As seems to be so often the case, while I was working on that mammoth project, a podcast popped up which referred to my current preoccupation. It was on RN's The Philosophers' Zone.
The guest, Catarina Dutilh Novaes from the Department of Philosophy at the Free University of Amsterdam, says that the discussion concept as a tool to discover truth doesn't work: people tend to hold more firmly to their beliefs when faced with dissent. She also says that Mill was thinking of educated, elite 'gentlemen' - but that such debates between groups of fully enlightened, well-versed people with good arguments and interacting in a mannerly fashion are far from the norm. Firstly, there are many people excluded from the debate. There are few people competent in the skills of arguing. And there are many people filling the airwaves and the Twittersphere with 'bullshit'. How can people find their way through such a morass of fake news and bad ideas?
This is a valid point.
Carl Bergstrom, who has written a book about bullshit, was interviewed recently on Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. He said that with all the people publishing online, a lot of poorly curated information is available (just look on these pages...). He said that AI can't manage the fact checking - and could be hacked and he opposed legislation, due to his firm belief in free speech, so he makes the claim for education. Just as Mill does. But, come on, it's not like Steve Bannon, for example, didn't have a good education. Bergstrom says that individuals should be encouraged to think more than they post. This still assumes that they are 'good' actors and that they have the skills to analyse the information they have taken in and are about to repeat. I mean, how can I analyse data coming from mathematical modelling about pandemic spread? And my biases will incline me to trust some conclusions rather than others.
One could also claim that people can express good ideas for years and it takes more than discussion to get them taken seriously. Think the Civil Rights Movement in America or the Suffragettes. Mind you, Mill does state that people should have the right to gather.
Novaes talks about offering others 'good epistemic resources' - this means giving people good reasons for believing an argument. So, for example, evidence from research that facemasks work in slowing the spread on the virus. She also mentions how important it is to give the other negative reasons - those which deflate or counter the position they hold. It is as important to decrease faith in bad ideas as it is to increase belief in good ideas. I think she is stressing that instead of seeking to change the other's mind, one could consider one's position as offering the other certain 'epistemic goods'.
But, of course, here the issue of trust comes in: we are more inclined to believe information from those we trust. Where the minority does not trust the majority, the value of the epistemic exchange is weakened. If a society has lost faith in institutions, the scientific community and so on, they will not appreciate the epistemic goods they are given by these groups.
There remains though the troubling issue of cultural elitism that is in place in much of this discussion. And a reading of 'On Liberty' makes it clear that Mill is speaking for a privileged perspective. He himself was incredibly well educated, and certainly well-motivated. Yet though he seems to be antagonistic to paternalism and seeks to avoid prejudice, his comments about the labouring classes do leave one well aware of the stratifications in society.
On another note, though, Mill's emphasis on the individual is interesting. He feels, like our hunter-gatherers, that shame can work as a means to inhibit behaviours that are antagonistic to the group and he emphasises throughout the treatise the duties that the individual has to society. Such points stress the connection between the individual and the group, and yet at the same time we have this urgent need to uphold the sacred freedom of thought, speech and way of living for the individual. Unlike the hunter-gatherer communities, Mill's society must allow the rich individual, for example - and he states this example, to have more stuff, to show off his stuff, to play the big man - so long as he is not taking unjustly from anyone or attempting to dominate them. Yet there is an awkward tension here between the individual and the group, it seems.
It's worth noting that the two philosophers I mentioned primarily in my commentary on the text, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, were both direct contemporaries of Mill. The conflict between individual and society is less of an issue for Kierkegaard, who sees the religious life as a sublime leap of faith for the individual that leaves him to an extent devoid of obligation. His concept of the ethical life, in contrast, recognises all the obligations one has to society and others. In the aesthetic life, the individual is seeking pleasure. Mill tries to work out a way in which these two modes can co-operate, but Kierkegaard's religious life offers a way, perhaps, of transcending the issue.
Nietzsche is extremely concerned with the individual's passionate commitment to life - though, to be fair, he is more complex than he's given credit for.
Consider this:
“Well-Wishing.—Among the small, but infinitely plentiful and therefore very potent things to which science must pay more attention than to the great, uncommon things, well-wishing must be reckoned; I mean those manifestations of friendly disposition in intercourse, that laughter of the eye, every hand pressure, every courtesy from which, in general, every human act gets its quality. Every teacher, every functionary adds this element as a gratuity to whatever he does as a duty; it is the perpetual well spring of humanity, like the waves of light in which everything grows; thus, in the narrowest circles, within the family, life blooms and flowers only through this kind feeling. The cheerfulness, friendliness and kindness of a heart are unfailing sources of unegoistic impulse and have made far more for civilization than those other more noised manifestations of it that are styled sympathy, benevolence and sacrifice. But it is customary to depreciate these little tokens of kindly feeling, and, indeed, there is not much of the unegoistic in them. The sum of these little doses is very great, nevertheless; their combined strength is of the greatest of strengths.—Thus, too, much more happiness is to be found in the world than gloomy eyes discover: that is, if the calculation be just, and all these pleasing moments in which every day, even the meanest human life, is rich, be not forgotten.” — Human, All Too Human A Book for Free Spirits by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche http://amzn.eu/2j1pRl3
According to Robert Solomon, Nietzsche's critique, when he says that he is an immoralist, is against a certain kind of morality. He believes that morality has to embrace feelings - as well as culture and the individual. For this reason, Nietzsche's concern is that a focus on universal principles and the need to stretch concern out to all thins down concepts of 'love' or 'respect' so much that they become almost meaningless. If my love for my father is the same as my love for someone in Bangladesh whom I don't know, what does that say about my love for my father? In addition, Nietzsche worries - as in fact Mill did - about the utilitarian concept of happiness, as in 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number'. What does that mean? Are different pleasures and preferences commensurable? In fact, he is rather scathing about Mill himself and utilitarianism and claims that people are not motivated by the desire for happiness or the escape from suffering but rather for what he calls power. This is not military power, or power over anyone, but a kind of self-mastery or self-esteem (as in a sense of knowing that we are pursuing our talent or capabilities). Why am I doing an MSt? Not because I think it will make me happy (though I hope it will); not because I fear losing my job and want an option elsewhere (though I have hopes there too), but because I want to grow.
Nietzsche says that specifically moral action, instead of being motivated by utility or Christian love or Kant's duty or fear of God, should be driven by the person having the right kind of virtues. So, one can see that by having the right kind of virtues, you don't make a choice between duty and personal pleasure, but you enjoy being virtuous for its own sake. You are identified with your virtues - being a friend, being trustworthy and so on - is what motivates you. You act, therefore, in character. The Kantian says lying is wrong; the Millian says lying harms others; the virtuous person says because I am honest. Thus the individual and her social commitments are aligned. There is no dichotomy between selfish desires and social desires.
In this way, perhaps, Nietzsche evades the tension between social and individual responsibilities.
With the later existentialists, who also share this sense of the individual as responsible for her own life (though perhaps Nietzsche even more than Sartre, for example, sees that a person's capacity for change is limited by her genes and environment), that tension between self and society is played out in a variety of ways.
Heidegger has a way of resolving this issue - though I don't fully get it. We are thrown into the world, in a certain 'historicity' yet we have a responsibility to assert a kind of authenticity (it's not about being 'genuine' but about 'being one's own person'). This though alienates us from 'being'. So, once having established our authenticity we then have to re-engage with our historicity. I kind of get it but...
Camus struggles with finding a place between experience and reflection - how one relates to world and self. Whereas the narrator of The Stranger is concerned only with experience of the world - rather like Sisyphus, who can be happy by losing himself in his task (or through resentment) - and is thus amoral; the hero of The Fall is so wrapped up in reflection that life loses meaning and he becomes narcissistically remote from reality. In both cases, the individual is cut off from an appreciation of any social understanding of himself. He needs to be reflected in the eyes of others, perhaps, and find some wisdom outside.
Sartre and Beauvoir claim that to be free, a person must ensure others are free. De Beauvoir, for her part, is very aware of the limitations that culture can place on women. As for Sartre, Bernard-Henri Levy in his short work The Virus in the Age of Madness says that equating everything to the self and enveloping the self in self-satisfaction and self-congratulation was the very definition of the deplorable according to Sartre. It's in ignoring this crucial side of existentialism that the current fashion for the philosophy goes badly wrong and ends up with a cult of self. I think I was influenced too much by the pop-view of existentialism when I wrote Good faith.
Levy offers a good corrective with a quote from a Jewish sage, Hillel, who says, 'If I am not for myself, who will be for me?' but immediately continues, 'If I am only for myself, what am I?' Notice that Hillel said 'what', not 'who' - the individual who is out only for herself ceases to be a real person.
But, back to matters strictly related to 'On Liberty' and both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, it's worth noting, make the same critique as Mill does of the conventional church-going classes who show no real commitment or belief. The latter two describe this as herd-behaviour. Kierkegaard wants the personal confrontation with God; Nietzsche seeks an embrace of virtue.
As you may know by now, that embrace of virtue is where I stand - and I think that my heroes on these pages - Murdoch, Midgley, MacIntyre, Solomon and now Nussbaum - all tend strongly in that direction. My confirmation bias suggests that I will go on reading them to the sad exclusion of others. Neiman is a Kantian - but it seems to me that her concept of growing up does incorporate an unstated element of virtue ethics.
Now, I read in A. C. Grayling's Ideas That Matter: A Personal Guide for the 21st Century that the Greeks, who assumed that we are individuals, and as such are ethical agents responsible for ourselves and what we do, had a concept of the great individual - the hero, the outstanding person, the megalopsychos. Now, I think this idea, which they drew from the heroes of the Homeric tradition and which of course is utterly alien to such schools of philosophy as Buddhism, has influenced the entirety of the Western tradition - perhaps dissolving in Hegel's Geist and in the Soviet-style Marxism. Yet at the same time the Greeks also saw humans as 'social' animals. Thus asserting both the body but more importantly also a social and political interdependence.
The tension between the ego and the group - like that between reason and the emotions, and that between experience and reflection or the mind and the body or the abstract and the concrete - is in a sense a false dichotomy. Even to put them in a hierarchy seems false. Yet the history of philosophy seems to incorporate see-sawing dialectics with occasional efforts at synthesis before one side or the other is again raised up. The balanced view though, in Aristotle's idea of the mean and in Daoist references to harmony, reflects another Goldilocks state that we seem to find it hard to settle into. Our desire to make something this or that, rather than both, seems to be a virus that we struggle to contain.
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