One of the common ways that I see quite a few people who want to study philosophy, whether in academic settings or in the wider world, screwing things up for themselves is a sort of mistaken process, prioritization, and perspective that they assign to the thinkers, the texts, maybe movements that they’re reading from the past. And I suppose that you could say it takes on a certain sort of perfectionism assigned not to oneself, but to other people, namely the people that one is reading. I would say judging, but judging improperly.
And in this, I’m going to give a little bit of advice, but it’s not going to be: Hey, don’t do that at all. It’s going to be more along the lines of: This is a problem. I’m not going to say stop doing it right now or here is a universal bar upon it, a negative imperative. Instead, I’m going to say think about these points, if this is indeed a problem for you, if you fall into these tendencies or if you see other people doing it, it might help to put it into perspective as well. And think.
Think about what’s actually going on here. Does it really make sense to take these sorts of positions, which is not something coming out of a brute necessity or some sort of moral imperative, although it might be felt that way. It’s actually on some level a choice that the person is making. So I’m going to give you an example of this and then maybe a few other similar examples as well. And then I’ll talk about what’s really problematic about this.
So some of you may have been seeing me recently releasing content on Jeremy Bentham’s unpublished until after he died. So we call that posthumously published work, which was supposed to be part of his major early released work, the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. I t’s usually titled Offenses Against Oneself, which is a bit of a misleading title because it really focuses much more on male-male homosexuality and whether it should be prohibited or punished by the law or not, which was indeed the case at the time that Bentham was writing.
He didn’t publish it in his lifetime, in part because he was afraid of the blowback that he would get, because what he’s actually making a case for is that it should not be prohibited or punished, and that doing so actually from a variety of perspectives, some of which are utilitarian, the principle of utility, and some of which are just based on, you could say, analysis of the arguments behind them. These are not good cases for prohibiting or punishing male-male sexual relationships.
So if there’s contemporary people that are going to get ticked off about me producing that content, it would probably be those who don’t like those kinds of relationships and would like to see them once again barred and punished and whatever else we’re going to throw into the mix. And there are quite a few people out there like that. There have been for a long time, even though we’ve seen considerable changes in our own lifetime on these matters here in the United States and you know, more so in some other places as well.
The comment that I got was instead from somebody who wanted to take issue with the subtitle that gets appended to this “Of Pederasty,” and the fact that Bentham does use that term within the work. They were saying: I’m glad that Bentham is a supportive voice, but I can’t stand the fact that he uses this term and it’s targeting gays with something that’s really terrible. In effect, they’re saying they can’t see past that, and that’s what they wanted to focus on.
And my response was pretty straightforward and simple. I said, I think that you’re smart enough to realize that Bentham is writing in the late 18th century and to, you know, yourself, place things in proper perspective when you’re thinking about language that everybody’s using at the time. To be fair Bentham pursues a rhetorical strategy of deploring homosexual relationships and sex, but you don’t think that he’s really committed to that.
He does by the way, and I’ll point out this, he does have some pretty odd ideas about masturbation, which he considers to be worse than any other sexual offense. But that’s a bit of a digression. And it shows you that he is a creature of his time because that is based on some of the medical opinions of his time.
Now, we can find similar, let’s call them, deplorings or dismissals of other philosophers. For example, there’s a lot of boneheaded things that Aristotle says about different people, slaves, women, non-Greeks. And you could easily say, well, I’m not going to learn anything by reading this person.
Or if you buy into some of the more hysterical views expressed out there aboutanimal ethics and Rene Descartes’ part in it, there’s a lot of people who credit him, I think, pretty unfairly with the idea that animals are simply machines and don’t feel pain so we can do anything that we want to them, which you’re not actually going to find in his writings. And it’s making him sort of a poster boy himself for something that you don’t like.
We could also go back to ancient times again and think of the Stoics. One of the topics that comes up over and over again is why didn’t the Stoics condemn slavery? Seneca had slaves. Epictetus himself was a slave. He often calls people slave in his discourses. They didn’t have some sort of systematic critique of slavery as an institution, which, by the way, was found in pretty much every other culture that they ran across.
So it was kind of a constant in ancient times. But they also didn’t say: Do whatever you like to your slaves. Seneca actually has an entire discussion of slavery. where he says, you know, you should be treating them in this way, in this way. Cicero says similar things. And we see that in Epictetus. He’s discussing the little bit of God that is in everybody, including that slave over there.
So you really have to kind of cherry pick or ignore important parts of a thinker’s work to allow yourself to focus in this way on the things that are going to offend you and allow you to say: I am bothered by this, and then to express that opinion to other people when the discussion really isn’t about that. So it’s a way of making it all about, not just you, but the point that you want to focus on to the detriment of the topic that pretty much everybody else at the time is interested in.
We see this in comments. We see this happening in classes. We see this in discussions. There’s a lot of conference questions that are not really questions, but more rants that people engage in doing that sort of thing. It’s a very common sort of foible, we might say.
What’s the problem with it? Well, there’s a couple different problems. You could say you’re being very anachronistic. People will often bring up a trope like, it’s a different time and culture. You have to understand that. And quite frankly, sometimes that’s just BS that is functioning like a cop-out. I just don’t want to discuss this thing. And it’s often poorly informed.
So if you try to defend Aristotle from the claim that he contributed to slavery by saying that some people were natural slaves, and you haven’t actually read the discussion in Politics book one, and you’re like: Well everybody had slaves back then. Don’t worry about that. Aristotle actually says that not everybody’s cool with this. And by the way, most slaves are not slaves by any sort of nature or justice, or they’re just slaves because they’ve been taken as war captives. So you do want to be properly informed.
Sometimes it actually is the case. I think in the case of Bentham, using the word pederasty, he’s not using it quite with the same tenor that somebody in our own time might be doing. Particularly if you read the rest of the work. But there are some cases where you can say: Yeah, this person really is using this term and doing so to be offensive in a way that translates across the eras.
It’s important, though, that we recognize that we might be relying on contemporary vantage points that 20 years from now or 100 years from now might get similarly called into question later on. We’ve got plenty of experience of that in our lifetime.
Another thing that you might think about is whether you’re expecting perfection or just to lower the bar a little bit, kind of sanitized or bowdlerized versions of the great thinkers who you want and you know, what’s behind that? I would suggest that a lot of the time it’s people who aren’t really that capable of receiving other people’s thought unless it’s been in some way put through some filters, dumbed down a bit, made safe for them.
And this, by the way, applies not just to progressives who want to, say appropriate Nietzsche, but it’s going to be a very sanitized, defanged Nietzsche, as I call it. It also applies to conservatives who are like: Yeah man, I love western civilization and the Classics. And then you put Plato’s works in their hands, and suddenly they realize that in the Symposium is a bunch of guys mostly talking about male-male homosexual relationships, and suddenly they want all of that stuff to be excised from the text.
There’s a kind of touchiness that goes along with this projection of perfectionism onto other people It also helps to realize that some terms may have just been in common use at the time that the author is writing and nothing detrimental in the same sense as we use the words today is intended by it.
You might think, for example, of the term cripple, right? We’re not supposed to use that anymore. As a matter of fact, in our lifetime, we were supposed to switch to handicapped or disabled. And now we’re not supposed to say those either in certain circles. We’re supposed to say differently abled. This is a prime example of how easily terminology can shift around.
So if you’re going to like get on somebody’s case, imaginary case obviously, because they’re long dead, because they’re using words in ways that you don’t like from the vantage point of the present, you’re really creating a problem more for yourself than for that thinker.
The biggest problem with this, though, and here’s what I want people who engage in this sort of thing to really think about, is it’s conversationally kind of a jerk move to shift the focus in that way. It’s like saying: I’m bothered by this, and so therefore we should be talking about this, not about the main topic that was brought up in the writing, the post, the teaching, the text, whatever it happens to be. That’s supposed to take priority over what the main focus previously was.
And I think that people who do that should ask themselves: Why do you think your feelings about this and the offense that you’re taking is so much more important than whatever contributions the person is making?
So if you’re looking at Aristotle’s discussion of slavery and you’re looking at it in a honest way that actually focuses on the text, you’re going to see that he is very interested in delineating power relations and how they should be structured, knowing that they’re not typically structured that way and taking seriously some people’s views that maybe all slavery is wrong. And if you’re gonna get offended by the fact that he defends some kinds of slavery and ignore all the rest of it, well that’s on you. And you need to think about why you want to steer things that way, because it is actually a choice.
If you’re going to take a document that was a very important set of arguments for gay rights and against criminalization of male-male homosexual relationships, and you’re going to mainly focus on the use of one term, that’s kind of weird. And you should actually wonder about why you’re being so weird about this. That would be part of being a thoughtful person.
It’s not to say you have to stop immediately, but you really do need to think that over, I’d say. And you know, think about where this desire to focus so much on a perceived injustice, or bias, or slight, or harm, where is this actually coming from?
AI’m going to close by suggesting that for many people who do this, I think it’s because they have actually encountered and seen genuine harm and injustice and stuff like that within the society that they live in. And there’s not that much that they can do about it. They’re not getting in everybody’s faces. It’s much more convenient and a lot safer for them to do so with a target who can’t effectively strike back because they’re long dead.
And maybe that provides some imaginary satisfaction, but it’s, I think, not only off target. But there’s a risk of developing a kind of habit, a disposition of selecting the wrong targets characteristically and allowing oneself to fight imaginary battles that don’t actually do any good. for anybody involved except perhaps that person who’s imagining themselves a white knight or hero defending goodness against badness.
There’s enough badness in the world that if you really want to confront it. You don’t have to go far. And you could be taking that as your focus. And then the very people who you want to criticize for having ethical lapses might turn out to be your best or at least decent ally.
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