties. For this reason nonviolence enters a new phase. Whereas with respect to civil rights it is true, as Dr. King said, that America wrote the negro a check with no funds to back it up, with respect to economic justice America has not even a written check. Nonviolent action for civil rights consisted of appealing for compliance with promises the nation had made but had not kept. Nonviolent action for economic justice needs to start at a more basic educational level by communicating messages that middle and upper class America, and even a segment of the poor themselves, have not heard and are not ready to hear: (1) There is a problem, (2) it is the moral responsibility of affluent America, and of everyone, to contribute to solving it, (3) It can be solved, but (4) It can only be solved through a considerable transformation of Americas institutions and values. Beloved community is a practical ideal in these circumstances. As a principle of principles it has the logical status of a measuring stick for evaluating values. We need it in practice especially now that some of our overly permissive values need to be challenged and reformed. The idea of beloved community is practical partly because it has an unfamiliar ring to it. Everyone has heard the words power and freedom. All of us think we know what they mean and that is part of the problem. The phrase the beloved community, on the other hand, is a relatively unknown expression. It is an opportunity for learning because we are more ready to learn if we do not start out thinking we already know. On the other hand, the phrase is not so strange that it cannot be learned and assimilated; not so distant from our understanding that we cannot incorporate it into our practice and enrich it by our practice. We can explain it by relating it to elements of our common life that are already understood and appreciated. Brotherly, is the single word Dr. King used most often to explain the beloved community. We should add Sisterly, especially since certain feminists have given us the concept of care ethic, which is, as far as I can see, synonymous with beloved community. The phrase beloved community contains the familiar word love tucked inside beloved, and it contains the familiar word community. Moreover, the word person, which is the key to understanding Dr. Kings concept of community as a caring relationship among persons is well known and widely appreciated. Popular psychologists like Leo F. Buscaglia write best-selling books like Personhood, which tell us that we would be happier and healthier if our lives were more centered on being fully functioning persons and less centered on having things. The psychological ideal of personhood can be tied to one of the guiding principles Dr. King proposed for the Poor Peoples Crusade, which was: the economy must become more person-centered and less propertycentered. Another way to make the concept beloved community a meaningful part of American life is to reduce it to themes in popular culture everybody knows about. We can tie our message, for example, to a popular television series like The Cosby Show. The Cosby Show, which is by all measures Americas most popular image, celebrates warmth and openness in family life. It also

celebrates affluence which we do not need. And it also celebrates the nuclear family which does no harm in itself, but which may be an unfortunate bucket of cold water for the millions who live in other kinds of homes. We can, nonetheless, here as elsewhere, treat the constructive images as growth points, which will help people to assimilate the meaning of the concept of beloved community. More than that, in starting discussions with a common experience like watching The Cosby Show, we can encourage people to enrich the idea of beloved community by sharing their own dreams for the future of our country. 421 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II Beloved community is practical as a guide on a global level and a national level, as well as in local projects. On a global level we must, as the Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung says, decouple our economy to a considerable extent from the world economy. We need to decouple both for the sake of others, to give them more autonomy in running their own countries, and for the sake of America, to give us more options in social policy, i.e. to diminish the constraints imposed on us by the requirements of international competition. Nationally and in general we must, as certain Notre Dame economists teach us, re-embed our economy in our values, so that our economy will serve our ideals, instead of the other way around. The contribution of the concept beloved community to these propositions about decoupling and re-embedding is that creating a community requires creating a world where ethical commands are more and more in control, as opposed to a world ruled by blind market forces for which nobody is responsible. Decoupling and re-embedding are two concepts which describe ways to subordinate economics to policy and policy to ethics. Making economics moral may seem to be an impossible task, but it is encouraging to note that Dr. King already tried to do it in his last years, and he did not completely fail. For example, when he met with Chicago civic leaders at the so-called summit conference on housing he told them that he did not come as an adversary to negotiate with them as opponents. He explained his role by saying he had come to confront them as responsible persons, to compel them to acknowledge and to deal with a moral issue. According to some economic theories, the business people present should have been deaf to Kings words. In fact, at the Episcopal diocese offices in Chicago on Wednesday, August 17, 1966, the business representatives were among the most constructive participants in the dialogue. They included industrialist Ben W. Heineman, the black businessman A.L. Foster, John Baird, Thomas G. Ayers of Consolidated Electric, and others. By setting a tone of moral seriousness King succeeded in bringing out the best in people to a greater extent than he could have if his approach had been confrontational. It is also encouraging to note that while it might seem that the social philosophy of a black Baptist preacher rooted in Christian theology would not appeal to people of other faiths or of no faith, history shows that whatever doubts one might have in the abstract, in practice the actions King took in accord with his philosophy attracted support from people of all kinds. It is worth remembering, too, that Royces intention in formulating the principle of beloved community was to express what is most universal in Christianity. In fact, practicing Jews, secular humanists and Catholics marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King and other protestants in freedom demonstrations in the South. Some of them died there for the cause. The Honorable Elijah Muhammed, the founder of the Nation of Islam, supported Kings efforts to end slum conditions in Chicago. Against the objection that his philosophy is so narrowly sectarian that it cannot be a basis for a national and international moral consensus, Dr. King would be entitled to reply as Jesus replied to

Pontius Pilate Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice. 422 Letter 50 50 NAMELESS Here are some phrases commonly associated with the word Deconstruct: to take apart, to dismantle, to separate the parts and thus destroy the whole, to reverse the process of construction. Deconstruction is an important word in philosophy now (in 1986) because it identifies the characteristic method of Jacques Derrida, who is, as I have mentioned previously in these letters, a professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Paris. Derrida deconstructs with equal thoroughness the ancient great ideas, such as those found in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and the modern great ideas, such as those found in the writings of Rousseau and Kant. I shall not mince words: Derridas subtexts declare that the great ideas are shams and frauds. Letus now consider reconstruct: to rebuild, to construct again, to fit the pieces together in a new form, to remake the whole on the basis of the available fragments. Reconstruction in philosophy has been identified with the works of the American philosopher John Dewey. Dewey wanted philosophy to contribute to rebuilding society in order to make it more functional and more democratic. He was the most influential figure in American philosophy in the 1930s and up until the beginning of the Cold War. I think of myself as following Dewey, but Dewey would not follow me. His personality was different from mine. He had more self-control, more self-confidence, and less imagination. I agree with Dewey that thinking is, in the last analysis, a biological process; it is a form of problemsolving characteristic of our species. I also agree that philosophy ought to function to help meet human needs. I am, however, inclined, as I suppose everyone is, to see the functions of thinking and of philosophy especially in terms of my own needs, and my needs reflect a somewhat different portion of the spectrum of human passions than those reflected in the personality of that Yankee from Vermont. My thesis here is that deconstruction paves the way for reconstruction. The theory and practice of deconstruction contribute to the theory and practice of reconstruction. In Part II following I will offer a view of some of the main need-fulfulling functions of traditional philosophy, agreeing with Derridas analysis but reversing his valuations. Then I will take a closer look at deconstruction. Then I will do a little bit of deconstructing, applying an admittedly limited version of Derridas method to the dominating ideology here and now. Arid after that I will use my limited deconstruction as an illustration of deconstruction as the handmaiden of reconstruction, and will propose that my thesis, thus illustrated, is generally valid. II One of my needs, which I think I share with the average person, is a need for more self-control.* If I had more self-control, I would have better health, smaller debts, a better * I speak of my own case, but I think there is empirical evidence that my case is typical of the species. What I am calling self-control is similar to a theoretically constructed entity studied by a school of psychology under the name ego-strength. If their research shows anything, it shows that ego-strength varies widely from person to person, and that those who, like me, would be better

off with more of it, are at least half of most samples of humanity which have been studied. 423 reputation, and fewer enemies. However, as I am, dim and unsteady, reasonable and unreasonable by turns, at crucial moments I do not hear the voice of reason. Instead, I follow the ideas arising spontaneously in my mind. They activate my muscles. They move my lips, tongue, and vocal cords. Instead of following my plans I follow their impulses, and as a consequence I have worse health, larger debts, a worse reputation, and more enemies. At those crucial moments, the moments when the voices of harmony debate with the charms of impulse, I need help. Names are one of the sources of my help. I say to myself, for example, Howard, be reasonable! thus invoking my own name. Or I pray, for example, Jesus, help me! thus invoking someone elses name. Or I ask myself, for example, What would my mother say? thus using the noun mother, which, although it is a common noun and not a proper noun, functions as a name referring to a particular person, invoking her presence. My life is a tissue of voices, and the voices have names. In ancient Greece, 2300 years ago, Plato devoted himself to defining the idea named by the Greek word dikaiosyne, which we translate as justice or righteousness. Aristotle, his student and successor, tried to define an even more abstract name: being. Both of them used a premise which I believe is true: that the voices which have authority for an individual are similar to the voices of authority which organize groups. To extend the same point a bit further: they are more than similar. They are the same voices. The voice of mother. The voice of justice. The voice of being. The voice of reason. Derrida would regard all of the examples just given, and emblematically the voice of being, as instances of the metaphysics of presence. I think it is a brilliant concept, and that it can be regarded as a great contribution of deconstruction to reconstruction. Derrida and I differ on its evaluation: he is (implicitly) against it. I am for it. The metaphysics of presence is hard to eliminate from language. It appears insidiously or benignly, depending on ones viewpoint in the common notion that language consists of words and words are typically names for things. The word evokes the (absent) presence of the thing. It appears too in the common notion that the written word represents the spoken word. The written word evokes the (absent) presence of the speaking voice. T.W. Adorno writes somewhere that Heideggers philosophy is fascist to the core. Conversely, I would say that Derrida is anti-fascist to the core.* Derridas passion seems ot be to discredit any philosophical doctrine which could possibly lend credibility to specious authoritarian rhetoric. If, however, I am right in my analysis of fascism (Letter 47), fascisms rhetoric is a chameleon and no philosophical critique of any of fascisms disguises will stop it. Fascism will be stopped by building a healthy** society that will function effectively to meet human needs. I believe that a healthy society needs to be constructed person by person, relationship by relationship, promise kept by promise kept, symbol by symbol. Let me illustrate why I believe that a metaphysics of presence might well in the future contribute to building a more functional and democratic society, again starting with my own case. I lack a voice of reason which would give me the self-control I need. Similarly, the people around me to whom I relate often do not know who speaks for reason, or, to say the same thing * ...sometimes I have the feeling that the Heideggerian problematic is the deepest and most powerful defense of that which I try to question under the heading of the thought of the presence. Jacques Derrida, Positions. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972, p. 75.

** Michel Foucault and others show how words like healthy lend themselves to specious justifications for non-legitimate authority. For reasons given in Letter 64 I take a rather sanguine view of the potential for good of health-talk. 424 in other words, they do not know through whom reason speaks. Our attempts to cooperate, to communicate, and to live with each other, are the worse for it. If, in the tissue of voices which is our common life, the various voices which have legitimate authority, those of mothers and fathers, of justice and fairness, of laws and ideals, were articulated and made coherent by a guiding logos, that is to say, by a viable metaphysics of presence, then we could pursue the common good together in a more orderly way. Let me state the same point a bit differently: if I lack sufficient self-discipline to follow my plans it is partly because the plans themselves do not speak with much authority, and that, in turn, is partly because the culture which formed my mind is disoriented, no longer able to orient itself with the no-longer-viable metaphysics of economic society, formless, grasping for straws, charmless, poor in motivating symbols. There are too many reruns of old movies, too many bogus cure-alls, too many commercial advertisements selling things I cant afford; there is too much truth decay; too little communication. In all of this struggle and confusion, various versions of relationships between names and reason seem to play crucial roles. Reason seems to speak with the voice of authority; this was, for example, the explicit goal of Plato in founding philosophy, and of Auguste Comte in founding social science. But the voices which speak with authority are originally, primordially, persons with names. Mothers and fathers, doctors and deities. Not for nothing Plato in Crito has the laws say to Socrates, We are your parents. Not for nothing Saint Thomas Aquinas names Being as God, and God as Father. The way that the traditional metaphysics of presence evoked the presence of revered persons in the garb of reason and its substrate being, and thus contributed to the organization of human action in persons and groups, was probably not the best way to build selfcontrol and cooperation, certainly not the only way. Nevertheless, it was a way. Carrying out its systematic deconstruction as Derrida has done helps us to see how our foreparents built our tradition; and therefore it helps us to see how we can revise and improve our tradition for the sake of our childrens future. III Now I need to take a somewhat closer look at Derridas discourse and practice of deconstruction. Josette Rey-Debove, in her Lexique Semiotique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979, p. 40), gives a definition of to deconstruct. Deconstruire v. tr. (Derrida) De faire, par un analyse semiologique, une construction ideologique herite. Translated, that is: To deconstruct, transitive verb (Derrida) To unmake, by a semiological analysis, an inherited, ideological construction. Let me comment on parts of this definition one by one.

To unmake, that is to say, to un-do, to un-construct something that was previously done, constructed, made.* by a semiological analysis, that is to say, by examining the words and other signs used in the construction. * Note, however, that Derrida specifies that deconstruction does not demolish. Grammatologie p. 21. 425 an inherited that is to say, left to us by ages past. ideological Ideology is usually contrasted with science. The connotations of ideological are usually pejorative, as when ideology is defined as a systematic distortion of reality in the interest of a ruling class. However, ideology, like worldview, can be used non-pejoratively to refer to a groups system of ideas for interpreting reality. construction. The last word of the definition reinforces the sense of the first words, to unmake. At some time in the past, somebody or some group constructed something; now, by deconstruction, we are going to take it apart. To achieve a broader understanding of how Derrida uses the word deconstruction, let us now consider some sentences where the word occurs in his fundamental work De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967). Operating necessarily from the interior, borrowing from the old structure all the strategic and economic resources of subversion... the enterprise of deconstruction is always in a certain manner carried forward by its own work.** What I think this means: It is the text itself which provides the materials for its own deconstruction. The work of deconstruction consists of examining the text carefully. The work of deconstruction consists of examining the text carefully. Careful examination will show how the ideological construction was put together, and, consequently, how to take it apart. An important qualification to what I just said is emphasized in the words I omitted (indicated by the ellipsis ... after the word subversion) in the quotation above. The words I omitted are borrowing them structurally, that is to say, without being able to isolate the elements and the atoms. What I think that means: The careful examination is not done word by word. Deconstruction always reveals the organization of a text, its form, the pattern of its set of relationships, what Derrida sometimes calls its grid. (For example, you would not deconstruct a Cartesian plane number by number, but rather by noting that it is constructed in such a way that every ordered pair of numbers is related to the x axis and the y axis.) Here is another passage from the Grammatologie: That the logos was at first borrowed and that this borrowing was the scripting resource of language, means, certainly, that the logos is not a creative activity, nor the element providing unity, full of the divine word etc. But one does not take a step outside metaphysics if one draws from this only a new motif of return to finitude, of the death of God etc. It is this way of thinking and this problematic that it is necessary to deconstruct.* Commenting on this passage line by line will illustrate important features of Derridas deconstruction.

That the logos was at first borrowed... There is a primordial ordering activity (called variously trace, archi-trace, archi-criture, differance) which members of the human species, including ancient human and remote tribes, engage in. The word, glorified by the ancient Greek name logos, borrows its capacity to bear meanings from this fundamental ordering. ** Grammatologie, p. 39. * De la grammatologie, p. 99. 426 ...this borrowing was the scripting resource of language... Linguistics and the human sciences generally have been misled by the metaphysical tradition of philosophy into thinking that writing is just a way of recording real, i.e. oral, language. (Derrida calls this error phonocentrism.) The spoken word (or the structure which permits words to be spoken) has mistakenly been given a higher status. The truth is that there is no hierarchical relationship of speaking-more-real-than-writing. Both are equally made possible as communication systems by more fundamental orderings. ...means, certainly, that the logos is not a creative activity, nor the element providing unity, full of the divine word etc. Deconstructing all the constructions made with logos, the word, overturns western metaphysics, which has always drawn its notion of being, hence of God, from mistakenly attributing to the word qualities it does not really have most importantly the quality of naming something. Metaphysics has always consisted, one could show, of trying to get presence from meaning... Derrida says elsewhere. [6] In other words, the very meaning of a word, any word, is taken to be drawn from a name; the name is of something; the something is at the moment of naming present; this presence is being, and being is God. Moreover, the speaker who does the original naming is psychoanalytically, theologically, and sometimes philosophically (e.g. Plato in Phaedrus [7]) identified with the father. But one does not take a step outside metaphysics... Derrida is in competition with other philosophers who are, like him, also trying to get outside metaphysics. My opinion: economic society requires for its legitimation the destruction of the love ethic, hence of the traditional Greek-Christian metaphysics which supported it, the social division of labor assigns to philosophers the job of carrying out the ideological work, and philosophers compete with each other in doing it with ever greater thoroughness and sophistication. if one draws from this only a new motif of return to finitude... Derridas target here is Heidegger, who failed to step outside metaphysics in spite of prodigious effort. Derrida shows, quite correctly in my opinion, that the voice of authority is always lurking mysteriously in the background of Heideggers philosophy, and that the move in Being and Time

which locates authenticity in finitude, i.e. in the call of the self to the self to be authentic, is a modern variation on the old Being = God = Father metaphysic, with the Kantian twist of making the self its own voice of the father. (Becoming autonomous, Kant says, is maturity. Kant s word translated as maturity is mundigkeit, which comes from mund = mouth and literally means mouthness, a detail which supports Derridas view that the hierarchy privileging the spoken voice is behind the whole tradition of metaphysics from beginning to end.) * La mtaphysique a toujours consist, on pourrait le montrer, vouloir arracher la prsence du sens, sous ce nom ou sous un autre, la differance; et chaque fois quon prtend dcouper ou isoler rigoreusement une region ou une couche du sens pur ou de signifi pur, on fait le mme geste. Positions. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972, p. 44. ** Derrida, Jacques, La Pharmacie de Platon, in La dissemination. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972, pp. 69-198, especially pp. 164-179, 193. 427 of the death of God, etc. Here Derridas target is Nietzsche, another philosopher who tried to step out of metaphysics, but who failed to do it by announcing the death of God. However, in another respect Nietzsche succeeded. Nietzsches way of writing shook... the transcendental authority and the master category of knowledge: being. (Grammatologie 139-40) It is this way of thinking and this problematic that it is necessary to deconstruct. A problematic determines not just answers, but also questions and approaches to trying to get answers. So when Derrida calls for the deconstruction of the problematic, he calls for the destruction of the questions, not just the answers. Deconstruction is not a tool for any job; it is a tool designed for and devoted to Derridas anti-metaphysical project. Like (in this respect) the positivists, Derrida wants people to stop asking metaphysical questions. We should not ask, for example, What being does the word God name? and we should be as little concerned to give the answer, no being at all, as we should be to give the answer Our Father in Heaven. IV Studying Derrida is work, unless one happens to be the kind of person who enjoys sitting in cafs reading hard books just for fun. I, for one, philosophize for practical aims. Having taken the trouble to read this important contemporary French philosopher, I want to do something useful with my new knowledge. Here and now. Where I am. With the talents and resources I possess, feeble and paltry though they may be. It happens to be that I am in Chile and it is 1986. I am like a perverse robin who winters in the north and then flies to the southern hemisphere for more winter. In the course of repeated sojourns I have become a familiar visitor to Chilean pharmacies in the rainy season. The pharmacists and their clerks greet me with a cheery Hola! apparently unaware that in the interval since my last visit to their shop I have migrated to the northern hemisphere and been a professor of philosophy. Unlike their northern colleagues they are not hampered by the formality of a prescription, and they happily dispense upon request the newest German remedies for flu. Recently as I was visiting one of my favorite pharmacies the police cordoned off the area and

proceeded slowly down the street with a large olive-green bus, checking everyones identity cards and throwing into the bus anybody who was on the wanted list, without identification, or shabbilydressed and smelly. Mercedes, the assistant pharmacist with whom I had been discussing Lysine-L (an amino acid recommended for cold sores), was not wanted as far as she knew; she was neatly dressed and her papers were in order, but nevertheless she was nervous because she was a clandestine political activist. She was happy to have the company of a foreigner for the duration of the raid. As it turned out they did not take her or me. The military dictatorship which rules us here and now is in power partly because of traditional metaphysics, but mostly because of modern metaphysics. Traditional metaphysics was born and bred in societies where rule by military castes was normal; it builds hierarchy into logic, language, family, society, and hearts. It fits authoritarian regimes as pods fit peas; rank is the essence of one and of the other; it is their doctrine and their discipline. The modern metaphysics of individualism provided the junta with its rhetoric and its opportunity. Its rhetoric is Anti-Communism. Anything and everything is justified by Anti-Communism because Communism is conceived as the enemy of the sacred ideal of the modern mind. The opportunity to take power was also due to freedom, although due to freedoms exercise more than to the threat of its extinction. The exercise of freedom led as it often does, and for 428 various reasons to economic stagnation; the bottles of pills disappeared from the pharmacy shelves, while the price of pills went up and up. People had to stand in line for penicillin and for bread. Toilet paper was not available at all. Enter: machine guns, tanks, helicopter gunships, olivegreen buses. The here and now. Living with the consequences of our social structures. Of our symbolisms. Derrida has no favorite between the ancient and the modern forms of metaphysics; he deconstructs the millennial hierarchies, and he also deconstructs the 17th and 18th century natural rights underpinnings of our modern ideal of freedom, and he does not spare more recent metaphysical projects which have enshrined the precious individual in a mysterious living present, producing a spirit of respect for liberty by more sophisticated means. The old exploitation, justified by a metaphysics favorable to the rhetoric of God and love, and the new exploitation, justified by a metaphysics favorable to the rhetoric of rights and freedom, are, for Derrida, two crimes with the same modus operandi = the mystical presence behind the name, the authoritative voice behind the presence. What surprised me this morning as I rode on an orange and white bus, which passed another bus which was burning, flames pouring from all its windows, was that nobody on my bus had anything to say. You would have thought my fellow passengers would say something after all it could have been our bus and we could have been incinerated. You would think someone would say, I hope they got the passengers off the bus before they threw the fire bomb! Or, Its those Communist terrorists again why wont they leave us in peace? Or, Thank God there are still some young men brave enough to resist! In fact everybodys lips were silent. Hegels prophecy was coming true in a world with an excess of rights, force was ruling.** The junta was ruling in the name of rights. The resistance resisted in the name of rights. Ideological stalemate. Violence. If I were an agronomist I would help unemployed people plant gardens. If I were a nurse I would probably do preventative medicine, now that the unpayable national debt has closed the doors of clinics. If I were in retail sales I think I would specialize in recycling used goods, or else in making basics available at low prices, or maybe in health foods. If I were an ordinary bum on the street I would beg enough money to get drunk, if I could, and if I couldnt I would become a Protestant

minister or a criminal. If I were a cook I would work in a soup kitchen, and if I were a musician I would sing hope. If I were a priest I would hear the confessions of torturers; if I were an army officer I would vote for democracy; if I were an economist I would plan. Since I am a philosopher I suppose I should deconstruct something. It would, I believe, be useful to deconstruct the televised speeches of our ruling tyrant, whose name it is not necessary to mention because nothing distinguishes him from the common run of dictators of poor countries. His discourses are, moreover, little different from those of many elected officials in democratic lands where the persuasive force of the televised image is the source of political power rather than as here, merely auxiliary. The structure of his speeches is military, bipolar, like the structure of Tolkiens Lord of the Rings or that of Star Wars. Good vs. evil. Good is, in the first instance, law and order; and evil is, correlatively, the Communist subversion of law and order. Disloyalty, which has been the constant theme of tyrants since Thucydides first wrote about them, is defined in terms of betrayal of the tyrant personally, of the national and military institutions he directs, and betrayal of the project for putting the nation in order which justifies military rule. If one analyzes in more detail the particular kind of law and order the general is (at the level of conscious self-presentation) defending and requiring everyone else to defend, it proves to be a slightly refurbished standard modern law and order, of the kind which was given a 429 sophisticated formulation and a philosophical defense by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. The refurbishings make it contemporary and Chilean. Its structure is as follows: GOOD EVIL

Rational (= according to the laws of economics Irrational (= demagogic = projects of = laws of free market capitalism progressive nature = laws of politicians = inflationary = discourages investment) Property (= legitimate = correct = natural) Freedom (= private enterprise = absence of restrictions on imports, on luxury consumption, on business) Clean (= responsible = Chilean = loyal) Charity * (= us = womens sphere = our voluntary assumption of our social responsibility) Right (= obedient to principle = loyalty to law and order) Crime (= theft = disorder = socialism) Marxism (= subjection of the individual to the state) Dirty (= criminal = vices, especially drug abuse) Violence (= them = subversives = will stop at nothing to get power for themselves) Wrong (= violations of property, freedom, clean living, and charity, which are connected with irrationality and disloyalty)

The ideals of the tyrants discourse loyalty, reason, property, freedom, charity, and righteousness describe a world that does not exist. The tyrants good is not a status quo that he defends; it is a utopia he is building, and he is well aware that he is trying to reshape the country by force to make reality coincide with his values, which are at once the values of his social class and the values of 18th and 19th century modernity. He leads a social project whose aim is to bring the nation into line with the simple ideals which constitute the basic legal and moral structure not only

of Chile but of western society generally. While others might, at heart, wince at the social cost, i.e., cruelty, of the measures taken, our tyrant speaks as a man assured of the righteousness of his mission. Voices come to him in the night; they are the voices of the ideology of his social class. He obeys them, and the troops obey him. The foregoing small deconstruction is admittedly limited and impure. It is limited because I lack the skill to do a full semiological analysis of the local tyrants speeches on television. If Derrida himself had done it, it would have been done better. My small deconstructions impurity, on the other hand, I regard more as a merit than as a defect. It is impure because it follows not just Derridas Deconstruct! but also Frederic Jamesons Always Historicize! (if Jameson himself had done it, it would have been done better). It aims not just to discern the outlines of the inherited ideological grid governing the generals speeches, but also to place the grid itself in the context of the material, historical processes which formed it, and which are considered in the preceding forty-nine letters. I have allowed myself to be succinct on the assumption that by now the patient reader grasps my allusions. I never said that deconstruction tells us all we need to know to reconstruct. I only said that it paves the way for reconstruction, and that it contributes to the theory and practice of deconstruction. Like copper, it is strongest when in an alloy. One benefit of my limited exercise in deconstruction, which I propose to call a threshold benefit one you get at the door before you enjoy the benefits of going into the room is 430 that I am freed from the generals rhetoric just because I can sit back and analyze it. In this respect deconstruction is an example of the emancipatory rationality praised by Jrgen Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests (see especially the appendix to the English language edition). My mind is less in thrall to those elements of the dominant ideology which the generals rhetoric presses into service because I can gaze upon them from a critical distance; similarly, the neurotic is liberated because psychoanalysis helps him or her to see the neurosis from a more objective perspective; and similarly the working class takes a step toward reconstructing society because it no longer takes for granted the subordinate role it plays in the existing society when its consciousness is raised by Marxist analysis. Apart from the threshold benefit of conceptual liberation, I also managed to bring into focus for myself as I sat in front of the television set and tried to imagine how Derrida would take notes on the dictators speeches, the fairly obvious point that the structure of his rhetoric was bipolar. I can use this. I can use it two ways. What I really want to do is to encourage people to think of multiple options. I could connect with the dualism of the televised rhetoric which I have just deconstructed, by amending it to add third, fourth, fifth options. That is one way. But I can also resign myself to the fact that humans are powerfully inclined to dualism, and then I can contribute to reconstructing society by inventing better dualisms. Let me try to give an example of the latter that John Dewey would have liked. A teacher I know invited me to observe her class, where she was building the new society in the shell of the old by encouraging children to be cooperative. It was evaluation day you may not like what she did because you may feel she put the little kids under too much pressure, but it worked, and it illustrates constructive dualism and on evaluation day each child in turn stood before the class and gave a brief self-evaluation, as follows. The child could make whatever preliminary remarks he or she felt inclined to make, leading up to one of four conclusions: Coopero mucho (which means, translated, I cooperate a lot.)

Coopero (I cooperate.) Molesto (This one is hard to translate; it means roughly I bother people, I interfere with what people are trying to do.) Molesto mucho (I bother a lot.) When a child thus evaluated herself or himself by placing himself or herself in one of these four categories, the rest of the class spontaneously, no instructions from the teacher were needed would make humming and whirring noises, as if to say, You just told a fib and we all know it, or You just told the truth and we all agree. The child was then free to say a word or two in response, like, Well, maybe not always, or My friends help me, or Ill try to do better. A little bit of deconstruction can thus lead to a little bit of reconstruction. After noting that the inherited ideological constructions are often dualisms, one can try to build into discourse and practice a better dualism, like cooperative/uncooperative. Now I propose to dream major dreams, and I want to use everything anyone has ever learned in deconstruction, in order to encourage anybody and everybody to rebuild society to make it viable and beautiful, starting here. I would like to encourage dona Mercedes, the assistant pharmacist, to participate in the reconstruction of our global societys symbolic structures, together with the agronomists, the unemployed, the gardeners, the nurses, the retail sales persons, cooks, musicians, priests, army 431 LETTERS FROM QUBEC: Vol. II officers, bums on the street, drunks, protestants, criminals, the silent passengers in the orange and white bus, the young man who set fire to the burning bus, the prisoners in the olive green bus, the police, and everyone else. Reconstruction will require a nurturing attitude towards names, voices, presences, and inherited constructions. Let us suppose that it is possible to work together on a concrete problem, such as finding a disappeared husband in a way which establishes bonding, so that we will be always present one to another, even in our sleep. Let us suppose that reasoning is a cooperative cultivating of shared insights. Lets suppose that communication is sharing by differentiating. Lets suppose that the human is a widely misunderstood species, which has been perceived as essentially hostile only due to a mistaken ideological construction. Let us suppose that human passions can be changed by giving them new names. Lets believe that people can change their personalities by falling in love. Let us produce a rich and diversified culture, rich in rhythms and images, diversified in spiritual life-supports as the shelves of the pharmacy are diversified according to each malady and malaise, with help for the awkward and the adroit, for ectomorph and neurasthenic, for the shaggy and the bald, the oversexed and the impotent, for those tempted by alcohol and those tempted by money, the dreamy and the mesomorphic, for athletes and for endomorphs, for the impulsive, the obsessive, the anally retentive the scatterbrained, the depressed, the moribund and the hyperactive. Let no one be abandoned at the critical moment when the worse self debates with the better self. Lets give all children names this is, admittedly, not a new idea, but it is a good idea, and one well worth encouraging, because and not in spite of Roland Barthes observation that to give something a name is always to sacralize it.* What Proust said of childrens trusting eyes could be said of childrens names, for both the eyes and the names invoke the presence of the family circle where the children are loved. Let us suppose that rights come only with duties, that freedoms come only with responsibilities, and (as the Pope said to the Latin American bishops at Puebla) that

private property is held subject to a social mortgage, property rights being valid only if when and to the extent that they serve social functions. Let us suppose that the new society will be built partly by subtracting from and partly by adding to the inherited constructions and let us give our added duties, responsibilities and social functions names, names that evoke voices, voices that evoke parents, voices that evoke the presence of the victims of our poorly designed institutions, voices that evoke the still-living presence of all the martyrs who ever died for love and justice. Let us suppose that we have promises to keep, and that somebody cares whether we keep them. We will do our reconstruction using all the resources and techniques humans have ever used. * Barthes, Roland, Le degre zero de Iecriture. Paris: Seuil, 1972. p. 74. Barthes refers to sacralizing psychological objects, such as la sincerit, by naming them, but I think his insight applies nicely to naming children too. 432 Bibliography Bibliography Introduction Barthes, Roland, Sade, Fourier, Loyola. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971) Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero. London: Cape, 1967. (Le degre zero de Iecriture. Pans: Editions de Seuil, 1953) Castaneda, Carlos, Journey to Ixtlan, the lessons of Don Juan. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972. Derrida, Jacques, Positions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972) Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World-System (Three Volumes). New York: Academic Press, 1974, 1976, 1980. Letter One Freire, Paulo, Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Scabury, 1973. (Educacao anno pratica da liberdade. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1967) Gramsci, Antonio, An Antonio Gramsci Reader. New York: Schocken Books, 1988. Gramsci, Antonio, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia de Benedetto Croce. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1977. Greenlee, Douglas, Peirces Concept of Sign. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. Notes: (1) The phrase Think globally, act locally, is attributed to Ren Dumont. (2) Jrgen Habermas and K-O Apel find a sort of foundation for philosophy in what must necessarily be assumed in order to communicate. See Jrgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon, 1975; Karl-Otto Apel, Die Erklaren-Verstehen Kontroverse in Transzendentalpragmatischer Sicht. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979. But the problem philosophy tries to solve is, as I see it, lack of communication. Philosophy needs to build communication, not assume it. Letter Two Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions, 1966. Louis Perche, Paul Claudel (tude et choix de poemes). Paris: Seghers, 1958 433 LETTERS FROM QUBEC

Letter Three Aeschylus, The Oresteia (various editions) Kuhns, Richard, The House, the City, and the Judge: the growth of moral awareness in the Oresteiu Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982. Plato, The Republic (various editions) Note: For a dim view of The Oresteia see Marilyn French, Beyond Power: on women, men, and morals. London: Cape, 1985. Letter Four Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Simon French, Decision Theory: an introduction to the mathematics of rationality. New York Halsted Press, 1986. Jrgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (see especially the appendix). Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Shaun Hargreaves Heap, Rationality in Economics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Frederick Schick, Having Reasons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Letter Five John Dewey (1859-1952), Essays in Experimental Logic. New York: Dover, 1953. John Dewey (1859-1952), The Quest for Certainty: a study of the relation of knowledge and action New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1929. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Gerard Radnitzky and W.W. Bartley III (eds.), Evolutionary Epistemology. Lasalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1987. Letter Six Nicole Ball, World Hunger. Oxford: Ohio Press, 1981. William Byron, S.J. (ed.), The Causes of World Hunger. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. Josue de Castro, The Geopolitics of Hunger. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977. Ren Dumont, Utopia or Else. New York: Universe Books, 1975. (LUtopie ou la mort. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973) Susan George, How Fares the Land: essays on food, hunger, and power. Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1984. George Kent, The Political Economy of Hunger: the silent holocaust. New York: Praeger, 1984. Frances Moore Lapp and Joseph Collins, Food First. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977. N.W. Pirie, Food Resources: conventional and novel. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976. 434 Bibliography Letter Seven Clausewitz, Carl von (1780-1831), On War(VomKriege) (various editions, but see especially the introduction by Anatol Rapoport to the Penguin edition published at Baltimore in 1968) Jon Elster, Leibniz and the Development of Economic Rationality. Oslo, Norway: University of Oslo Press, 1975. Gideon Freudenthal, Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton: on the genesis of the mechanistic worldview. Boston: D. Reidl, 1986. (Atom und Individuum im Zeitaltm Newtons: zur Geneseder Mechanistischen NaturundSozialphilosophie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982.) Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (various editions, but see especially the introduction by C.B. MacPherson to the Penguin edition published at Harmondsworth, UK, in 1968) MacPherson, C.B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1962. Letter Eight Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Maurice Godelier, Rationality and Irrationality in Economics. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Martin Hollis and Edward Nell, Rational Economic Man. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Charles K. Wilber and Kenneth P. Jameson, An Inquiry into the Poverty of Economics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983. Note: See especially the works cited in the text at the end of the letter. Letter Nine Note: the currently prevailing norms of rationality are criticized in several of the works cited above. The following works support the proposition that different rationalities have been and can be constructed. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1966. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Carol Gilligan, Mapping the Moral Domain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Hartsock, Nancy, Money, Sex and Power. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. (Especially Chapter Nine) Dorothy Lee, Freedom and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988. Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942. 435 LETTERS FROM QUBEC Letter Ten Adams, Richard N., The Eighth Day. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1965. (Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse. Paris: F. Alcan, 1912) Claude Levi-Strauss, La function symbolique. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934. Jean Piaget, Biology and Knowledge, an essay on the relations between organic regulations and cognitive processes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. (Biologie et connaissance: essaie sur les relations entre les regulations organiques et les proccssus cognitijs. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.) Letter Eleven Note: see also the books cited in the text at the end of Letter Eleven, and Dorothy Lee citcil above. On logical positivism. AJ. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic. New York: Dover, 1946. Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), The Logical Structure of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. (Der logische Aufbau der Welt. Berlin: Weltreis-Verlag, 1928) Oswald Hanfly, Logical Positivism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. C.E.M. Joad, A Critique of Logical Positivism-. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950. On ordinary language philosophy.

Charles Caton, Philosophy and Ordinary Language. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1963. Antony Flew (ed.), Logic and Language (first and second series). New York: Doubleday, 1965. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. On dialectical materialism. Maurice Cornforth, Dialectical Materialism. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955. Maurice Cornforth, Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965. On phenomenology. James M. Edie, An Invitation to Phenomenology. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965. Marvin Farber, The Foundations of Phenomenology. New York: Paine-Whitman, 1962. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), An Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. (Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik. Tubingen: M, Niemeyer, 1953) Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), The Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press, 1962. (Phenomenologie de la Perception Paris: Gallimard, 1945) Paul Ricoeur, Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers, philosophic du mystere et philosophic duparadoxe. Paris: Editions de Temps Present, 1948. 436 Letters Twelve, Thirteen, and Fourteen Plato, Apology (various editions) Plato, Crito (various editions) Plato, Euthyphro (various editions) Plato, Gorgias (various editions) Plato, Phaedo (various editions) Plato, Symposium (various editions) Plato, Republic (various editions) Plato, The Laws (various editions) The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Jean-Marie Benoist, Tyrannie du Logos. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975. Natalie Bluestone, Women and the Ideal Society. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Letters Fifteen, Sixteen, and Seventeen Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (various editions) Aristotle, Politics (various editions) Aristotle, Metaphysics (various editions) Saint Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nichomachean Ethics (various editions) Saint Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle (various editions) Letter Eighteen Saint Augustine, Confessions (various editions) Letter Nineteen Austin, J.L. How to do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952. Rom Harr, Causal Powers: a theory of natural necessity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1975. Rom Harr and Roy Harris (eds.) Linguistics and Philosophy: the controversial intent linn ( Word: Pergamon, 1993. Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), Homo Viator: introduction to a metaphysics of hope. Chicago: Regnery, 1951.(Homo viator; prolgomnes une mtaphysique de lesprance. Paris. Aubier,

1944.) Nel Noddings, Caring. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. John Searle, Speech Acts. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen). New York: Macmillan, 1953. 437 LETTERS FROM QUBEC Letter Twenty Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1905. Jacques Derrida, Passions. Paris: Galilee, 1993. Rom Harr (ed.), The Social Construction of the Emotions. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Stanley Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: essays and experiments. New York: McGrawHill, 1992. Marcel Proust, On Reading Rtiskin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. John Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens (Part I of sketches of the history of Christendom for boys and girls who have been held at its fonts) Orpington, Kent: George Alien, 1884. Saint Augustine, The City of God (various editions) Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Blackfriars edition, Latin text and English translation. Cambridge, UK: Blackfriars, 1964 (See especially Volume 34). Letter Twenty One Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Verbum: Word and idea in Aquinas. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967. Anatol Rapoport, Prisoners Dilemma, a study in conflict and cooperation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965. Anatol Rapoport, Strategy and Conscience. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Letter Twenty Two T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960. M.K. Gandhi, My Socialism. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1959. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. New York: Macmillan, 1944. Peter Maurin, Easy Essays. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936. Novalis, Die Christenheit oder Europa. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966. Ezra Pound, The ABC of Economics. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1940. William Butler Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil. New York: Russell and Russell, 1903. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) The Slavery of our Times. London: Porcupine Press, 1948. Letter Twenty Three Note (1): For several views on the origins of modernity see the books to which Letter 2 3 alludes. Note (2): The following titles represent a selection from research and reflection on moral development, which, in their general thrust and tendency, tend to show, with facts, (a) that solidarity with others and respect for individual liberty both characterize higher levels of moral development; hence the ideal of love and the ideal of freedom are, rightly understood, complementary in practice; and (b) that most human behavior is conventional; hence constructive changes in behavior can be expected lrom constructive changes in conventions. 438 Bibliography Note (3): Periodic updates of bibliographies on moral development are prepared by Donald Cochrane and published in the journal Moral Education Forum.

Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Emile Durkheim, Moral Education. New York: Free Press, 1961. (Leducation morale, Paris: Mean, 1925) Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984. Jane Loevinger, Ego Development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgement of the Child. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1932. (Jugement moral chez Ienfant. Paris: F. Alcan, 1932) James R. Rest, Moral Development: advances in research and theory. New York: Praeger, 1986. Letter Twenty Four Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: essays on Cartesianism and culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Elie Denissoff, Descartes, premier tbeoricien de la physique matkematique. Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 1970. Ren Descartes (1596-1650), Discourse on Method (various editions) Ren Descartes (1596-1650), Metaphysical Meditations (various editions) Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Behemoth or The Long Parliament (various editions) Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Leviathan (various editions) Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: the origins of modernity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Jacques Maritain, Lesonge de Descartes. Paris: Correa, 1932. Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980. Peter A. Schouls, The Imposition of Method: a study of Descartes and Locke. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980. William of Ockham (1285-1349), Philosophical Writing. Edinburgh: Nelson, 1957. William of Ockham (1285-1349), A Short Discourse on the Tyrannical Government over Things Divine and Human. (BreviloquiumdePrincipatu Tyrannico) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Note: See also the works of Elster, Freudenthal, and MacPherson cited above. 439 LETTERS FROM QUBEC Letter Twenty Five Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: an exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism. London: Wildwood House, 1975. Thomas J. Peters and Robert A. Waterman, In Search of Excellence: lessons from Americas bestrun companies. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Jean Piaget, Structuralism. New York: Basic Books, 1970. (Le structuralisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968) Introduction to Volume Two Rom Harr, Social Being. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: the riddles of culture. New York: Random House, 1974 (Notice the trialectic among ideas, ecology, and the exploitation of some humans by others.) Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: biological constraints on the human spirit. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982. Peter Marsh, Elisabeth Rosser, Rom Harr, Rules of Disorder. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Robert Ricklefs, The Economy of Nature: a textbook in basic ecology. New York: Chiron Press,

1983. (See also Jean Piagets works, two of which are cited above. A great merit of Piaget is to have shown how the world studied by the natural sciences and the world of human conduct regulated by meanings is the same world.) Letter Twenty Six Hannah Arendt, On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1970. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Liveright, 1950. (Jenseits der Lustprinzips. Leipzig: IPU, 1920) Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume II3. London: Hogarth, 1964. Letter Twenty Seven Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Dictionnaire encydopedique. Paris: Editions du Monde rnoderne, 1930. Martin Luther (1483-1546), 95 Theses. Saint Louis: Concordia, 1967. Martin Luther (1483-1546), Martin Luthers Basic Theological Writings. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989. Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (various editions) Adam Smith (1723-1790), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (various editions) 440 Letters Twenty Eight, Twenty Nine, Thirty, Thirty One, Thirty Two, and Thirty Three Monique Castillo, Kant et lavenir de la culture. Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 1990. Dick Howard, The Politics of Critique. Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990. Immanuel Kant (17241804) (various editions): Critique of Pure Reason (Critik der reinen Vemunft) Critique of Practical Reason (Critik der practischen Vernunft) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlagen der Metaphysik der Sitten) Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden) The Metaphysical Elements of Justice (Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Rechtslehre) What is Enlightenment? (Was ist Aufklarung?) Prologomena to any Future Metaphysics (Prologomena zu einer jades kunftigen Metaphysik) The Doctrine of Virtues (Tugendlehre) Letter Thirty Two Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: our history, our future. Cambridge, Mass.: Harper & Row, 1987. Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1983. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. London: Zed Books, 1986. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: an ecofeminist theology of earth healing. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992. See also the works of Gilligan, Hartsock, and Merchant cited above. Letters Thirty Four, Thirty Five and Thirty Six Karl Marx (1818-1883), Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), Works. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975-83. (Werke. Berlin: Dietz, 1959-) (Note especially: the early articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, the critique of Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, the Theses on Feuerbach, the three volumes of Capital and the notes published

as a fourth, the Critique of the Gotha Program.) Howard Richards, Distributive Justice, (unpublished doctoral dissertation). Santa Barbara, California: University of California at Santa Barbara, 1974. John Woolman (1720-1772), The Journal of John Woolman (various editions) 441 LETTERS FROM QUBEC Letter Fifty Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. (Lcriture et la diffrance. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1967) Wolfgang Fuchs, Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976. Note (1): See also works mentioned in the text of Letter Fifty. Note (2): See also works of Derrida cited above. Note (3): Letter Sixty Five, which is not included in this volume, is on Derridas critique of Searle. 442