Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity 
by 

David Foster Wallace

 

Thinking Impossibly

It was the Greeks who discovered that numbers, and therefore mathematics, had only the most tenuous connection with the world in which we live. Numbers constitute a separate order of existence. The number 5 for example has no connection with the five apples that might be sitting on my kitchen table, or with the age of my youngest relative. The number 5 is something all on its own. It is constructed out of other numbers, which are made up of other numbers that may in turn be constructed using the number 5. Mathematics, in other words, is a completely self-contained and isolated world we make up. 

No one was aware of this quite separate world before the Greeks stumbled across it. They were, rightly, in awe of its implications. The otherworldliness of mathematics suggested an unnaturalness, indeed a supernaturalness, that demanded religious veneration. Mathematics seemed to literally reveal things that were unknowable in any other way. Numbers must be divine, they thought. Numbers were perfect. What we experienced outside of mathematics were imperfect approximations or distorted reflection of numbers. Within this religion of numbers, only two heresies were recognised: zero and infinity. These were demons which had no place in either the divine or the divine ‘word’ of mathematics.

The theological prejudice of the Greeks was tempered a bit in late antiquity. As mathematics inched its way from geometry to algebra, zero was recognised as a useful addition to mathematical doctrine - much like free will later became essential in strict Calvinism to motivate virtue. Zero seemed real enough since it was possible to point to an empty basket of fruit as a purported proof of its existence. But even today, there is debate about whether zero is a number or merely a digit which is useful in mathematical expression - something like a decimal point for example. 

Infinity, however, is a different matter altogether. Although infinity is an essential concept in modern mathematics, there is no way to throw shade about what it is. Infinity can’t be pointed to nor represented except by symbols for something that is entirely beyond anyone’s experience. As Wallace’s title so concisely says, infinity is more than everything there is - more than the number of gluons, muons, bosons, and all other elementary particles in the entire universe, for example. 

And the distance of infinity from any reality we know only increases when we recognise that there are many ‘orders’ of infinity - infinities that are more or less than other infinities. These higher orders of infinity weren’t discovered until the 19th century. And we appear still to have resisted the implications of these discoveries in the same way that the Pythagoreans did by keeping the indeterminacy of the infinitely long decimal expression of π, the relation between the circumference and the diameter of a circle, as a cultic secret which might undermine faith in mathematics. Infinity for them meant ‘mess.’

And infinity today, although less of a mess, is still very messy indeed about what it implies. Wallace quotes the great German mathematician, David Hilbert, approvingly: “The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality, no matter what experiences, observations, and knowledge are appealed to.” Infinity is an abstraction, the ultimate mathematical abstraction. But an abstraction of what? No one has ever seen an infinitely full basket of anything in order to make such an abstraction. 

No, infinity is an abstraction from a system of numbers, which themselves are supposedly abstractions. It is at this point that the ultimate revelation of mathematics takes place: numbers are indeed abstractions but abstractions of each other not of some experience of baskets of various items. Numbers produce each other; they have no existence except in their relationship with each other. 2 + 2 = 4 is not an inductive generalisation of market experience of baskets and their contents; it is an entirely intellectual proposition/discovery/definition. Which of these you choose to describe infinity is a reflection of one’s already established metaphysical position. It fits with and confirms them all.

Here’s the thing: infinity shows that the world created by mathematics has only an obscure and unreliable connection to our experience. This applies not just to the infinite in all its manifestations but also to the number 5 and its colleagues and associates. Like infinity, no one has ever experienced the number 5, or the way it interacts with other numbers to produce itself or yet further numbers. If you doubt this, just try to provide a precise statement of, say, the square root of 5. Numbers don’t cut the world at its joints. Sometimes they don’t even know their own joints. As Wallace summarises the situation: “... mathematical truths are certain and universal precisely because they have nothing to do with the world.” 

And the revelations generated by infinity are not limited to mathematics; they extend to that more general realm of which mathematics is a part: language. Wallace nails this too: “... the abstract math that’s banished superstition and ignorance and unreason and birthed the modern world is also the abstract math that is shot through with unreason and paradox and conundrum and has, as it were, been trying to tie its shoes on the run ever since the beginning of its status as a real language.” Mathematics is the most precise language we have. Yet, ultimately it doesn’t know what it’s talking about, except itself.

None of this means that mathematics, or language in general, isn’t immensely useful. Of course it is; but for rather complex and often mysterious reasons. The revelation of infinity is simply that mathematics is not reality. Nor is any other language. Like all language, mathematics can be beautiful, and compelling, and inspirational. But it is never the way the world is. Confusion about this simple fact is something that human beings seem to have a great deal of trouble with. Language especially political language, easily reverts to religion (and vice-versa). Wallace’s little book is appropriate therapy for reducing this confusion. 

And by the way, Neal Stephenson’s introduction alone is worth the price of admission.

The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: The Theological Basis of Ethics by Karl Barth
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It’s All About Other People, Karl

Karl Barth was arguably the most important Christian theoiogian of the 20th century. A Calvinist who felt that Protestantism had been distorted into a pernicious civil religion, and that Catholicism remained bogged down in its own self-justification, Barth tried to recover the meaning of divine revelation in a world bent on using it for other than divine ends.

The Theological Basis of Ethics is an attempt to demonstrate that Christian theology has teeth, as it were, in that the revelation of a Trinitarian God has implications for how human beings are meant to act with each other. This has become a somewhat persistent theme in theological ethics even into the 21st century.

The details of Barth’s argument are dense and complex, largely because of his highly refined, one might say tortuous, view of what constitutes revelation. It is not this argument that concerns me here but the rather more general logic of the relationship between revelation and ethics. It is at this level that I believe Barth becomes incomprehensible.

The problem that all ethicists face is that they must ultimately recognise something as The Good against which to evaluate correct behaviour. Once The Good is specified, however implicitly or indirectly, behavioural implications are usually obvious. So this choice is pivotal for ethical discussion.

Theological ethicists, that is theologians who claim to ‘derive’ ethics from ‘revealed truths’ about God, don’t approve of what might be called liberal sentiment as the basis for ethics. For them the mores and feelings of society at large are inadequate guarantees of the appropriateness of ethical standards. For the theologians these are mere conventions with no absolute claim on our consciences, laws or attitudes.

Rather the theologian starts with what he calls revelation, that divinely provided insight which, however inarticulate, demands to be heard and acted upon. Revelation is a gift, a dandum rather than a datum, according to Barth. The core of this gift is contained in sacred scriptures, but the message it gives is constantly adapted to our present circumstances. Even the Bible is an interpretation of the Word of God mainly appropriate to times in which it was written. It is static only for those who would make an idol of the human word.

The problem is, of course, the distinction that Barth and other theologians make between revelation and conventional ethical wisdom. Barth quotes St. Augustine on revelation as not being “…as if we believed something new, but having remembered it we approve of what has been said.” Just how such familiar thought can be distinguished from conventional wisdom that floats about the community we live in is a mystery. Indeed, what is the revelation he talks about other than slowly evolving thoughts about the divine passed down in the cultural gossip we call tradition?

It is just as valid therefore to argue from liberal ethics to theology as the other way round. Our ideas of God are generated by our feelings about what is important and how people should act with each other. We deduce God from what we think we should be like. Barth’s catalysing issue, as it were, was the fact that many theologians and fellow-churchmen cheered Germany’s initiation and continued participation in WWI. But the proposition that Barth saw what was being done and rejected it precisely because he himself was re-stating liberal bourgeois values is not a trivial possibility. From this conventional viewpoint he was correcting the profound error of trying to deduce ethics from religion, precisely what his colleagues were doing.

Carl Jung wrote contemporaneously with Barth. There are two principles of Jungian psychology: First that the Unconscious is indistinguishable from Reality. Second that the Self, consisting of The Conscious and Unconscious Mind, is indistinguishable from God. I don’t think that Barth would have argued with these. Surprisingly they are not inconsistent with Barth’s neo-Calvinism of the “radical externality” of the Word of God.

The “voice of the Living God” is indeed present in what we experience around us, as Bonaventure most famously insisted, particularly in other people. Jung’s theory has the great advantage of being immensely simpler than Barth’s theology. And it has a much sharper and tighter ethical import: It is other people who must be respected as the divine voice lest our own selves become idolised. What more could theological ethics want or need to say?

Postscript: For more on the theology of Barth, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Platonism and the Spiritual Life by George Santayana
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Uninspiring Aspirations

The essence of spirit is to aspire. Aspire to what? This is the question Santayana sets himself to answer in Platonism and the Spiritual Life.

Santayana approves of Platonic philosophy, mainly because it provides for the existence of ideals that can motivate human behaviour. He quotes Dean Inge approvingly: “Values are for the Platonist not only ideals but creative powers.”

I too find idealistic philosophy inspiring and satisfying; perhaps the latter because of the former. But I find Santayana’s presentation of Plato somewhat confusing, and a little less than inspiring.

On the one hand, Santayana seems a sort of budding proto-constructivist when he says, “Harmony itself is a good only because the spirit which it creates so regards it.” I take this as a clearly self-referential statement in which he recognises that the human ability to perceive order in the universe, creates such order.

He goes on to say, “The distinction between true goods and false goods can never be established by ignorant feeling...”, thus implying a critical relation between the intellect and the emotions, as well as the possibility of emotional development. One might be justified in expecting, therefore, an aspiration to progress in just this direction.

But Santayana takes an unexpected tack. “For felt values,” he says, “... are all equally genuine in their excellence and equally momentary in their existence.” In other words whatever emotion pops up at the moment is definitive as the basis for action. This sounds more like a philosophical rationale for the behaviour of Donald Trump than a programme for idealistic striving.

My consternation increases when he subsumes even ideals within his concept of emotionally driven values: “The Ideals of Plato were really nothing but values... forms of the good.” If my logic is correct, this means that these ideals have no external reality at all; they are, rather, subjective emotional instincts. Perhaps some of these instincts are more or less common among human beings; but not necessarily. They are essentially personal.

Santayana’s primary concern seems to be the ideological threat of ideals which are considered as more than completely subjective: “Idealism, as it moves away from its origins, easily becomes idolatrous.” Since those origins are personal and emotional, one presumes, any attempt to generalize, or impose them on others, is unjustified.

It’s easy to see the individualistic point that Santayana is making. But it seems evident that he started from this point and worked backwards in order to justify it. In other words it could well be that his interpretation of Plato is a tendentious rationalisation of what is a political position, perhaps an intellectual opposition to the socialist theory of the day.

On the other hand, Santayana appears to want to displace ideals and their emotional effects. “Spiritual life,” he says, “is not a worship of values... it is the exact opposite: it is the disintoxication from their influence.” So apparently these personal, emotionally sovereign ideals make us drunk. Good judgment demands we sober up before making any decisions.

In this part of his argument Santayana seems to be directing his ire not toward political ideology but toward religion as ideology. “It is the world’s business to call down the spirit to dwell in it, not the spirit to create a world in which to dwell.” Evangelical fundamentalism was on the rise as he wrote and it therefore seems like he intended to counter this popular trend. ‘The spirit itself is not afraid of being stamped out here, or kindled there.”

So the spirit is in a sense our most personal possession. Yet the spirit is not something that can be touched by prayer or the rituals of religion. Neither is it subject to intellectual control. It is a sort of basic instinct, an unconscious, unwieldy Id, that, although central to our personalities must be resisted and even feared lest it be released into the world.

Can such a conclusion inspire anyone’s spirit to aspire, much less to create? It seems to be more nihilistic and gnostic than Platonic. I find it an absurd interpretation, a sort of polemic against the times in which Santayana found himself, apparently unwillingly.

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The Idea of Christ in the Gospels: Or, God in Man: A Critical Essay by George Santayana
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Philosophical Roots of American Populism

George Santayana, from his elevated position as professor at Harvard College, was a major force in America philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century. He was a prolific writer but his greatest influence was probably with and through his students, who included T S Eliot, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann, and Wallace Stevens, among many other literary names.

Santayana self-identified as an atheist-Catholic, reflecting his birth in Spain to a Catholic family. Nonetheless, he was respectful and even appreciative of religious wisdom, at least when he found it compatible with his own philosophy. William James was his friend and mentor and encouraged him in his literary style of philosophical reasoning. He was on friendly terms with the other American Pragmatists, including C S Peirce and Josiah Royce; and although he wrote the first extended exposition about Pragmatism (The Life of Reason), he never identified himself with that school of thought, and much of his philosophy is incompatible with it.

Because he created no philosophical ‘school’, his views seem to have been disseminated and diffused rather than passed on in an academic way into American intellectual culture. The dominance of Harvard philosophy came to an end during WWI, which also marked a discontinuity in philosophical issues and methods. Neither his brand of literary philosophy nor Pragmatism survived as academic traditions. Consequently Santayana’s importance is subject to debate. He is probably known today more for his aphorisms than his philosophical writings.

Nevertheless, Santayana remains worthy of consideration today for at least one good reason: he articulated the individualism embedded in America culture, possibly better than any other contemporary American philosopher. He didn’t invent this individualistic stance but he gave it weight. This individualism is arguably his most forceful legacy, and permeates much of the populism that increasingly has manifested itself in the United States over the last two decades.

It therefore seems to me of some importance to understand the underlying ethos of Santayana’s philosophy. I have written several other pieces on his aesthetics and his analysis of Platonic philosophy elsewhere (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). My intention here is to use his The Idea of Christ in the Gospels to excavate a bit more of his reasoning and evaluate its relevance to current issues.

_—————————————————————-

Written during the war against European fascism and published in 1946, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels is I think Santayana’s most mature statement of his philosophical position. Although its argument is a critique of religion, the elements of this argument are, as it were, standard-issue Santayana tropes. Because of his expository style it is necessary to select carefully the elements that constitute structure as opposed to decoration. Some distortion is inevitable therefore. Nevertheless, I think this uncovering to bare wood shows that things might not be all that on the level or weather-tight in the Santayana edifice.

He begins his argument in good literary fashion with what is really a concise summary of his story. “The natural man,” he says, “never feels more passive, or more at a loss to explain his performance, than when he has a brilliant thought or does impulsively some unexpectedly some heroic or shameful action.” This is as much a statement of intent as it is an observation of his own reaction to life. And shortly thereafter he makes the connection to both his subject and his philosophy clear: “... inspiration far more primitive and pervasive than we commonly suppose... marks the birth of spirit.”

Spirit is a central category for Santayana. He uses it in virtually all his work. What he means by spirit is very specific and also somewhat idiosyncratic. Spirit cannot exist, for Santayana, without a body. It is an aspect of the material world not a part of some other dimension temporarily united with a human being. The spirit is the motivating force within the body; it is what makes the body human, or presumably any other living being.

And not just living beings. Spirit is also a component of institutions. “To be a spirit without a body is as impossible for the Church as it is for a believer.” This is important for his critique of the Church, by which he primarily means the Roman Church. He uses the idea of corporate spirit to correctly point out that it was the Church which authorised the gospels, not the other way round.

It is also the Church which constructed a doctrinal and hierarchical structure. It became established in the world and when it did, “... as was inevitable and requisite... spirit in it could not retain its primacy.” Despite this overwhelming of the spirit by the administrative and political consideration of the Church body, the spirit, “... continues to work in the lump.” Just why the practical concerns of the Church should imply the degrading of spirit is not specified. Nor is the operation of the spirit on the “lump” discussed.

From that point, Santayana traces the activity of spirit in the record of the Bible of both the old and new testaments. His views are interesting, for example: the Bible throughout “assumes that the universe is a system of bodies more or less animated by spirit”; Jesus’s cursing of the fig tree is a condemnation of those who ignore the “divine opportunities” revealed by the spirit; Christ himself represents divine creativity, the “absolute prerogative” of the ultimate Spirit, which Santayana considers “eminently anthropomorphic” not as a criticism but in sympathetic understanding.

But at this point in his story, Santayana starts making what appear to be contradictory claims. After citing ‘love’ or more precisely ‘Christian charity’ as the central virtue of the faith, he then interprets love as the “Moral freedom [of] ... the physically undiscoverable love of the spirit for that which it truly loves.” The opaqueness of both love and its object is startling. Santayana suggests that neither can ever be articulated. Yet he then goes on to say:

The idea of God as spirit, loving the spirit in us and realizing in Himself all that spirit in us looks to as its supreme good, is evidently prophetic; that is, it sees in its vision as an accomplished fact, though hidden from vulgar apprehension, a secret ideal of the heart, and helps to render that ideal clearer and more communicable... Holiness is the triumph of the spirit over the other elements of human nature.

Spirit, and God as ultimate spirit, has already been established in the book as indecipherable. In his other writings he treats the spirit as impossible to discern or describe in any meaningful detail much less to change by human intervention. Yet here Santayana talks about a ‘vision’ with the character of fact. Still, this fact is not factual in any obvious way. It remains ‘secret’ and ‘hidden’, two qualities that would seem to define anything but a fact. And he believes that this entirely inarticulate ‘fact’ can become even more articulate, and then, suddenly, ‘communicable’, presumably to oneself and to others.

Santayana’s final sentence about holiness in the quotation above is perhaps the most disturbing part of his conclusion. In the earlier parts of the book, he has lamented the subjugation of spirit. But his consistent view throughout his writings, as well as here, is that the spirit is destructive of all forms of social structure. Not just the Church, but the State, and corporate organisation in general, he recognises as the enemy of spirit. On a personal level, his view of holiness is effectively a sacramentalisation of the Freudian Id, that unconscious component of the psyche which provokes uncontrolled and irrational behaviour.

The Idea of Christ in the Gospels is consistent with his other writings over the course of his career. All contain the same sort of deified instinctual unconscious. The consequences of this consistency for either individual mental/spiritual health or the stability/habitability of society are immense and immensely frightening if they were ever to be taken seriously. Fortunately they have not in any formal way. But, judging by the recent elections and subsequent political activity in the United States, it appears that the populist and evangelical nihilist sentiment that is so evident has come from one of America’s least read philosophers.

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Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power 
by 

Josef Pieper, 

 

Lothar Krauth (Translator)

 

BlackOxford's review 

Aug 14, 2013  ·  edit

it was ok

bookshelves: philosophy-theology, epistemology-language, church, german-language 

Living in Glass Houses

Christianity backed the wrong horse. Not Jesus who was admirable in many ways, divine or not. But language, that most unreliable of creations, which morphs and wiggles incessantly and always ends up controlling those who think they are using it. And the Christian sect most controlled by the independent beast of language is the Catholic Church, which doesn’t appear to realize that when it speaks, when it literally pontificates, it is doing so from the belly of the beast of which it thinks itself master.

Joseph Pieper was a leading German Catholic philosopher who wrote a number of interesting books on the philosophy and theology of culture. But in his Abuse of Language - Abuse of Power he has ventured out onto some very thin ice. His thesis is that language, that essential carrier of culture, has been corrupted and controlled, primarily by political interests which want to manipulate not merely public opinion but the very minds of the general populace.

Whether or not one agrees with Pieper’s thesis, however, it is clear that historically the dominant controller of language and mass linguistic manipulator has been the Catholic Church itself. The Church firmly hitched its wagon to the star of language as soon as it started making infallible pronouncements in the early Middle Ages. It’s been squirming ever since to get out of its historical positions on things as varied as slavery, usury, military service, democracy, Jews, and whether or not it’s only Catholics who can be saved. Language is its permanent vulnerability but it can’t back down from its obsession with it.

Unaccountably, this seems not to have occurred to Pieper. Nor does he seem to understand the essential connection between the control of language and what Christians refer to as faith. So his apologetics implicitly condemn precisely that which he means to defend, the authority of an institution which is the eminent example of the abuser he is attacking. The problem is in fact more fundamental than just saying regrettably stupid things. It lies at the core of Christian doctrine itself; so the Church, and in fact all Christian churches, are stuck with the consequences.

Christian faith is a somewhat slippery thing. It is a concept invented in its entirety by that genius of religious innovation, Paul of Tarsus. According to the theology of Paul, that set of ideas which forms the core of Christian thought, the desired state of human existence, that is to say, salvation, requires this essential quality: faith. It is generally accepted by Christian theologians ever since that this quality can not be acquired by trying to get it. It comes as a gift not as a reward for doing good or thinking good thoughts.

According to Paul, the object of this faith is Jesus as the risen Christ whom he expected to appear imminently to take ownership of the universe, which he will then return to his Father from whence it came. Paul got his timing for this event rather wrong. But Christians have stuck with Paul’s idea of the importance of faith out of... well I suppose out of the importance of faith. The self-referentiality doesn’t appear to bother them much. Nor, I suppose, should it since we have to build our lives as some presuppositions as we go along.

But what is this presupposition of faith? Paul says it is Jesus, a person whom he never met but about whom he has heard stories from others. Clearly, however, the historical existence of Jesus is itself a not very substantive matter. That existence is the tip of an iceberg which Paul and others would like all of us to accept as factual characteristics of that existence, things like Jesus’s motivation, his special status, the consequences of his short but dramatic life in cosmological terms, and his intentions for those who remembered him after his death.

Thus Pauline faith demands some considerable elucidation. It requires language in the form of foundational scriptures (mainly Paul’s letters to his dispersed Asian congregations), references (particularly to the existing Hebrew Scriptures which Paul used to ‘prove’ his assertions about Jesus), and gradually various creeds which summarized the ‘content’ of this thing called faith. As a practical matter, without this linguistic content, faith would be vacuous. 

Hence the Christian problem of faith which arose immediately as the story of Jesus spread through the Roman Empire. Or more properly ‘stories’ since language implies interpretation which implies variation which creates disunity. So the early Church began a series of linguistic conflicts which continue to the present day. From the so-called Judaizers and Gnostics in the 1st century, to the Protestant Reformers of the 16th, to the dissenting traditional Catholics the 21st, the nexus of religious unity has always been linguistic content and its interpretation in every Christian sect. 

Faith, in other words, is not just the acceptance of a formula of words (whether biblical or doctrinal makes no difference) but the commitment to defend this formula against competing formulae. Whatever historical events, original intentions, or progressive interpretations lie ‘behind’ these formulae are irrelevant. The words themselves are what one is meant to believe, to have faith in. What else is there? This is Christian faith, the defensive repetition of credal formulae. 

In such a situation how could Christian churches do anything other than control language in order to maintain the unity of their adherents. It is an unavoidable consequence of Pauline theology. And it is more than a bit obtuse for an educated, intellectually sophisticated thinker like Pieper to pretend that he is defending human freedom against political forces out to reduce it. The Church is the standard, both historical and current, of just the sort of abuse he is worried about.

 

The City & the City by China Miéville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

O Happy Fault

I have never underestimated China Mieville’s writing talent. But until recently I also hadn’t realized the depths of his thought. The City & the City is not merely a cleverly structured detective novel, it is also a rather profound anthropological analysis.

The premise of the book is that the City in question is divided in two by a sort of psychological Iron Curtain, sometimes at the level of individual dwellings. The two parts of the City intertwine physically, but the residents of each half are not permitted to see, hear, smell, touch, or otherwise interact with the residents of the other half. Each population is restricted to its designated spaces in which everyone lives apparently normal lives but with no awareness of the others who live among them.

Residents from each half may visit the other half by transferring through a sort of border tunnel in the middle of the City. Having crossed from one half to the other, the visitor is required to participate fully in its life. He or she must ‘unsee’ everything with which he is intimately familiar from his half. Any lapse in this protocol is considered a Breach and is dealt with harshly as a matter of law.

There are certainly a variety of ways in which Mieville’s imagination can be interpreted: for example, as a representation of the human psychological ability to simply ignore what it does not wish to see; or as the regrettable compartmentalization of modern life in which certain moral behaviors are permissible in one ‘box’ but anathema in another; or as a critique of the economic, social, and racial ghettoization of not just cities but also of whole societies.

My first reading resulted in an interpretation of the City as wallowing in an unfortunate fate, implicitly waiting and hoping for some sort of redemptive unification of the City. The separation of the two parts of the City was the result of an obscure historical act equivalent to Original Sin. No one remembers what the act was or when it was committed but its effects persist in the rigid and unnecessary conventions that dominate the City’s life.

Upon reflection, I have come to a very different interpretation of the book thanks to the influence of an unexpected source, a discussion of so-called ‘religious aesthetics’ by a theologian named Frank Burch Brown [see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...]. Brown’s analysis opens up a very different possibility for understanding Mieville’s idea of parallel worlds occupying the same geographical space but alien to one another.

This alternative explanation is based on some rather interesting observations on aesthetics, the study of choosing the filters by which we allow ourselves to perceive the world. Generalizing his conception a bit, what Brown suggests is that Mieville’s type of split world is not a flaw or distortion but a necessary condition for human beings to avoid falling into the trap of their own hubris.

Each world in fact helps to make the other visible. The unique social conventions, mores, architecture, literature, cuisine, and routines of one can never be taken entirely for granted because there is another set of these cultural conditions, literally just around the corner. This fact ensures that neither half of the City can ever turn itself, its particular concerns, aims, and prejudices into idols because ‘This is the way the world really is.’ They are forced in daily life to recognize the existence of the ‘other’ precisely through the persistent demand to not notice it. Brilliant.

So the ‘split personality’ of The City & the City is not a flaw resulting from some horrible primordial mistake, but a well-conceived design executed by some wise folk to to keep the residents from that most dreadful mortal sin of believing one’s own press.

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Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction by John D. Caputo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event by John D. Caputo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Helping God Escape

Our largely secularised world prides itself on its freedom from the deadly virus of religious dogmatism. This condition, one might believe, frees us also from the need to know anything about theology.

But it is the remnants of religious doctrine which lurk in our presumptions about what constitutes reality that are often more potently destructive than any explicit dogma. These remnants are largely unconscious, undiscussed and impenetrable except in a theological genre.

I believe that 'power' is one of the most important of these theological remnants. And John Caputo is arguably the world's leading thinker about how we might make them explicit, and thereby a matter of some debate, and perhaps even choice. Caputo puts the matter bluntly: "One of the most fundamental fantasies of religion is the fantasy of power." Among other things it is this fantasy that religion perennially tries to sell to those in power, for its own advantage, that destroys religion from within. And it is this fantasy which The Weakness of God seeks to reveal as such.

Power is an inevitably theological problem in that no matter where or how it is exercised - politically, militarily, socially, within the family, the firm, or the charitable organisation - it provokes the question of its legitimacy and its ultimate source. The assertion that the legitimate font of power is the monarch, or the law, or the president, or even The People, begs the question 'Why?'. Historically therefore, one way or another, Ultimate Power, God in some guise, is invoked as its justification.

Caputo's idea is to stop thinking about God as a massive source of ontological or dynamic power that connects via spiritual high tension lines to governments, ruling hierarchies, and individuals. He invokes instead the (rather undogmatic) Judaeo-Christian idea of the "power of powerlessness", a weak force (for lack of a better vocabulary) which is exerted by the "unconditional claim" that we have on each other as human beings.

God, for Caputo, is neither a set of doctrinal propositions nor a fixed point of belief, nor a sovereign power or authority. God is a "call, a promise, and a hope". In traditional theology God is termed 'not a thing'. Caputo conceives of God in a similar way, as an 'event'. "The name of God is powerful because it is the name of our hope in the contract Elohim makes with things when he calls them 'good', when he calls them to the good...The name of God is the name of an unconditional promise not of unlimited power".

Caputo is not a closet atheist or anti-traditionalist. Neither is he a biblical literalist. But he is keenly sensitive to questionable interpretations. For example, a rather persistent doctrine of creation ex nihilo, from nothing, doesn't stand the test of comparison with biblical testimony. In Genesis the movement is not from non-being to being at all; it is from being to the good. Thus this presumed fundamental power of God can be seen as a philosophical rationalisation - of someone's existing power to be sure.

Caputo spends a great deal of thought on the biblical Kingdom of God. "The Kingdom of God is the event called by the name of God,... [it is] the contradiction of the 'world' (cosmos) which is the order of power and privilege and self interest, of the business as usual of those who would prevent the event."

Caputo's message, despite the apparently archaic but precisely apt terms in which it is expressed, is for 'prophecy'. "A prophet belongs not to the order of being...but to the order of the event, of the call, ... a troublemaker who speaks for justice now." The task of the prophet is to release what is happening within the name of God in the world.

So, if you're thinking that, I don't know, maybe the Democratic Party in the USA, or the Labour Party in Britain, or the Social Democrats in Europe, could use a new foundation for their political life, perhaps there is something in Caputo that touches a nerve. Is there even a possibility for a political party of weakness ro exist?

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The Philosophy of Loyalty by Josiah Royce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loyalty to Loyalty

The postscript included below is from today’s New York Times. It reminded me that I had never made the comments I’d intended two years ago on Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty .

In The Philosophy of Loyalty Royce makes the case for what he believes in the central human virtue. Royce’s philosophy was substantially influenced by the Christian teaching of his mother who was also somewhat of a mystic. For him, loyalty is the general social aspect of the Christian idea of love, that is, the habitual raising of the interests of another above our own. The theological model from which he derived his concept of loyalty is that of the Divine Trinity in which each of the distinct Persons is defined in terms of their complete and eternal devotion to the Others. This devotion is not a property of each Person but rather the defining characteristic of the relationship among them. In a specific sense, therefore, the essence of each Person is a distinctive commitment to the mutual relationships within the Trinity. This is expressed in Royce’s philosophy as “Loyalty to Loyalty.”

Despite its religious inspiration, Royce’s philosophy is meant for a secular audience. His argument is that we are all improved as human beings through the demonstration of loyalty by any one of us. Loyalty is not a zero sum but a positive sum relationship. But his concept of loyalty, and especially loyalty to loyalty, is easy to misinterpret. In an era when someone like Trump extols the virtue of loyalty as a reason for omertà, silence about criminal activities, some further explanation is obviously necessary. For Trump, loyalty clearly means personal devotion at any cost to someone else. But this has nothing to do with the loyalty of Christianity or Royce’s philosophy. It is a parody, a purposeful distortion of the principle of love.

Loyalty is a two way street. Not in the sense that we can only be loyal to those who are loyal to us, but because loyalty demands that we accept the diverse loyalties of others. Ultimate loyalty is to the relationship which promotes the loyalty of others, not just to ourselves but much more generally. Loyalty demands that we respect what Royce calls the ‘Cause’ of the other. This is another way of saying that we are all pursuing some purpose, and that as an essential aspect of being human purpose must be respected. Valuing the Causes of others, he contends, will assist in the recognition as well as achievement of our own. We and others may not be even aware of the possibility of such a Cause, in which case the duty of loyalty is to assist in its articulation and bringing it to conscious awareness.

Of course not all Causes are equal. Some may be trivial; others provoked by neurotic impulses; some are evil. According to Royce there is a way to distinguish among Causes. A Cause is more important if it is ‘bigger’ than another, that is if it incorporates other Causes within itself. Thus the Cause of a marriage is more important than the Causes of the individuals who constitute the marriage. A Cause is better than another Cause to the extent it accepts the Causes of others and reformulates those diverse Causes successfully - for example the health and well-being of an entire family of parents and children certainly includes the well-being of each individual but redefines what that well-being means as a member of the family..

Loyalty to loyalty is the practical commitment to finding a joint, group or communal Cause. The default relationship - in marriage, in corporate business, in politics - is to presume that no such Cause exists unless the parties have interests in common. Loyalty to loyalty implies not the discovery of common interests but the invention of an entirely new set of interests in which individual interests are not obliterated but subsumed as special cases. Loyalty to loyalty also implies that no Cause, except that which restricts or invalidates other Causes, can be excluded. This is a profound re-interpretation of democracy, not as a political system of equality of opinion but as a process of discovering increasingly general purpose.

Royce’s sort of philosophical idealism was a response to the carnage and civil disintegration of the American Civil War. It was abruptly removed from the national scene as a consequence of the carnage and civil disintegration of the First World War. I think the NYT article is correct. There are strong reasons for promoting a revival of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. It is a prescription for finding real unity out of divisive chaos. It is a philosophy as urgently relevant in Europe as it is in North America. It is simultaneously a morality and an organizational principle which applies as much to politics as it does to business. Finally, it is a personal attitude which promotes listening for the hidden intentions and unspoken purposes of not just others but also ourselves.

Postscript 1Feb19: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/op...

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The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Great Expectations

This is the definitive case history of the demise of the most admired company in America. What it demonstrates is that the failure of Enron, although facilitated by the greed and moral indifference that is typical in corporate life, was at root down to its excellence in precisely that set of skills for which it was most admired: corporate finance.

Jeff Skilling, a former McKinsey colleague of mine, was the 'vector' by which the infectious scourge of financial theory found its way into the company and eventually killed it. Corporate finance is what passed, and still passes, for intelligent business practice and spread like a cancer to every level of the company. Widespread corporate organ failure was triggered by an almost insignificant mutation in a rather insignificant limb.

What McLean and Elkins show is that Skilling, who received top honours from the Harvard Business School and rose to an exceptionally young partnership at McKinsey, had a devotion to corporate finance of religious intensity. He established it as the pervasive ethos of the company. He also sold this ethos to the people who provided finance to Enron, the investment banks, analysts and advisors who set the fashion for business rationality.

Skilling did not have to sell very hard. He merely had to push on the door that had been unlocked by years of academic indoctrination of the young MBA's in all these institutions who were eager to show just how savvy they were in the theory of corporate finance. On the face of it this theory is as esoteric as quantum mechanics. But this is of course is part of its charm: only the insiders, the experts, can understand it. Those who can't can be ignored as relics of business-past.

But in truth the modern theory of finance is based on a very simple, and as it turns out, a very stupid idea: value is prospective. That is, it doesn't have to do with whats in the bank, or in the warehouse, or, in general, what's been achieved; those things are matters for the stodgy accountants. Value is a function of expectations, of what is expected to come about because of our business plans. Specifically its about the cash flows that are anticipated far into the future.

The fly in this business ointment, of course, is whose expectations count and how reliable are they? It doesn't take much thought to realise that the only people who have the capacity to formulate expectations are the managers of the company. It is they, after all, who make the decisions and have access to the detailed information on things like operating costs and likely sales, etc. All the managers have to do is convince the banks and analysts and advisors that their numbers are credible. At this Skilling was a pro. They bought it.

But what goes around comes around. If you pay people down the line based on the expected value of what they do, they too hold most of the cards. And the house of cards grows and grows. Estimates of expected value expand, as it were, to meet the internal as well as external market demand.

The maximum level of these expectations was never touched simply because the finance director made a small error. In order to be able to get expected values into the accounts, the company set up a complex network of shell companies which became co-investors in Enron businesses. As long as these shell companies were less than 50% owned by Enron they didn't appear in the company's consolidated accounts. More importantly Enron could sell these companies parts of Enron investments at prices based on Enron's valuations. These sales could enter the audited accounts. Hey presto, corporate finance is baptised by accounting.

So far everything is legally kosher. But the FD got a little careless. One of the hundreds of shell companies technically controlled by friendly investment banks and their customers, was owned at slightly more than 50% by Enron. This is the snowflake that caused the avalanche of disaster. At one go the entire facade of valuation based on management expectations became visible and all came tumbling down.

Without doubt, Skilling had created the boldest experiment in corporate finance ever seen. Until it was seen to be what it actually was, an irrational game of chicken which could only have one outcome. Surprisingly, as far as I am aware neither McLean nor Elkind, despite their follow-on book on the crash of 2008, have generalised their analysis to a full-blown critique of corporate finance. We live in hope.

Postscript: Arguably the most influential populariser of corporate financial theory is Al Rappaport, a former professor of business at Northwestern University. His book, Creating Shareholder Value, is still in print after more than three decades (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...). Rappaport and several others started a financial consulting firm to commercialise his ideas. This firm was bought out by myself and two other partners in the mid-90’s. To my great and lasting shame I helped peddle these daft ideas to a number of banks and commercial companies. Despite the growing evidence of their destructiveness, my former partners maintain a virtually religious devotion to them. This is proof to me that human beings can rationalise even the most damaging and stupid behaviour.

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On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism by Gershom Scholem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An Ancient Philosophy of Language

Although Jewish, Kabbalah isn't only about Jews. It isn't even only about religion. It's about language, in which Judaism and religion, along with everything else of interest and importance to human beings is expressed. One way to explain the human significance of Kabbalah is by analogy: Kabbalah is to language as number theory is to mathematics. It probes the hidden structures and relations among the basic components of language just as number theory does with the primitive components of mathematics.

Like numbers, the components of language, words and grammar, are always already established in a context when we encounter them. The context of language can be virtually any narrative so long as it is taken seriously by the community in which it is recounted(!). The immediate context of Kabbalah is the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew and Christian Bible, and the source of a significant amount of Muslim scripture. It therefore has a claim to be the most seriously regarded narrative on the planet.

Kabbalah treats the Torah as a story, a story with divine import, but nonetheless a story. The vocabulary, and narrative trajectory, indeed each letter of this story, are taken as in need of interpretation in order to approach even a limited comprehension of the meaning of the whole. Kabbalah, therefore, however else it may function religiously, serves as a fundamental method of inquiry and a philosophy of the language which is required to mediate all other inquiry.

The objective of Kabbalah is expressed in theological terms: "To preserve the purity of the concept of God without loss of His living reality..." The substitution of the term 'language' for that of 'God' in Scholem's phrase does not harm the sense in the least. He goes on to make this point explicitly, "At the heart of the Kabbalah, we have the myth of the one God as a conjunction of all the primordial powers of being and a myth of the torah as an infinite symbol, in which all images and all names point to a process in which God communicates Himself." The term myth is not pejorative but simply an indication of a genre of story that carries spiritual meaning.

According to Scholem, who is the undisputed master-commentator on the Kabbalah in the 20th century, there are three cabalistic principles of the Torah. He discusses these at some length in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism:
1. The Principle of God's Name: the Torah as a pre-existing entity which has been with God eternally and from which the cosmos emanates.
2. The Principle of the Torah as an Organism: each component of the Torah, no matter how apparently trivial is of crucial importance because it contains within it the entire Torah.
3. The Principle of the Infinite Meaning of the Divine Word: the positive aspect of what is typically termed negative theology, that is, that all statements touching on the divine as ultimate reality are incomplete.
Each of these principles is intriguing in its own right. Together they constitute a highly sophisticated mode of thinking, an epistemology of language itself.

The Principle of God's Name

The Kabbalah is expressed in religious language, which for some may be difficult to disentangle from dogmatic prejudices. However, Christianity and Judaism have essentially the same fundamental view about the character of the 'divine word'. As Scholem notes, "What [the Christian mystical theologian] Joachim of Floris meant by the ‘Eternal Gospel’ is essentially the same as what the Kabbalists meant by the torah de-‘atsiluth." This last term is 'the supreme state of revelation', that is, the Torah as pure symbol. In other words, the Torah as language not religious practice.

Language is the essential tool of human community and human imagination. But language exists outside the control of any individual. We are born into a language which is entirely independent of the members of of the community who speak it and yet language lives or dies with that community. Language is all-present but also all-absent. Like Terry Pratchett's marvellous Small Gods, a language has power proportionate to those who believe in it.

Despite its power, language doesn't exist anywhere definite. It constitutes our thoughts but has no substance in itself. It is eerily divine in the manner in which it dominates our lives even if we become inured to its effects. We cannot resist language. We can only submit to it. The Divine Name, HaShem, is consequently the ultimate symbol of language.

Modern Semiotics has shown that there can be no identifiable initial point of language or the speakers of language in evolutionary history. Just as the evolutionary transition of species cannot ever be identified in a single individual, so the point at which symbols begin to be interpreted could never be established in human history. Language in other words is eternal. As the matter is expressed in modern linguistic theory: Semiotics has no beginning. There is nothing before language. Like the universe, we may hypothesise it had a beginning but this can only be conjecture. Language appears to pre-exist the users of language.

This is the generalised meaning of Scholem's first principle: Language itself creates the cosmos, including ourselves. But it is so powerful that we dare not consider it directly. Like the sun, language is too energetic to observe. We are forced to discuss it obliquely through the stories that are told within it.

The Principle of the Torah as an Organism

Modern systems theory makes the distinction between a mere collection of objects and a system. A system is more than the sum of its parts. Its functionality as a whole cannot be deduced from its parts. It has what are typically called emergent properties. Some rather sophisticated systems demonstrate purpose, that is, they can adapt to changing environmental circumstances in order to continue pursuing an objective. An automobile is such a system. Not only does it carry me comfortably to work everyday, but it's windscreen wipers, brakes, and lights automatically activate depending on driving conditions.

But an automobile cannot function as a toaster. Still more sophisticated systems are able to behave not just purposely but with purposefulness. That is, they are able to choose among and change objectives based on experience. Purposefulness means that a system can adapt not just its tactics but its objectives. If it is conscious, it can want different things depending upon its experiences.

Purposefulness is a difficult state to maintain. Because purposefulness, demanding relentless self-awareness, takes effort. It easily deteriorates into an established purpose, becoming myopic and routinised as something in particular is done particularly well, and comfortably so. Perhaps the syndrome could be called Semiotic Entropy, an unwillingness to think about 'Why' as much as 'How'.

Modern corporate organisations can be characterised as purposeful systems. They frequently demonstrate semiotic entropy as habit, meaningless language and conventional responses to novel situations. Such loss of purposefulness is the most common cause of corporate failure.

The only way that any system can maintain purposefulness is through a particular relationship within itself. Each component of a purposeful system must itself be a system which 'contains' the larger system. This may appear as a contradiction but it is an everyday event. The modern corporation for example works, when it does, in precisely this way. Corporate officers, when they are empowered and act in the name of the corporation, are the corporation. They 'contain' the corporate system within them both legally and pragmatically. As a collective they are the carriers of purposefulness. If they are constrained, purpose is fixed and the corporate entity withers.

Language itself is a type of corporate institution. All of language both contains and is contained within each of those who use it. Language in this respect is the ultimate system of purposefulness. It adapts continuously to its environment, and through the initiatives of its users, who also contained within it, language continuously explores new purposes. It is the mutual containment of language and members of the language community that Kabbalah models this fundamental existential condition. Scholem emphasises this point as the source of Kabbalah's power, "The mystical idea that each individual soul has its own peculiar way of understanding the Torah..." This conception is not very different from that in the philosophy of the 17th century Gottfried Leibniz or the 20th century Wittgenstein.

The Principle of the Infinite Meaning of the Divine Word

By considering the smallest element of the Torah in the greatest possible phenomenological detail, Kabbalah allows the 'sweeping-in' of multiple perspectives. There is an almost Leibnitzian insistence that each interpreter of the Torah will have a unique understanding of its meaning, a meaning of peculiar import to themselves but also of indirect significance to all others. According to Scholem, "What constitutes the special mythical structure of the Cabalistic complex of symbols is the lack of restriction of the infinitely many aspects under which God can be known…"

In this, it's method anticipates the modern philosophy of communicative rationality in Juergen Habermas, the social theories of Hans Jonas, and the epistemological critiques of Charles Sanders Peirce and Karl-Otto Apel. Put theologically, "The great Name of God in His creative unfolding is Adam." Mankind as a user of language, in other words, is the necessary condition for the manifestation of the divine. Anything which restricts this manifestation is inhibiting creation.

As there is no beginning to interpretation within language, there is no determinate end. Interpretation proliferates interpretations. All interpretations are possible but none are definitive. There is an ideal which in theory incorporates all previous interpretations but the content of this ideal is unknown. It's existence however is attested by the presence of recognised errors in current or past interpretations, usually in the form of approximations which are no longer precise enough for the purposes being pursued.

This third principle therefore is complementary to and essential for the operation of the second principle. It is the mechanism through which language users influence the language system as a whole. By telling stories, language users modify the relations among both words and other users. They create new meanings which provoke new purposes.

In sum, Kabbalah is an exercise in reconciliation and of disconcertion. The first because it attempts to bridge the differences in expressed belief, not just among Jews but also among all those inquiring about the significance of life. The second because it relativises all language that touches on the divine, that is, on ultimate purpose. It both reconciles and disconcerts not through argument but through suggestion, one might say 'hypothesis', if that term didn't carry so much rationalistic baggage. Perhaps 'guess' would be a less emotive term.

This process of reconciliation and disconcertion is captured in Scholem's reference to the 16th century Kabbalist, Isaac Luria, "Luria’s new myth is concentrated in three great symbols, the tsimtsum, or self-limitation, of God, the Shevirah, or breaking of the vessels, and the tikkum, or harmonious correction and mending of the flaw which came into the world through the shevira"

This process goes on continuously in every particle of creation, and notably in every story, sentence, phrase, word, and letter of language. We cannot escape it. We can only observe ourselves in it with a certain degree of awe.

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Terminal Value by Thomas Waite
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Technology is often dangerous. Technology plus finance is too often lethal. This is a tale about why the modern combination of practical science and money goes off the rails. Tightly written with a compelling plot, Waite's debut novel is more than a good read. It's an acutely observed social commentary about the world of the high-flying, high-tech entrepreneurs who turn the abstract ideas of physics and logic into cash... or at least stock prices. And it's about how easily "wanting to make a difference" slides into greed, obsession, and self-promotion. Clearly Waite has been on the inside of this culture which is so incessantly reported but rarely understood. He knows the 'types', the Bernie Madoff, the Steve Jobs, the Jeff Skillings who inhabit the this world of wealth by innovation. And he knows what can happen when they mix: the tragedy of success, quite literally Terminal Value.

Michael Black
Oxford

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JR by William Gaddis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Big Business Is For Kids

I grew up just down the road from William Gaddis's home. But I didn't encounter his writing until about thirty years ago, first in his enthralling Recognitions, and then in JR which to me is the most important piece of fiction ever written about business.

JR is a six-grader who builds a business empire from a phone box. He gets to know the tricks of the trade, any trade, by trial and error. Hence he can reveal the real ethos of business as he goes along, without commentary but just the way it is.

Gaddis uses an innovative technique to keep the action going that takes a bit of acclimatisation but is well worth the reader's effort. The centre of narration shifts more or less constantly and without announcement as characters literally brush up against one another. The story is passed on like a sort of secret parcel that one has to watch for continuously. The effect is a literary mimicry of the frenetic but not terribly useful sequence of commercial activities from selling to corporate takeovers. The busyness of business.

Gaddis's point, I think, is the essential puerility of the corporate rat-race. It is a game played by children who, like Donald Trump, may have passed through puberty some time ago. It is a game with fixed rules which make little sense except to the players of the game. It also, alas, is a game that crushes authentic creativity whether in art or other human endeavour.

A dozen years after JR was published, that would be in 1987, someone, possibly Gaddis but I can't confirm it, wrote a supplemental piece entitled JR Goes to Washington. In that piece JR is only an expert witness testifying before a Congressional Committee. Little could any one have dreamed that this bit of slapstick would be a gross understatement of the coming reality of a Trump presidency: http://www.williamgaddis.org/nonficti...

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The Second Coming by Walker Percy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Belief Isn't Faith

Walker Percy is often referred to as a 'Catholic writer'. Indeed, like G. K. Chesterton, he became a Catholic in adult life, but unlike Chesterton he didn't become a spokesman for the institutional church.

I suspect that the underlying reason for Percy's ecclesiological reticence was his fundamental scepticism about the category of 'belief’. Religious faith for Percy is not a solution to a problem of life. And he recognised that belief is not necessarily divinely sourced; it could equally be derived as a rationalisation for one's status in life, let's say as a white, middle-class, privileged player of golf in the pleasant greenery of the North Carolina mountains. It comes as revelatory to such a person that "There are only two classes of people, the believers and the unbelievers. The only difficulty is deciding which is the more feckless."

One is reminded of Hegel's nostrum: "You need not have advanced very far in your learning in order to find good reasons for the most evil of things. All the evil deeds in this world since Adam and Eve have been justified with good reasons." Walker's theology therefore is not ultimately grounded in beliefs because beliefs are always suspect.

Faith for Percy is inseparable from doubt about belief, in a commitment to a belief in questioning even itself. This is the real mystery of religion, at least of the Christian variety: "If the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it? And if the good news is true, why are its public proclaimers such assholes and the proclamation itself such a weary used up thing."

So also, in contrast to Chesterton, it is unlikely that there will ever be an institutional movement for Percy's canonisation. Thank God for that.

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The Moral Philosophy of Josiah Royce by Peter Fuss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Aesthetics As the Foundation for Morality

One of Josiah Royce’s earliest memories was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Royce was only 9 years of age in remote California, but the event was decisive for the direction and focus for his life: the reduction of political violence. That he failed utterly has no bearing on either the quality of his thinking or its continuing relevance. Peter Fuss’s book captures both remarkably well.

‘Harmony’ is the central term in Royce’s moral philosophy. This is remarkable because it is not a term usually associated with ethics or morals, but with aesthetics. It refers to the beautiful, not to the good. And harmony, while clearly a desirable thing, hardly carries with it an obvious connotation of moral obligation. Nonetheless, Royce builds his entire philosophy around it.

Harmony for Royce is an end in itself not a means for achieving other human ends, although it facilitates that as well. Hedonism is the antithesis of harmony and is Royce’s precise moral term for any sort of utilitarian ethics. So harmony does not imply happiness or individual contentment. It is a social concept that describes a relationships among people, not psychic states or intentions. As Fuss writes: “Royce argues that the very fact that our ends do conflict both intrapersonally and interpersonally, is reason enough for the reflective moral agent not to derive from any one of these a definitive moral standard.”

This seems at first run an innocuous or even a facile assertion. ‘Sure’, one could respond, ‘there are many possible human goods, and sometimes these appear to be in conflict, even in my own mind. But that only means I have to sacrifice a little of one good to get a bit more of another one. Isn’t that what compromise is about?’ Well no, says Royce, that is exactly what utilitarian obfuscation is all about. There is no rational way to determine how much of one good is equivalent to how much of another. It can’t be done; and even considering it undermines all subsequent moral choice.

Harmony is not just another human good, one among many other warring goods. Harmony is the goal of achieving all other human goods, in full, without compromise, and without the charade of a utilitarian calculus to cloud the moral waters. It is Royce’s contention that anyone who has ever experienced the pull of conflicting obligations - work vs. family, justice vs. mercy, indeed rights vs. obligations - knows implicitly that harmony, the reconciliation of all possible goods, is something more than just another good.

Harmony is the ideal of ideals, therefore. Royce’s key moment of moral insight is the recognition that faith in the possibility of harmony is an essential condition for human morality itself. Without such faith, it is clear that human disagreement can only result in universal disappointment and dissatisfaction. Whether one agrees with this conclusion or not, it is obviously not vacuous. It creates a very different focus for moral discussion than had been available before: we ought to want what is beautiful, and what is beautiful is the goods we all want. Not the goods we hold or have in common, or the goods of the least common denominator, or what’s good for most of us, but all goods.

Somewhat strangely perhaps, harmony need not be a desire of anyone; yet it still plays this pivotal role in moral discussion. In a sense, this is a sort of ‘objective’ endorsement of harmony. It is grinding nobody’s axe, it is not partisan, it isn’t judgmental. All goods have a moral right to be recognised and achieved. As Fuss summarises the position: “If we are ever to discover a ...summum bonum we must first come to know the plurality of human aims in all their vividness and in all their conflict.”

The uniqueness of harmony as a moral standard lies in its relational quality. It demands a singular virtue for its achievement: Loyalty. Loyalty is the manifestation of faith in the community by its members that harmony is possible. Loyalty is, as it were, the 'organisational' form of love. This too is a remarkable conclusion. Loyalty obviously implies a number of other necessary virtues like patience, fortitude, even courage. But loyalty is a social virtue; it has to do with one's relationship to one’s fellow not to a state of the soul or one’s character. In later work Royce develops this concept with inspiring articulateness.

What Royce wants to establish is that there is no morality independent of a moral community. And the existence of a moral community is dependent upon the degree of commitment that the members of that community have to each other, not necessarily in emotional terms, but certainly in terms of respect for each other’s aims, goals, and ambitions as worthy of fulfillment. It is the habit of widening our attention to what others want that is critical for the existence of the moral community.

More than a century later, the core of Royce’s thought is still visible in the work of philosophers like Juergen Habermas, particularly in his influential Theory of Communicative Action. The idea of a community held together by a commitment to serving each other with a very individualistic agenda seems on the face of it contradictory. But thanks to Royce the false dialectic between the individual and the collective is neither necessary nor accurate.

This is a moral lesson of enduring significance during a time of dramatic increases in both neo-liberal and fascist sentiments as well as political polarisation on many fronts. Royce's is a philosophy of profoundest respect and regard for everything that is human.

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The Problem Of Christianity by Josiah Royce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Overthrowing Power

Josiah Royce was a philosopher who wrote at a time when it was acceptable, among both philosophers and theologians, for a philosopher to mention the name God. This was a remnant of a thousand year tradition of ‘synthesis’ of all the strands of human inquiry. But this was also a tradition whose influence was to be severely curtailed by the intellectual as well as material trauma of the First World War. The war forms a sort of wall on the far side of which is the wreckage of the cultural importance of theology to the educated mind.

This situation is regrettable, among other reasons because the influence of theology has not declined with its demise from discussion among polite company. Rather theological ideas become hidden and therefore taken for granted and live their life as un-criticised presumption. Royce’s The Problem of Christianity is a subtle, sympathetic but merciless critique of a central complex of Christian thought involving the concepts of salvation, divine grace, and, most importantly, power. It seems to me that an attempt to recover that critique and its implications is worthwhile.

One of the oldest Christian heresies is the Pelagian, named after a fourth century British monk who had the temerity to suggest that the idea of original sin was bunk, that humans had free will and that through free will mankind could contribute to its own salvation. This displeased the likes of Augustine of Hippo who had him condemned at a church council. The heresy was confirmed as such throughout the history of the Church, through the Protestant Reformation, and by the most influential theologian of the 20th century, the Swiss Karl Barth.

The insistence on the inherent corruption of human free will, and on the absolute inability of mankind to contribute in even the smallest part to its own salvation might seem strange. True, the biblical pronouncements of St. Paul stated clearly that Jesus died so that we could be saved. But on the face of it, there appears no reason why the rest of us might not help just a bit through the emulation of Jesus’s sacrifice. A consistent message of the Old Testament - Abraham and Isaac being prime examples - is that one must choose to be chosen, that is, cooperate with a divine invitation.

The parallel Judaic concept of the Zachuth Avot, The Merit of the Fathers (Mothers were also included), for example, held that the Hebrew Patriarchs, through their faith and trust in God, had created a store of divine power which was available for the spiritual help of any Jew in need. But this store could be augmented at any time by the good deeds of anyone. In principle there seems no reason to deny the ‘new Israel’ a similar capability.

Moreover, Augustine’s intransigence led to a rather unfortunate implication, which has had a continuing, decidedly un-Christian effect: Predestination. If only God could decide the salvific fate of human beings; and if not all human beings are to be saved; then it is strictly a matter of the most obvious logic that God saves or condemns based solely on an inscrutable divine instinct. And since God is omniscient, he knows who he has saved or not from the beginning of time. To claim otherwise would be to impugn the unlimited power of God, who is the source of all power. QED.

So the absoluteness of divine power is apparently protected by the Augustinian doctrine. But, not coincidentally, so is another power, that of the Church. The power of God is conceived as an infinite reservoir of grace that has been filled by the sacrifice of Jesus. The sluice gates are controlled by the formal authority of the Church which dispenses this power through its sacraments to the remainder of the world. Only authorised members of the clergy are permitted to exercise this power of distribution, so the Church has a monopoly which it has ever since sought to strengthen and protect.

And this conception of divine power is not relevant only to the Church. In the year 800, Charlemagne is crowned the new Roman emperor by the pope in a ceremony by which he pointedly grants divine power conditionally to the civil authority. In 1066, the Conqueror, having established military control over England, claims every square inch of the country as his personal property to distribute among his followers as a matter of divinely ordained right. In 2016, Britain votes to ‘take back its sovereignty’ from the European Union. Sovereignty is an idea which means responsibility only to God. In every high court in the land there is an ornate plaque which declares ‘Dieu et Mon Droit’. Theological ideas have a very long reach indeed.

This, therefore, is The Problem of Christianity to which Royce’s title refers. A devotion to a man and his teaching of humility and sacrifice for others has been doctrinally transformed into an institutional justification of absolute power and control. While Royce could understand and appreciate the Christian message as something of vital importance to the world, he had a difficulty, as do many others, reconciling that message with the patently self-aggrandizing and self-serving doctrines of the Church. The centre-point of his concern was the doctrine of grace and its source.

But if Royce were critical of the Church, he was also loyal. His entire philosophy was founded on the idea of commitment to one’s ‘cause’ within a community, in fact a Beloved Community, which exists solely because of the mutual regard of its members and their consequent dedication to finding a satisfactory solution to all disagreements. His criticism of Christianity, however necessary, was not therefore meant to undermine or destroy the institution but to bring it to an awareness of its own fallibility.

This Beloved Community was for Royce something universal, open to all not on the basis of credal affirmation or tribal membership but on the basis of being human. All people had a right to participate in this community. “The atoning deed of the Founder [i.e. Jesus] establishes the Beloved Community, thus making real in the world a form of loyalty capable of overcoming the tragic fact of the moral burden the individual himself can not overcome.” The Church exists to help not to command mankind, to condemn sinners , or to protect God. It exists in order to share the burdens that are the inevitable consequence of being a self-reflective animal thrown into a world he doesn’t understand and among others who understand as little as he does.

The Beloved Community is intensely political. In a sense, it’s purpose is to keep society away from the non-political, that is to say, violence. “Christianity,” he says, “makes possible the redeeming community which avoids individualism and collectivism.” Both these forms of social organisation - socialism and capitalism - are forms of violence, that is coercion, duress, threats, and hostile persuasion. These are manifestations of power and are the antithesis of the Christianity of the Beloved Community.

“The power to give loyalty,” Royce says, “is grace.” This is authentic power. It is also a human capability. We decide to give such power when we commit ourselves to the Beloved Community. True power flows not downward from some spiritual fountain controlled by a hierarchy, it flows upward and outward from those who are loyal to the community. “Loyalty in an individual is his love for a united community.”

Royce recognises the kernel of truth in the Augustinian position, namely that none of us is capable of achieving his or her own salvation, however that is conceived: “We cannot choose to fall in love. Only when once in love can we choose to remain lovers.” But he avoids the predestinational trap of Augustine because he is concerned not about the violent power of the Church but the developmental power of the Beloved Community: “You are first made loyal by the power of someone else who already is loyal.” As with any love, the birth of loyalty is something miraculous. It can’t be predicted and it certainly can’t be coerced. It nevertheless happens as a typical human reaction to those who act in a loyal manner.

“We don’t want our Beloved Community to consist of puppets, or of merely fascinated victims of a melancholy insistent love. We want the free loyalty of those who, whatever fascination first won them to the cause, remain faithful because they choose to remain faithful.” This community is not one that exists for itself. Its unity is meant to foster interpretation of the world, including interpretation of the community itself. A diversity of interpretations is essential for the health of the community. Unity does not mean sameness of interpretation but permanent commitment to expressing, accepting, and continuously interpreting these interpretations.

To say that Royce was ahead of his time would be factually correct but morally inaccurate. Most components of the Christian Church have moved toward Royce’s position over the last century despite their inability to shuck an historical burden of some very bad doctrine. But would that Royce’s criticism had been stated two millennia sooner. Perhaps a great deal of violent misery might have been avoided.

Postscript: The presumption of infinite divine power is a Greek philosophical, not a Hebrew theological one. It is a presumption which causes enormously painful theological headaches and needlessly complicates the ethical lives of ordinary people. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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