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Timothy Williamson

Philosophical method: A very short introduction

From thought experiments, to deduction, to theories, this Very Short Introduction will cause you to totally rethink what philosophy is.

• Assuming no previous knowledge of philosophy, this is a highly accesible account of how modern philosophers think and work
• Presents a distinctive view of philosophy, arguing that it is far more scientific than many philosophers think
• Includes a wealth of examples from history charting the successes and failures of philosophical thinking
• Offers a timely and much needed intervention in the current hot debate on philosophical methodology

What are philosophers trying to achieve? How can they succeed? Does philosophy make progress? Is it in competition with science, or doing something completely different, or neither? Timothy Williamson tackles some of the key questions surrounding philosophy in new and provocative ways, showing how philosophy begins in common sense curiosity, and develops through our capacity to dispute rationally with each other. Discussing philosophy's ability to clarify our thoughts, he explains why such clarification depends on the development of philosophical theories, and how those theories can be tested by imaginative thought experiments, and compared against each other by standards similar to those used in the natural and social sciences. He also shows how logical rigour can be understood as a way of enhancing the explanatory power of philosophical theories. Drawing on the history of philosophy to provide a track record of philosophical thinking's successes and failures, Williams overturns widely held dogmas about the distinctive nature of philosophy in comparison to the sciences, demystifies its methods, and considers the future of the discipline. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. Previously published in hardback as Doing Philosophy

Preface 1. Introduction 2. Starting from common sense 3. Disputing 4. Clarifying terms 5. Doing thought experiments 6. Comparing theories 7. Deducing 8. Using the history of philosophy 9. Using other fields 10. Model-building 11. Conclusion: the future of philosophy References and Further Reading

Timothy Williamson is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and A. Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor at Yale University. Previously he was the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University. He has published books and articles on many branches of philosophy, some of which have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Serbian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and other languages. He frequently writes on philosophy in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times blog The Stone, and newspapers in various countries.

Clara E. Mattei (New School)

The capital order: How economists invented austerity and paved the way to Fascism

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

"A must-read, with key lessons for the future."—Thomas Piketty

A groundbreaking examination of austerity's dark intellectual origins.

For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they've had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal?

In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.

Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies "succeeded," relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign-trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism.

Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity—and of modern economics—at the levers of contemporary political power. 480 pages | 3 halftones, 8 line drawings, 3 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2022

Economics and Business: ECONOMICS--HISTORY, ECONOMICS--INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE

History: EUROPEAN HISTORY, HISTORY OF IDEAS

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction

Part I: War and Crisis 1 The Great War and the Economy 2 "A Wholly New School of Thought" 3 The Struggle for Economic Democracy 4 The New Order

Part II: The Meaning of Austerity 5 International Technocrats and the Making of Austerity 6 Austerity, a British Story 7 Austerity, an Italian Story 8 Italian Austerity and Fascism through British Eyes 9 Austerity and Its "Successes" 10 Austerity Forever Afterword Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Cato Institute)

Beyond positivism, behaviorism, and neoinstitutionalism in economics

A penetrating analysis from one of the defining voices of contemporary economics.

In Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative neo-institutionalism. McCloskey argues that institutions as causes are mainly temporary and intermediate, not ultimate. They are human-made, depending on words, myth, ethics, ideology, history, identity, professionalism, gossip, movies, what your mother taught you. Humans create conversations as they go, in the economy as in the rest of life.

In engaging and erudite prose, McCloskey exhibits in detail the scientific failures of neo-institutionalism. She proposes a "humanomics," an economics with the humans left in. Humanomics keeps theory, quantification, experiment, mathematics, econometrics, though insisting on more true rigor than is usual. It adds what can be learned about the economy from history, philosophy, literature, and all the sciences of humans. McCloskey reaffirms the durability of "market-tested innovation" against the imagined imperfections to be corrected by a perfect government. With her trademark zeal and incisive wit, she rebuilds the foundations of economics. REVIEWS

"A compact discussion of some crucial issues economists should be contemplating." The Enlightened Economist.

"Beyond Positivism [presents] a criticism and reshaping of economic thought that departs from neoinstitutionalism and other non-'humanomical' movements, promoting the ethics of liberalism as the ideal foundation for an adequate economic science." Journal of Economic Literature

"The manuscript is a collection of writings for various forums, many reviews of others and many replies to critics. One unifying theme is a critique of neoinstitutional economics. But yet another theme is a defense of the bourgeois trilogy against its critics. This book is well worth a read." Richard Langlois, University of Connecticut

"This new book deepens the continuing conversation in Humanomics. It's essentially about discovering Adam Smith and resuming a path that McCloskey has so magnificently helped to reinvigorate in the last half century." Vernon Smith, Chapman University and 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction The Argument in Brief

Part I. Economics Is in Scientific Trouble Chapter 1. An Antique, Unethical, and Badly Measured Behaviorism Doesn't Yield Good Economic Science or Good Politics Chapter 2. Economics Needs to Get Serious about Measuring the Economy Chapter 3. The Number of Unmeasured "Imperfections" Is Embarrassingly Long Chapter 4. Historical Economics Can Measure Them, Showing Them to Be Small Chapter 5. The Worst of Orthodox Positivism Lacks Ethics and Measurement

Part II. Neoinstitutionalism Shares in the Troubles Chapter 6. Even the Best of Neoinstitutionalism Lacks Measurement Chapter 7. And "Culture," or Mistaken History, Will Not Repair It Chapter 8. That Is, Neoinstitutionalism, Like the Rest of Behavioral Positivism, Fails as History and as Economics Chapter 9. As It Fails in Logic and in Philosophy Chapter 10. Neoinstitutionalism, in Short, Is Not a Scientific Success

Part III. Humanomics Can Save the Science Chapter 11. But It's Been Hard for Positivists to Understand Humanomics Chapter 12. Yet We Can Get a Humanomics Chapter 13. And Although We Can't Save Private Max U Chapter 14. We Can Save an Ethical Humanomics

Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo145786166.html

192 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2022

Economics and Business: ECONOMICS--GENERAL THEORY AND PRINCIPLES

TRANSCRIPT

August Baker: Hello and welcome to Philosophy Podcast. I'm August Baker. Today I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Professor Deirdre McCloskey. I'd say that her book The Rhetoric of Economics is one of the pop five books that influenced my understanding of economics. And it was such a great, exciting read, really.Deirdre McCloskey: Thank you.August Baker: You know her as the Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago. However, after 34 years of praying for the Bears and the Cubs in Chicago, she has a new title now, which is a great title, Distinguished Scholar, Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute. Welcome, Professor McCloskey.Deirdre McCloskey: Thank you, dear. I'm here in my home, which is right next door to Cato, so I'm three minutes away from my office.August Baker: Okay, good. How has the move been?Deirdre McCloskey: Well, if you've moved, you know how it is.August Baker: Yeah, I know.Deirdre McCloskey: It's really rough.August Baker: I know.Deirdre McCloskey: It's starting to come to together.August Baker: Good.Deirdre McCloskey: It'll be another week or so before everything's put away.August Baker: Gotcha. Okay. Okay, so today we're talking about your newest book Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, University of Chicago Press. And I would say that it's got some economics, it's got some philosophy of economics, sociology of economics. It's got some great nuggets and some gossip, and it's got some saying of things that you aren't supposed to say, but she says them. I thought maybe we could start with the economics, which I think to me is the great enrichment, which I had not heard of before, but what is that and what are the various schools of thought on that?Deirdre McCloskey: Well, the great enrichment is simply the amazing change in world income per head since 1800. In places like the United States, it's a factor of, I don't know, 40 places, and worldwide, a factor of 25 or 30 in the increased amount of goods and services that the average person could buy. And recently as 1960, about four out of the five billion people on the planet lived at $2 a day. Imagine living where you live on $2 a day. And now the average of the seven billion people on the planet, the average has gone up to about $50 a day and the same prices. And of that seven billion, one billion are still at this horrible $2 a day. So there's this enormous quantitative change, and it's so large that it's a qualitative change. It's a change in the character of life. I take it that you, like me, are a descendant of peasants or urban workers, unspeakably poor.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: Here we are. So it's an amazing change, and the two usual explanations are exploitation from the Left. Europe is rich because it stole from the Third World or because of slavery or something. And on the other hand, savings accumulation, which is embodied in the very misleading word, capitalism, that piling up factories and roads and so on is how we get rich. Neither of those is correct, I would argue. And what actually caused our amazing increase in human scope since 1800 is the idea of liberalism, understood as equality of permission, allowing people, as the English say, to have a go. And this having a go has just been amazing. You look around your room and everything you see is someone's smart idea. So it's ideas that caused the modern world, not one group of people stealing from another or some people piling up capital. So that's that. And to just-August Baker: Yeah, please.Deirdre McCloskey: Connected with the theme of the book, the main thing of the book, the materialist suppositions in economics are ill-suited to understanding ideas. The ideas were philosophical, political, sociological, and it's those ideas that made us rich.August Baker: So did the idea of liberalism occur in 1800?Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. It occurred, and although it sounds kind of single-minded to say it that way, it did occur. It's not ancient. It's not from, I don't know, Christianity or the Indo-European race. Not Indo-European, the European race, something like that. That's not what caused it. It happened in Northwestern Europe in the 17th and especially in the 18th century, starting in Holland and then transferred and translated to Britain, and then the North American colonies, such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts. Now, these societies were not perfectly liberal by any means. The American founders were largely slave holders.Even Benjamin Franklin had owned slaves. But the idea was implanted and that idea that all people are created equal, and their equality consists of being allowed to do things, to have a go, keeps... It's very appealing to most people, although some people don't like to be adults, but it's appealing to most people. And it's extremely powerful, it inspirits people to invent in institutions, such as the modern university invented in 1910 at the University of Berlin, or the field of analytic or continental philosophy, just to speak of here ideas. And then ideas such as internal combustion engine or the computer, a zillion other things.August Baker: And so I guess one comment would be it doesn't seem to be necessary to let everyone have a go, but it's necessary to have a lot of people, enough people to have a go.Deirdre McCloskey: That's a very wise comment, because it's obvious that in the United States, for example, until 1865, substantial part of the population, all women, for example, and all Black enslaved people were not allowed to have a go. So it's this gradual increase, and as you said, if there are enough people?August Baker: Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey: Now, it can't be confined to a tiny, tiny class. That's not going to work and does not work. But in places like Hong Kong after the Second World War, or Ireland since the 1960s, you relieve people of obstacles to having a go, and they keep having a go. They keep trying things. That doesn't mean they succeed, but they're allowed to try.August Baker: And part of it is also, I think, for economists, the baker does not bake our bread out of a sense of benevolence. It's for a reward.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah.August Baker: Now, I'm sure that people who are inventing things are not doing it solely for the money, but that would be part of it. People can have a go and they can get monetary rewards for doing so.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah, it's true. But of course, it's always been so that if you allow people to invent, they would make money out of it. But there were very strong forces against invention. The very word innovation in English, and I think in French and so forth, is a bad word until the 19th century, because it suggests you're going to change religious conventions. "Oh, no, let's not do that." So there are these conservative forces that were temporarily overcome places, as I said, like Holland or Scotland, and immediately resulted in astonishing innovation. And then the innovation just got completely wacko. It got crazy. We're inventing all the time, new apps for our cell phones and so forth.August Baker: Yeah, right.Deirdre McCloskey: And yes, it's profit, but you and I know that in, say, academic life-August Baker: Right. Sure.Deirdre McCloskey: Money, profit is not where it's coming from.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: And that's surprisingly true, I believe, if you actually talk to people in business, it's true in business, too.August Baker: Sure.Deirdre McCloskey: People like to found companies and to pursue their American dream, and it's not all material.August Baker: They like to work with other people for a common goal and compete and win and rise in the hierarchy and all of these things.Deirdre McCloskey: Exactly. And there are all kinds of other coin in which ones paid. And indeed, that passage from Adam Smith that you paraphrased.August Baker: Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey: Where you said it's not from the love of the butcher or the baker that we expect our dinner. It's actually an appeal to take the viewpoint of the other person to walk in his shoes. He called it the impartial spectator. It's very theatrical metaphor. And the impartial spectator, kind of substitute for God, is watching you. And in order to do well by your fellow humans, you have to be able to have moral empathy, fellow feeling, it means of course in Greek. And that's what he's talking about. It's not so much he's saying, "Oh yeah, everyone's driven by money. You got to give them money, or they won't do anything." That's not Adam Smith. It's some of his followers, I admit, but not Adam Smith.August Baker: You see, the way I think of that quote is, if you think of a new economic system and that economic system is, well, we're all going to work together and we're all going to do the best we can, and we're going to share with each other because we're going to all love each other, you think, "No, I don't believe it."Deirdre McCloskey: Well-August Baker: That's not going to happen.Deirdre McCloskey: But it works in a family.August Baker: True.Deirdre McCloskey: It works in a small group of friends, and I love it. It's wonderful. A bunch of colleagues, most academic departments don't behave like that. But still, that's the idea. And it works fine in a small group. The problem is it doesn't work at arm's length. You order something on Amazon, you're not depending on the love of the person at the other end. Although, indeed, in a odd way, you're depending on their sense of professionalism and so on.August Baker: Sure.Deirdre McCloskey: So in a large society, love doesn't work. And in fact, it's worse than that, because appeals to the love model in a large society, we have seen in the 20th century especially, are extremely dangerous.August Baker: Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey: The Germans loved the folk, the German people. And Hitler's vision of a thousand year Reich and people loved the Communist Party. And arousing this king and country passion in which you can do these things, you can also do terrible things.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: So it's much better, it works for human flourishing to let people make deals between the smith and the baker.August Baker: Right. Now, if I were to... Excuse me. Go ahead.Deirdre McCloskey: You have a last words habit of thinking before you speak.August Baker: No, I just... Well, okay. Thank you.Deirdre McCloskey: Well, that's a good habit.August Baker: I appreciate that. Appreciate that. If I were to take a Marxist response, I would say... Well, I think two things, compound question. Sorry. One of them is, when you say ideas, a Marxist might say ideology. I think you actually pointed that out in your book.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. And I say I actually use the word ideology a lot. I think it's just fine.August Baker: Right. Okay.Deirdre McCloskey: Marx particularly adopted it from French where the word ideology, when he adopted it, didn't have the Marxist meaning, which I approve of. I was once a Marxist, so I'm very familiar with the German ideology and so forth.August Baker: Well, there's a funny... I think that the feel of your writing has something of Marxist, he's sarcastic with people.Deirdre McCloskey: I know. I'm sorry about that.August Baker: No, no.Deirdre McCloskey: It annoys people, and I don't mean to be mean.August Baker: Hey.Deirdre McCloskey: Yes, I do. I mean to be mean with stupid people who are not doing it right.August Baker: Right. The other thing, though, I would say is, okay, so the Marxist it's going to say, "Well, the ownership of means... what is required is ownership of the means of... Private ownership of the means of production."Deirdre McCloskey: That's what they'd say.August Baker: And they'd say-Deirdre McCloskey: That causes the ideas.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: Ideas are merely the superstructure of the froth on top of the great waves and tides of material history.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: It's the business of turning Hegel on his head.August Baker: And then I think they might also say, "Look, it's true that maybe even if we grant you that it wasn't capital accumulation or exploitation, which enabled this. Still, the exploitation, if you just think of it in sense of the worker is not going to be paid everything they protect, that would be required to accumulate large..."Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. Except that accumulation is not where it's at. You accumulate once you have a new idea. You open a hairdressing salon in the neighborhood, and if it was a good idea to do so, and if you do good work or have some innovation in organizing a hairdressing salon, then it'll have success. And then you'll be able to buy more machines and you'll be able to... The big mistake in modern economics is that we can't get away from the conviction that capital accumulation is creative. But it's not, unless there's a smart idea behind it. I just wrote a column for a Brazilian newspaper in which I made this point. I said, "Look, just spending doesn't generate anything." You say, "Oh, we'll spend a lot on the northeast of Brazil, and that'll make it better off." If the ideas are stupid, if the spending is bad, and it's not doing new things or organizing things in a better way, then all it does is shuffle resources around without making the resources, namely people better off.August Baker: Right. That makes perfect sense. There's a lot more to talk about on this, but I want to go to the next part of your book. I would say, we'll talk about the critique of economics.Deirdre McCloskey: Sure.August Baker: You've got the... Very well shown that the scientism, the contempt for the humanities, the creepy behaviorism. I loved your discussion of that. The creepy is such a great word. The idea of incentives and these policies, economists, policymakers controlling these levers to control people for their own good. The ones that... You could speak to any of those if I misrepresented them. The other two that were so new to me was what you called the unmeasuring silliness.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah.August Baker: And then the idea that the way economics is done is you spend the first week, if you think of economics as being a microeconomics course in graduate school, the first week is on the first and second welfare theorem, and the rest of the year are on the 108 imperfections.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah.August Baker: My camera.Deirdre McCloskey: Those two are closely connected. Are you there?August Baker: I am. I'm going to fix my camera, but just go ahead.Deirdre McCloskey: It's okay. I'll go ahead. The justification for the social engineering that economists have gotten more and more enthralled by in the last century, since the 1920s, is that, oh my word, there are so many imperfections in this economy. But my first response as an economic historian is, have you heard of the great enrichment? Don't you know that this highly imperfect economy with monopoly and externalities and all kinds of terrible things going on, consumer ignorance, meanwhile has been producing an increase in human scope by a factor of 25 or 30 or higher? So there's a kind of strangeness about this claim that all things are really imperfect. And my scientific... Well, that's a scientific criticism of the argument, but the other scientific criticism is that they don't measure it. Surprisingly, since economists are, as Edmund Burke said, economists and calculators are well known in the culture as being quantitative. But they're not.August Baker: No, they're not. You're right.Deirdre McCloskey: Their quantification is phony in all kinds of ways.August Baker: I thought that was pastime. Yeah, go ahead.Deirdre McCloskey: I've done books and articles up the kazoo on the technique. They're called tests of statistical significance. Correlation, R square, E tests, anything you want to call it. And it's just nonsense. It's the belief, which if we were to say about words, we would know it's false, the belief that numbers have their own interpretation, that inside a number is its meaning. And that would be like saying the American constitution has of 1789 has inside it its own interpretation, which is ridiculous. Everyone agrees on that. They don't get that the same is true of numbers. So anyway, there are all kinds of assertions of Krugman and so on, shows all their imperfections, and they're informationally symmetries and blah, blah, blah.And in some fields, like environmental studies, there are serious attempts to measure it. The advantage in those fields is the economists are sitting right beside people who actually do measure things, like climatologists. So they're led to actually do quantitative science in that field, and in agricultural economics, the economists are serious about magnitudes. And that's, again, because they're right next door to agronomists and practical farmers who want to know how big is big. But in many other fields, like this informationally symmetry stuff or monopolies increasing their monopolies. Google is a monopoly. It's complete nonsense and it's silly. And it's not backed by numbers. So I think that's a major scientific failure for a field that claims to be a policy science. I wish it wouldn't, but claims to be a policy science, and I'm from economics, and I'm going to run your life from now on.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: If a doctor came to you and said, "Well, I'm going to bleed you because I think that's what you need," and had no evidence at all that bleeding was good for you, I would run from doctors.August Baker: Sure. Yeah. One of these quotes that I love, you're right, "Mostly in economic theory, it has sufficed to show the mere direction of an imperfection on a blackboard. The quantitative theorems recommended by Samuelson in 1941, and then await the telephone call from the Swedish Academy early on a Monday in early October."Deirdre McCloskey: I could attach names.August Baker: Irreverence.Deirdre McCloskey: If you wanted me to be really mean, I could tell you the economists for whom that is true.August Baker: Right. No, I don't. I'm not as brave as you. But I did want to ask you... Well, first of all, two things, and I think this comes from Rhetoric of Economics, but I might be wrong. If we're trying to understand economists, then we would say, "Well, it's not that..." Well, okay. Why is this? It's because what are economists doing, academic economists, what are they doing? They're trying to self-actualize, they're trying to do interesting things, come up with interesting ideas. And that's what other economists find interesting, ar these.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah, that's true.August Baker: And that's what journal editors want. And you might also say there's a little prestige in measuring. I don't know.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah, there is. Oh, boy is there. It was amazing that Simon Kuznets actually got the Nobel Prize. Yeah, that's right. There's a little prestige because of a absurd idea that economists have about physics, which since the war, everyone admires for the second one, because they think, "Well, there are these people called theoretical physicists who do a lot of math, so that must be what I could do as an economist. I'll just sit here and make up theorems," as though they're in the math department. And the other reason this happens is that economists, when they take math courses, take them from mathematicians.August Baker: That was a good point also.Deirdre McCloskey: They don't take them from engineers or physicists meteorologists or other people who use math. And this is not really how physics operates. The theoretical physicists are disdained who don't propose quantitative measures. And necessarily, the theorist makes them now. They hand that over to another group of physicists. But I was at a conference in South Africa about string theory, and who was the English physicist who ended up in a chair with-August Baker: Hawkings?Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah, Hawkings. He was there. I was within a couple of yards of him listening to his machine talking and so on. He was there, a whole bunch of famous physicists. And then there were these string theorists from Santa Barbara and so forth, and you could tell that the other physicists just hated them because it was all theory. It was airy-fairy, it's the strings. I mean, it's consistent. It's good math. The strings are so small that according to most physicists, there is never going to be a way of testing this hypothesis. Never. So they hated it. And that's the way physicists or geologists. Look, if a geologist proposed a theory of the origin of mountains and didn't have quantitative simulations, so to speak, that showed how big was big, and look, you can see that these plates are moving around, that could raise the Andes.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: No one would paying any attention to it, whereas economists who in this airy-fairy way say, "Oh, there's imperfections in the capital market. Trade causes distortion."August Baker: Behavioral finance.Deirdre McCloskey: Behavioral finance is a good case in point because the only test of a financial model is can you make money from it?August Baker: I love that quote in your-Deirdre McCloskey: And if you can't, shut up, go home. The idea that you do econometrics that shows there's a glitch in the foreign exchange market, give me a break.August Baker: Right. Here's from your book, page 60, "When I used to eat lunch daily in the seventies at the Quadrangle Club at the University of Chicago with Merton Miller, Gene Fama, Myron Soles, and Fisher Black, I would hear, without quite grasping it import, that the Journal of Business did not accept tests of statistical significance of an alleged irrationality in the stock market, but would instead demand to see the author's bank account."Deirdre McCloskey: And that's, of course, sensible. And it's true of a lot of things. It's true of art. Show me your painting, I'll evaluate it. You say you're a great artist. Okay, show me. And if it is true, there are payoffs. And to keep asserting that we're going to just do things because numbers have intrinsic meaning is just silly. They have external meaning. When I say the temperature in Washington today is a disappointing 45 degrees, that means something because you can compare it with other numbers.August Baker: So I think that one of the comparisons with physics is when we look at physics, I heard a lecture about this that Daniel Robinson, that we forget how... We know that there are these mathematical laws underlying the natural world, but it wasn't known before Newton.Deirdre McCloskey: Sure.August Baker: But there's this assumption that there must be some mathematical laws underneath the social economy.Deirdre McCloskey: That's right. That's Adam Smith's conviction.August Baker: And that would be an assumption in becoming an economist, that you're going to believe that.Deirdre McCloskey: Yep. And it's got this problem that if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: We know that there's an inverse square log for gravitation. It doesn't make anyone... There's no profit to be gotten from that because everyone knows it. And when you don't know it, you can't follow a cannonball very well. But when you do know it, then you can derive the parabola of the cannonball. But if there were similar tricks in economics that would aid people to buy low and sell high, they would already be exploited for one thing. And it would be... This is the problem with modern finance. If it were easy to do, then we'd all be multi-billionaires. So there's this big difference. A great economist named Fritz, an Austrian, in 1941 review said, "Imagine what physics would be like or chemistry if molecules could talk to each other. I mean, actually persuade each other to do stuff by saying, no, no. Why don't you not repel me this time because I do love you so much?" This would be very hard to do and would have this deep uncertainty that consciousness and social life creates.August Baker: Right. Yeah. And in fact, once you make a rule and it seems to work, if people find out about it, they'll say, "I'm going to prove it wrong."Deirdre McCloskey: Exactly. Exactly. And if that's an opportunity for profit, it'll happen. Now, I was trained as a transportation economist, and there are some transportation engineering formulas that work. For example, the famous gaper's delay. There's an accident on the left side of the highway, and yet people slow down on the right side to have a look. And that adds up. And you can actually simulate that rather easily and show how long the queue is going to be, how much delay in total there's going to be so there. And I don't deny that there are, what can you say-August Baker: Regularities.Deirdre McCloskey: Important and true regularities such as that if you raise the relative price of something, the quantity demand of it will go down pretty much. And that's true for all kinds of things. And it's not a dumb thing that economists say. It's appropriate. But the idea that you could run an economy, like a machine, like a car, you'll hear an awful lot about the Federal Reserve steering the economy, and it puts on the brake and it puts on the accelerator. And these mysterious people in Washington are doing this, and it's just baloney. They can't do it. They're driving in a dense fog. The instruments are no good, they're not sure what speed they're going. They're not sure if the brake works. The accelerator is very unreliable. The steering wheel doesn't work very well, and they're in a crowd of people. What do you do? Stop the car and get out of it. Stop trying to steer it.August Baker: I guess the counter would be, if we had a case of laissez-faire, really had one, then we could say that's true. But all we really do is have laissez-faire with a substantial government.Deirdre McCloskey: That's true. That's certainly true. We have a massive government. Look, before the First World War sophisticated modern countries, their state took 10% of national income for its purposes at all, from local to federal. Now, in most of these countries, well, for all of them, actually, it's 40% or somewhat higher. In France, it's 57%, actually. And that's in the last century that's gone up. And not only spending, but then they regulate the rest. Childcare is regulated. In the United States, when I was a kid, moms would say, on Saturday, "Go out and play. Come back when the streetlights come on." So we played. And if we wanted to play football, we played football. We didn't have adult supervision.August Baker: Ride your bike.Deirdre McCloskey: We wandered around and we did stuff and learned how to deal with each other. And now, if you do that, child protection will come, the state will intervene and take your child away from you. So even childcare is now under strict state supervision. I think it's terrible. And I wish we could get... You have to have some state. I don't disagree with that, but it doesn't have to be this leviathan.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu write books in favor of the leviathan, and they keep saying that bigger and bigger state, such as we have now, and getting even bigger is good for, shockingly, they say for liberty, by which they mean, Mama and Papa State will take care of you. I assure you, they'll be nice parents.August Baker: So therefore you can-Deirdre McCloskey: Therefore, just allow yourself to be a child. Go back to being a child in your household, and that's fine. You'll be happy as a lark. Not like a lark, more like a worm.August Baker: Let me go now to some of these great nuggets. I've always felt that Friedman's The Methodology of Positive Economics, well, everyone can criticize it. I really have always thought that it captured a lot of what economists do or the way they think.Deirdre McCloskey: Or what they think they're doing, at least.August Baker: The idea to me, from what I recall, was that you're supposed to make assumptions which are contrary to reality. That's what a good assumption is. So then how would you judge a good assumption? It's based on what other economists find is an interesting assumption.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. But if that's all, then we're back to a bad aspect of the Rhetoric of Economics, where the kind of academic agreement that, well, we're going to suppose there are tremendous imperfections in a modern economy, and so we need state intervention on a massive scale. That just gets assumed as the basis for public policy, as Milton would say, without serious inquiry. Milton was an empiricist. He was not much of a theorist, to tell the truth.August Baker: Yeah, I understand that.Deirdre McCloskey: He was a fact guy and he kept wanting to test things. Now, I think some of his tests were silly, and some of them were wonderful. His greatest book is a book called A Theory of the Consumption Function, which he wrote in the 1950s. And no economist can read that book without knowing that he's in the presence of a master.August Baker: Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey: It's extraordinary book. And it's got some theory, but mainly it's got, okay, now let's see, cross section savings rate and time series savings rate. What's going on here? They're not the same. And so he was an empiricist.August Baker: Well, this is the quote I wanted to get at, the sort of gossip. You say that... You refer to The Methodology of Positive Economics, 1953. You say, "A paper Friedman told me that he later regretted." I wanted to ask you about that.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. I have it somewhere in my files. I'm going to be going... Having moved, I had to move all my files, because we didn't have time to go through them and throw most of them away. But there is a letter in some file. I've shown it to some people, but it hasn't got into the public sphere very much. It's not that I'm secretive about it. It's there somewhere. Where he wrote to me when I had sent out a... I guess it was after the publication of the original article on The Rhetoric of Economics that Milton wrote to me and said, "I agree with what you say mostly. And I have regretted doing that methodological paper." His lifetime enemy, they didn't hate each other or anything, but opponent is a better word, Paul Samuelson, had the same methodology and wrote at the same time, circa 1950, wrote in favor of this kind of methodology.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: Paul Anthony Samuelson, by the way, was my mother's longtime mixed doubles tennis partner. A fact that everyone should know.August Baker: Yes. No, it's important. How did that happen?Deirdre McCloskey: Well, they were in the same tennis club. I didn't know Samuelson.August Baker: Okay.Deirdre McCloskey: I think when I was undergraduate, he came to Adams house and I heard him talk to us. But yeah, that's all I ever knew of Samuelson. But my parents were close friends of him and Marion, his first wife.August Baker: Interesting. Then the last part I wanted to get to were some of these things that you say that one is not supposed to say. I'll just read off some of them.Deirdre McCloskey: I'm in Washington, and the great Washington hostess of an earlier generation, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, had a pillow on her settee embroidered with, "If you haven't got anything nice to say about anyone, come and sit beside me."August Baker: I love it. All right. "I await testing refutations, but it seems to me on the basis of existing empirical studies," and I won't read all of them, but some of them, "that the following propositions are factually true, inequality since 1800 has fallen, not risen." Another one, "Imperialism was not profitable for the countries conquering others."Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah.August Baker: "Unemployment is caused as much by government interference, such as interference in the wage bargain as it is by inherent flaws in market economies." Here's one, "That consumers are irrational does not imply that markets are."Deirdre McCloskey: Yep.August Baker: "China and India broke out of the vicious and allegedly unbreakable cycle of poverty. Foreign aid has not saved the poor of the world, but has enriched elites and financed impoverishing projects." And then the last one, "Global warming is a... Or the last one I'll mention, "Global warming is a crisis, but not an existential one."Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. I think all those are true, and there's a lot of evidence for each of them. I could go... You can choose one and I'll at least be able to refer to.August Baker: Yeah. How about the global warming? Can you do that?Deirdre McCloskey: Well, the most famous calculation within the little group of economists about this is one that Bill Nordhaus at Yale did, where he pointed out that if income per head continues to grow at the rate that it is now and has been for 40 or 50 years, as the World Bank, for example, thinks it is, about 2% a year, if that's the case, then in a century, income per head in the United States, I mean in the world, in the world now, will be four times what it is now in the United States. And there's no good reason from a technological point of view that that can't go on happening. Some people say, "Oh, we've made all the inventions we can." Bob Gordon says this, and I don't believe it. But anyway, suppose. In that case, the reduction of income from bad climate will, for one thing, have millions, billions of engineers working on it, engineers and entrepreneurs from this immensely enriched world. And the hurt will reduce income, what, 20%?August Baker: Fascinating.Deirdre McCloskey: Well, out of 400%, 20% is not that much. So this idea that we're doomed and so on is not terribly plausible. Now, look, I'm not a climate scientist. But I do know, as everyone knows that looks into it at all, that these climate models are very uncertain. And that doesn't mean they're stupid or shouldn't be done, or these people are liars, but it does mean that we can't panic and do terrible things that impoverish the world now. We should probably have a certain optimism about the enriching world that we face if we don't screw it up. Now, we're very good at screwing it up, so maybe we will. If we follow the advice of Swedish schoolgirls instead of very wise, 80-year-old economic historians we're going to get in trouble.August Baker: There you go. I'm with on that. Well, Professor Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, and a lot of other great books, including the great Rhetoric of Economics, it's been such a pleasure to speak to you today. Thank you so much for joining me.Deirdre McCloskey: Thank you. I've enjoyed it. I love speaking to philosophers. It often gives me a headache, but I love...August Baker: There's a lot of similarities between economics and philosophy, really.Deirdre McCloskey: There are. And some of them are not too flattering to the economists. There's this phrase that Bob Heilbroner made famous, worldly philosophers.August Baker: Yes.Deirdre McCloskey: And that's right. We are worldly philosophers. Sometimes we're too much philosophers and not enough worldly.August Baker: No, I remember in the worldly philosophers, he was speaking about how he came up with that word. It was going to be the money philosophers or something. And his editor said, "Worldly. That's the word you want." Perfect.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. Well, I became an economist because of that book.August Baker: Interesting.Deirdre McCloskey: I was a history major, and I found that as a history major, you had to read a lot of tiresome long books. And I found this very irritating.August Baker: Well, you said-Deirdre McCloskey: And now I write boring, long books.August Baker: Right. No, not boring at all, fascinating.Deirdre McCloskey: But still, I look, and my father was in government at Harvard. That's political science. So I couldn't do that. That would've been a natural major for me.August Baker: Right, right.Deirdre McCloskey: I think Dad even told me, "No, you can't major in government." So I said, "Oh, well." Over the summer after freshman year, I read Bob's book and it just fascinated me. And ever since, I've been in love with economics. Then I tried to use the book, and of course, I went back to it, this is, I don't know, 40 years later. But gee, maybe I should assign it in my... I was assigned to teach the history of economic thought, which I hadn't done. So that was nice. So I looked at Bob's book and it's terrible.August Baker: Yeah. It didn't age well.Deirdre McCloskey: It's not good history. It's not good intellectual history. It's very bad. It's charming and well-written. But I grew to admire Bob on other grounds. For example, and this is one test I use, he was smooth as silk about my gender change. No problem. So was Milton Friedman, for that [inaudible 00:53:26] Rose.August Baker: Of course. Yeah. I would've expected that. Right.Deirdre McCloskey: That's right, but even from Bob. And Bob, late in his life said, "Capitalism has won." He said, "Look, if you want to have a rich country, you better adopt capitalism." Now, as you know, in orthodox Marxism, that's actually orthodox Marxism.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: That the fruit of the bourgeois era will be taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering of the state. And then we'll have this wonderful anarchist situation. But you need to go through the capitalism.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: But still, he was a charming man.August Baker: Yeah. No, I thought it was interesting that you listed him among your favorites. And also that you talked about wishing you had worked at the new school since he did. Not because of that, but...Deirdre McCloskey: The reason for that is that new school kids don't learn what we called in Chicago price theory.August Baker: Price theory, yeah.Deirdre McCloskey: So Mariana Mazzucato is a completely incompetent economist because she doesn't know supply and demand. Now, you can be a Marxist and know supply and demand. I know people that do who are, and that's fine.August Baker: Right. Sure.Deirdre McCloskey: I don't blame David Harvey because he doesn't claim to be an economist, but Mazzucato does.August Baker: Well, thank you so much for speaking with me. It's really been a pleasure.Deirdre McCloskey: Okay, dear.August Baker: I'm a big fan of yours for a long time.Deirdre McCloskey: Thank you very... Well, don't be a fan. Send money.August Baker: I buy the books. That's something.Deirdre McCloskey: Buy the books. Buy the books. Okay, dear.August Baker: Goodbye.Deirdre McCloskey: Bye-bye.

Elijah Anderson Black in White Space The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life

Elijah Anderson

From the vital voice of Elijah Anderson, Black in White Space sheds fresh light on the dire persistence of racial discrimination in our country. A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces. In Black in White Space, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level. He focuses in on symbolic racism, a new form of racism in America caused by the stubbornly powerful stereotype of the ghetto embedded in the white imagination, which subconsciously connects all Black people with crime and poverty regardless of their social or economic position. White people typically avoid Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the "white space" as a condition of their existence. From Philadelphia street-corner conversations to Anderson's own morning jogs through a Cape Cod vacation town, he probes a wealth of experiences to shed new light on how symbolic racism makes all Black people uniquely vulnerable to implicit bias in police stops and racial discrimination in our country. An unwavering truthteller in our national conversation on race, Anderson has shared intimate and sharp insights into Black life for decades. Vital and eye-opening, Black in White Space will be a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the lived realities of Black people and the structural underpinnings of racism in America.

Tommie Shelby (Harvard)

The idea of prison abolition

An incisive and sympathetic examination of the case for ending the practice of imprisonment

Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or "the new Jim Crow." Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether? In The Idea of Prison Abolition, Tommie Shelby examines the abolitionist case against prisons and its formidable challenge to would-be prison reformers.

Philosophers have long theorized punishment and its justifications, but they haven't paid enough attention to incarceration or its related problems in societies structured by racial and economic injustice. Taking up this urgent topic, Shelby argues that prisons, once reformed and under the right circumstances, can be legitimate and effective tools of crime control. Yet he draws on insights from black radicals and leading prison abolitionists, especially Angela Davis, to argue that we should dramatically decrease imprisonment and think beyond bars when responding to the problem of crime.

While a world without prisons might be utopian, The Idea of Prison Abolition makes the case that we can make meaningful progress toward this ideal by abolishing the structural injustices that too often lead to crime and its harmful consequences.

Review "In this sharp and provocative book, Tommie Shelby shines new light on the misguided logics and harmful practices that structure the entire criminal legal system in America. He engages the political philosophy of Angela Davis to advance our understanding of the legacy of slavery, the impact of racism, the morality of punishment, the limits of reform, the meaning of justice, and other important questions that have been central to Davis's work and the growing movement to abolish prisons. No matter where you stand on the issue, The Idea of Prison Abolition is essential reading that will frame debates about the purpose and function of incarceration for decades to come."―Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America "Should our manifestly unjust prison system be abolished or radically reformed? With characteristic philosophical acumen, and by way of a careful, nuanced engagement with Angela Davis's powerful and influential defense of prison abolition, Tommie Shelby's answer to this question is an indispensable contribution to ongoing debates about the function of incarceration within a racially stratified capitalist society. The Idea of Prison Abolition is worldly philosophy at its best, a book from which all parties to these debates stand to benefit, whether they agree with Shelby or not."―Robert Gooding-Williams, author of In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America "With characteristic clarity and analytical precision, Tommie Shelby offers a probing discussion of the idea of prison abolition. Drawing on philosophy, intellectual history, and the social sciences, he zeroes in on the complex moral meaning of violence. Arguing for much more than incremental reform of the prison system, this indispensable book asks whether prisons must be abolished for justice to be served."―Bruce Western, author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison About the Author Tommie Shelby is the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform and We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. Transcript This is August Baker. Welcome to Philosophy Podcasts, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent books. Today I'm happy to be speaking to Professor Tommie Shelby about his 2022 Princeton University press book, The Idea of Prison Abolition. He is the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African-American Studies and a philosophy at Harvard University. His previous books include Dark Ghettos, Injustice, Dissent and Reform. And the book, We Who Are Dark, the Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. Welcome, Professor Shelby. Thank you for speaking to me today. Prof. Tommie Shelby: Thanks so much for having me August. I'm looking forward to our conversation. August Baker: Great, thank you. I wanted to start with a quote from Heidegger 1926, the Logic: The Question of Truth. He says, "To philosophies means to be entirely and constantly troubled by, and immediately sensitive to the complete enigma of things that common sense considers self-evident and unquestionable." It seems to me that in this book, you are in line with that definition of philosophy. You're questioning something that common sense seems self-evident and unquestionable. Prof. Tommie Shelby: Yeah, I think I approach philosophy very much in that spirit. I think of, at least those of us who see ourselves in the broadly Socratic tradition of philosophy, see that it's important for us to be disposed to question the taken for granted, the basic common sense things, that are long established and revered, to be willing to turn a critical eye toward it, and think about whether this is something we should continue, or something that we should endorse, despite the fact that perhaps even ages have found it fit to hold onto, or even cherish. August Baker: And in this fascinating book, you... I know the answer, but what is the common sense thing that you're questioning here? Prof. Tommie Shelby: Well, I think a lot of people regard imprisonment as a practice that is obviously required, justified, maybe even something that it would be ludicrous to question. And so, I am taking up the question of, here motivated by prison abolitionist thinkers and activists, of whether we should allow ourselves to just treat the prison as something that has always been with us, will always be with us, can't be questioned, to really ask a question about that practice in much the same way the philosophers have asked similar questions about other practices that are ostensibly for purposes of law enforcement. The question of death penalty, say just for example, will be a similar question, existed for a really long time, much longer than prison. But yet, philosophers and many others have saw fit to question that practice as a way of enforcing the law. And I think here, we find ourselves interesting moment, where a number of abolitionist have even broken out into the mainstream, to force us in the broader public sphere to take up the question of whether this is a practice that's fully justified. And I think philosophers are well equipped to... Not to settle the matter or anything, but at least to contribute to thinking through that, I think, critical question for our time. August Baker: Absolutely. And it was, I think, one of the reviewers says that... It says that... Well, I'll just go ahead and read the review. This is from Robert Gooding-Williams. This is an endorsement or review of Professor Shelby's book, The Idea of Prison Abolition. "Should our manifestly unjust prison system be abolished or radically reformed, with characteristic philosophical acumen, and by way of a careful, nuanced engagement with Angela Davis's powerful and influential defense of prison abolition. Tommie Shelby's answer to this question is an indispensable contribution to ongoing debates about the function of incarceration within a racially stratified capitalist society. The idea of prison abolition in this book, is worldly philosophy at its best. A book from which all parties to these debates stand to benefit, whether they agree with Shelby or not.@ That's Professor Robert Gooding-Williams. He raises a number of things I wanted to talk about. One was that whether one agrees with you or not, it's interesting or fascinating to go through your reasoning. Two other things are, well, first of all, the fact that part of what's going on here is you're engaging with the work of Angela Davis. Could you tell us about that aspect of the book, what she means, certainly as an icon, and how you're engaging with her in this book? Prof. Tommie Shelby: Yes. Angela Davis, so many reasons to focus on Davis's work. One reason is that she's been reflecting on and engaging in resistance to the prison system for more than 50 years. In many ways, she became internationally famous as a political prisoner. At least that's how she would've thought of herself. And who famously in part defended herself, against a range of allegations and was acquitted fully and released. And so, she came on the scene in a way as a person who was engaged in anti-prison activism, trying to free political prisoners, was herself political prisoner. And has been for years working in that space among others. That firsthand experience within imprisonment, I think lends a certain credibility, and uses firsthand experience to enliven what could be some rather abstract and dry theoretical how pros, which probably I could be accused of largely engaged in. And through her autobiography, is also very well known autobiography. She kind of tells that story, and her story in the movement in the late 60s and early 70s. So, she's critical in that way. And she's a touchstone in the abolitionist movement. For those of us who come to the question within the context of the black radical tradition as I do, she's going to be your first stop if you're interested in the question of prison. And for many people made her last stop. And for me in particular, I am a philosopher by training and by disposition, and she's a fellow philosopher. And so, she approaches the questions in a ways that are familiar to me. We often speak the same language around this, which is not always true with others who write about this topic. So, she's a great interlocutor for me. And so, I decided I would structure the book around, and almost in conversation with her thinking over the years. So, she's principal interlocutor, if you like. And I hope that people will find a better productive way to engage the book, particularly those who have learned about abolition as many people have from reading her work, particular her Are Prison Obsolete?. But of course she's written many other things besides that. So, I hope it'll be a way for people to take the book in the spirit in which I mean it, which is to be in conversation with people who I think are like-minded about many things, but want to think through critically the question about whether the appropriate stance to take here is one of abolition rather than say a more radical reform position, which is my preferred stance. August Baker: Yes. In my case, it was a way for me to be introduced to Angela Davis' work. I think you describe it well, a conversation. And so I, of course, knew the name, but I hadn't never read Angela Davis. But it was a great way to be introduced to her work, to see you in conversation with her. And one of the things you said was that, I'll quote here, "Too often, Davis is treated as a mere symbol of black radicalism and militancy, like a raised fist or an Afro, as she herself laments. As one of our most original and influential philosophers, she deserves the same critical but respectful engagement that distinguished white or male philosophers regularly receive." Can you elaborate on that? I just thought that is what you're doing here, is critically engaging with her. And I thought it was interesting that it seems to be, this is of course in the way she wants to be treated, not as a mere symbol. Prof. Tommie Shelby: Yes. That was very important to me. I think for those of us in the field of philosophy broadly, it's rare to have a person of African descent taken seriously as a philosophical thinker. Even when they are taken seriously, they usually are seen as at best, a popularizer of the thought of some major white male thinker rather than as someone who has original things to say and to teach us. And so, it was important to me to engage her in that way of something I've done in a lot of my work, in engaging other black thinkers, but I had not engaged a black woman philosopher at length in any of my writings. And that's a failing on my part. And I thought it was really important to take a thinker, especially of this stature, and really grapple with her thinking about something she spent a lot of time thinking about. And so, that was important to me. I think a lot of my colleagues in philosophy would not be so inclined to engage her in that kind of detail. And I think that's a failing on their part, to not be willing to do that. So, it seemed to me important to engage her for both reasons, for the reasons I already gave about just her importance in the field of prison studies. But also just as a thinker in her own right, who has written numerous books and essays, thinking about critical questions of philosophical interest. And that was important to me, that it'd be her that I engaged, and not just people who I think are largely building on the work that she's done, extending work that she's done, that I think that should be rightly credited to her as the most important philosophical thinker on this topic. August Baker: Right. Yeah, no, that was very evident, and I thought it was a great way to structure the book. Another thing that comes up in this endorsement from Professor Gooding-Williams is... And you addressed this in the book. Maybe you could touch on it for our listeners. There's one question, which is, if you had an ideal society, how would you deal with crime? Would you use imprisonment? And then there's another question about, what if you don't have an ideal society or a justice society, how does that change the question? Could you just talk about that? I thought that yeah, that's right. You can't just sit here and think, well, if we had an ideal society, what would we do? Prof. Tommie Shelby: For me, I thought it was helpful to take up the question really as two questions, and you've touched on them. So one question is, can the practice of imprisonment be justified despite many well-known existing structural injustices? Or should the use of prisons be discontinued? Should we stop our use of imprisonment as a practice, wholly or in part, until these injustices have been rectified in some way? But that's a question about what to do now. It's a question about our immediate aim. So, here we are faced [inaudible 00:13:22] society where it's not just that the criminal justice system has many morally objectionable features, is that the social structure that it's embedded in has many objectionable features, and they affect how the prison system, and the [inaudible 00:13:36] system more broadly operates. And you might think, given the background injustice that we face in the United States and elsewhere, we really can't justify the use of imprisonment to control crime against a background or that. So, that's a position you could take. Or you might think that, as I do, that we should radically reduce our reliance on prison in that kind of context, to really only the worst kinds of wrongs, the kind of wrongs that will be wrong regardless of whether they were prohibited by law, and the kind of wrongs that even though oppress can't justify engaging in. So, if we restrict ourselves to those, that we might think that prison, it could be used in that case, but it's hard to justify its use in a range of other cases against a background of somewhat structural injustice. So, that's a first question. But as a second question, maybe somewhat more philosophical, at least more familiarly philosophical, where you're asking a question about what a fully just society would require. So, there you're trying to figure out, well, in a fully just society, or either nearly just society, is imprisonment as a practice compatible with such a society? Could you have a fully just society that had this practice of dealing with law-breaking, even of a serious sort? And so that's a question about... A traditional question in many ways, from Plato to now, if you think about, well, how do you think about what justice really requires? And I think abolitionists are interested in that question too. They're interested in the question about what to do now, but also, many of their goals are long term goals and are thinking about what should we aspire to, what should we be trying to bring about? And there the question of, is this a legitimate practice? Even in a fully justice society, I think, is one that philosophers think a pretty well situated to engage with. August Baker: So, the word abolition, we're talking about the idea of prison abolition, of course, you immediately think or associate to the abolition of slavery. And one of the things that just looms so large here is this... And which you deal with and I learned a lot from, is this idea of whether imprisonment, the incredibly high rates of imprisonment of young black men and black people, generally is in a way a continuation of slavery. Can a young black man who is imprisoned, for example, not associate it, see it as a continuation of this longstanding oppression? Prof. Tommie Shelby: Yeah, I think it'd be reasonable for people to focus on the legacy of slavery when thinking about imprisonment in the United States in particular, and maybe in the Americas more broadly. Part of what's going on here, I think, is you have a lot of... Not only unrectified ongoing injustices, that disproportionately affect people of African descent. You also have a large portion of the black population in the United States deeply disadvantaged because of past right brave injustices against them. So, you have a very group that's highly disadvantaged across a range of indices, and that's going to make you very vulnerable to being imprisoned, or defining yourself confronted by law enforcement agents. And so, there's an obvious connection with the consequences of enslavement, and not only enslavement, but the many unjust practices that came in its way. Jim Crow lasted a hundred years. You have urban ghettoization, as black people try to leave the terror of the south, to find opportunity to industrialize north, and Midwest, and west. They found themselves ghettoized in urban centers, and treated almost, if not just as badly, as they were in the south where they were subject to mob violence and lynching. And so, against the background of that long history, and against the background of existing in racial inequality, it'll be natural to see the high rates of imprisonment of black people as more the same. August Baker: Right, yeah. Actually right. Prof. Tommie Shelby: So, I do see that point of view, and think there's something to it. August Baker: And I think another area I learned a lot about, I vaguely knew about this. But the way prison writings, you compare prison writings to slave narratives, which was fascinating. And you don't say they're the same, you point out really big differences. But I also hadn't been aware, or only dimly aware of how political black prison writings were. You're talking about Huey Newton Shakur, these writings which were in prison, and which were about political consciousness and activism. Prof. Tommie Shelby: Yeah, I'm very interested in... Maybe one thing to say is, a lot of the work I do is philosophical engagement with black life and black letters. A lot of the things I've written of that sort. Anybody who wants to take that up as part of their vocation, you can't just solely focus on the philosophical treatise that we're all familiar with. I love the philosophical treatise, but- August Baker: Then write them. Prof. Tommie Shelby: But if you're interested in black philosophical thought, there are people who do write such treatises, but many people in the history of black political thought and black philosophical thinking, write in other genres. And I don't think that puts them at odds with the broader philosophical tradition, because many of the great philosophers also wrote in other forms, in other genres, including Plato who wrote in dialogues, and the people who wrote autobiographical writings, Augustine and others who sew, and so on. So, these are familiar forms in a lot of ways, but I think in the professional philosophy now, it's probably not a lot of attention to these other genres of writing, when people are engaged in contemporary philosophical writings. Unless you're working on certain figures, [inaudible 00:20:51]. There are certain figures where it will make sense to do that, because they just don't write in a traditional academic philosophical way. So, that's one thing, and I thought it was important. And so, that's going to be true, even thinking of relatively contemporary black writing. You might find it in the form of a memoir, or even a prison memoir, or prison letters, that might be the form in which the philosophical thinking takes. So, I thought that was important to do there. Because as you already pointed out, your abolition brings to mind slavery, your title, slavery in particular in Americas, it'll be natural to think about the ant-prison movement, contemporary anti-prison movement as analogous to the abolitionist movement against slavery. And abolitionists make that connection themselves. And so, I thought it would be interesting to think about these prison writings from interesting and highly influential thinkers, in a black radical tradition, as a starting point into the question of anti-prisons theory and practice. And that's the context, the late sixties, early seventies, where Davis forms her anti-prisons consciousness, and becomes the figure that she's known for. So, I wanted to situate her in that context amongst those writings. And she [inaudible 00:22:13] of course wrote an autobiography where a big part of it is about her experience in prison, and with law enforcement generally. So, I thought that was important to do. There are some differences between that kind of writing and traditional slave narratives. How to point out, among probably the most important one, is that many people who were writing slave narratives engaged their audience, there would've been powerful sympathetic whites correct, who they thought might be able to persuade them to help enslavery. And so, a lot of people they wrote in that way, they spoke to white audiences, telling their story. Douglas famously telling their story, trying to garner that sympathy to try to tap into the sense of justice of white elites, to help with the movement to enslavery. Whereas, I take it that many of the abolitionists, the radical revolutionary abolitionists from the 60s and early 70s, or later, they would've seen themselves as engaged in a much more militant project. And they were largely looking at people who were oppressed, and the downtrodden, the dispossessed, to try to raise their consciousness and get them to engage in a larger anti-prison movement, that's aimed not just at changing the prison, but changing the world. And so, there your audience is different. The way you might articulate things is going to be different. The rhetoric that you're going to use, is going to be different. So, there are differences though. There are some interesting similarities as well. August Baker: I'd like to read, if you'd indulge me. Here's a prison writing that... Or this is from Martin Luther King Jr, his book, Why We Can't Wait, 1964. He talks about a young black man, I guess in the 30s, who was being put to death in prison... Or he was in prison. And his last words, or the mantra that he was saying over and over was, "Save me Joe Lewis. Save me Joe Lewis. Save me, Joe Lewis." And King writes, "It's heartbreaking enough to ponder the last words of any person dying by force. It is even more poignant to contemplate the words of this boy, because they reveal the helplessness, the loneliness, and the profound despair of Negroes in that period. The condemned young negro, groping for someone who might care for him, and had power enough to rescue him. Found only the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Joe Lewis would care because he was a negro. Joe Lewis could do something because he was a fighter." King says, "In a few words, the dying man had written a social commentary. Not God, not government, not charitably minded white man, but a negro who was the world's most expert fighter. In this last extremity was the last hope." There you have an example of powerful prison testimony. Prof. Tommie Shelby: Extraordinary. Totally extraordinary. No, King is of course a hero. And my colleague and I, Brandon Terry, co-edited a collection, To Shape a New World, that was just 15 essays on Martin Luther King's political philosophy. Which also engaged some of these questions we've been talking about genres of writing, and he wrote books too. People don't [inaudible 00:26:13] five books, but people often focus on him as an order, because he was powerful order, and so many memorable lines constantly quoted. But yeah, very much influenced by his thinking, and in particular by that book, Why We Can't Wait, I think it's a great book. People mostly know it because it includes the Birmingham jail essay, though there's much more in there as you just found. August Baker: I want to turn a little bit now to the more philosophical side. I'm not trained in philosophy, and I am often curious about this continental analytic divide. Here's the way you put it, in your own case. "I favor..." You say pluralism when it comes to philosophical method. I think different approaches, phenomenology, critical theory, conceptual analysis, pragmatism, genealogy, which you do in this book, reflective equilibrium and so on, often yield complimentary insights. And this book is an attempt at philosophical engagement across the continental analytic divide. Afro analytic Marxism, as I call it. As someone who's not a professional philosopher but is interested in it, could you speak a bit to that continental analytic divide, and how you were on both sides of it? Prof. Tommie Shelby: Sure. Happy to. One thing I might mention, a couple years ago I was the president of the American Philosophical Association, so eastern division. And as a part of that, you give a presidential address. And I gave a presidential address on Afro analytical Marxism, and the problem of race. That was the title. If you want the detailed version, if you like- August Baker: No, that's good to know. Prof. Tommie Shelby: ... how I think about that, it's there and you can find the essay version of it on my website. So, I got interested in philosophy through a course in logic and a course in political philosophy, as an undergraduate. The course in political philosophy was my first introduction to the work of Karl Marx. And I was super interested in his work, and went off to graduate school expecting to continue working on Marx and Marxism, which I, in a roundabout way came around to doing, and wrote a dissertation on Marxism and meta ethics. So, I've been engaged with the continental tradition since I was an undergraduate. In some ways the divide is not terribly helpful, philosophically to focus so much on it. There are some broad generalizations you could make about different ways of approaching philosophy, say roughly since the influence of Hegel, where you get some people who, I think, are broadly aligned with the humanities and history as disciplines, might be more interested in literature and poetry, oracular forms of wisdom and the like. And Icano tradition has that tendency. Analytic philosophers are often drawn to the sciences, and mathematics, and formal logic, and rely on those in their own work. Tend to maybe pay more attention to the details of argumentation, rabbit in big visions of the world, or of human existence, and the way continental philosophers might be more inclined to. So, there are some very rough differences, but I think they're just really broad generalizations because you could come up with counter examples across both sides of course. So, I see myself as not a part of that fight, I a way. So, I suspect some people who identify more strong as continental philosophy, might not love the way I go at things in my own work, but I try to draw broadly on those. So, that's another reason for engaging with Davis. Angel Davis, I think, probably would have to be positioned closer to the continental tradition than analytic tradition. Her dissertation advisors, [inaudible 00:30:45], she studied in Germany- August Baker: Frankfurt School. Prof. Tommie Shelby: Frankfurt School, person and very influenced by Adorno and others. And that's her broader orientation is critical theory, as an approach. Whereas I'm much more influenced by the tendencies, and an English speaking mainstream philosophy that traces itself back to people like Birch and Russell and others, who it's a largely stylistic in a lot of ways. But it also, there's some substantive dimensions, in the sense that it's... I do in this book, and maybe it'll put some people off, spend a lot of time trying to carefully explain the key arguments that abolitionists make, and pointing out where I think there are limitations to those arguments, where there might be a bad inference for instance. And that requires going slowly and carefully through the reasoning. August Baker: Absolutely. Prof. Tommie Shelby: So, that is an approach I take, and it is more characteristic of analytic philosophers to do that kind of work. But I'm very much interested in the broader vision. I'm not afraid of providing other genres. I'm not afraid to take up the literary or the historical. I think these are important things to do as well. August Baker: That's very helpful. That makes a lot of sense to me. I appreciate that. Let's do a little of [inaudible 00:32:15]. There's a lot of careful reasoning here, but one of the questions that comes up is, what is a prison? And that's the question you raise. I'll just, the things that I saw here were involuntary confinement, enclosed space, hierarchical daily life, hierarchical institutional practice, isolated from the general public, and there's a sense of custody. And so naturally, one wants to think, well, let's think about what is close to that. And you don't say that that's everything. You say that here are some of the features. And of course, I immediately thought of working. Going to work, and sometimes spending all of my time at this place where they also have a cafeteria. And all of my best time, certainly the time where I'm most awakened, you're confined in this place. Is it involuntary? That would be a difference. I could conceivably quit. It is an enclosed space. It certainly has a hierarchical institutional, and you are isolated. Custody is a little bit different, but then there are some forms of occupation where, for example, the military. Well, I've never been in the military, but I imagine it would have even more. So, I think the other thing, and one of the things you raise, is the ghetto. How is the ghetto different from a prison? I think what strikes me that it also is maybe a necessary feature to call something a prison, is that it has to have some shame or public stigma attached to it. That's something where we are saying, you are bad, and you need to be expelled, and you are shunned. You are an example of someone who is not doing well and I am doing better than you. And something like that. It is another feature of that. Prof. Tommie Shelby: Yeah, that's interesting. I did not include the stigmata of prison, as a part of what's constitutive of a prison though I can see why one might be inclined toward that view. I'm very much focused on incarceration, you give it the characteristics of an incarceration right there, which is a broader phenomenon of custodial confinement, and it takes various forms. And so, you mentioned some of the forms it might take or things that are resemble it, or are close to custodial confinement. But in this case the custodial confinement is used as a penalty, or common wrongdoing. That's what makes it a prison, is that it has that particular purpose, which would distinguish it from what you might do in the case of involuntary commitment of someone who's seriously mentally ill, and are dangerous to themselves or others. August Baker: That's why- Prof. Tommie Shelby: It's still custodial confinement, but it's not a punishment. It's not a penalty, unless they've broken the law. And that might be true in other cases too. It might be like if it's a war, and you capture people, you will also hold them in custodial confinement as prisoners of war. But again, it's not a punishment. It's a part of just war practice, to not kill the capture, the people who've surrendered. But to hold them until the dividing has ceased. So, the practice is used for many purposes. The cadet is custodial confinement, to put it generally, or what I'm here just calling incarceration broadly. And of course, in these various cases, people might react as they do in the case of what people used to call the asylum, or a psychological psychiatric hospital. They might react to the people who spent time in there in a negative way. They might see them as permanently tainted in a way, as marked, in a way in which a prisoner who spent time in prison, even though they're not or may not be mentally ill, as permanently marked by that experience. So, I didn't treat her as a constitutive feature, though I think it is a not uncommon reaction to the fact that people have been imprisoned, or confined in a psychiatric hospital, that they are stigmatized in this way. And I think that's something to be fought against, is to see people as permanent outsiders cause of that experience. And part of if any justification for the use of imprisonment would have to include serious efforts to allow those after they've been released, to rejoin their community with equal standing. And that's a hard thing to do. It's been hard to do many places. Some society has been more successful than others, but I think that's part of what any radical reform movement should be pushing for, is to try to persuade the public not to treat the formerly incarcerated as permanent outsiders, and no longer deserving of equal citizenship. August Baker: One of the really fascinating parts of the book is when you talk about the official functions of prisons, and then the covert functions of prisons. And also, you talk about the difference between imprisoning someone as retribution versus... Or one might say vengeance as opposed to imprisoning someone for deterrence, and those mixed together because there's the official reasoning and then there's the covert reasoning. I take it that when you're talking about a book like yours, you're talking about having a public discussion. And the covert reasons are not people are going to... Let's say that a big covert reason for prisons is Schadenfreude. You might say that people like to have an identified group that's doing worse than them, and they feel good. It takes some really, or people just are aggressive and Freud said wolf, "The man is wolf to man." Say something like that. But once you get into discussion, those covert... And you're talking to someone face-to-face, even though they may have them, those are going to fall away once you get into the actual political discussion, or the actual discussion about what are we going to do? Prof. Tommie Shelby: Well, I wouldn't let them fall away exactly. A couple things. So, one of the chapters, chapter three, where I talk about just a broken system to question. And so a lot of abolitionists when they're talking about prisons, what they will say is in response to reformers, who think that, yeah, prisoners are unjust as they exist, but we could make them just. What they'll say, "Well, no, you can't, because you're assuming that they aren't operating as they were intended, or they aren't operating as you would expect them to operate given the kind of thing that they are. So, they think, look, what's happening here is, there's a covert or latent function of imprisonment, and it could be many different things. You mentioned some, but there are others. Maybe it's political repression, maybe it's racial subordination, maybe it's exploitation. And it's disguised by the fact that people present this official function of law enforcement, as a way to prevent or reduce crime. That's the thing people offer in defense of it. We could talk about retribution in a minute if you like. They offered that, but the reality, so as to abolitionists, is that no, it's real function if you like, though it's latent, and isn't expressed openly, is this other thing. And part of what they're trying to do is to reveal that, reveal that it has that function. And so, I don't so much dispute that prison sometimes serve these other covert ins, or that they are used for those purposes, or that they have those consequences. I agree, they often do. I take it, the question has to be whether these are inherent, inerrable, incorrigible features of the practice somehow part of the logic, the very logic or the practice that it has these functions. And it's that that I am in disputing, not so much that it often has those consequences. I think that's indisputable, that it often does. But insofar as the debate is between, as I frame it, and I'm taking this to abolitionist, it's not my framing. That the abolitionist opposed those who think that it's possible to reform the prison, so it will be justified. The critical question is, whether these latent covert functions are features that could be removed or dispensed with, and that you could bring the practice in line with its official purpose or function, namely to prevent and reduce crime. So, I take that that's a critical question, but I wouldn't want to leave those other things off the table, because those things are real, and there are things that should give us pause and should... As I mentioned before, you separate the two questions. When you're thinking about the first question, that is, what do we do now? It is true that prisons operate in ways that reinforce racial subordination, that exploit the poor, that are vehicle for the repression of political enemies. That these are true things, and you can't deny it. I wouldn't, at least. So, I would want to have that conversation, and that may make a difference to whether it will be legitimate in any given locale to use imprisonment or to what extent it will be justifiable to use it when these are the consequences that you can expect from its use. August Baker: I guess maybe the alternate side, I don't know how to argue would be to say, I guess it's maybe what do you call the hermeneutics of suspicion, or the hermeneutics of paranoia, is that what people say is the function is just a cover story, whether they know it or not. Difficult to know how to argue with someone, or how to change someone's opinion, if they have this cover story that, oh, we're just trying to deter crime here and it's helpful, when really it's something else that they either don't admit or don't even know. Prof. Tommie Shelby: Sure. The question is, how do you resolve that? So, that disagreement. So, in many ways the book is structured, as a debate amongst progressives, leftists, radicals even. So, people who are already extremely unhappy with current social arrangements. So, it's a discussion amongst, that's how I see it anyway. August Baker: That's a very good point. That's helpful. Thank you. Prof. Tommie Shelby: So, you're already taking a skeptical posture toward the current social arrangements. And part of the question is, what should be our stance toward this practice? It's one among many. There are other many other practices within the social structure that you might have problems with. The educational system, healthcare system, military, industrial, complex, what have you. There many other features of it that you might object to. And there's a question here about, what should your attitude be towards prisons? Now you could, as I discussed in the first chapter, think that even if you thought that under some conditions prisons might be justified, under more just conditions, where there wasn't so much poverty, there weren't all these ghettos. You might think in this context, the important thing you could do is do everything in your power to resist this use of state power, to try to find ways to disrupt it, to weaken it. Because any attempt to try to change the society going to be thwarted, or at least inhibited, by this practice. And so on that point, you could get a lot of agreement, because here we're talking a lot about political strategy and tactics, and what's the right way to approach things. And maybe it's good in that case to de-legitimize the practice, but try to constantly draw attention to its limits, to free as many as you can and so on, because you're engaged in an ongoing struggle against the abuse of state power. But that's a somewhat different question from the second question I'm trying to address, which is the practice sort of inherently and encouragingly unjust, like say slavery is? Or is it something that you might expect to persist in some form, even on the more just circumstances? That's a different question. So, I think that sometimes these questions are run together, and I think it's important to see that they have different practical implications depending on how you come down on those questions. In the case of slavery, we all take it, that it's inherently unjust. There's no form of slavery that you can justify to the enslaved. And so, if you're under unjust conditions, you do everything you can to free as many as possible. You're trying to end the practice and everybody who's in currently enslaved, you want to free them, and you do whatever you can to do that. But you don't expect that there's some form of slavery that will still persist under just conditions. So, that's part of the issue here. Is that the right view to have of imprison and is it like that or is it rather under more just C circumstances? You could justify it, but you can't really justify it under these circumstances, in which case we have to figure out, what's going to be our posture toward it, where we know many people who are unjustly disadvantaged, unfairly marginalized, are going to be caught up in it. But we also think that there are going to be some people who are a serious danger to others, and who can't justify their wrongful aggression against others. What do we do in response to that? August Baker: Absolutely. That's very helpful. There are just so many different levels, and you do a really good job of saying, here's what I'm talking about in this book. Here's what I'm not. And yet, all of these questions come up to the reader so it's fascinating. I would like to talk about retribution, but we're out of time. I wanted to just have one final thought that just one reader, I can tell you one reaction. You talk about the case in May, 2017, where Tennessee Judge, Sam Benningfield, signed a controversial court order permitting prisoners in the white county jail to receive 30 days off their sentence if they allowed themselves to be sterilized. And several imprisoned women and men agreed to the arrangement. The way you wrote about it, I think one, the reader realizes that really when you are imprisoning someone for a long time, you are in a way sterilizing them, even though they're not... When you put a bunch of men, young men in prison for a long time or for life, you have really engaged in eugenics. You've sterilized them even though you haven't done it medically. It just came to me when I was reading that section of your book. Prof. Tommie Shelby: Yeah, that's super interesting. It used to be the case in the United States, and it is the case in many other places, that conjugal visits are allowed. That's a practice that was ended, for good reason. My own view is that incarceration is the penalty, but people should retain as many of their basic liberties as is compatible with incarceration. That includes the opportunities to work and get an education, practice their religion. And I think to maintain romantic relations with others, so that's possible. There are some limits to that, I get it. But certainly it used to be the case. And again, in some societies it is still the case that conjugal visits are allowed. Now you in the most extreme cases, might not allow it. There might be a person that's just so dangerous that you really do have to maintain that isolation from the general public, but that's not going to be to the vast majority of prisoners. August Baker: And just in closing, I will say to the listeners, also in addition to all the theory, this is also, I felt inspiring, in terms of there are things we can do. I think this idea... That I'll let the listeners read, but this idea of their imprisonment, but it would be like a last option. And that in a way, you try to use the minimal harm to get the effect that you want, and then prison as a last resort. It seemed to me very practical and doable, not this isn't... There's a lot of philosophy, but it seems very practical and doable to me. Prof. Tommie Shelby: I hope the readers will come away with that view. There is a lot of abstract reasoning, but I try to keep it grounded. And the laws of the imprison and what prisons are like, or at least could be like. Or have been in the past, and that it is that way in some places, and not so much in the United States even now to try to, because I think you can't really defend the reform position without trying to think about, well, what could you actually do? August Baker: Yes. Prof. Tommie Shelby: So otherwise, I think the abolitionist is going to have all over you. If you don't have any proposals about things that you might actually do, or be able to point to places where, they actually have been able to do this. We could do it too. Maybe we can't do it in a society that is so highly unequal, and where people are so unwilling to invest in public services, as is true in the United States. Somewhere just, the tax revenue is low compared to lots of other places. People aren't willing to pay for things. And that's not just prisons. They're not willing to pay for education, and healthcare, and roads, and many other things that are really important. So, in that kind of context, yeah, it's going to be very difficult to do it, but it's not that it's practically impossible to do. At least that's what I think currently. August Baker: Absolutely. Well, that was a great read, really. And I really appreciate you talking with me today, professor Tommie Shelby, The Idea of Prison Abolition. Thank you so much. Prof. Tommie Shelby: Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Lewis R. Gordon (UConn)

Fear of black consciousness

Lewis R. Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking account of Black consciousness by a leading philosopher In this original and penetrating work, Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism and anti-Blackness, takes the reader on a journey through the historical development of racialized Blackness, the problems this kind of consciousness produces, and the many creative responses from Black and non-Black communities in contemporary struggles for dignity and freedom. Skillfully navigating a difficult and traumatic terrain, Gordon cuts through the mist of white narcissism and the versions of consciousness it perpetuates. He exposes the bad faith at the heart of many discussions about race and racism not only in America but across the globe, including those who think of themselves as "color blind." As Gordon reveals, these lies offer many white people an inherited sense of being extraordinary, a license to do as they please. But for many if not most Blacks, to live an ordinary life in a white-dominated society is an extraordinary achievement. Informed by Gordon's life growing up in Jamaica and the Bronx, and taking as a touchstone the pandemic and the uprisings against police violence, Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking work that positions Black consciousness as a political commitment and creative practice, richly layered through art, love, and revolutionary action.

Reviews

"Lewis Gordon's expansive philosophical engagement with the current moment―its histories and globalities, its politics and protests, its visual and sonic cultures―reminds us that the ultimate aim of Black freedom quests is, indeed, universal liberation." ―Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz

"Reading Fear of Black Consciousness had me nodding so often and so vigorously, I got a mild case of whiplash. With surgical precision, laser-sharp wit, and the eye of an artist, Lewis R. Gordon doesn't just dissect race, racism, and racial thinking; he also offers a clarion call to embrace Black consciousness, to take political responsibility for decolonizing and transforming the world as it is." ―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

"Lewis R. Gordon is a thinker whose reflections on race have produced singular illuminations on our times. In Fear of Black Consciousness, he refines our conceptual understanding of how race consciousness is made and lived, and shows how reflection and survival are intertwined for all those who suffer from antiblack racism. Drawing on the history of philosophy and on a wide range of colonial histories, African popular culture, aboriginal histories, contemporary films, and stories, he shows the critical powers of creativity in dismantling racism and the making of a world where breath and love and existence become possible." ―Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence

"This striking text offers the first systematic examination that I've seen of the epistemic dimensions of the universal illness that encompasses neoconservatism and neoliberalism. We learn the differences between a first-level, naive black consciousness and a revised and refined 'Black consciousness,' which critically reflects on this world and is capable of radically transforming it. You will want this book among your primary intellectual road supplies for the future." ―Hortense J. Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English Emerita at Vanderbilt University

"In Fear of Black Consciousness, we are invited to think through the deep racial contours of philosophical thought and notice how black ways of being animate new modes of living together. As atrocity, injury, white supremacy, and racial violence loom, Gordon holds steady a Fanonian outlook, theorizing black consciousness as the realization of possibility―that is, a sustained political commitment that recalculates the stakes of freedom." ―Katherine McKittrick, author of Demonic Grounds and Dear Science

"Fear of Black Consciousness deserves to be carefully studied . . . deeply engaging and captivating . . . [Lewis Gordon] is an ally of the revolutionary struggle for human freedom." ―Joel Wendland-Liu, People's World

About the Author

Lewis R. Gordon is an Afro-Jewish philosopher, political thinker, educator, and musician. He is Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs. He has received accolades for his many influential books and articles, many of which have been reprinted and translated around the world. He is Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and a former president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, for which he now serves as chairperson of awards and global collaborations. Gordon's previous works include Disciplinary Decadence, Her Majesty's Other Children, and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Of Divine Warning.

Transcript

Transcription: August Baker: Welcome to PhilosophyPodcasts.org, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent books. I'm August Baker. Today, I'm interviewing Lewis Gordon, and we're speaking about his book, Fear of Black Consciousness. I think some of the endorsements are helpful. Hortense Spillers of Vanderbilt University, "This striking text offers the first systematic examination that I've seen of the epistemic dimensions of the universal illness that encompasses neoconservatism and neoliberalism. We learn the differences between a first-level, naive black consciousness and a revised and refined 'Black consciousness,' capital B, which critically reflects on this world and is capable of radically transforming it." Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz, distinguished Professor Emerita, "Lewis Gordon's expansive philosophical engagement with the current moment―its histories and globalities, its politics and protests, its visual and sonic cultures―reminds us that the ultimate aim of Black freedom quests is, indeed, universal liberation." Lewis R. Gordon is an Afro-Jew philosopher, political thinker, educator, and musician. He's the head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut. Welcome, Professor Gordon. Lewis Gordon: Thank you, August Baker. Thank you. It's a delight to be here. August Baker: Great. I think when we first look at this book or the title, Fear of Black Consciousness, someone might think, "Well, consciousness, how does consciousness have a color?" So perhaps you could start off with the two types of Black consciousness and how they come into being. Lewis Gordon: Sure. Well, to begin with, consciousness has no color. In fact, if one were to articulate the classic, phenomenal, logical discussion of consciousness, consciousness is not a thing at all. Consciousness is actually a relationship. That's why consciousness is directional, intentional. To put it simply all the way back from Franz Brentano, consciousness is always consciousness of something. If there's not something of which we're conscious, consciousness disappears. So, when we say any consciousness, we're really talking about relationships. So, when we say Black consciousness, brown consciousness, white, yellow, whatever we want, it's about a relationship to a reality in which those phenomena emerge. So, if we come down to it, of course, since we have a limited time to get straight to the point, the Black consciousness we're talking about is a racialized Black consciousness and the history of racialization. I don't need to spell out to the listeners the reality that there were people who, in antiquity, no reason to call themselves Black or any other color. They were just people living in their own ethnic groups, their own understanding of themselves, but historical forces of colonization, enslavement, et cetera, led to a circumstance in which their people were designated as Black by another group of people who in doing so designated themselves as something else. A lot of us presume that it's always about White, but no, there are other people who designated people as Black. For instance, in the Arab enslavement of African peoples or if we think about in South Asia, what happens among the Dalits in the society. So, we start with that one. So, if we're talking about the oppressed or dominated or exploited, et cetera, that is a reality that everybody knows. Everybody knows that there's a group of people who are enslaved, colonized, dominated, et cetera, who are called Black. We're all conscious of it. So, on the one hand, that's a Black consciousness that everybody has. We're conscious of that. August Baker: Good point. Yeah. Lewis Gordon: Now, we come to the people themselves who go through that, because as I mentioned before, they had no reason to think of themselves that way until those historical circumstances emerge. Not only that, even today when people are born, they're not born thinking of themselves that way. August Baker: Exactly. Lewis Gordon: All they think about is, "Damn, it's cold out here," and all kinds of other things. They get socialized into a world in which one day studies have shown really around the age between three and five. August Baker: Isn't that early, really? Lewis Gordon: Yeah. Well, in American society. In other societies, it's much later. In some societies, it doesn't happen at all, because their framework is different. But when it does happen, there's a point at which one said, "Oh, they're talking about me. What is this?" They try to figure it out. So, that's an initial lowercase b, black consciousness. It's almost invariably negative, but there's a certain point where one has a child and an adolescent or just people generally begin to notice that how they live among themselves is very differently than what people think they are. This is not just about Blacks. It's about any group, whether you're Italian or if you're in religious categories. Whether you're Jewish or Christian, every Christian, every Jew, every Muslim, every Hindu, we could go down the list, every Daoist, every Buddhist knows what people think about what they are and what they know they are among one another. So, that creates a form of tension, because on the one hand, you're hearing all these horrible things about what being a Black person is, but on the other hand, you're looking at your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, the people you love, your best friends. They don't match those descriptions. So, at this point now, unfortunately, some people buy into false beliefs. So, even though those contradictions are right around them, some people begin to project the society's negative attitudes onto themselves and the people who are like them and they begin to live a lie. I call that bad faith. Bad faith is when we make ourselves believe things that are not only false, but we make ourselves believe things we don't really believe because the evidence contradicts them. So, we move into investments in pleasing falsehoods versus displeasing truths. One may wonder, "Why and how in the world could a negative conception of the self be a pleasing falsehood?" Well, the short answer is the pleasing falsehood could be you can't do anything about it. It can release you from the responsibility of action to change the world, to take on the political responsibilities. However, if you now face the falsehood as a falsehood, now you begin to deal with a different question. This is a question that many have dealt with all the way back to W. E. B. Du Bois and even before him, but others such as Anténor Firminas. There are many others. This has been written about by Richard Wright, Anna Julia Cooper, Frantz Fanon, many people. It comes down to this. The negative imposition onto the people attempts to lie to the people that they in themselves, in their supposed nature are problematic. They are problems. There is a point, however, in which like the example I gave of looking at your relatives, your parents, looking at the beauty of the music around you, the foods you love, looking at even your body, right? There's a world that tell Black people were ugly. I was watching a New Year's Eve entire program on White people obsessed with trying to in effect have body types that look like Black peoples. August Baker: Yeah, sure. Lewis Gordon: So how can you be ugly and how could this all be true when the people are telling you you're despicable, where they're trying to imitate you, your music, your looks and everything? So at that point, you say, "Wait a minute, maybe this is a lie." Then you begin to step back and you shift. You say, "Maybe I'm not a problem. Maybe the problem is a society that makes me into a problem." This is the point at which you realize, "Oh, wait a minute. I'm a human being like every other human being who faces problems. It's just that another group of human beings are lying to themselves that they don't face those problems." You take any human being and put them into situations of poverty, double standards of justice, lack of access to healthcare, no matter how much they may qualify, being denied employment, things like that. Of course, you're going to have certain responses. When we look at other groups, for instance, because you may notice in the book, I don't only talk about Black people, but I see this, as Angela Davis observed, as illuminating of certain universal truths. When you look at the way people in Ireland were treated on the British colonialism, when you look at the way different groups of people, not only in South Asia but in the Pacific, were treated, if you look at the treatment of the Welch at certain point, you can go through varieties of issues around Eastern Europeans versus Western Europeans. You could go through within Asia, the difference between Han and Manchus and all the way through. I mean, there's so many examples. If you go through conflicts with Palestinians, and I don't like to say Palestinian and Jews because there are Jewish Palestinians. August Baker: Oh, interesting. Lewis Gordon: There are people who forget that, but the main point is at a certain point, you begin to say, "Wait a minute. There are normal ways people respond under adverse conditions." Perhaps we should shift. In fact, not perhaps. We should actually shift and ask the question of, "What does it mean to be a human being trying to live an ordinary life in a sick society, an unfair and unjust society?" The short answer is that society imposes extraordinary conditions on what it means to live an ordinary life for one set of people instead of the ordinary conditions for all people. August Baker: I'm really interested in intellectual history. You mentioned some names, and you also mentioned bad faith. Just as background, I could be wrong about this, you're continuing a line from Frantz Fanon. Do you think of yourself as working following him? Lewis Gordon: Well, actually, it's interesting. An anniversary edition of one of my early books is coming out. Mabogo More, a philosopher in South Africa wrote the foreword. He alludes to another book I wrote in which I talk about how we talk about intellectuals. This connects to the previous question, because you see that second answer I gave about understanding what it is to be a human being in a society in which we face problems. Now, you can now see your potential as a human being, and that is the uppercase Black consciousness to be an agent of history. I call that potentiated double consciousness. It's not just me. Jane Anna Gordon actually coined that term. What it means is you can see the potential for action. Well, if we come to intellectual history, it's a very interesting thing. Part of what happens in the history of the study of Black intellectuals is there's a presupposition that Black intellectuals are not generative of new ideas. So, often, when we read Black intellectuals, we want to find which intellectuals are being applied to Black intellectuals. This is different from the question you just asked because it's interesting that you asked me about Frantz Fanon. He was another Black intellectual. The racism usually comes in when there's a presupposition that it must have been from a White intellectual. August Baker: I see. Yeah. Lewis Gordon: So there are people who would ask if Fanon is Sartrean or Hegelian or Marxist. Where it's interesting when Hegel who engages Kant, develop his ideas, I have not met anybody who called Hegel Kantian. You see what I'm saying? August Baker: So true. That's such a good point. Yes. Lewis Gordon: The thing is that intellectuals, our ideas are never willy-nilly. The way I talked about consciousness, we're always related to other intellectuals. August Baker: Sure. Lewis Gordon: So in terms of me, I've written a lot on Frantz Fanon inspiring. I learned a lot from his thought. There are things I agree with, I disagree with, but like me, Frantz Fanon is located as part of the African diasporic existential tradition. Those ideas take concepts such as consciousness that we began with very seriously, but we also take existence very seriously. August Baker: Sure. Lewis Gordon: The thing about existence is to exist is to stand out, to exist is to face possibility. So, you could see why that potential question is so important. All existential thought thinks about freedom. Now, in my writing, because I also studied classics and I studied ancient thought and I studied a variety of other things as well, yes, I'm inspired by Fanon, by Sark, by Husserl, by Schutz, by Anténor Firminas, the Haitian philosopher I talked about, but also so many all the way to Zera Yacob in Ethiopia, all the way through to people from antiquity such as an Ani, such as Ontef, which is ancient African philosopher from 4,000 years ago. I don't have to agree with the people I find inspiring, but I love the ideas, the critical question that's raised about thought in Plato's symposium and so many other things. But Sartre and people like Simone de Beauvoir, the centrality of freedom in their thought or people like Ali Shariati, the Iranian or Persian thinker. Again, the centrality of freedom is there. Or Sri Aurobindo, the East Indian philosopher who again culminates the thought in freedom, and he's also an anti-colonialist. Or if I think about Keiji Nishitani, the Japanese philosopher again, who does something rather remarkable. He's so committed to the question of freedom that Nishitani's criticism of what's called Western philosophy is that it covers reality. You could see how you could see the point about bad faith, right? He says, "The problem is ontology covers reality. It's so obsessed with being that it forgets reality." So the answer is yes. Yes, all those people. For me, they're ancestors. They're human beings. They don't have to be perfect, but they are illuminating. Yes, I learn a lot from all of them. August Baker: Well, one of the things I really liked about your book reading it was there's a lot of philosophy. There's also you weave the abstract and the particular, and some of the particular examples are from pop culture. Well, they're from your own life, from pop culture. One of the great things was I was introduced to a couple of movies that I hadn't watched before that I watched, because you mentioned them in the book. One of them is this great film called Get Out, which I had never seen before, which I did. Which is tremendous. There were several others, but I think it seems like the same thing is that philosophy can cover over. So, you also need to be able to think about these actual examples. Lewis Gordon: Yes. In fact, my position on philosophy is that any philosophy that ignores reality is not worth its weight at all. I mean, I'm technically a professional philosopher, but I don't fetishize that. For me, ideas are ideas. They don't have to come from a person with a PhD philosophy. In fact, many of the greatest philosophers we have read did not have PhDs in philosophy. Edmund Husserl was mathematics. Bertrand Russell was mathematics and economics. Vichtenstein was in engineering, and he was also a nurse by the way. William James was a psychiatrist as we know. Jasper is a psychiatrist, phenomena psychiatrist. David Hume was a lawyer. It's an interesting pattern here, isn't it? August Baker: Fanon was a physician also, correct? Lewis Gordon: Yeah. He was a psychiatrist and he was a forensic and a clinical psychiatrist. Nietzsche was a philologist, person who studied literature. Anna Julia Cooper, she did literature in other areas, including philosophy. The thing about philosophy to remember is that philosophy has to be so radically critical that it makes us face something very scary. You see, the thing is reality is both beautiful and frightening. The beautiful part about reality is that if we face it, we realize we are alive. The frightening part about reality- August Baker: We realize we're alive. Lewis Gordon: ... is that we realize and that it ultimately doesn't give a damn about us. That reality preceded us, will succeed us. August Baker: Well, definitely. Lewis Gordon: There's so many who say, "You know what? We got to not take ourselves too seriously." August Baker: Well, no, there's a playfulness here that's great. I'd like to actually talk about Get Out, because I think you did a lot with it. I thought the idea of first of all, the sunken place. I guess why don't we assume people watched it or they can watch it or they'll pick up on it, but as racism, as putting people in the sunken place, that made so much sense to me. Lewis Gordon: Yeah, it was brilliant, isn't it? August Baker: Yeah. I should say that's a Jordan Peele 2017, if I didn't say that before, right? Lewis Gordon: Yeah. It created a new genre, because before, things were just put in neat boxes. Comedy, horror, drama, et cetera. But you notice the films I talk about defy being contained in a single genre. August Baker: Yes, definitely. It's certainly also true for Black Panther, right? Lewis Gordon: Yeah. A lot of people oversimplify what these films are about, but this is connected to something in that's part of the history of Black thought and Africana thought. If you look at many Africana philosophers or Black thinkers, many do not start with a disciplinary identity, because what they have discovered is that often those identities close off our access to the truth and reality. In fact, I call it disciplinary decadence when I talk about disciplines, but what they tend to do is they realize that there's not one shoe size that fits all. If we're trying to understand the world around us, we need to communicate with the many facets and creative ways people attempt to understand the world we live in. So, it's a similar ethic, so to speak, at the level of citation and at the level of exploring the many voices through which we examine this. Today, for instance, when many of us talk about classic literature and we study great text, we don't realize in their times, they were popular. I mean, I remembered when I was learning ancient Greek and just reading through the writings of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, I mean, the community got together and watched them the way we go to movie theaters and watch Get Out and Sorry To Bother You. These are all films I talk about. August Baker: They were even more rowdy than we sit in hushed silence, but my understanding is people who went to see Shakespeare were talking and eating and throwing thing. Lewis Gordon: And farting, but in the content, the point is all art, all theory, all ideas are ultimately connected to that point we talked about earlier, which is, okay, fine, reality has no reason to give a damn about us, but we have reasons to give a damn about us. In what we produce to communicate our humanity with one another, those projects, whether they're poetry, films, theater, philosophical works, scientific works all the way through to everyday journalism, even down to everything from tweets to Facebook posts, all of those things really matter. So, what I focus on is to look at what insight they offer and build on them. There's also a very simple pedagogical reason I do this. The reality is- August Baker: They're really fun and interesting, and they grab your attention. Lewis Gordon: That, and also more people have seen these or listened to these radio programs. Here's the point. You may notice a pattern with every film I analyze in this book. If I came in with the obnoxious, "Okay, I'm a highly trained scholar, I'm going to begin and just talk about certain classic text and people," then I'm would be in my action given a message that only certain kinds of readers will matter versus others. However, if I start with what the larger number of people engage and talk about it and then offer what from my learning I can bring to it, they may say, "I didn't realize that." Maybe I should read that book. Just like for instance, you hadn't seen that film. In reading this book, you started from a book and you went to a film. There are others who may open the book, because they've seen the film, and they learn about other books. They may not have seen the connections between important elements of Get Out and The Wizard of Oz. They may not have seen other elements even more deeply as I go into Ancient African myths about how one can deal with Mayette, the Goddess that makes judgment over justice, good and evil, et cetera. Or when people see the movie Get Out, another movie I talk about in the film, many of them may not realize its connection to Pinocchio. Many people don't realize Pinocchio's connection to Apuleius, The Golden Ass, which is an ancient novel from ancient Rome. Many of them may not know its relationship to an ancient Greek text on onus. The word onus is just ancient Greek for donkey or ass and the whole connection to Beasts of Burden, the fact that ancient people of Kemet, which we know today as Egypt, they're the ones who domesticated the donkey. So, at the level of learning how to read culture, to know that Beasts of Burden like donkeys have a deep rooted connection in our history when we deal with concerns of enslavement. August Baker: Yeah. I think you said Get Out was about created adventures at Pinocchio. Did you mean Sorry to Bother You? Lewis Gordon: No, no. Sorry to Bother You. Oh, I'm sorry about that. Yeah. Sometimes as we're going, we lose some sight, but yeah, Sorry to Bother You is connected to Pinocchio. Pinocchio is connected to Apuleius' The Golden Ass and it goes all the way back. What they have in common that is striking is that, Sorry To Bother You is dealing about Beasts of Burden, about enslavement. Pinocchio is a story about that, even though many people know it through the popular Disney film. Apuleius is about that as well. Get Out is on many layers. Get Out is not only in terms of its classical myths connected through to certain ancient Egyptian myths, but also, it's a profound philosophical inquiry on questions of embodiment and disembodiment. August Baker: Right. I thought it was also great for thinking about just illustrating some of the concepts. So, for example, Black consciousness, well, the way I saw it was there were a couple of times where Chris approached someone that he thought was Black or that had Black skin, the groundskeeper, Walter, and also Logan King in the body of Andre Hayworth. He approaches them like with a smile. Okay, I'm going to meet this Black guy in the midst of all these White people. I would be like, "Hey, it's good to see you here. Hey, man." The person turns around and doesn't respond. I think that was, to me, what Black consciousness was. I don't know if you would agree with that, but it was that whatever was missing there. Lewis Gordon: Sure. In fact, the film is a great critique of certain misguided arguments. Earlier, I talked about, for instance, this lie that's constantly thrown on Black people that were uglier. Many White people are actually almost bullied to lie to themselves that they find Black people ugly, but that is actually false. That's beautifully. August Baker: Oh, boy, is it ever. Yeah. You have this great term, Afro-somataphilia, desire for Black bodies, which was so true. Fear of Black Consciousness along with Afro-somataphilia. Lewis Gordon: Yeah. We see it all over the place. August Baker: Yes. It's just so beautifully depicted in that film. Lewis Gordon: Beautifully done. The film also raises some rather interesting... I mean, it's an amazing film at the level of metaphor. It's also wonderfully psychoanalytical and all of these things Jordan Peele consciously did. Even to his choice of colors, you notice in my analysis, I bring these things out. August Baker: A lot of the things you brought out in your analysis, I hadn't recognized and I would watch over. Yeah. The beginning scenes were fascinating. I thought, one thing that I could not find was that when you talk about Black consciousness, one of the ways you talk about it is that it's a fear of a Black consciousness looking back at you. As a White person, it's the fear of looking and seeing that Black consciousness look through you, which I've experienced personally, unfortunately. But I know exactly what you're talking about. Just racist for some reason. Then there's not words. It's just a look, and it's like, "Oh, it goes right through me and it haunts me." It's not really a problem, but I was trying to think if that was depicted really anywhere in art, but certainly, it isn't in that film because all of the White people in that film are just oblivious to it. That was my sense. Lewis Gordon: Well, that film was raising a rather interesting question, which is the desire to have a White consciousness looking back at you in a Black body. That film brought that out very well. I talk about how many examples of this emerging popular culture. It was there in the jazz singer with the idea of Blackface. The thing is all those performances are caricatured Blackness. They're not the actual liberty. So, that brings out the desire of a society to live a lie, to want to have Black people be what Black people actually are not, but what a racist society would prefer Black people. But one of the things I also point out in the book and this is something some critics miss, this is not a book that is claiming at all that every White person is that way. The book is claiming that a racist society bullies everybody to live lies. I think the person who says this rather elegantly was Franz Fanon. He wrote a book called Black Skin, White Masks, and a lot of people misunderstood the title. They thought the entire book is about Black people wearing White masks, but what the book is about is about two kinds of lies. The first one is what we have been talking about, which is the lie to make Black people believe that our skin is our fate, that we're sealed in our skin. We're closed, we have no possibility. That is a lie. That's the lie of Black skin, but there is another lie. There's the lie called the white mask. The question is, who wears the white mask? What Fanon actually says is the people who wear the white mask are mostly White people. White people wear a mask of having to lie to themselves, that they're superior to all other people. Or if you think about it, the way White people are among White people is often different than if a Black person walks in the room. August Baker: Completely, yeah. Lewis Gordon: The moment the Black person walks in the room, those same White people now put on the white mask, because they have to pretend they're somehow special and superior, when in truth, they're just people. August Baker: So I think even if the Black person doesn't enter the room, but even if you're looking at a Black person in the distance, if they're in the whole scenario. Lewis Gordon: Yeah. It's like, "Okay, time to put on the white mask." So they're both lies. So, if we come back to this film, this film is rather great in many ways, but it's also provocative in others because it does leave open a very strange question, because basically, how can we put the coagulants as they're called? It's pointed out in the film that they go back to ancient times that these are people where, in their case, it is not about racism. In their case, if some other group of people became in fashion, they would occupy them. August Baker: It says that at one point, Black bodies are in fashion or something. Lewis Gordon: In fashion. This is a very important part, because there's another danger. You may notice, I bring this up in the book. I put it this way. People think their Blacks are the Blacks. Their Jews are the Jews. They think their condition constitutes the condition. That's the point at which we take ourselves so seriously. We fail to disarm a lie imposed upon us. So, that film does a beautiful job of trying to point out that if we develop a better understanding of our responsibility for the world we live in, then we can change those conditions. But if we anthologized them, then there's nowhere we can go. There will just simply be Blackness sealed into itself forever and ever. Whiteness sealed into itself forever and ever, but that's not only not true, but it fails to deal with our existential condition. Our existential condition is about our responsibility for our actions and possibility. There's so many, but of course, you may notice not only in that film, but already brought up Sorry to Bother You, but you notice later on I talk about The City of God, the Brazilian film, right? August Baker: Yeah, I watched that too. Lewis Gordon: That's an amazing film, isn't it? August Baker: Yes, it is. Another one that I saw because I was reading the book. Lewis Gordon: Great, but there's this point sometimes where we're so mannequin and so Black and White, so overly judgmental that we fail to think about how people make decisions in certain situation. That film, I won't give it away. I would love for the lot of listeners to go and look at the films I talk about in this book, but that connection between the chicken that took flight and Rocket, the little boy, even their names, it's just so powerful. If you look at lots of stories, even when I talk about the Cohen Brothers films, all Cohen Brothers films are philosophical films. They're just so beautifully done, right? The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, I mean, that's an anthology, right? August Baker: Barking dog. Lewis Gordon: The barking dog and all of these themes, the whole point of a lot of these is the moment we're in film, in art, we're already in a realm of creativity and possibility, which means all art ultimately ask us to take something serious enough to understand its meaning, but not so seriously that we forget our responsibility to build new forms of meaning. August Baker: I think one of the things we talk about is various ways of evading responsibility, right? Lewis Gordon: Yeah. Bad faith. August Baker: Well, bad faith. I was thinking of all the different varieties of them. I wrote a long list, but one of them was human nature. It's human nature. One, that's my ancestors, not me. Lewis Gordon: You may notice the way I talk about bad faith too. It defies the reductive singular definition. I talk about it phenomenologically as modes of living, that there are ways we attempt to live in bad faith. August Baker: Right. No, I did come away with a much broader understanding of bad faith after this book. Here's another one of the ways of evading responsibility. I have a quote for you here. This is from LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka. Lewis Gordon: Yeah, Amiri Baraka. Yeah. August Baker: He says, "From the fair-haired Black boy of Off Broadway, as Langston Hughes called me with his tongue stuck way up in his cheek, I got to be a full up racist. So, strange that the victims, once they began to scream and shout at their oppressors, can now be termed as the oppressors. We accuse whites of racism. So, presto change-o, Black racism is the real problem. Hate Whitey dramas were what I and my colleagues on West 130th were writing." That would be another one. Lewis Gordon: Oh, you may notice also, there's some critics who ironically, in their criticism manifests the criticism I'm making, which is there's a section where I talk about White supremacy as a form of narcissistic disorder. August Baker: Absolutely. I wanted to talk about that. Lewis Gordon: It's very funny because there's a large lecture class I teach and this has several hundred students. It was interesting, a bunch of them read this book. It's interesting that all of them, all the White students said, "That's absolutely accurate." August Baker: Yeah, no, absolutely. Right. I said that many times in this book, right? Lewis Gordon: Yeah. I mean, that white mask is that narcissistic disorder. August Baker: Absolutely. Lewis Gordon: But the narcissistic disorder, I usually give the example is if you bring a child into the world and tell the child it's superior to other children and then that tells that child, it's always to get everything it wants, you know what you're going to raise. There's a whole history of throwing that onto White people, people who are designated white to the point where at any moment, they don't get what they want. They define themselves as victims. August Baker: No, I understand. Lewis Gordon: So this means there isn't even room for the people they victimize even to be recognized as having been victimized. We see this today. It's funny we are seeing it in the contemporary everything from the whole White genocide discourse, which is bizarrely defined as simply in some cases, White people in interracial relationships, to all the way through to people who are upset that when they vote, their votes don't function as the equivalent of 10 say votes against one Black vote. So, this narcissistic disorder is something profoundly unhealthy that is part of that white mask, but there's something else that I want to bring up that is argued in the book, but I could make really clear in this conversation. I actually take the position that human reality is narcissistic. I make a distinction between good narcissism and bad narcissism. A lot of people would be shocked by this, but the reason human reality is narcissistic, and it's not bad, is it connected to what we were seeing earlier about art and reality. If you think about what it is to be a human being, it's to spend every day looking at and interacting with things created by fellow human beings or actual other human beings. In other words, our mirrors are our fellow humanity. If you took that away from us, we would go insane and die. There are people who romanticize isolation, the hermit being in the wilderness. That's not a human existence. Even when we look at gardens and trees and what we call beaches, they're human affected gardens, beaches, and so forth. So, human beings live in human worlds. That is normal. What we learn from fellow human beings is an extension of that world that produces meaning. Narcissistic disorder is when we move from the outward reach of meaning with fellow human beings and try to contain it and lock it into our individual self at the expense of other human beings. In other words, the person with narcissistic disorder has no room for others. You see? This is what racism does. Racism blocks others from having the right to live their freedom and to appear in the world with everyone else. It's the use of power to disempower other people's capacity to live as human beings. August Baker: All right. Yeah. I hadn't really made the connection with narcissism, but I remember the discussion about... I think you had this exercise of what if there were no bad faith. Lewis Gordon: We wouldn't be human beings. August Baker: No, exactly. Lewis Gordon: Yeah. The irony of bad faith is that it's a necessary possibility of our freedom. Really to be free is also to have the option of trying to avoid being free. August Baker: I'm not sure how this fits, but this Kohut, he's a psychoanalyst. I don't heard of it. Lewis Gordon: Yeah, I know who he is. August Baker: Narcissism is good. In his sense, it's vibrant. You need some, there's a healthy amount. I also thought that your example of walking across campus, I'll leave it to the readers, but such a great example of this sense of, "Oh, my gosh, I see you. You have Black skin. This is something I wasn't expecting. I need to complain." During the COVID, I was just not listening to things. I don't know if other people had made this point, but I thought it was fascinating to think of the people who are protesting against the rules. It's like this must be a hoax, because I don't have face limitations. This thing that's coming in is evil and wrong. Because I as a person am completely immune to anything like this, so it must be a hoax that's being perpetuated on me. Lewis Gordon: Yeah. To treat the self like a God. August Baker: Right. I would also say, I think that some of that, the white "Oh, well, now you're being a Black racist," and getting really upset. I think of Jonathan Lear. He talks about this anxiety defense. Part of the reason of showing all this anxiety, it's conscious or it has at least purpose of it has the effect of getting people to stop saying that. Lewis Gordon: Indeed. But one of the things, of course, it's also in a very mundane and familiar example. You tell your child, "I'm going out. You eat what you'd like, but don't eat the cookies out of the cookie jar." You come home. The child's hand is in the cookie jar, crumbs on the lips. You say, "Didn't I tell you not to eat the cookie jar?" Now the response is, "You scared me." August Baker: That's good. I like that. Lewis Gordon: Well, in a way, those efforts are structurally similar, right? Deflect from the reality of wrongdoing by saying to identify the wrongdoing is a wrongdoing. August Baker: Right. The time is flying. Here's where I was confused about the narcissism. It seems like when you point to narcissism, that's to say ultimately that if racism is white narcissism or white narcissism creates White consciousness and Black consciousness, underneath that is a sense that what is really driving this is an insecurity on the part of White people. To me, they don't want to face this, because they have, for some psychological reason, low self-esteem or something as though they are in fact or we are in fact the injured people. I understand that the argument would be that actually by facing truth, you're going to be also more free. But I think the alternative would be, say Freud, is to say it's not underlying Freud. Man is wolf to man. It's not that the racism is from this underlying low self-esteem or need to maintain one's grandiosity. It would be simpler to say no, even if the same person were to face this, they would still want to keep it the way it is, because it's more of just aggression, not underlying vulnerability. Lewis Gordon: Well, there's several things. The first thing is one of the things I argue throughout the book and throughout my work actually, is that we should avoid models of human science that look for a single element about a human phenomenon. You may notice the way I talk about the emergence of anti-Black racism, and I talk about it as distinct from White supremacy. You can get rid of White supremacy and still have anti-Black racism. You can get rid of anti-Black racism and White supremacy and still have other forms of racism. So, racism is connected to a variety of commitments that meet in what we call a racist society. So, for instance, I told the story of how The Odyssey functions in this. The Odyssey is a commitment to the idea of the purity and power and absoluteness of for God, which would make all forms of evil external to that God. Now, although that's a metaphysical notion, when human beings adopt that, what they try to do is to imagine they're not in relationships with anything else, because to be in relationship with anything else would render one impure. So, that first element is already there in the history of what created the concept of the reza, which eventually became race, which in the Iberian Peninsula, in the conflict between Christianity and Islam. But that by itself is insufficient, because even though that's there, we have to remember that society did not exist in a vacuum. It also had a history of certain attitudes toward women that not everywhere people think of gender in the same way. But the societies that inherited a certain way of looking around gender in which women were undeveloped to men had a certain way of imagining the self as complete, fully developed if one were a man. So, you have this gendered element, and then you have this theological element. The theological element then moves into a theo-naturalism, which is the notion that there are people who are unnatural to God and to nature and to reality. For them, within the confines of Liberia, those people were called Jews and Moores, so you could see it, right? Moores were African Muslims. So, you have Afro Muslims, you have Jews, and a lot of them were Afro-Jews as well. But again, so you have all that. They have the other element of war. War requires creating enemies. You need to know who's in and who's outside. People think about Columbus as a scientific expedition, but it wasn't. No, it was war. August Baker: I thought it was moneymaking, but yeah, war, right? Imperialism, right? Lewis Gordon: Yeah. It was war. It was basically to find a way to get rid of Muslim control of the Mediterranean. All wars also have economic element syndrome, right? August Baker: Sure. Lewis Gordon: Because the Muslim control of the Mediterranean put the northern areas into a nearly 800-year economic depression. I mean, look at what we went through back in 2007 or 2008. Could you imagine 800 years? I mean, when you go from indoor toilets and Roman engineering to throwing the pisspot out the window to try to find a way just to get some grain. So, with all of those factors, as I'm telling this story, lot of people want to have a single factor. August Baker: I understand. Lewis Gordon: But then something happens. Other factors are the history of diseases. So, suddenly, if you have a theology that says you're in and God is on your side and you end up in Bahamas and suddenly the indigenous people are dying like crazy and you're fighting them and you just keep winning, you develop a sense of superiority. At first, we have to remember those initial people from Europe, well, we call it Europe now. Europe is just West Asia. I mean, it's a term that was created from the British Isles to refer to the mainland, but a lot of people forget those ships were multiracial. There weren't properly White people. There were Africans, and there were people who were just different backgrounds. August Baker: You pointed out some paintings where that's shown. Lewis Gordon: Yeah. They were Christians basically. We already know this, just everyday psychology, but everyday level, some people can be very cool, but when they start getting really famous and rich, they change. If people have any idea of the level of wealth that suddenly was hitting these people to the point where their humanity became subordinated to commodification, to profit, et cetera, something then also was added another ingredient. That is capitalism, but that ingredient of capitalism that people don't understand and I talk about it in the book, it's capitalism as The Odyssey. You notice today we don't talk about markets. We talk about the market like it's a God, which means that anything that contradicts the market's got to go. It's got to fall. August Baker: Yeah. That's the root of all problems, is some imperfection with the market. Lewis Gordon: That logic, by the way, also feeds into a certain brand of socialism, because what it does is that brand is, again, to have a monopoly over markets. A lot of people don't realize this, that the opposite of capitalism isn't socialism. There's something more complex at work, because capitalism, in order to control people, the logic of it, you have to get rid of the humanity in people. People have to become commodities, things. We call it individuals, but no human being is actually an individual. We're actually individuals. We're actually in relationship to other things and other people. August Baker: We're human resources. Lewis Gordon: So when you put all those elements together, now you have a whole logic in which you have to convince yourself that their people who are not really people. They're people who are instruments for certain needs, for profits, for all kinds of other things. This also reminds us that many other people under those conditions, it goes both ways. The argument where I said, if we make people into the problems, we face to understand how people act when they face problems. Well, you notice in the book, I'm careful to point out that the goal here is not to write out the humanity of the people who became what we call White people. It's to understand the conditions that lead to them lying to themselves, that they are foretold, they are ordained to be the rulers of all reality and all of the people. That is the lie, but other people could be seduced by that lie. We're seeing it happening in India right now with Hindus against Muslims, Dravidian populations, non-Hindus. That logic is at work. So, the book is to get, at least the reader, to understand the grammar, the actions, the practices at work and the humanity of people when they're in those situations. That we can change those, because as you know, we are short of time. But you may notice that I get into a detail, but a different understanding of what political reality is, right? That's not the old coercive way, the distinction between politics and governing, and why political action has uncertainty, contingency, and possibility in them. Political actions go all the way back to humanity understanding that the world we create is also a world that infused with power, but you notice that in this book, power is not a bad thing. Power is the ability to make things happen. That's why humanity is still here, and it's through having access to the conditions of doing so. However, the abuse of power is the use of power to block other people from having the capacity to flourish and make things happen. So, the fight against racism of all kinds is a fight to transform the options. These are the political conditions that would enable people to make meaningful choices to live their lives, right? Oppression is to limit the options by which people can live meaningful lives. So, liberation goals is to increase the options by which people could live meaningful lives. August Baker: There's also a powerful discussion of commitment, which I thought was very helpful, which it goes back to this idea of the world not really caring that we're here. Lewis Gordon: Right. A lot of people want to have the outcomes before the performance, but you notice I give nobody guarantees. August Baker: No, exactly. Yes. I like that. Lewis Gordon: We have to have the existential commitment to the political actions necessary for things greater than ourselves. A lot of humanity is understood that from antiquity to the present. It's right there in the view that even if you won't enter the promised land, the promised land is worth fighting for. August Baker: Yes. Some very powerful themes. Lewis R. Gordon, the book is Fear of Black Consciousness. Thank you so much for talking to me today. I really appreciate it. Lewis Gordon: Thank you so much for inviting me, and yes, I enjoy our conversation very much. I'm so glad that you enjoyed the book.

Martha C. Nussbaum (U Chicago)

Justice for animals: Our collective responsibility

A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.

Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day.

The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international proportions. In Justice for Animals, one of the world's most influential philosophers and humanists Martha C. Nussbaum provides a revolutionary approach to animal rights, ethics, and law.

From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum's groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before.

Author

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department and the Law School of the University of Chicago. She gave the 2016 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and won the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The 2018 Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, and the 2020 Holberg Prize. These three prizes are regarded as the most prestigious awards available in fields not eligible for a Nobel. She has written more than twenty-two books, including Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions; Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice; Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; and The Monarchy of Fear.

Reviews

"The most important book on animal ethics written to date, Justice for Animals is a brilliant and remarkably comprehensive exploration of the ethical issues connected with human treatment of nonhumans. a milestone in the field."—Thomas I. White, author of In Defense of Dolphins "With urgent clarity, Martha Nussbaum explains why we must and how we can take responsibility for the multi-species world that is our reality. Justice For Animals is a celebration of the human potential for love and mutuality and a song of hope, as much as it is a steely-eyed analysis of our callous dominance of the nonhuman world."—Amy Linch, Penn State University "Martha Nussbaum's work has changed the humanities, but in this book her focus is startling, born of an ardent love for her late daughter and for all animals on Earth."—Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Case Western Reserve University, and Senior Research Fellow, Earth System Governance Project

"Martha Nussbaum takes an honest look at how animals may survive in a human-dominated world, and lays out a plan of action to help creatures great and small in important and critical ways."—Dr. Denise Herzing, Founder and Research Director of the Wild Dolphin Project "A provocative book. Nussbaum lays out a foundation for the political rights of animalsand asks what creating a world where animals could be our friends would look like. An essential read for anyone interested in what we owe to our fellow creatures."—Nicolas Delon, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies, New College of Florida "The morality of the human-animal relation urgently needs updating. We can't wish for a more insightful and compassionate guide than philosopher Martha Nussbaum. She urges us to look beyond pain and pleasure and to consider all animals, not just those that resemble us. Each species' specific needs and capabilities offer a guide of how they should be treated."—Frans de Waal, author of Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist "A thought-provoking guide to ethical coexistence with the diverse creatures of Earth." —Kirkus Reviews "This trenchant and masterful blend of political analysis, philosophical study, and call to action is a must-read."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Philosophy Podcast. This is August Baker and Philosophy Podcast is where we interview leading philosophers about their recent books. Today I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Professor Martha Nussbaum, who's really needs no introduction, won several prizes. I looked at one of these prizes, the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The other winners in addition to Professor Nussbaum are Popper, Quine, Ricœur, Habermas, Charles Taylor, Spivak, and Latour, and really needs no introduction. I told one of my other interviewees that I was interviewing her and they said, "Well, she's the most important living and active philosopher," so I'm very delighted that she joined us today. She is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the philosophy department and the law school at the University of Chicago. Welcome, Professor Nussbaum. Martha Nussbaum: Hi. Thank you so much for having me on. Great pleasure. August Baker: Thank you. I'd like to start with your introduction. I appreciate the vulnerability really that you showed in the introduction. You speak about your daughter, losing your daughter when she was 47 in 2019. And some of the things you said here, you say, "As long as I live, I will see the sparkle in her green eyes and her subversive smile. We were a study in contrasts, I with curly blonde hair, she with a black almost buzz cut, I with femme colorful dresses, she with all black pants suits; but so deeply our hearts were allied. This is not a book about that tragedy. This book is different: it looks forward attempting to further the causes she loved, with a theory she knew about and supported," a version of your capabilities approach. And then later you say, at the end of the introduction about animal rights, "Now I believe is the time of a great awakening: to our kinship with a world of remarkable intelligent creatures, and to real accountability for our treatment of them that is genuinely global, including all sentient beings. I hope this book will help direct that awakening, giving it moral urgency and theoretical structure, and inspiring new people to take up the cause of justice for animals-just as Rachel's passion for marine mammals made me curious, willing to embark on a difficult voyage that has proven more rewarding than any other journey in my life, apart from the journey of motherhood." It was just fascinating to me that this had become... I mean, of all the work you've done and books you've written, this one seems to have been even more rewarding than others? Martha Nussbaum: Well, yes, in a very personal way. I think what people may not know from what you read is that Rachel was a lawyer for animal rights. She worked for an NGO called Friends of Animals, and she worked in the wildlife division. So it was through her that I got to know so much about wild animals and particularly marine mammals, which were her passion. And we co-authored four papers together about that, where she supplied the law and I supplied the philosophy. So yeah, I mean, she started me on this journey. And therefore after she died, she had already read some chapters of the book, but the book was not nearly finished, and so I poured all the energy of my mourn into making the book as good as I could make it, and thinking that I was at least keeping alive the causes that she loved and doing something for the animals that she loved. So I think it had a special personal meaning for me in that sense. August Baker: Let's talk about the capabilities approach. It seems like one of the places to start, or one of the core intuitions here is the difference between flourishing lives and impeded lives. Martha Nussbaum: Yeah. August Baker: Could you explain that essentially? I think... Martha Nussbaum: Well, the question I was trying to ask is, what really is injustice? Have to start with a clear idea, as clear as we can get it, of what it is we're talking about. And justice is such an elusive idea. So I suggested that the best way of thinking about justice is thinking about what it is to be going ahead with your life, trying to flourish, and then to be suddenly blocked or thwarted by wrongful or negligent action. So it doesn't have to be malicious, but it might be just negligent, but it's wrongful. And that I think is something that both humans and animals have in common. We're all trying to flourish and then we get blocked. And the blocking, sometimes it's just an accident, but very often it's wrongful human conduct that we should be dealing with, with law and with activism. So that was what I was trying to do, because justice, it's just a word until you give it some content. But if we give it that content, then it makes sense to think that what we need to be focusing on is what a flourishing life is for the different kinds of animals and how that's related to the human effort to seek flourishing. And then what are the different things that can block that flourishing? Some of which are, as I said, just accidental. But some of them are wrong and some of the wrong ones are malicious: as when let's say a person beats a dog. But a lot of them are just negligent: as when we permit global warming to destroy habitats, as when we fill the seas with plastic trash, and so forth. So that was the idea, to start the book with an intuitive probing of the very idea of justice. August Baker: And I think one of the interesting things is there's several different levels you could talk about. Well, it would be virtuous, it would be nice to treat animals better. Then it seems like a second level would be to say no, that it actually rise to the rises to level of morality. And then even a higher level would be that it rises to the level of justice. Do you think of them as three different levels? Martha Nussbaum: Well, I guess that that's a good way of putting it. Sure. I mean, I think for example, John Wall has always said, well, we should have compassion for animals, but they don't have rights. Now, Christine Korsgaard, a Rawlsian and a Kantian, has said, look, the reasons that Kant gave for thinking that humans have rights, these reasons apply to animals. And so we can talk about that later if you want. But yeah, I think first of all, there might be some degree of concern. Then we have to establish that it's ethical concern. But there are many things that are objects of ethical concern, which I would not think are involved in an idea of justice. For example, I think plants and the non-sentient, natural environment all around us, that can be an object of ethical concern. But for reasons that I give in the book, I don't think it's a question of justice. I don't think you can do an injustice to a tree because a tree is not a sentient being pursuing a life. And that's, I think, the core of the idea of justice. August Baker: And to say, once it reaches this level of justice, then that means practically that it means that there can be... Once one commits and says, okay, this is a justice, this reaches at the level of justice, then it says, now we can use laws, people who aren't acting the right way can be punished. Is that the [inaudible 00:08:22] force? Martha Nussbaum: Yeah. And I think really, if it's a question of justice, then we are obligated to make laws and to try to enforce it. Just like the closely related idea of rights entails duties, we have to take upon ourselves the duty to fix this. This is why I call the subtitle of the book is Our Collective Responsibility. Because if animals have rights, then the question is who has the corresponding duties? And I think we can easily specify that in some cases if the animals live in a local place, but a lot of animals roam around in different countries. So we can't say, oh, this country or this city has the duty to fix this problem. But instead, the duty is held collectively by all human beings. Think about plastic trash. So I mean, we don't want to waste time thinking who put that plastic bottle in the ocean and when. No, we just have to fix it. We have to get together, get our act together and fix it. August Baker: A big question is, okay, if we're going to include more than humans in terms of creatures that we have duties to that fall under morality or justice, how big is this new circle going to be? And you referred to this idea of sentience. That's where you're going to draw the line, not all living creatures, but those that are sentient. Is that close to subjectivity or consciousness? Martha Nussbaum: Exactly. It is the idea of sentience. And I learned this from scientists. I spent a lot of time and had great joy learning what scientists have been doing in the last 30 years. There's been a real revolution in the understanding of animal lives. So basically what scientists think sentience is, is the idea that there's someone at home in there, there's a subjective point of view on the world, and therefore not just aversive reactions, which might be mechanical or route. There are creatures who do act to ward off disaster, but there's no reason to think that they feel anything or have a subjective perception of what's happening to them. But so it's that ability to avoid the bad and pursue the good, plus a sense that they feel something. Now, experimentally, usually what people are looking for is the feeling of pain. But that's not the only thing. It's just that that's the easiest thing to do experiments on. What would be a larger part of sentience would be to see something from your own point of view, to have the perception that feels like something. But as I say, pain is the thing that people experiment on. So when, for example, people have very successfully demonstrated that fish are sentience, what they typically do is to devise experiments where the behavior would change only if they feel pain, not just see a danger, but feel the pain. So anyway, that's what I mean by sentience. And then, once you get that standard and things to look at what people currently think about how to apply it, but we could always change that. So right now, what scientists think is that insects are not sentient. They are their disciplined voices, but I'm going to just summarize the consensus. Insects are not sentient. Crustaceans are probably not sentient. Cephalopods like the octopus and the squid almost certainly are sentient. And then there are disputes of various kinds within that. I mean, some people do think, well, bees might be sentient, but the point is the standard. And as we learn more, we'll probably apply that same standard in different ways. And we might discover that more and more creatures qualify for justice in my theory. August Baker: Right. No, that was a very interesting chapter, to read about all the different types of animals and to also learn about this scientific evidence about it. I think I have some questions about it still. At one point you said, "Let's not oo and aah over sentience. It's a useful trait." And I thought that was interesting because I mean, let's take two creatures on either side of this line. Let's say it's been decided that, or we know for sure that salmon are sentient and stingrays are not. Are we saying that the salmon's life is better? Martha Nussbaum: No. August Baker: Yeah. What is it you're saying? Martha Nussbaum: No, we're just saying that as they've evolved, they've developed a tool which is extremely useful to them, and that tool enables them to see the world from a distinctive subjective point of view. And even the further ability, which I call meta consciousness, that is awareness that you're having a certain view on the world, awareness that somebody else has a different view on the world; lots of animals have that too. But again, they have that because it's useful to them. So for example, when a squirrel hides a nut, it needs to know where other squirrels will not look. And of course we're familiar with this very clearly in the lives of dogs, because dogs can deceive, they can hide things and they know how to fool us. But that's also true of many, many other animals, many kinds of birds, many rodents and so forth. So these are things that of course we could [inaudible 00:14:15] about, but the crucial thing is they evolve because they're useful. August Baker: And we would owe justice or moral obligations to one and not the other. Is it basically because we have more, this is something that we have compassion for, this is something we can see feels... Martha Nussbaum: Well, I [inaudible 00:14:34] no moral [inaudible 00:14:35]. I think obligations of justice is what I'm talking about in this book. We might well have moral obligations such as to preserve them as part of a habitat, and we could go on and on about that. But my book is about justice. And I've tried to say that justice is about the idea that there is a striving being who has goals. So sentience is essential for having goals, not just things that you by rote avoid. And so it's part of the whole picture of being a striving being with goals and then goals that could be thwarted. August Baker: And then we can, obviously humans can have wrongful actions towards these creatures, either by intentional actions or negligence such as the plastic in the sea. Martha Nussbaum: Yeah. August Baker: So then you come to a very strong place, as I understand it, all sentient beings interests have equal weight. And this standard western view, which puts humans above the others, ranks and rates beings with considerable unjustified narcissism. As I understand it, you're saying there's no real good reason to put humans higher. Martha Nussbaum: Well, look, the first thing is I don't want to make generalizations about West and non-West. I think in the Western tradition of philosophy, we just have forgotten about a lot of voices that really did treat animals within tremendous concern, such as the Neoplatonists, Porphyry and Plutarch. So that's something I mentioned. There are dissident traditions also in Judaism and in Christianity. So we could talk about the different parts of each tradition. In non-Western traditions, again, Indian philosophy has Buddhist and some Hindu sources for the good treatment of animals. And that's one reason why I think India is the one place where if you're flying from city A to city B, you will be asked veg or non-veg, that it's just a routine question. There are many more vegetarians in India than in most countries. But on the other hand, many animals are treated very badly in India too. So each tradition is plural. Indigenous peoples are also plural. I mean, of course it is a commonplace, in a way, that indigenous people live with animals and they often show concern for animals in their practices, but often it's not fully adequate concern. Indigenous people's hunt whales and hunt deer and so forth. So I think we really should just focus on the goal that we're trying to reach. And the goal I think, is that all creatures, all sentient creatures, should be enabled to lead the lives that they're trying to lead up to a certain threshold point. So it's not a maximizing theory, it's a sufficientarian theory, and it's saying we have to get each one up above a certain threshold. Human beings are not special, in that, we're one of the animals that is trying to get up above a certain threshold. Now, I think you think that that's a very surprising idea, but it's an idea that really has deep roots in both Western and non-Western philosophy. It's just that those voices have usually been the minority voices and they've been eclipsed by the desire to use animals for our own pleasure and our own profit. So those voices have been dominant, but the others have always been there. August Baker: I thought it was very interesting, once you start talking about how to implement this, there becomes a whole new set of theory, all, well, new to me, set of theories about how one would put this into practice. And you talk about constitutions. The idea is, how would one devise a constitution? One of the things I wondered if you could share was this idea about political principles should be narrow and thin. Martha Nussbaum: Okay, let me go back and say just one more thing about the former question, because I think I didn't fully answer the idea, why shouldn't we think that human beings are better? Well, I mean, as both I and Christine Korsgaard think, there's no way of ranking one creature against another anyway, because all value is internal to a way of life. But if we think that we have something that the other animals don't, I think we better think again. What do they have that we don't have? And first thing is we have five senses, but there are senses we don't have that some other animals do have. Birds can perceive magnetic fields, which we cannot do. That's how they're able to migrate across the globe. Dolphins can sense what's inside an object they approach by their capacity for echolocation. I tell this story about a trainer whose pregnancy was signaled to her by the dolphin she was working with. She didn't know she was pregnant, but the dolphin sensed that there was something inside and he gave a signal to her, which had been used between them before to indicate pregnancy. So anyway, that's something. We should just look at what's there. And the world contains amazing horizontal variety, and ranking and ordering just doesn't make much sense [inaudible 00:20:08] If we even think about avoiding a conflict, many animals have more sophisticated and more successful peacemaking strategies than we do. Frans de Waal's book, Peacemaking among Primates is a great description of the bonobo capacity for peacemaking. They also have great capacities for constructing elaborate aesthetic structures. So anyway, we could go on and on about this, but that's just something that I wanted to add. August Baker: Sure. Martha Nussbaum: So now back to your other question. I think in the capabilities approach, which Amartya Sen and I jointly developed, and then I used in connection with constitutional law, says in my version that all citizens should be supplied with a threshold level of ten central capabilities. And that means that a nation is only minimally just if it's been able to bring all its citizens up above that threshold. So that's the idea that when I ask how can we apply this to the non-human animals, well, the answer is pretty complicated because they don't live in a nation. Some do, and then we could say, well, each nation should also have an animal constitution or similar legislation. And of course a lot of nations do, but they just don't enforce it. So we have an Animal Welfare Act that does a lot of the things I want. It's just that number one, it leaves out all the animals we eat very explicitly. And second, it just is never enforced because there's no one who has standing to go to court, and that's something I want to talk about later. But anyway, so here we are. What do we do with the animals who don't live in a particular nation? And so what I say is at least we need to know where we're heading. When we have international agencies and international deliberations such as the International Whaling Commission, we at least should have a goal in view. And so I think of the capabilities approach, which would then make a list of the central capabilities for each type of animal, as supplying a virtual constitution. It can't be a real written constitution because nations would never agree to it and nations would never write that down. But it's what a cooperative gathering of nations should be striving for. So that's the idea behind the virtual constitution. August Baker: My understanding was I thought that a virtual constitution meant that your vision would be ultimately that there would be a constitution, but in the meantime, out of respect for the fact that there's a wide variety of opinions on this, that we would start with a virtual one. Martha Nussbaum: Well, that's partly true. That's true of animals who are localized within a given nation, but many animals are not. And I do not think that it's even a good idea to aim for a world constitution for humans or for animals because I think a world state would be a horror and it would quickly become corrupted because it would lack accountability to the voices of the citizens. So, in the international realm, we are already dealing with a virtual constitution. What are the various human rights documents but exactly that. They're statements of what rights people have, but they won't have teeth unless nations incorporate them into their legal systems, which of course it would be good for them to do. But that's the idea I have in mind. It's going to be a list of animal rights, just like we have lists of human rights. August Baker: And I thought one of the interesting things is that these are not abstract. You have in mind using experts who have a lot of experience with particular animals. In a way, it's the animals talking or speaking as it were to say what is important to them. Martha Nussbaum: Exactly. So animals do speak in the sense that even the ones that don't have an elaborate language, and of course quite a few animals do. The language isn't understood by us. We can't even hear much of the sounds that elephants make. And bird language is very complicated. It has a rich syntactic structure in many cases, but we don't understand it. But what animals do certainly is signal to us what they want and what they don't want. And those behavioral signals are perfectly capable of guiding legal action if we only took them seriously. If you think about human beings with severe cognitive disabilities who, let's say, don't use language, we still get an idea of what they want and what would be good for them by living with them and caring about them. And sometimes we make mistakes, but then we correct their mistakes. Eva Kittay in her book Love's Labor and her other books about her daughter Sesha, who has very severe cognitive disabilities, she reports how she made mistakes about what Sesha wanted. And then later she had some other data and she corrected her mistakes. That's what we need to do with animals. But with some of the animals, we have plenty of data already from what we live with. But with others, we have to figure out who knows what they're doing. I think there are experts like Barbara Smuts with baboons, Joyce Poole with elephants. It's important to have more than one because each one is fallible. We would want to have a group, and a group that recognizes its own fallibility because of course we want to have this as a tentative and evolving list. But the idea would be to select the most important capabilities, which means not internal skills, it means a space for choice, so the most important substantive opportunities that would be part of this animal's life. And then they would write that down. And there is a thing called the elephant ethogram that reports what the most important parts of an elephant's life are. So something like that, probably with a little more normative guidance about which are the most important parts, but that would be made by people who live with elephants. August Baker: That was fascinating. So you can think of it varying, some animals would be more social than others. Some would want to roam more widely, some wouldn't. Martha Nussbaum: Yeah, exactly. So for example, to keep an orca in a marine park as the film Blackfish showed, that's a terrible ruination of that whale's life because orcas are extremely social. They have a very complicated social structure. They live with a large group in which different responsibilities are held by different members of the group. And for example, so orcas, they're the only species other than humans that we know that where the females have menopause and live a lot of their lives after menopause. Well, the postmenopausal females do a lot of teaching because orcas, like many, many other animals, don't just have a genetic program that sort of blossoms at a certain time. They have to learn socially. And so who teaches? Well, the other females are busy giving birth and being pregnant. So the postmenopausal females are the aunties who teach orca behavior. And so that's one example. So they need a quite large group. But others, for example, parrots are loners and they may even be happy being alone, but if at most they would mate with one mate and remain with that mate throughout life. So there's great variety. August Baker: It's fascinating, really. I think that a common reflex reaction to these ideas is that, you're just taking human values and putting them into animals. But this is clearly not that because you're really relying on humans that are with these animals. Martha Nussbaum: We really have learned so much. And it's just thanks to this great work that scientists have done in the last 30 years that we can even talk about how to apply this. I mean, birds were thought to be really, really stupid because they had no neocortex. August Baker: Bird brain. Martha Nussbaum: Bird brain. Yeah, exactly. Now we know that by a process called convergent evolution, they arrived at some of the same behaviors through a very different process and therefore through different anatomical structures. And we know some of them by people who actually live with them. Like Barbara Smuts spent years with nobody else but baboons around her until it was very strange to her to come back to human society. And you have to learn to behave like a baboon, because if you look at that baboon in the eye, they think it's a threat. So you have to learn that the proper way to look is to look down and so on and so on. But anyway, there are other animals that that's not possible, like quails. Dolphin's a little more possible because they swim near shore. And so we can have examples of humans who interact with dolphins in that way. But whales, the scientists that I've talked to, and I know Hal Whitehead. And he's a really great whale scientist, that's why I named one whale that I talk about in the book Hal after him. He spent six months of every year with his partner Luke Rendell on a small yacht. I mean, it's an amazing thing because it's a sailboat out in the very threatening and cold temperatures. I mean, if you see these guys, their skin is so weathered, it's really, you can see the life they're living. But in any case, they know them as well as anyone. But of course they can't go down there and sort of hang out with them. They have to maybe occasionally go down in the diving bell. But for the most part, they're just observing behavior. So people do what they can. And with birds, I think the knowledge has grown exponentially. I would particularly give credit to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is a wonderful repository of all the things we know about all the birds in the world. It's quite amazing. You just go to their website and you can hear the calls of thousands of different kinds of birds. So anyway, that's one group that's done fantastic work. But yeah, we're just learning by leaps and bounds. And there are now these people who I would call them really friends of those animals. I would love to be a friend of an elephant. I really have this deep desire to be a friend of an elephant. And I sometimes think, oh well, if they could genetically engineer for size, because they have identified the gene for size, then there could be an elephant that's the size of a dog. And I would like to adopt that elephant. But of course I never would because it would be cruel to the elephants because they wouldn't have other elephants around them. But anyway, so I also can't go and live with the elephants because you have to be a researcher and you have to know what you're doing and you have to have a project and so forth. So that's just not my life. But I really admire the people who do that. August Baker: I think one of the things that, we have a lot more information now about animals, people who've lived close to them. Sometimes you talk about the meat industry or the meat farming industry. So I once lived near a meat market and I just had to walk by it, and I was a vegetarian the entire time I lived there. It seems like, I think initially, well, meat farmers are just meeting demand and they're not making a lot of money. But I guess my understanding would be from what you say, that they're keeping information out that we, or that we are not... I don't know that most people want to see the conditions. It's kind of like I'd rather not know. Martha Nussbaum: Exactly. Exactly. But they deliberately do. They've gotten almost every state at one time or another, they've gotten them to pass laws that are called ag gag laws, meaning gagging the information of the agricultural industry. That means that you can't photograph and you can't [inaudible 00:32:48] what goes on in these facilities. So I mean, meat market of course could have humanely raised pigs and chickens. There might be such things in a meat market. But what I'm talking about right now is I don't think we should be eating pigs and chickens anyway. But I do feel that it's important to say the horrors that should be stamped out first. Because I'm an incrementalist and I think it is important to start with the worst, are in the factory farming industry, which has great power in American politics like no other country. If you look at the laws that have been passed in Europe, most of the countries in Europe have much better regulation of how pigs, chickens, and cattle need to be treated. But we can't have those laws because of the power of that industry. And it's got its claws deep into Washington politics. I know people who were up for confirmation to a post that needed Senate confirmation, they had to sit down with the American Farm Institute and persuade them that they weren't going to be a threat who weren't going to try to regulate that industry. So we've got to reckon with that. And I think luckily the public is beginning to be on guard. And there are some good books that describe these conditions now. I refer to some of them in the book. And a lot of states that had the ag gag laws have either repealed them by legislation or the laws had been over overturned by State Supreme Courts under state constitution free speech clauses. So we're making progress and that has to continue. But before long, I think the horrors will be open to view. And the fact, for example, so pigs are really intelligent animals. And they are very social, highly intelligent, and they are very clean animals too. Contrary to this stereotype, they actually do not ever defecate near where they live and so on. Now, a gestation crate is a thing into which sows who are pregnant are forced. It's a metal cage just the size of the pig's body. I think I said cow, but I mean pig, the pig's body. And the pig stands there in this metal cage, cannot lie down, cannot turn around and is forced to defecate right into a sewage lagoon that's right below that cage through some slats in the floor. Imagine that as a life. That's the whole life of that pig. And it's just so shocking and horrible. I mean, I don't think we should be killing pigs for food anyway. But I do feel that at some times in history and on certain humane farms today, pigs are treated not like things, breeding machines, but they're treated really creatures with some dignity. So I do want to make that distinction. August Baker: When I said I lived near a meat market, I don't know if that was the right term. Basically I saw these carcasses every day that hanging there, these cow carcasses. The question then would be whether people want to look at it, because it seems like if you did look at it, you would change your mind. But it's also revolting to look at. Martha Nussbaum: Well, I think disgust is not a very useful emotion ethically. And that is why I would agree with you, that if you're revolted, that doesn't inspire constructive action. It just makes you turn away and ignore the whole issue. So yeah, I don't think that's an emotion that's helpful. I think much more helpful is the kind of getting outraged by this. I don't want to say angry in the retributive sense, that is no help, but outraged in the sense of saying, this is outrageous what's going on here. Let's move forward and make sure that doesn't happen anymore. Martin Luther King Jr. distinguished between these two kinds of anger, as I do myself. And [inaudible 00:36:59] the backward looking kind that just wants to punish people is not any use, but the useful kind is getting upset going forward and saying, we got to fix this. And that would be the right way. So to get people to feel that, I think it's important first that they see the animal in its flourishing condition. August Baker: It makes a lot of sense. Martha Nussbaum: You understand what pigs are like, then the whole idea of putting that pig in that cage seems absolutely unacceptable. So I think we now have so many ways of teaching children. It's so easy. And you don't have to be rich and go on a safari. You don't even have a trip. And of course, in most cases, I wouldn't recommend a trip to a zoo because I think at least for large vertebrates, they're not well kept in zoos. They need a social community and so forth. But I do think there are films, videos, books; there's so much out there. And scientists have been very public spirited because they spend a lot of time creating picture books for the general public. I love these books and I have them all over my house with wonderful pictures of dolphin behaviors and whale behaviors and so on. But pig behaviors too. So I think children need to start early and learn these. And of course fiction can be helpful, but it has to be fiction of the pretty accurate kind, not sentimentalizing fiction. I mean, Black Beauty, which I was raised on, it did some good to wake people up to the horrible treatment of horses. But it wasn't particularly accurate. I actually prefer Tolstoy's wonderful short story called Strider about a horse. It's the most... Because Tolstoy loved animals, but horses in particular. So you can even see I'm rereading Anna Karenina for the enth time now, and Brodsky's interactions with his horse, who he called Frou-Frou. So Vrosky and Frou-Frou are much more intimate actually than Vrosky and Anna, I believe. Because Vrosky has no... There's no interest in his honor that's threatened by Frou-Frou. So anyway, and that short story about a horse could be read by anyone. And there's stories about other animals. I was raised on the Babar books. Now, I feel on the one hand that's not a good portrayal of elephant society and it's full of French colonialism that in retrospect is pretty objectionable. But it awakened me to the love of elephants and to the idea that humans and elephants could be friends. The part where Babar is an orphan elephant because his mother has been shot by a hunter and he wanders around and he wanders into a city. And then it's a woman known as the old lady who takes Babar into her home and helps him buy a green suit in a department store. And so all of this is quite artificial, but at least it contains the essential idea that elephants are badly treated when their mothers are shot by hunters and that they can be well treated by humans who care about them. August Baker: When you talk about the different kinds of anger, it seems to me that the difficult part there, even if you're really trying not to be backward looking, is that first of all, anytime someone comes up with any sort of moral standard, there will be people it seems who just don't like someone telling them what morality they should have and just will almost therefore pick the opposite side. And I think it's difficult to take something... I mean, let's say if you've been, I mean this isn't me, but suppose there's someone who's been fishing their whole life or hunting and now they're being told that there was something questionable about that, no matter how you frame the anger, it's difficult for that not to come to an impasse and... Martha Nussbaum: Well, I don't really agree. I do think there are approaches on this issue that are not pragmatically helpful for the reasons you give. I have read books that make me feel guilty. And if I feel guilty, my diet isn't perfect, et cetera, et cetera, then that's not a good approach too, because people will turn away, they'll feel hectored. But that isn't my temperament. I guess with any issue, with gender issues, which I've worked on all my career, my approach is we should find a way forward and we should find a way to live together. And that's my approach on this issue too, that we should really listen to the voices of animals and think seriously. But I think our attention can be arrested not by chastising, but by rather saying, look how beautiful and how wonderful they are. And do you really want those wonderful creatures to be tortured in this way? When, with a little more thought you could get rid of single use plastic items and help clean up what's out there and all of those things, I think everyone can contribute something. And I don't think we have to have everyone living a perfect life in my terms. We just need enough people who care, and who think, well, what can I do? And I think, for example, people can adopt a shelter animal. I'm not going to do that myself because I travel too much and I wouldn't be a good parent for that dog because I live in a small apartment and I live right on the lake shore of Chicago, which is lovely, but there's no dog park there. So I just really couldn't give the dog the exercise that it would deserve. And I see in my building, all these lovely dogs who are being walked by servants of the people, so like six dogs held by one person because the so-called owners are out of town. They've gone to Arizona. So I mean, this is not a good life for a dog, so I'm not going to do that. But I think that people who can offer the love and the care that a dog needs, or a cat, and this is just as big a decision as the decision to have a child, can do that and that can be their contribution. Or they can help teach children about this just by going teach in a school, or in a university you can teach that. And of course I do that all the time. I think I've helped move young lawyers in this direction. Actually, one of my current research assistants who's about to graduate this year, has convinced her big New York law firm to create a pro bono program for animal welfare. August Baker: There you go. Martha Nussbaum: So there are many, well, entrance points to this cause. August Baker: No, that's great. It's great because I don't know, sounding like when you think of morality or justice, it's like, oh, let's freeze up here. Let's talk about standing and this idea of how legal standing and how... Well, for example, I don't like the little mice in my house and I never really even thought about it before, but I've trapped them with these. Until I read your book, I hadn't even really thought about it. It was like this nice thing I did to get rid of the mice. Clearly, we're not talking about that then that mouse family would then be able to sue me. It's rather, how would that this work in your [inaudible 00:44:33] Martha Nussbaum: Okay, well, the first thing to say is that my principles do have a self-defense principle. So if the creature is threatening either your wellbeing or that of other creatures, you could use lethal force against that creature, but you should think of other possibilities. So I think for mice and rats, sterilization is a much better possibility. And it's being used already in big cities. I think New York has had a lot of success with that. But in any case, so that's the first thing to say. But the other thing is that if you want to... Well, so let's see. I want to back up and see where we were now with this question. What we... August Baker: Was it about the standing [inaudible 00:45:14] Martha Nussbaum: So who goes to court. August Baker: Yes. Martha Nussbaum: Now the first thing is you don't have to be a lawyer to go to court. Of course, most of us don't know law. And I myself [inaudible 00:45:25] have a law degree. So if I had to go to court, I would hire the best lawyer I could and I wouldn't do it myself. And even if I did have a law degree, I probably would hire somebody else to do it. But then there might be many people, and there are many people who can't even do that. They can't indicate their preferences to a lawyer because they have cognitive disabilities, either lifelong or because they aged a certain amount. And then they need two things. They first need a guardian, and then the guardian would hire the lawyer. And of course there are many rules and laws bristling with rules about how the guardian has to behave, what fiduciary duties of the guardian are and so forth. And this is the kind of thing that I think we really need for animals. There's absolutely no reason why, let's say a friend of mine who now has Alzheimer's disease is and is in a nursing home, why he should be able to go to court in his own name as the plaintiff of an action, even though, of course the guardian would bring the action and then the lawyer would argue the case and an animal could not do that. There's absolutely no reason. There's absolutely no constitutional reason, it's been agreed by legal experts. And the thing is, a lot of times there are laws regulating how that animal should be treated, but those laws are not enforced. So it's already come up many times, who can go to court to demand the enforcement of these laws. Well, it turns out that a human has to show, to have standing you have to show a particularized injury. Now, what human being has a particularized injury when the laws against animal cruelty are not being enforced? Well, courts have wrestled with this for decades, but what they emerged with is something pretty crazy. It's that the human being has to say, I have an aesthetic injury. My eyes [inaudible 00:47:22] because this is so ugly, what... They don't even count an ethical injury. But the injury that gets you into court, it's got to be an aesthetic injury. This is just crazy. The injury is to the animal and so it should be the animal that goes to court. Four countries in the world already allow animals to be legal plaintiffs. One is India, we've already talked about that. But there's Argentina, Ecuador, and Columbia. Now, Columbia was really interesting because Pablo Escobar brought all these other wild animals to Columbia because he liked them. And hippos bred very prolifically and they were causing a nuisance. And so the legislature said, let's go and shoot all the hippos. And they passed the law that the hippos would be shot. But a humane organization went to court, but the hippos were the plaintiffs, the legal plaintiffs because they do give animals standing in Columbia. And they won. And then so right now there's a contraception program that's been substituted for the killing program. So that is a good idea. And there's no reason legally why the US can't do this. It just seems very threatening [inaudible 00:48:33] people, and of course, particularly to the industries that make a great profit off of animal suffering. August Baker: And that was also a fascinating discussion in the book. I guess I will throw out some objections that, probably only have time for one, but that I think a lot of people would have. Which is I think a lot of people will think, I understand it's not good to dominate other humans, and I can respect that, but once we talk about our being animals and being similar to other animals, shouldn't we recognize our own... And here's this assumption, I have no idea where it comes from or whether it's founded, but that we have this inner beast in ourselves or this aggression, and it's part of our nature to want to dominate other things, other animals, that it's natural for us to do that. I would think that would be something you might hear. Martha Nussbaum: Well, yeah. You can certainly hear. But like a lot of animals, we learn, and our behavior is not purely from genetic heritage, but from social learning. And I think most of the aggression that humans engage in is from bad social learning. We know from psychological experiments that the minute a baby cries, it's gender labeled. Even if the person in the experiment doesn't know what the real gender is, they say, "He's angry. He wants to get what he wants." And so that behavior is projected onto that little baby. And as the baby grows up, they learn, that's the proper behavior for a little boy. And so that, of course, I don't think all aggression is male gendered, but a lot of it is and that is learned. Now, we also know that we can deflect whatever aggressive impulses we have into other more fruitful courses. So I mean, what are sports really, but a way of deflecting the bodily part of the aggressive urge. I don't think some of them do it very well. My previous book before this was partly about sexual assault in the sports world. And there's so much aggression that's not properly deflected in that world, but it's getting better. And I think we are learning better and I think certainly particularly in baseball and in basketball, the norms are really good right now. And the norms for proper conduct, both domestic violence and sexual assault are really evolving in a good way. So animals are like that too. They can learn. Now, how much and where and so on? Not clear for every species, but we do know that most behavior of the large mammals is learned behavior. So why should we... I mean, we know that we are irresponsible if we don't train a companion dog to behave well, if the dog is aggressive. Any pit bull has an aggressive, let's say, genetic capacity. But it doesn't have to manifest itself. As people who own... And, well, I won't say own, who are companions of pit bulls know very well they can be loving and very reliable companions if they're properly trained. So too with human beings, it's like if you just think, oh, because I'm a human, I get to beat my wife, that's not correct. August Baker: Yeah, no, I understand. That makes sense. Unfortunately, our time is up and I realize I was so nervous at the beginning that I forgot to even name the book, which is Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility by Professor Martha C Nussbaum. Professor, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Martha Nussbaum: Hey, thank you. I really enjoyed that. It was a good conversation. August Baker: Thank you. Martha Nussbaum: Thank you very much. August Baker: Bye. Martha Nussbaum: Bye.

Karin de Boer (University of Leuven, Belgium)

Kant's reform of metaphysics: The Critique of Pure Reason reconsidered

Scholarly debates on the Critique of Pure Reason have largely been shaped by epistemological questions. Challenging this prevailing trend, Kant's Reform of Metaphysics is the first book-length study to interpret Kant's Critique in view of his efforts to turn Christian Wolff's highly influential metaphysics into a science. Karin de Boer situates Kant's pivotal work in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy, traces the development of Kant's conception of critique, and offers fresh and in-depth analyses of key parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, including the Transcendental Deduction, the Schematism Chapter, the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic, and the Architectonic. The book not only brings out the coherence of Kant's project, but also reconstructs the outline of the 'system of pure reason' for which the Critique was to pave the way, but that never saw the light.

Review 'De Boer has succeeded in writing a much-needed account of Kant's critical philosophy as the salvation - not the destruction - of metaphysics, correcting the epistemological focus of over a century of Kant scholarship. Her illuminating rereading in light of the metaphysics of Wolff and Baumgarten and her scrupulous reconstruction of the system of pure reason that Kant intended but never completed makes this book essential reading for anybody interested in Kant's philosophy.' -----Paul Franks, Yale University 'De Boer shows in detail how Kant's Critical aim was to reform metaphysics as a system, not to reject it altogether. An especially valuable feature of her discussion is its focus on Kant's concern with Wolff's philosophy and the meta-metaphysical question of how metaphysics as a science of pure reason is possible at all.' -----Karl Ameriks, University of Notre Dame 'By contextualizing Kant's Critique of Pure Reason against the background of Wolffian philosophy, de Boer innovatively argues that Kant's Critique should be interpreted as a reform (rather than simply a destruction) of traditional metaphysics. In the course of her overall argument, de Boer helps further our understanding of 18th-century figures like Wolff and Baumgarten, while also casting new light on aspects of Kant's own thought. De Boer's book should appeal both to scholars of Kant's theoretical philosophy and historians of 18th-century philosophical thought more generally.' -----Reed Winegar, Fordham University Book Description This book reinterprets key parts of the Critique of Pure Reason in view of Kant's sustained engagement with Wolffian metaphysics. About the Author Karin de Boer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She is the author of Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger's Encounter with Hegel (2000) and On Hegel: The Sway of the Negative (2010), as well as of numerous articles on Kant, Hegel, classical German philosophy, and Heidegger. She also co-edited, with Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet, The Experiential Turn in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy (2020). TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Philosophy Podcast where we interview leading philosophers about their recent books. Today I'm speaking to Professor Karin de Boer about her book Kant's Reform of Metaphysics: The Critique of Pure Reason Reconsidered. And a couple of endorsements, this is from Paul Franks, Yale University. De Boer has succeeded in writing a much-needed account of Kant's critical philosophy as the salvation not the destruction of metaphysics, correcting the epistemological focus of over a century of Kant's scholarship. Her illuminating rereading in light of the metaphysics of Wolff and Baumgarten, and her scrupulous reconstruction of the system of pure reason that Kant intended but never completed, make this book essential reading for anybody interested in Kant's philosophy. And Carl Aric of University of Notre Dame. De Boer shows in detail how Kant's critical aim was to reform metaphysics as a system, not to reject it altogether, and especially valuable feature of her discussion is its focus on Conant concern with Wolf's philosophy and the metaphysical question of how metaphysics as a science and pure reason is possible at all. Yeah. Karen Dubbo is the author of Thinking in the Light of Time, Heidegger's Encounter with Hagle also on Hagle the Sway of the Negative. She also co-edited with Tinka Prenaya [inaudible 00:01:49] , the Experiential Turn in 18th century German philosophy. Professor Karen De is professor philosophy at the University of Lu van in Belgium. Welcome to Philosophy podcast. So tell me, when I read those endorsements, they talked about you're having a different interpretation and something about epistemology having been dominant before and you're emphasizing something else. Could you give us an overview of that? Speaker 2: Yes, sure. So maybe I can clarify the take on the reason that I developed, starting from a very simple example, namely the principle of causality. So the concept and the principle of causality are very often used to clarify Kant's project, but I think that has an interest in this concept and in other concepts that is maybe somewhat different from what we take it to be. So normally we would consider Kant be interested in the concept of causality because causality is seen as a principle that makes possible our empirical judgments about, for instance, colliding billiard balls. So that would be an interest in the concept of causality. That has to do with the way we acquire knowledge of things. So that could be called the epistemological approach. So as I just said, I think that Kant was interested in the concept of causality also for a different reason because he noticed that his predecessors and contemporaries also used the concept of causality to make statements about gods. Yes. For instance, by positing, by arguing that God is the cause of the universe. And for Kant, this was a very problematic statement. Yes. Because in fact, what the meta physicians were doing on his account was just combining two concepts, but there was no bearing to actual empirical cognitions. And as you probably know, yum had a similar criticism. Yes. Yum also thought that it was very problematic to speculate about God and to claim that God is the cause of the universe. And as is well known, Kant took Yum's skepticism in this regard extremely seriously, but Kant thought that we could not just get rid of metaphysics in the way Yum proposed. Because according to Kant, it was really important to conceive of causality as a pure concept. That is to say as a concept that is part and parcel of the hardware as it were of the human mind that is not just a concept such as all kind of empirical concepts that we develop through experience. So Kant wanted to preserve the concept of causality as an absolutely necessary concept because he thought that only in this way can we account, as it were for the objectivity of our empirical knowledge. So I think that if we only think about Kant's project as a project that is interested in causality in relation to empirical knowledge, we miss, as it were, the other part of the story, namely Kant's concern with the use of the concept of causality in a speculative metaphysics. In my book, I tried to shift the focus from the parts on let's say the conditions for empirical cognition to the part where Kant develops his criticism of former metaphysics. But unlike many other authors, I take this criticism of former metaphysics to as it'll motivate the project as a whole. And so I take count also in the early parts of the work, including the transcendental deduction, to be concerned with the limits within which the concept of causality can be used. I hope that this is clear. Speaker 1: And as opposed to Hume, he's not trying to get rid of metaphysics, he's trying to reform it. But it is a limitation, isn't it? Or perhaps you don't think of it that way. Speaker 2: Yes. I take reform of metaphysics to indeed consist in a limitation of metaphysics, yes? So what he opposes, what he rejects, as I already mentioned, the tendency of metaphysics to speculate about God, the soul, or the world as a whole, completely divorced from the realm of possible experience. That is something that Kant rejects, at least with regard to our theoretical cognition. But he thinks that metaphysic still has a really important task, namely to identify all a prioritized concepts as he calls them. That is to say all concepts that have their origin in the human mind per se. So he takes this to be an important task for metaphysics that needs to be preserved also within the modern context. Speaker 1: Right. And so you speak of him having an inner end in the text, which is this system of pure reason. That would be what metaphysics will look like in his mind. And you describe it, or maybe it's a translation of German, it's an inventory, it's a list of, it's limited. It's not about God or the world or the soul as such. And instead it's a inventory, I think of it. Tell me how you think of it as a list of synthetic statements. Speaker 2: Yes. That that's partly correct. So in fact, already develops a small version of this system within the critique of pure region itself, yes? Most importantly, he puts forward the famous table of categories, which is just a list or invent of 12 basic concepts that according to Kant as it were necessary, piece of positions of any cognition that we can achieve of any knowledge that we can achieve. So we find in the critique itself already a minimal system. And I think that ambition was to increase this system, and that is to say to also deal with more specific concepts that are not presuppositions of any knowledge whatsoever, but for instance, are necessary presuppositions or principles for the actual natural sciences. Instance, a concept such as force or movement should also be included in the lists. These concepts are not yet presented systematically within the context of the critique of pure reason itself. But accordance to Kant all particular sciences share, as it were, the basic conceptual framework already presented in a critique of your reason. But they also are based on a set of specific principles that is to say principles that are specific to, for instance, physics or psychology or any other discipline. Speaker 1: I think you described that there was this distinction I thought was helpful between maybe he started out in the role of judge, but along the way took on the role of architect or designer one might say. Could you explain that? I thought that was helpful. Speaker 2: Yes. I think this is indeed an important distinction because it pertains to the two separate tasks that Kant tries to carry out in a single book. Maybe this is not something that we should advise our students yet to identify two tasks and carry them out simultaneously. Because it stuff gets very complicated. So maybe it would be preferable to do the first thing first and then move on to the other task. But I think that for Kant, this was impossible. So what are these two tasks? Maybe I start with the task of the architect, and this I think is something we have already discussed, yes? Namely providing a systematic account of all the pure elements of our actual cognition. That is to say the concepts and principles that are necessarily presupposed in our actual knowledge of objects. So the accounts in his capacity as an architect is concerned with presenting the various lists of concepts in a systematic manner. And Kant thought that his predecessors in Germany had already done this to some extent, but hadn't done a proper job. Speaker 1: And they... Go ahead. Right. Speaker 2: So maybe I can first move to the other task, the task of the judge. And this is something that Kant emphasizes in the prefaces, namely the need to, as it were, step back from the work of the architect and to investigate how metaphysics can be established as a science in the first place. And in order to answer this question, the classical task of providing a systematic account of all these aporia elements must be interrupted in order to ask a more fundamental question. That is the question, what are the ultimate conditions of metaphysics itself as a discipline? So in this case, we are not interested in the conditions of physics or empirical cognition more generally, but in this case, we are interested in the conditions that make it possible to do metaphysics in the first place in an adequate manner. And I take it that Kant uses the metaphor of the judge to explain this part of the word. The second task, as it were. So the judge doesn't do anything but assesses the various claims that have been made by meta physicians, but also by the skeptics. And the judge assesses, as it were, the validity or lack of validity of the various claims that has had been made. Speaker 1: Right. And I thought one of the really interesting distinctions was what Kant is doing is restricting not individuals, but the discipline of metaphysics, in other words. Well, maybe you could elaborate on that. It's not a restriction on what people will do. It's a restriction on what the field of medic physics should do. Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. Well, I think that the term individual is maybe not sufficiently specific because individuals can be engaged in all endeavors. I think I can answer your question by looking in particular at what individual scientists do, yes? For instance, when they are engaged in physics. Now on my reading, the scientists who actually engage in empirical research, they are not limited whatsoever, yes? They can go on with the investigations indefinitely. Kant doesn't really put a limit on the activities carried out by the scientists. And maybe this is not sufficiently appreciated by scholars. That in that regard there's no reason for the scientist to be modest. Kant's philosophy is often associated with a requirement to be modest, yes? I don't think this is correct because I think that Kant is, as you just mentioned, is interested in the existing tendency of metaphysics to go beyond any bounds. And he wants to restrict metaphysics. Such that it takes upon itself a mother staff, namely systematically organizing these various aporia elements of our knowledge. Speaker 1: Right. I think that the quote I had was the restriction is imposed not on the human mind as such, but on the field of metaphysics, because isn't there the sense that humans not, instead of looking at professional philosophers, look at everyone, we're going to naturally do metaphysics in our head. And it's not my understanding of what you're saying is he's not saying there's anything wrong with that. He's saying in the field of metaphysics, it should be restricted. Is that the way you see it? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yes. That's the way I see it. And I think that Kant would also affirm that it's perfectly fine for human beings and perfectly purposeful in at least a number of cases. For instance, to believe in God. What you believe in immortality of the soul. So Kant is not against human beings who believe in God or in the immortality of the soul because his concern is the action supportive or not. If it's supports individuals in having a certain hope, or if it supports them in acting morally, then believing in god's or in immortality of the soul is perfectly fine. So again, this I think illustrates that Kant was not interested in delimiting human cognition and human activity in general. No, he investigates human cognition and human action for the purpose or for the sake of clarifying what the limits are of the traditional type of metaphysics. Speaker 1: Maybe what is getting confused for people is this idea that there is Kant saying that there is this nominal realm, but we can have no access to it. That's not to say that we can't have synthetic truths, but there is this realm out there that we're not going to be able to tap. That is the source maybe of this idea that he is all crushing. Speaker 2: Yes. That is indeed an important point and has also been an important bone of contention in the literature. Now, my way of looking at this is as follows. I think that we should first of all get rid of the expression there is that you used. Yes. You say you- Speaker 1: There is a nominal realm. Speaker 2: There is a nominal realm, and I don't think that Kant would normally use this expression. And more generally, I think it is being used way too often in philosophy. One thing I learned from Kant is that there is expression or question is relevant to philosophy, Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: Or at least to the type of philosophy that Kant's is doing. Yes. So Kant doesn't posit that there is this realm outside of us, to which we don't have any access. But he tries to clarify, as it were, from within his investigation of the human mind, how we can on the one hand engage in unifying our appearances. That is to say how we can produce empirical knowledge, on the one hand, but how on the other hand, the human mind is also able to produce ideas such as the idea of God or the idea of the soul. So he's not positing anything, he's just, as it were, clarifying how the human mind operates, how it can operate on stuff out there or stuff that we get access to through our senses. But how your mind can also operate in a different manner and produce the idea of God, the idea of the soul, the idea of freedom, et cetera. And so Kant then further reflects on this distinction just on the two directions that we can take in so far as we try to think about things. Speaker 1: No, I understand. That's very helpful. I think one of the things you observe is that the project, his lifelong pursuit was to turn metaphysics into a science or to reform metaphysics by turning it into a science. And so all those words need some help there. But what was metaphysics like at his time, supposed to now, and I wondered if you could give some concrete examples of what was wrong with metaphysics at the time. Any theories out there that he thought were really harmful or? Speaker 2: Yeah, there were several problems that he identified. I have already discussed one earlier on in this conversation, namely the tendency of meta physicians to make judgments such as God is the cause of the universe. Speaker 1: Okay. Yeah. Gotcha. Speaker 2: And in this, the judgment looks very similar to an empirical judgment such as the swan is white. Or this movement is the cause of the second movement, right? The structure of these judgments is very similar, but Kant thinks that the judgment about God is basically elusory. It's just a combination of two concepts, but in the way the concepts are being combined, no real object is being generated. So there is an emptiness to this judgments, which is not acknowledged by the meta physicians. Because they took their judgment about God, for instance, to be the pinnacle of metaphysics. So this is something that we already discussed, but there is an other problem that really bothered Kant and that he tried to solve and that is somewhat related to this one. And so the other one concerns the discipline of cosmology and cosmology was considered to be a part of metaphysics that was very different from actual physics. And that consisted in a number of speculations about the world as such. But of course, we cannot observe the world as such, or the world as a whole. We only can observe bits and pieces of the world, but many of Kant's predecessors and even contemporaries, they debated about questions concerning, for instance, Monas. Yes, of course this is an idea that they took over from lightness, but they had very heavy and animated debates about whether a Mona takes up space. So how can we know whether a Mona takes up space just cause Mona by definition cannot be perceived by the census. So these debates and controversies about Mona, for instance, were really focal, very problematic. And I guess that he was also personally irritated by these books and articles where these controversies were discussed. And he probably also got irritated by his own earlier attempts to contribute to these debates. So the critique of pure reason is in a way also a critique of Kant's own earlier position. And so he developed his ideas and emancipated himself, at least to some extent from his earlier assumptions, which were more or less the [inaudible 00:23:23] ones. Speaker 1: Right. And so is it fair to say that on the epistemological front, which maybe has been the focus, Kant was responding to Hume who was saying we couldn't really know much, but on the metaphysical, I think you also point out that the terms metaphysical and epistemological would not have been Kant's terms. But anyway, on the side that you're emphasizing, he was saying humor was wrong because he was too limiting, and the meta physicians were need to be reigned in because they are too expansive or have too much flying too high. Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Speaker 1: I think one of the things I think it's very appealing about this idea is that there is this... Okay, so in one sense he was in the critique of pure reason. He was going about doing this second order critique, but along the way you have much of this general metaphysics. But in the other sense, it was never something that he actually finished or never really wrote a second, wrote this all up, I guess you could say. And it gives you this sense of this lost manuscript or this unwritten manuscript, which is really intriguing because you want to know what it would say, but why was it not ever finished by him or anyone else? Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. That's a good question. Yeah. So in the final chapter of my book, I tried to provide an outline of consistent by dealing with the various main parts and also filling in some of the details to the extent that I could do so relying on his lectures on sections of the critique of your reason itself. Speaker 1: Letters of the people. Speaker 2: So for me, this has been important because in this way I think I could provide a different vantage point from which we can, as it were, reassess the whole project. Yes. The critical part and the aim that Kant had set himself. So that I think is the relevance of this final chapter. Not so much because we now know exactly what Kant had in mind with his future system or his future metaphysics, but because it allows us to put into perspective as it were, what he actually did in the critical pure reason. So that that's maybe one part of the answer. The other part of the question is, well why didn't Kant go on and actually sit down to write this system of pure reason or metaphysical system that he promised at various points in the text? And there I think we can only speculate yes, and just said Kant was not really in favor of speculations, but as readers and writers, we can not avoid engaging in a little bit of speculation from time to time. So as you know, Kant felt that he had to carry out a number of other tasks after the critique of pure reason. No, he went on to write two more critiques and he went on to write a number of other works as well. And as I also suggest in the book, I think that Kant in a way lost interest in this metaphysical system. And as he took almost 10 years to write the critical, so it is very possible that the aim he set himself, let's say the late 1770s, had maybe lost some of its appeal once he had finished at the time he had finished the book. And it's also possible that he realized gradually that carrying out the task of the architects in a full-fledged manner would be more complicated. Then he had suggested in the critique of pure reason, so it could be a combination of both that he felt that other tasks were more pertinent. And maybe he was also somewhat discouraged because he realized that the task of the architect was more complicated than he had thought. Speaker 1: Well, I'll speculate also, but this is just from reading your book, that it seemed like he thought maybe this was something for a student or someone an heir to do that that was not really his forte. That was my only read on it. Speaker 2: Yes. So these passages where he basically suggests that his students and followers could easily carry out the work they suggest that Kant was very optimistic about the possibility of writing up a metaphysical system. Speaker 1: Just write it up. Speaker 2: Just write it up. But as I just said, it's possible that after the publication of the critique reason, Kant gradually realized the obstacles that might be in the way of a satisfactory elaboration of the metaphysical system. Now, what I did not really discuss at length in the book is the fact that some of Kant's students took his message to heart and did try to elaborate a meta fiscal system. And after I published my book on country reform, I wrote an article on Schmid who was not exactly Kant's student but someone who very early on started teaching a concept of reason in [inaudible 00:28:59]. Speaker 1: Interesting. Speaker 2: And the book chapter is not yet published. But I thought it was really fascinating to see how someone at the time, based on Kant's own indications and some thinking to do the job, and maybe it's not very satisfactory, but at least I think it's of interest for story philosophy to see that there was something going on with regard to this idea of a philosophical system in between [inaudible 00:29:34] on the one hand, and for instance, Reinhold and Fester and Hagle on the other hand. Because the German idealists also had this ambition to develop an encompassing philosophical system, not call it metaphysics, but in fact there is a lot of continuity between the idea of a metaphysical system if you look at what Kant has to say about it. And if you look at what Fester and Hagle, et cetera have to say about it. But as said, I was really fascinated by this attempt, by this unknown figure called Schmidt to develop a metaphysical system on the basis of Kant's own indications. Speaker 1: Especially since you had just thought about how you thought it would look. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: How accurate you think, well, I mean it's just one person, but were there. Speaker 2: Well maybe someone can compare my chapter. Speaker 1: That's a good point. Speaker 2: And what I have to say about at some point in time. Speaker 1: So the emphasis by Kant was trying to make this more scientific turn, metaphysics into a science, science must have meant something or I don't, whatever the German word was it even that word meant something different at that time than now. How is this new metaphysics that he envisions, how would it be scientific as opposed what about it is scientific? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's as well a very good point. So the German term is vision shaft. I don't know if that's helpful. Speaker 1: No, I do remember that. Speaker 2: Ask the question. No, but let me try to explain a bit more about- Speaker 1: My main question is, I guess is it about the method you use to arrive at your results? Or is it about scientific means it's something that the end result is what we can call knowledge? Those are two options I can see. Because people often, when you hear science, you immediately hear the word method. And so is he saying that what's different is that he wants to use a new method? That was that's where I'm leading. Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. So I think that's a good point. Yes. And I think that indeed for Kant the method is really, really very important. And so I think that we can understand what he means by science and scientific, if we contrast his own ideas with what he took to be Wolf's project. So basically the metaphysics that emerged from Mitch Metaphysics, and that was incredibly influential during the first half of the 18th century. So seen from Kant's perspective, Wolf was not able to turn metaphysic into a science for various reasons. But one of the reasons was that according to Kant, Wolf did not proceed systematically. So for instance, in Kant's, sorry, involves general metaphysics, we find a whole list of basic concepts such as causality and substance and possibility and necessity and ground and so on. Yes, these well-known concepts now Kant was not satisfied with this metaphysics because it was just because Wolf in his view, was just listing these various concepts but not developing the account in the systematic manner. And so we can compare these two Kant's own micro system within the critique of pure that I already mentioned, namely the table of categories. 12 categories ranged under three, four headings. It looks really nice and elegant and ant also asserts that the table of category is developed from a principle. Yeah. He's not very clear on this. And as well has caused great discussions among his contemporaries and also later commentators, but at least count himself held that his table of categories was developed strictly, systematically. And he thought this was a great improvement compared to the arbitrary collection of concepts that we find involves first part of the metaphysics. And so I think that for Kant's Sentaficity is basically the same as Systematicity. Okay. That's helpful. And of course, in order to proceed systematically, you need to have a method that allows you to proceed systematically. So for Kant's, the notion of a science does not necessarily mean that there has to be a true relationship between my thoughts and the object of thoughts. So the correspondence theory of truth is I think irrelevant to Kant's notion of a science or recent shaft. And of course in the case of particular sciences such as physics, a lot more is required. According to Kant, physics is only a true science insofar as it rests on mathematics. So it has to be able to objectify contents in a scientific manner. And in the case of physics, it requires the needs to quantify the findings. And so the physics needs to rely on mathematical principles in order to be able to quantify its results. But this is a requirement, this is a requirement in my view that is specific to physics. It's not a requirement that must be met in all sciences. And so I think that Kant has a loose notion of science, which allows him maybe two things, first of all to distinguish as it were, non-scientific types of metaphysics from a properly scientific metaphysics. And it also allows him to think about the specific requirements that must be met in the specific sciences. Does that make sense? Speaker 1: No. It does, that's helpful. I think one of the things that I thought was fascinating, and you raised this point in your book is if it is a method then is critique a method that leads to scientific results it seems to have here? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: I don't know if I summarize that right from your book. Speaker 2: I find this a very interesting and important question. So at first or at first site, we can say indeed critique leads to the possibility of developing metaphysics as a science, yes? So it's a step toward the elaboration of a scientific metaphysics. And as we just discussed, Kant never really got there, but at least we can see that this was his project. But then I think the more interesting part of your question is whether the critique which is carried out in the critique pre itself, itself already scientific. Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. Speaker 2: Because if were, if the critique pre were just the heap of thoughts or arguments loosely connected together, how can it then function as a first stepping stone towards a scientific metaphysics. Speaker 1: And how can he criticize Wolf? Speaker 2: Yes. If he cannot meet the requirements of any scientific endeavor. That he establishes within the critique of, so this is I think an extremely important question. And what is very interesting is that Kant's successors, including Maiman and Ryan hold and Festar and Simone and so on, they all felt that Kant was lacking in this respect. So they felt that the critique of pure region itself did not meet its own requirements for scientificity. Speaker 1: Interesting. Speaker 2: And so they challenged Kant in this regards or rejected the critical reason in some cases, and this allowed them also to present their own philosophies as an improvement in this regard. Yes. So for instance, Ronald and Fester, they claimed that Kant was perfectly right with regard to everything he had said in the critique reason. However, he had not been able, according to them, to present his insights in a properly scientific manner. Yes, it is, to say not in a properly systematic manner. Speaker 1: Interesting. Speaker 2: Yes. Very interesting. Speaker 1: Yeah, no, fascinating. Speaker 2: However, what I am doing at the moment is working on the question, well is there maybe a certain system to Kant's own critique of reason. Speaker 1: Ah, interesting. Speaker 2: So is there maybe a certain scientific and systematicity throughout [inaudible 00:39:28] reason that was not sufficiently acknowledged by Rhino and Fester and also others. Clearly the method or the methods that they use to develop their systems is very different from Kant's, yes? And Fester is the first to recognize this, but it doesn't mean that there is no systematicity to the critic reason at all. So I think that what could be done by commentators today is to try to look at the systematicity that as it were allowed to organize the various parts of the critique. Speaker 1: Go ahead, sorry about that. Speaker 2: Yes. And I think that this, looking at as it were, the systematicity of the critique of reason itself requires that we adopt this rather loose notion of scientificity that I just mentioned. Because it's clear that otherwise you can only infer that the critique of your reason is not itself scientific. To think about a notion of scientificity that can apply both to what Kant himself does in a critical reason and can also apply to the future metaphysical system that he had in mind. Speaker 1: Right. Now it's fascinating. And then my synapses are firing and I have about 75 questions, but unfortunately we're out of time. Thank you so much. The book is Cons Reform of Metaphysics by Karen Delore, Cons Reform of Metaphysics, the Critique of Pure Reason Reconsidered. Look forward to talking to you about that next book. Thanks very much for talking with me. Speaker 2: Yes, thank you very much for this conversation. And it's true. I'd like to be re-invited in a couple of years. Speaker 1: Let's do it. Excellent. All right. Thanks very much. Bye-bye. Speaker 2: Bye. Bye.

Nancy Fraser (New School for Social Research)

Cannibal capitalism: How our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet and what we can do about it

A trenchant look at contemporary capitalism's insatiable appetite—and a rallying cry for everyone who wants to stop it from devouring our world

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital—and starve it to death. Editorial Reviews Review "Nancy Fraser is a legendary radical philosopher grounded in the best of the Marxist and feminist traditions yet whose genuine embrace and profound understanding of Black, ecological, immigrant and sexual freedom movements make her a unique figure on the contemporary scene! Cannibal Capitalism is not only a singular gem—it is an instant classic for our bleak times!" —Cornel West, author of Race Matters "A brilliant synthesis of Fraser's many pathbreaking contributions to a Marxian theory of capitalism for the twenty-first century, beautifully written." —Wolfgang Streeck, author of How Will Capitalism End? "Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. With characteristically clear and inventive prose, Nancy Fraser unpacks capitalism's historically shifting, interlaced dynamics, revealing the interrelations between seemingly disparate crises and social violences. Throughout, we see the powerful potential of an anti-racist, eco-social reproduction critique. And we see why the future of the planet and humanity depend upon the socialist left building anti-capitalist struggles that reach across workplaces, streets, forests and oceans." —Sue Ferguson, author of Women and Work "Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. With characteristically clear and inventive prose, Nancy Fraser unpacks capitalism's historically shifting, interlaced dynamics, revealing the interrelations between seemingly disparate crises and social violences. Throughout, we see the powerful potential of an anti-racist, eco-social reproduction critique. And we see why the future of the planet and humanity depend upon the socialist left building anti-capitalist struggles that reach across workplaces, streets, forests and oceans." —Sue Ferguson, author of Women and Work "Nancy Fraser has produced the most elegant theory yet of capitalism in our age—capitalism not in the narrow economic sense, but capitalism in the sense of a total omnivore, a system that cannot stop devouring everything around it, destroying the lives of people and nature. This is Marxist theory for our age of crisis—and, we shall hope, of reckoning." —Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline About the Author

Nancy Fraser is Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fortunes of Feminism and The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born, and co-author of Capitalism: A Conversation and Feminism for the 99%.

August Baker: Welcome to Philosophy Podcasts where we interview leading philosophers about their recent books. I'm August Baker. Today, I'm speaking with Professor Nancy Fraser about her new book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It. Some of the endorsements, Wolfgang Streeck says, "A brilliant synthesis of Fraser's many pathbreaking contributions to Marxian theory of capitalism for the 21st century, beautifully written." The second one, Cornel West, "Nancy Fraser is a legendary radical philosopher grounded in the best of Marxist and feminist traditions yet whose genuine embrace and profound understanding of Black, ecological, immigrant and sexual freedom movements make her unique in the contemporary scene. Cannibal Capitalism is not only a singular gem, it is an instant classic for our bleak times!" She is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. Welcome, Professor Fraser. Nancy Fraser: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. August Baker: As I see it, your starting point is that there are many different crisis points that we're facing at this time, yet there's no theory which integrates them. Nancy Fraser: That's correct. Absolutely. The Marxist theories that we've inherited focused almost exclusively on the economic crisis and the dynamics within capitalism that incline it to periodic economic crises. But in our time, it's very clear that we have a major and very urgent ecological crisis on the agenda as well as what many people would call a crisis of care or social reproduction, political crisis, crisis of democracy, racial justice, or I should say injustice crisis. There's a lot going on and I think the idea of a theory that focuses on only one dimension will not really clarify our situation and help us figure out what we can do about it. August Baker: Right. I like the way you said there were these different crisis points. I think of them as flash points, gender, race, ecology, and then for politics, you say that's kind of all of the other crisis points are overarched by the political dysfunction, you say the political dysfunctions that block our ability to envision and implement solutions. Nancy Fraser: Right. Because politics is what we look to to solve crises, to figure out how to unblock the blockage and transform whatever needs to be transformed and move on. But when the political system is itself in crisis, then we have to ask, well then where is the medium that we can use to correct the situation to resolve it? That does in a way give a political dimension, a special importance, but I would not on that account say that it is the fundamental deepest, like the old idea of the economic base of society, politics is the base. I wouldn't say that, but I do think from a practical standpoint, it creates a huge dilemma for us. August Baker: Right, and kind of a feeling of being in a dream where you want to do something but you just can't do it. Nancy Fraser: Good analogy. Absolutely. August Baker: Let's talk about that crisis of care, crisis of social reproduction. It's a resting phrase. Can you explain some more of that? Nancy Fraser: In every society has to, in addition to producing food and shelter and tools and other useful objects, every society also has to devote a certain amount of time and energy and creativity, giving birth to children, to raising them, to caring for adults, to socializing new generations, all of that stuff that is devoted not to making things, but essentially to sustaining people, and that's been called the work of social reproduction. It's about reproducing human beings and the social bonds that connect us. Now, in most societies, that social reproductive activity has been more or less integrated with the making of things. These have not been too sharply separated domains. Capitalist societies are quite unique in making them sharply separated domains. For us, work means employment and that usually, at least pre-COVID, meant leaving the house, going somewhere else, doing something and getting a paycheck while reproduction, making and sustaining and nurturing of people was supposed to happen in the household as a private matter. Even in terms of space, home versus workplace, there's a sharp separation. And then when you add historically in one case there's cash remuneration through wages or salaries and the others, not so much. It's either not paid at all or in some cases when it is, it's severely and chronically underpaid. This is a fundamental structural division of capitalist societies, every bit as structural as the one that people usually talk about, the structural division between the owners and those who have nothing to sell, but their labor power. This is also structural and the problem is that capital societies incentivize the business owners, the investors and other powerful economic actors to free ride on care work, to not pay for it if they can get away with it, or to pay as little as possible. It's like something to which they help themselves and depend on because where would they get their workers if somebody else weren't back there in the shadows, feeding and bathing and clothing and educating and raising those workers. August Baker: And caring for the elderly as well. Nancy Fraser: Exactly. All of that. Capital depends on this care work, the social reproductive activity, but also disclaims any obligation to replenish it, to repair any damage that's done to the family or communities that do it. It basically takes what it needs and it sort of in a way, assuming or it's built in a kind of assumption even when it's not made explicit that this work is just somehow there infinitely available. You can keep taking whatever you want, you don't have to worry about replenishing. This is the way we used to think about natural resources. August Baker: Sure. Nancy Fraser: Now, we learned in the environmental and ecological movements that that's false about natural resources, that we do have to worry about replenishing what we take and repairing what we damage. The same is true with care work or social reproduction. When you get a phase of capitalist development that is just using that up and doing nothing to assure that it will be there, then you get an acute care crunch. That's what I think is happening today because this form of capitalism relies very heavily on women's waged work. This system depends on women leaving the home, going into often service work, often low paid service work, but also in some cases, professional work that's well paid. It depends on that. At the same time, it's also insisting on austerity, we have big deficits, we have to cut social spending, we have to cut social programs. It's like a pincer motion, you are taking the time of those who used to devote a fair amount of their time to care work in the home, in the community. You are taking away the public programs and public supports for it. Is it any wonder that we have latchkey kids running around and elderly people being warehoused in or with for-profit nursing homes? So, yes, there is a crisis of social reproduction or care that is very acute at the moment. August Baker: Right. No, that's fascinating. That has so many different aspects to it. You think about the caregiver, a well-off family hires a nanny or a caregiver, but that caregiver is often a young woman who has kids of her own, but she's caring for some kids, not her kids. It also seems like what's really valuable, I don't know if this fits into the same framework, but what's really valuable in capitalism or what gets paid a lot is the opposite of care. It's sort of the ability to ride your employees really hard to get a lot out of them, to get a lot out of people. Narcissism is highly valued, being able to lie is highly valued, and that is to say something like care is not highly valued. Nancy Fraser: I think you're absolutely right on both points. This issue that you raised first about hiring the solution for those families who have the sufficient income to purchase care work that it's purchased from people who are often migrants or racial or ethnic or religious minorities who have very few opportunities to earn real decent wages, and as you say, who have to skimp, if not totally leave the place where they would normally be performing these functions in their own family for their own children and relatives. In fact, feminists have theorized what we call global care chains in the same way that economists have talked about- August Baker: Interesting. Nancy Fraser: ... global value chain, because in some cases, we are talking about migrants who leave their families halfway around the world to come to wealthy regions and they don't see their families and their children for many, many years. They try to FaceTime them. Sometimes their kids are pretty angry about being left and refuse to even talk to their mothers, and then you get this sort of outpouring of love. It's a diversion of care from a poor part of the world and poorer populations to wealthier and more privileged populations, which is in a way, the formula for imperialism to extract precious metals from one place and divert the wealth elsewhere. Now, we're extracting care. August Baker: Very interesting. They're literally in their new country performing the same work, caring for kids, caring for the elderly often, that they would've been where they came from. Nancy Fraser: Or adult partners and other adult relatives. Absolutely. That point is quite right and it does raise this question that you noted about what is valued in capitalism. Anything, in this case, I would completely agree with your idea that part of what's valued is the capacity to be an egotist, to be instrumental, to be almost predatory. That's rewarded in the society. Even if we might raise an eyebrow now and then, that's where the money goes, that's what's rewarded. You're absolutely right that those qualities are the inverse of what we expect in the way of care, what we expect mothers to do, what we expect grandmothers to do, and so on. We expect selflessness, we expect exquisite attention to the needs of others and all of that altruism. In a sense, I would say that that capitalism has a built-in tendency to turn the world upside down, to take the things that we should value and treat them as if they're dirt, they're worth nothing, that if they're going to be paid at all, they're going to be paid very little and the work is going to be organized in a way that is degraded so that the caregiver who performs that work be subject often to abuse, to violation, sexual assault, will have no labor rights, no capacity to complain and better the situation. The things we should be valuing, we are degrading, and the things that arguably at least we should not be valuing, we're elevating. It's very perverse. August Baker: Right. Even on a more, this happens by what you might call osmosis, that there's the typical story that the children in a family, they understand on some level that the person who's going to work and then coming back home is the powerful one, the one to be respected. The one who is staying home is the one who is lower level, who is the maid or whatever. I mean, that's just kind of picked up, that's just assumed by the... which makes the care work even harder. Nancy Fraser: I think you're right. That's a really deep and very sad observation you've just made because it means that children internalize a value system that is, as I said, perverse, but in many cases it's going to cripple them. Those among them, roughly half, are themselves going to be people who essentially assigned a heavier share than their fair share of that work. It's pretty consequential from a psychosocial point of view, pretty consequential thing. The one thing I would add though is that today, in the United States, many, many women do go out to work. They figure out the best they can, who's going to be there when their kids come home from school, what kind of after school programs there are, what kind of daycare there is that they can afford, what kinds of bartering, childcare relations they can make within the community and so on. They figure that out, and yet, when they come home, they still have all kinds of housework and domestic- August Baker: Well, that's true. Nancy Fraser: ... abilities and kids see that as well. August Baker: That's a very good point. Nancy Fraser: They see what the division of labor is like in the home even when both parents, assuming we are talking about two parent families, even when both are doing wage work outside the home. August Baker: Absolutely. I noticed many times in the book this inversion. One of the ones, I was going to talk about this later, but to talk about it right now, which I thought was fascinating. You talk about the word cannibal, you say cannibal, you talking about the history of the word, it was applied by an inverted logic to Black Africans on the receiving end of European predation are fascinating. Nancy Fraser: Right. Who's eating who, right? August Baker: Right. Nancy Fraser: And then I'm trying to turn the tables yet again- August Baker: Exactly. Nancy Fraser: ... by speaking of capitalism as a cannibal and of the capitalist class as those who, in effect, whether they intend it or not, are making a meal of the rest of us. August Baker: We've got these multiple areas of crisis. Then as I understand it, there are also multiple theories each focusing on one particular scene, but they're lacking integration perhaps, or you're trying to provide some integration and you're looking back to Marx, but you're saying Marxist theory doesn't do the job, we need to go deeper than that. As I see it, you make three moves. One is to add in this concept of expropriation in addition to exploitation. We can come back to each of these two. I think to me, what was interesting was then capitalism understand as having a broader domain, you might say, than production and exchange. Then third, this notion of cannibal capitalism and what that means. Does that seem like an overview that captures essential pieces? Nancy Fraser: Absolutely. That's a very good overview. I would say that you're right that as I see it, we've got feminists, philosophers and others working on the question of care and social reproduction. We've got eco-philosophers working on our problem of nature and climate catastrophe and so on. The point is that from my perspective, all of these crisis points, as you call them, are located in one and the same social system, and all of them arise by a certain logic, which I'm calling the cannibalizing logic. In every case, you have a system that licenses, authorizes and incentivizes the managers and owners of profit-making firms and investors to, like I said before, help themselves to care work, to public goods and political regulatory capacities that they need to help themselves to natural inputs, to energy sources, to so-called raw materials and all of that, and to the free or very cheap labor of people who have been colonized or enslaved or subjugated or dispossessed from their land and so on, and who are not really exploited so much as expropriated. These are all, let's say, forms of social wealth, that labor, that natural wealth, that caring activity, those public goods, these are all forms of social wealth that capital helps itself to, does not pay for, or to the extent that it's forced to pay, is always chiseling, paying as little as possible, trying to get out of it, right? August Baker: Tax dodges. Nancy Fraser: Tax offshoring, all of it. Therefore, over time, the result is a depletion or destabilization or really messing up these essential forms of social wealth. They're not, as I said before, infinitely self-regenerating. If you take them long enough, you will destroy them. I think that's in a sense what has happened today. We have lived through now 40 years of an unusually predatory form of capitalism, which has been called neoliberalism or financialized capitalism. That has been like a green light, permission, just go devour whatever you want. We are reaping that multiple crisis that we started out by talking about on all of those fronts because of that cannibalizing logic. Expropriation, exploitation, you mentioned to me, that's a distinction that corresponds to the global color line. It's a distinction between those who are free, they have the status of citizens, they have papers, they have labor rights, they have at least in theory, the ability to call on the state or whatever powers are around to protect them from violation. Therefore, they're in a position to insist maybe there are minimum wage laws or they have unions or whatever, they're in a position to insist that they be paid, if not profit, at least for their living costs, but that's exploitation. But capitalism also has historically depended and still depends also on labor that is expropriated, that is labor that is not fully free. This can range from chattel slaves at one stage, to colonized subjects, to dispossessed indigenous peoples, to racialized minorities under Jim Crow or mass incarceration, subprime capitalism today. These are all cases where people are not, even if they are formally citizens, they don't have rights that are actionable that they can vindicate, they can't call on state protection, or maybe they're migrants and they're deportable, may have no papers, or even if they have some papers, they don't really guarantee a secure right to stay and to claim other rights. These people are often not paid for their full living costs. They are severely under-waged. August Baker: If you could also extend that to someone who is Black, who is working in a professional job and making a lot of money, but not making as much as the other person, as a colleague, and who is kind of harassed in certain ways, having to justify himself or herself more. This would apply along gender lines too. There's that no matter where you are, you might think of that gap as a expropriation gap. I'm not sure if that- Nancy Fraser: I do. I think that historically, to the degree that racialized people have or some portion of them have been able to advance and to move into professions or other reasonably well paid jobs, you're right, there remains a sort of subtext of expropriation. I think of this as a hybrid situation where they are both exploited and expropriated. August Baker: Right. No, I agree with that. That's what I was thinking when I was reading that. Nancy Fraser: The interesting thing is that nowadays, that hybrid situation has become quite normal. It's not so exceptional because now we have lots of white or majority ethnic workers, working class people who used to be paid for their full living costs and were merely exploited. August Baker: Interesting. Nancy Fraser: But now with deindustrialization, with the crushing of many labor unions, with the rise of a low wage service work economy, displacing better paying... now those people are also being paid less than the full cost of their living. And so, they have a mix of exploitation and expropriation as well. This form of capitalism, this neoliberal capitalism is scrambling, I would say, that what used to be a sharp division between exploitation and expropriation, it's now becoming a bit more blurred, and partly because some people are doing better than they did before and also because lots of people are doing worse than they did before. August Baker: Right. It's interesting, as you broaden the concept of what the capitalist economy is, you also broaden the domain of economics as a field. Often, economists would think, racial discrimination, that's just this strange unfortunate taste that people have, but that's outside of our realm. Our realm is the market and then markets work against that. This is a broad book and there's a lot of places to backfill, I think, and that would be one in my opinion. Nancy Fraser: Yes. There are two things going on here. One is that I'm trying to expand our conception of what capitalism is. I'm suggesting that it's a mistake to think that capitalism is an economic system, one that's based on market exchange, private property in the means of production, wage labor, and so on and so forth. That's all true. That's what the capitalist economy is like, but the economy sits, let's say, in a relation of dependence on a whole range of other spheres of social activity and social life. Capitalism is not just about the economy, it's about the relation between the economy and nature. It's about the relation between production and reproduction or paid work and care work. It's about the relation between exploitation and expropriation. It's about the relation between the market and the state between commodities and public goods. Right there, we get access to a potential critical scrutiny of those relationships instead of just talking about the internal dynamics about the economy. There, you can have more or less rosy views of how well markets work, do they really clear, et cetera, et cetera. But now, we get a whole new set of questions within capitalism. What's the relation like between economy and nature and so on and so forth? This is where we get access to those forms of cannibalization and to those other crisis tendencies, those other contradictory dynamics. Then as you said, if you take that expanded view, then we should very well be looking at the racialized character of the economy itself. The labor system is racialized, it is gendered, it is crosscut by issues about citizens versus migrants and so on. You can't understand that as just supply and demand. We have a demand for this kind of person as opposed to that kind of person. August Baker: It occurs to me that in neoliberalism, I would like it actually if you could say a bit about what neoliberalism is for our listeners, but I also think that there's a sense in, as I understand it in neoliberalism, that the attitude is kind of a surface level and it's at for every single person, it's kind of, "Oh, I'm not racist." It takes neoclassical economics and says, I'm going to fit neoclassical economics, which means I'm not going to. It's almost part of the whole ethos is to deny these things that's an essential part of the way one fits in in a neoliberal economy. Does that make sense? Nancy Fraser: Yeah, that's a very interesting way to think about it. I think that has a lot of merit. To me, the most important starting point is to say that capitalism has a history and that history is well understood as a succession of different forms of capitalism punctuated by moments of crisis, by interregna, where something has stopped working very well, and then there's a rush to figure out how to reform it. In that history, we've had mercantile capitalism in the 16th through 18th centuries. We had industrial/colonial capitalism or liberal colonial capitalism in the 19th and early 20th. We had social democratic or state managed or New Deal capitalism in the interwar and postwar period, depending on which country, but war anyway from the '30s to '70s in the US, and then we got something else, this new animal, this the liberal thing. Basically, each one of these forms responds to the previous crisis. Each one is an attempt to solve a problem that was generated in the previous era. But in each case, the problem arise from that same dynamic of cannibalization one way or another. A famous example, probably the most familiar example would be the way in which New Deal capitalism tried to solve the problem of the previous era, which was this kind of crisis of social reproduction. The previous form of capitalism was making it very, very difficult for people to raise families and to have a home life and a community life. Women and children were being dragooned to work in mines and factory, and so on and so forth. Protective legislation didn't really work as a solution. It turned out that what you really needed was states to tax and invest public funds into supports for family life. We got social security, pension assistance, we got unemployment insurance, we got all sorts of ways to make it possible for families to live with all- August Baker: This insane asylums. Nancy Fraser: Right. Now, what we can see in retrospect, and this is really interesting, I think, that seemed to solve one problem, at least for a while and at least for people in the wealthy countries of Europe and North America. This didn't do much for anybody else. In fact, a lot of it was funded through the continued siphoning of wealth from what was then called the Third World. But it worked for a while for some. Now what we see in retrospect was another way in which this was all financed. It was the age of the automobile. It was the internal combustion industry. It was refined oil. It was the steel and cement industries. It's like the Dutch Boy. We put the finger in one hole in the social [inaudible 00:33:38], but the other hole opened up and that's the ecological hole. August Baker: That was fascinating. Nancy Fraser: We're constantly doing this. We're trying to solve one problem and creating another. In the neoliberal, you asked, what is neoliberal. August Baker: Yes, please. Nancy Fraser: In a way, it's the idea that what caused profit rates to drop in the '70s and caused problems for firms was too much state regulation, too much taxation, too much labor rights, the beginnings of environmental concerns with Rachel Carson, the Silent Spring, and the creation of the Superfund and the EPA in 1970. And so, you just got capital flight. Let's go someplace where they don't have unions, where they don't have these pesky environmental regulations, where we can just be as rapacious as we want and people are going to be thrilled to have us there. They need us and we'll escape all of that. Basically, it was that sort of evasion of the New Deal regulatory apparatus, including the relatively high rate of corporate taxation, which was to pay for all of this. We got a race to the bottom, then everybody's trying to get foreign direct investment and is going to give away the store. You get that. You get unions reeling and making all kinds of devil's bargains. Just keep the insurance for the current workers. You can hire new ones, that kind of situation. It's every man for himself, basically. Then you get overlaid on that financialization. You get a huge ballooning of economic sectors where people make nothing except securities, new derivatives, new kinds of investment vehicles, which is paper being traded back and forth until 2007, '08 when we get the New York meltdown of all of this in the beginning of [inaudible 00:36:00] securities. August Baker: Right. Oh yeah. Nancy Fraser: In other words, it's financialization, it's offshoring, it's evasion of regulation and of taxes. Then the last piece, well, I already mentioned, then we're going to bring women into the paid workforce in a massive way that changes the relation between production and reproduction. It changes the relation between society and nature, vastly exacerbates that aspect. It changes the relation between manufacturing and banking or other forms of finance between states and the market because states are now with each other. It's a race to the bottom. They dismantle Brett Woods, the international financial system that permitted deficit financing and capital controls. Now, you have periodic attacks from the investors on different currencies. The question of who's going to get bailed out and so on and so forth. Debt is a huge part of this. There's a lot going on here, but all of that is neoliberalism, including what you mentioned, the sort of ideological veil that we should think of everything as, in economic terms, as capital. We should all be investing in our own human capital, treat our children like capital, and just figure out how to get them into expensive nursery schools that will set them on the road to Harvard. August Baker: I guess you didn't really go into this in the book as I recall, but just as a layman, you said 40 years. Do you think that the fall of the Soviet Union was used ideologically to say, this is all by the way natural, this is all by the way the only way to do things is to be rapacious and greedy? Nancy Fraser: Absolutely. I mean, it was clear that really existing communism on the Soviet model, the Eastern European model was hollowed out on a non-viable society. It was really, who knew exactly when and how it would crumble, but it was crumbling internally already. And so, naturally, the collapse, the fall of the Berlin Wall and all of that was this moment of capitalist triumphalism. Famously, Francis Fukuyama writes the book, it's The End of History. Margaret Thatcher says, "There is no alternative." This is the sort of idea that yeah, you're right, what we have, warts and all, is the only game in town. That was a very paralyzing and to many people persuasive moment. We are still, I would say, struggling to convince ourselves and to convince others that there are alternatives. They're not going to look like socialism was historically imagined or built before. We have to invent something new. It's got to be logical, it's got to be feminist, it's got to be anti-racist, it's got to be democratic, but we're up against the wall. If anything bespeaks the urgency and severity, it is the looming climate catastrophe, which is already catastrophic evidence. We're up against it and we have to find alternatives. Capitalism cannot fix this, in my opinion. Now, maybe that's a controversial statement and not everyone will agree. I'm saying, fine, let's focus on de-fossilizing the world economy and stopping greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. If what we end up with, you want to still call capitalism, that's fine with me. I don't care about the word. I care about the problem. Maybe we don't have to exactly agree on what we're going to call it. We have to get serious about imagining and implementing alternatives that involve deep restructuring of what we have. August Baker: I think from my reading of your book, props to you, admiration and respect for going into these areas. You're adding some thoughts about what the future would look like. From my reading, it seems like you are including some sort of democracy in these plan, which is of course so difficult as we see people have this great ability to ignore things that they want to ignore. And so, I give props to you for being positive and coming up with ideas. It's very easy to cut them down. But that was one that just looms for me. But there would be a lot of work involved in what this democracy would look like. Nancy Fraser: You're absolutely right, and I'm really not in a position to give anything like a full picture of this, but I think we can already say some things about why the forms that democracy takes within capitalist societies are extremely limited and not capable, going back to the point you raised with the [inaudible 00:41:38], not capable of actually solving our problems and that we will need to reinvent democracy to solve these problems. Because first of all, I mean, many people would say that there is a problem of money in politics, citizen [inaudible 00:41:58] Supreme Court decision that removed all limits on the basis that contributing money was a form of speech, free speech, that's an obvious point. It's obvious that richer people have a much easier time making themselves heard how there are lots of obstacles to poor and people of color even getting valid access in the first place and so on. Those are the obvious problems about money and politics, but I think there are much deeper problems in addition. What I have in mind is the whole way in which we distinguish what is an issue for the market and what is an issue for the Congress. Capitalism essentially, let's say, devolves the whole question of what should be produced, how much, on what basis with what kind of energy underpinning with what materials, by whom on the basis of what sorts of labor relations, all of that is off the political agenda. That's for the market. That's for the- August Baker: For no one. Nancy Fraser: ... for the entrepreneurs to decide. August Baker: Well, that's a good point. Nancy Fraser: They decide on the basis of their profit, how they are going to survive in a world of cutthroat market competition. Democracy in a sense is already relegated to a remainder of issues that are left over, wants all of that. What all of that after all is our relation to nature, the character of our family life, all of that is somehow fall out from the way these productive decisions are made. I think we have to democratize. We'd have to not just get the money out of the politics understood as a predefined- August Baker: Understood. Nancy Fraser: ... political sphere. We have to democratize the question of what should be decided democratically and what should be left to the market. That's a kind of meta question in a way. August Baker: No, I understand. Nancy Fraser: The whole design of the society, it's become so dysfunctional that we have to have the capacity to redesign it and to call on democratic forms of deliberation and decision making in that redesign. Can't leave it to elites or authorities or wealth or market to decide. We've got to get into the act. That's a part of what I think is involved now is that whatever new form of post capitalist society we want to try to create, you can call it socialism if you like, I'm happy with that name, but not everyone will be. Whatever we call it, it's got to be democratic in the way it's going to operate in a robust way, and it's got to be designed and implemented in a democratic way. Now, that's a very tall order. How exactly we get there, I can't say. But my best guess is that we try to find some way of, let's say, bringing together the people who really care about climate, with people who really care about racism, people who really care about social reproduction and gender, with people who care about livelihood, insecurity, and democracy. The idea would be all of these issues have become acute crisis problems because all of them arise in one, in the same social system that is cannibal capitalism, and that basically, we have to stop cannibalization and the only way that we can be strong enough and a broad enough social constituency to do that is by bringing together all of those. Not everyone has to have the same priority, that climate is number one, or police murdering of Black people in the streets is number one. We don't all have to have the exact same lexical ordering of importance, but we have to all share the understanding that the root of all of this is this cannibal capitalism and that we have to transform. August Baker: You've provided a framework for understanding that, which I think is extremely valuable. It's hopeful, I must say. The easy thing is just to say, "Oh, well, nothing can happen." But I appreciate your going in and finding some optimism, finding some hope for the future. The book is Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet and What We Can Do About It. Professor Nancy Fraser, thank you so much for writing the book and for joining me today. Nancy Fraser: Well, thank you. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you about it, and I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you.

Barry A. Farber (Columbia, Teacher's College), Jessica Suzuki (private practice, NYC), and Daisy Ort (Columbia, Teacher's College)

Understanding and enhancing positive regard in psychotherapy: Carl Rogers and beyond

The therapeutic relationship, more than any particular technique or intervention, is the key to therapeutic success. Positive regard is a crucial component of that relationship.

This book reconsiders the role of positive regard in contemporary psychotherapies.

Positive regard, along with the therapist's empathy and genuineness, is one of Carl Rogers' three "necessary and sufficient" conditions for therapeutic change. However, positive regard is the least well-researched and most misunderstood of the three conditions. It has long been conceived as a potential ingredient in the formation and development of an effective therapeutic relationship, but many therapists in recent decades have considered positive regard a dubious ingredient, too oblivious to human frailty and malevolence, and too susceptible to a therapist's potential for collusion with patients' defenses and resistance to change.

Written for a variety of psychotherapists, this book offers an investigation into the efficacy of positive regard by examining its history, evolution, misperceptions, criticisms, and value. The authors argue for a broader acceptance of the role of positive regard across diverse patients and therapies.

Table of contents

• Chapter 1: What Is Positive Regard and Why is it Important?
• Chapter 2: Positive Regard and Treatment Outcome
• Chapter 3: Re-Conceptualizing Positive Regard: Let Me Count the Ways
• Chapter 4: PR-Like Concepts Outside the Person-Centered Community
• Chapter 5: Positive Regard Outside Psychotherapy: Another Rogers, Personal Relationships, and Social Media
• Chapter 6: Positive Regard: Clients' Perspectives
• Chapter 7: Positive Regard: Therapists' Perspectives
• Chapter 8: Clinical Examples of Positive Regard in Four Different Therapies
• Chapter 9: Positive Regard and Psychotherapy: Controversies, Criticisms, and Conclusions

Author bios

Barry A. Farber, PhD, is a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Farber received his PhD from Yale University.

Clinically, he has had training in behavioral, client-centered, and psychodynamically oriented psychotherapies. His research and scholarly interests are in the areas of psychotherapy process and outcome, the impact on the therapist of working in psychotherapy, the development of psychological-mindedness, and the way in which interpersonal disclosure is influenced by emerging technologies.

Dr. Farber was director of training in the clinical program at Teachers College for 21 years, from 1990 to 2011, and recently, from 2014, reassumed that position. He's currently the editor of the Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session. He's also on the Executive Committee of Division 29 (Psychotherapy) of APA.

Jessica Y. Suzuki, PhD, is a client-centered therapist trained in a relational psychodynamic approach. Dr. Suzuki received her PhD from Columbia University Teachers College.

She believes that client outcome depends on the quality of patient-therapist collaboration and on therapeutic strategies. She incorporates CBT strategies to scaffold behavioral change and draws on mindfulness and experiential approaches to strengthen self-compassion, insight, and healing.

Daisy Ort is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the clinical psychology PhD program. Her research experience with the Psychotherapy, Affirmation, & Disclosure Lab began as a masters student at Teachers College in 2013.

Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she worked within New York City's mental health and legal systems conducting research at a criminal justice nonprofit, co-leading weekly support groups at federal jails, and facilitating forensic psychological evaluations for immigration purposes. As a graduate student, she is interested in better understanding relational aspects of psychotherapy across different contexts.

Podcast blog

In philosophy, Carl Rogers is known for (1) his debates with B.F. Skinner; (2) his dialogues with Martin Buber; and (3) his independent development of phenomenology. (Only after developing his ideas did he learn that this approach--what he was doing--was in Europe called "phenomenology").

Rogers also developed what he called "positive regard," (PR) which grew out of John Dewey's work on valuation, especially Dewey's concept of "prizing."

In this podcast, I interview Barry A. Farber about his new book (co-authored with Jessica Suzuki, and Daisy Ort) which is an up-to-date and comprehensive presentation of PR, its history, theoretical underpinnings, interscholastic variations, empirical support, and practical applications. This book is primarily directed towards practitioners and theorists of psychotherapy, as the interview with Dr. Farber will show; it will be featured in our forthcoming series on psychotherapy podcasts.

For philosophers, however, the book and the interview may also be of interest, especially for philosophers interested in phenomenology, intersubjectivity, talk therapy, and valuation.

The remainder of this blog entry provides additional background for philosophers who may not be familiar with Rogers' work.

Rogers started his career with a doctorate from teacher's college and then practical work as a psychologist at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, NY. Outside of his clinical work, he started writing books and then transferred to academic work at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago.

Although appreciative of Freud's writings, Rogers attacked the doctrinaire Freudians of the American Psychoanalytic Association who dominated American postwar psychotherapy. He was a committed empiricist who developed testable versions of his theories. His primary concern was: what works in talk therapy.

Rogers acknowledged that he learned the essence of his psychotherapeutic technique from two people primarily. First: Otto Rank, once one of Freud's inner circle who came to the United States and found significant influence in schools of social work. Rogers was completely UNinterested in Rank's theoretical work (regarding, e.g., birth trauma), but he was fascinated by Rank's ideas on psychoanalytic practice.

For example, Rank de-emphasized intellectual understanding, and instead emphasized the therapeutic use of empathy. Rank wrote, "What prevents us from a correct ... therapeutic understanding is the desire to understand intellectually. Correct understanding is one of empathy, ... whereas intellectual understanding is ... a compelling of the other to our own thought, our own interpretation." Also, he wanted to "put[] the whole emphasis of the process on emotional, instead of intellectual, experience."

Rank's name is also associated with "Will" therapy. He emphasized that in the therapeutic situation, the patient in some sense "willed" the illness (gained a "substititute satisfaction" from the illness [today we, might say, a "jouissance"], one that the patient would resist relinquishing. For example, Rank wrote that, "As a result of my experience, I found ... that the illness is nursed by the patient in order to withdraw from life ... [I]t is self-willed, a sort of [personal creativity that finds] expression only in this negative, destructive way."

Finally, Rank is well-known for flipping the hierarchy in the therapy situation. "The whole [traditional, "Freudian"] psychoanalytic approach is centered around the therapist, who is doing the research and the explaining on the basis of what he knows. Real therapy has to be centered around the client, his difficulties, his needs, his activities." And, succinctly, "The therapist must not take the part of authority of any kind, but must be satisfied with the role of an ego helper (assistant ego)."

The second primary influence on Rogers' technique was the philosopher Jessie Taft. Taft wrote one of the earliest dissertations on the feminist movement; her 1913 University of Chicago thesis (advised by George Mead) was The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness.

As a woman, Taft was unable to receive an academic position. She went to work in the "mental hygiene" movement with Virginia Robinson who would become her life partner and her career partner. As life partners, Taft and Robinson adopted two children and lived in a "Boston marriage." As career partners, they founded the school of social work at the University of Pennsylvania; they also are known as the founders of a school-of-thought within social work, the "functional" school.

In official versions of the history of American talk therapy, Taft is regularly overlooked (again, presumably because the link is made from male Rogers to male Rank), but Rogers acknowledged that his personal interaction with Rank was limited, and it was truly Taft and her team who actually taught their method hands-on.

There are, of course, many gifted therapists who never wrote down their method, or published their method as a book. Taft, however, was a professor, scholar, translator, and psychoanalyst. (She translated Ranks's major works, and she chose Rank as her training analyst).

A strong case could be made that the first book in the Rogerian tradition was Taft's 1933 The Dynamics of Therapy in a Controlled Relationship. Originally, the client-centered (Rogerian) approach was called either "nondirective" or "passive" therapy (meaning that the therapist was "passive" as in not active, not the center of attention in the therapy).

Taft originally attempted to work as a psychotherapist, but she felt her attempts were failures. Thus, she went to look for a training analyst (and chose Rank). Her description of her first session with Rank is telling:

"When I finally came to my first hour with Rank, while consciously submissive, afraid, and fully aware of my ignorance of psychoanalysis, my underlying attitude was far from humble. I was, after all, a psychologist. I had some knowledge of myself and my problems. I had achieved a point of view psychologically. If there was anything in my unconscious in terms of buried memories, I would have to be shown. And so the battle was joined; but I soon found that it was a battle with myself. I was deprived of a foe.

"It took only two weeks for me to yield to a new kind of relationship, in the experiencing of which the nature of my own therapeutic failures became suddenly clear. No verbal explanation was ever needed; my first experience of taking help for a need that had been denied was enough to give a basis for the years of learning to follow."

The Rank-Taft-Rogers approach has also been called "relationship" therapy--in that the therapy provides a new kind of (disciplined) relationship, one which serves as fertile soil for the client to grow from his/her own action.

Excerpts from Taft (1933)

"Therapy as it relates to the balance of forces in the organization of personality has always been of prime importance to me, but my concept of what such therapy involves has undergone a complete revolution in the past twenty-five years. It has developed from the notion of a reform of the 'other' through superior knowledge of life and psychology, a concept closely allied to that of scientific control in the field of emotions and behavior, to my present acceptance of therapy as presented in this volume, a therapy which is purely individual, non-moral, non-scientific, non-intellectual, which can take place only when divorced from all hint of control, unless it be the therapist's control of [herself] in the therapeutic situation."

"The word 'therapy' is used instead of 'treatment' because in its derivation and in my own feeling about the word, there is not so much implication of manipulation of one person by another. To treat, according to the dictionary is to apply a process to someone or something. The word 'therapy' has no verb in English, for which I am grateful; it cannot do anything to anybody, hence can better represent a process, going on, observed perhaps, understood perhaps, assisted perhaps, but not applied.

"The Greek noun from which therapy is derived means 'a servant'. The verb means 'to wait'. … No one wants another to apply any process to the inmost self, however desirable a change in personality and behavior may seem objectively."

"Over [the client's use or non-use of the therapeutic relationship,] I have no control beyond [1] the genuineness of my understanding of the difficulty with which anyone takes or seeks help, [2] my respect for the strength of the patient, however negatively expressed, and [3] the reality of my acceptance of my function as helper not ruler."

"As I conceive it, the therapeutic function involves the most intense activity but it is an activity of attention, of identification and understanding, of adaptation to the individual's need and pattern, combined with an unflagging preservation of one's own limitation and difference.

"[Any] preconceived idea of what the interview should sooner or later bring forth, tends just as much to control and domination of the client as if [the caseworker] had tried [deliberately] to reform [the client's] habits or his morals. Very few case workers ever realize [this], because if they did they would be greatly at a loss as to what function remains for them." "One might fairly define relationship therapy as a process in which the individual finally learns to utilize the allotted hour from beginning to end without undue fear, resistance, resentment or greediness ... In so far [as] he has learned to live, to accept this fragment of time in and for itself, and strange as it may seem, if he can live this hour he has in his grasp the secret of all hours, he has conquered life and time for the moment and in principle."

"In the last analysis therapy as a qualitative affair must depend upon the personal development of the therapist and [her] ability to use consciously for the benefit of [her] client, the insight and self-discipline which [she] has achieved in [her] own struggle to accept self, life and time, as limited, and to be experience fully only at the cost of fear, pain, and loss. ... To make case work therapeutic, incidentally or deliberately, one must be a therapist and only to the extent that this is true are the relationships one sets up therapeutic … rests upon strength of will, freedom to feel, and an ability to lend oneself to the use of the other … in addition to skill. … [p. 22] to develop or accept the self which is required by her job, a self with real strength to be utilized therapeutically by the client.

"If I had followed out my own theoretical interest, I should have pursued some of the biological material introduced by John, his symbolic use of the rug in a birth struggle, his references to toilet functions and breast, his use of the tent, etc. But I am convinced that in so doing I should have lost sight of and interfered with the creative use of a present experience, which I had only to understand and respond to intuitively not to interpret or investigate in terms of my own intellectual curiosity. To pursue the symbol may be science. It is not therapy."

Podcast Transcript

August Baker: Welcome to Psychotherapy podcast. This is August Baker. Psychotherapy podcast is where we interview leading scholars about their books on psychotherapy. Today, I'm talking about the book, Understanding and Enhancing Positive Regard in Psychotherapy: Carl Rogers and Beyond. It's by Barry A. Farber, Jessica Y. Suzuki and Daisy Ort. Today, I'm privileged to speak to Barry Farber. He's a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College Columbia University. His research interests include the nature and consequences of therapist provision of positive regard, the extent to which patients, therapists, supervisors, and supervisees honestly disclosed to each other, and the ways in which individuals construct and evoke mental representations of others. Previous books include Secrets and Lies in Psychotherapy, Self-disclosure in Psychotherapy, which I highly recommend, the Psychotherapy of Carl Rogers, and Rock and Roll Wisdom. He recently completed a term as editor of the Journal of Clinical Psychology in Session and maintains a small private practice of psychotherapy. Welcome, Barry. Barry A. Farber: Thank you. August. Nice to be here. August Baker: To start off, tell us something about your two co-authors rather than have me read the blurbs. Barry A. Farber: For sure. Jessie Suzuki is a recent graduate, doctoral graduate, of our clinical psychology program in Teachers College who's now in private practice in New York. Actually, teaches for us at this point our, family therapy course. Her dissertation was about positive regard and she'd been working with me for years on issues surrounding positive regard. Daisy Ort is a current fourth year doctoral student in our program, applying for internships. Another very talented doctoral student who's also been running one of the research labs on positive regard. Both of them are wonderful additions and contributors to this book. August Baker: Great. Thank you for that. I want to start off, generally. Tell us about the book, what it covers, its intended audience, and also something about the history of the Positive Regard Lab, which I was interested in. Barry A. Farber: Some of your listeners, perhaps most of your listeners, will know Roger's posited three necessary and sufficient ingredients of psychotherapy. To be more technical, actually posited more than that, but three fundamental conditions, which was the therapist provision of empathy, positive regard, and genuineness/transparency/authenticity. The other two, meaning the empathy piece in particular and, to a certain extent, the authenticity piece had been and continues to be fairly widely researched. Especially, the empathy piece. Books, research articles, conference presentations, et cetera. For some reason, positive regard was neglected in the history of psychotherapy research. Maybe, 10 years ago or so, we decided to look at that particular variable a little more closely. Rogers considered only the ways in which the client received positive regard is what was important. That is, it wasn't, from his perspective anyway, it didn't really matter what the therapist was providing what mattered was what the patient... Well, actually he preferred the word client, the nature of what the client was receiving. Over the years we started looking at the ways in which clients most preferred, that is what kinds of positive regard they most preferred. We expanded greatly the classic measures of positive regard to include other potential aspects that clients might regard as positively regarding. We also looked at the ways in which therapists thought that they most often provided positive regard and that which they thought the most salient aspects of positive regard were. We started looking at some cultural aspects of positive regard. That work is really central to what these labs are continuing to do. Now, one of the peculiarities of that positive regard or, actually, two of them. Is the extension, which Rogers never really articulated what positive regard looked like in psychotherapy. That he thought of it as an attitude and he used multiple synonyms for positive regard, non-possessive love, acceptance, liking among others. August Baker: Prizing. Barry A. Farber: The ways in which the classic ways of actually assessing positive regard was tremendously confounded with empathy. In fact, when Rogers gave a couple of examples of positive regarding his case history it was, essentially, empathy. One of the other pieces we try to look at was to see whether positive regard could be defined and whether it was manifest in both patients and therapists views as more than empathy. What else it might consist of other than the therapist's ways of accurately hearing what the client had to say. Those are some of the activities that the lab has been doing for about 10 years. August Baker: Yeah, that's interesting that empathy was confused with positive regard. I think Kohut would say that empathy is neither positive nor negative. You can understand what drives someone and understand their perspective and then there's a question about whether you're going to use that for good or for the ill of that person. Barry A. Farber: A hundred percent. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: Of course, the other piece that researchers have tried to distinguish around empathy is the whole notion of intellectual empathy versus emotional empathy. Do you understand or what I'm saying? Or do you really feel on a more visceral level what I'm trying to convey? August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: The other piece that you and I, for your listeners, have been writing each other about is the extent to which Kohut did or didn't benefit from being at least in proximity to Rogers, even though he never quite acknowledged that. August Baker: He didn't. The Strozier biography of Kohut says that he never mentioned him in his writing and it seems that he didn't really understand what Rogers was saying. He seemed to think, from my understanding of the Strozier biography of Kohut, there were two times where Kohut mentioned Rogers peripherally. He expressed it as though Rogers were asking people to free associate, but then not add any interpretation. Barry A. Farber: I think, the last part of the sentence is true. He didn't add interpretations, very often. Although, like virtually all psychotherapists he wasn't pure in his theoretical implementation. He did occasionally interpret, he did occasionally ask leading questions. Yeah. The other thing you and I have communicated about too before this podcast is the extent to which, in particular, I feel, that relate contemporary relational dynamic therapist having given Rogers is due for emphasizing the extent to which the relationship is fundamental, foundational even for the provision of good psychotherapy. You have books about contemporary dynamic therapy, even a book called Relationality by Stephen Mitchell, one of the founders of Contemporary Relational Dynamic Therapy. He never even mentions Rogers and the book called Relationality. August Baker: I like the distinction between being reparative or being skeptical, paranoid. The paranoid way to say would be that the psychoanalytic tradition is so arrogant that they don't want... The thought of Rogers as a popularizer and we are not even going to read him, because we don't think there's anything there. The more repetitive way would be to say each of these traditions really only reads the people in their tradition. Barry A. Farber: Every tradition is so insular, it's a hundred percent sure. What's ironic, of course, is the extent to which most, especially experienced therapists, now regard themselves as integrative. It's a funny integration. It's like, "I'll utilize multiple aspects of multiple traditions, but I'm not going to read bunch about any of them." August Baker: Right. Exactly. Often my impression, a very strong emotional loyalty towards their particular school or their particular... Yeah. Barry A. Farber: Well, it's only relatively recently, in the last couple of decades, that the American Psychological Association has insisted that programs become more diversified in the theoretical orientations that they're offering. That is in the eighties, nineties, you could essentially have a doctoral program in clinical or counseling psychology and offer one theoretical position. Now, APA is more or less insisting that you offer your students multiple ways of understanding clinical phenomena. Most new students, to the point, is most new students are at least being... Understanding, getting some awareness of the ways that... Even, say, at Teacher's College, which is still primarily a psychodynamic tradition, our students are learning a great deal about cognitive behavior therapy, about IPT, interpersonal psychotherapy, and that's true multiple places across the country. August Baker: Let me read a... This is an endorsement, which I think covers nicely what the book covers. This is from Adam Horvath of Simon Frazier University. He says, "Under one cover, this book offers a rich and thorough review of the history and philosophical roots of positive regard, the related empirical research," and I'll add that includes both quantitative research and qualitative research, "and a practical guide for clinical uses. It provides both an inside, within the client centered tradition or the Rogerian tradition and broader pan theoretical perspective." I'll add there that the book goes into how other traditions have developed these concepts, whether we're talking about Winnicott or Kohut, or whether we're talking about back in cognitive behavioral or Miller in Motivational Interviewing. Even when they have... This book will cover how those traditions have developed similar concepts and how they're different. Barry A. Farber: Yes. August Baker: Then continuing with Horvath, "The authors offer a deep appreciation of the value of PR and, at the same time, also carefully delineate the limits and challenges associated with the concept." He says, "This outstanding book is a rare combination of scientific rigor and tried clinical wisdom in an accessible and engaging format. An essential item in the library of every psychologist." I thought that was very true. Barry A. Farber: Well, thank you and thank you, Adam. August Baker: Yeah. I didn't think you would want to say that, so I thought I should read that. Let's talk about it. Barry A. Farber: There should be a limit to everyone's narcissism, but thank you for offering that. August Baker: Let's talk about what is positive regard in one sense? Well, you could look up positive, you could look up regard, that's what it is, but it's really a term of art. It's more than just those two words. Barry A. Farber: One of the complications I think you're getting to, which I'm a good thing to speak about, is Roger's confusion. That's probably a little bit too leading. Rogers wasn't clear throughout his career and whether positive regard was really one attitude or two or one omnibus attitude. What do I mean by that? In the beginning, he was mostly about positive regard, which by the way was a term offered by one of his doctoral students that he adopted, it was for the most part acceptance. That is the therapist was to be nonjudgmental and accepting of virtually everything that the client had to say. That said, it wasn't just acceptance, because they also used words like support, caring, liking. There was often an added emotionally, positively laided emotional piece to it. To accept something neutrally is distinctly different then me as a therapist letting you know that not only do I accept what you say, but I care for you, I support you. I like you. Non possessively loving you. At times, including some ways assessing positive regards. Barrett-Lennard Scales originally had two positive regards scales that try to distinguish between these two. Historically, they've melded into one piece in part, because of the quirk, I think of the Bergen and Garfield Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change. Sort of the Bible of psychotherapy research. Where the success of addition talked about acceptance and affirmation as one chapter. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: There are times where the purer Rogerian's have pushed back against positive regard as including an element of affirmation. Other times, particularly non-classical person center theorists, as well as other psychotherapy researchers have suggested no positive guard needs to be seen as not just acceptance, but as having this positive valence attitude of caring for. That's the confusion in the literature. August Baker: Very interesting. You can see that you could have one of those and not the other. Barry A. Farber: A hundred percent August. August Baker: You could be very caring about someone, but really hate it when they tell you something about themselves. You can be... Actually, it's pretty easy to be accepting of someone that you don't care about. Right? Barry A. Farber: Right. August Baker: Yeah. You can see how they're different. Barry A. Farber: You're right. Now, contemporary, most not all. Contemporary theorists with who still adhere to believe themselves as person centered have more or less adopted the more omnibus definition and positive regard. Some of the research outside my lab have pushed back hard against that. "No. That's not what Rogers meant. That's not what positive regard is." Positive regard is more or less acceptance. If you add an element of evaluation you're no longer talking about positive regard and have actually pushed back against the term. It's really not positive regard they say. That's an unfortunate term that Rogers adopted from his, as I said, his student was actually Stendhal. You don't have suggested, the term has sort of lost its essential meaning, because now we're including too many attributes around it. I think not by the way, but there's always people within every tradition who are more classical, and traditional, and who don't like central terms to be adopted for contemporary reasons... August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: ...or somehow expanded in their meaning. August Baker: In one of the Rogers classic articles, and your book talks about this, he uses the word prizing. Barry A. Farber: Prizing. Yeah. I forgot that. Absolutely uses the word prizing. You're 100% right. Of course. August Baker: That's really supportive and... Barry A. Farber: 100%. That's part of this other secondary definition. If I prize you it's more than accepting you. August Baker: Yeah, that's right. Prizing, it's clearly emotional. There's also a sense in which it's something you can do. You can cultivate. It's not just, I don't know, I either like you or I don't. It's something that it has a bit of an action within it. Barry A. Farber: I think I agree with you entirely. I can make statements that suggest that I affirm, prize, support your actions. I'm proud of you. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: I've done well. I'm pleased with the work we're doing together. I think that was an appropriate behavior that you showed last week. August Baker: One really, as you said earlier, one of the things Rogers claimed was that he didn't want to impose any theory on people. Barry A. Farber: Right. Though he did. August Baker: It's like a respecting a person's autonomy. Barry A. Farber: Right. August Baker: Is that part of... Do you put that under positive regard also? Or is that sometimes considered there? Barry A. Farber: No, I do. It's one of the aspects. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: Except a person's... Rodger's predated the army, "Be all that you can be," but that was his notion. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: Yes and no, "Be all that you can be," but he also, of course, as you know, believed that if he showed you his total acceptance and believed in your ability to find your own way that you would in fact find a way toward being a virtuous person. August Baker: Right. Yeah. I think he had a view, as my understanding, which is quite common today, I think, which is that yes, people can be terrible, and vicious, and cruel, but it's usually coming from a defensive place and that actually underneath that you wouldn't find it. It's coming from a place of insecurity or defensiveness. Barry A. Farber: In that regard, he aligns himself to a great degree with psychoanalytic tradition. That the object relations people suggest that aggression is not particularly a primary drive as Freud would have it, but rather reaction to people not getting what they need. August Baker: One of the things- Barry A. Farber: Lack of interpersonal caring from others leads to aggressive stance rather than it being a primary motive in life. August Baker: Right. The idea was he's not saying I'm okay with your aggressive behavior or your aggressive thoughts. He's saying, I can accept it and then he has this idea that rather than criticizing you accepting you will get you to start to change. Barry A. Farber: Exactly. It's roughly analogous to the parental stance. To the good parents who give the message to their kids, I don't like what you're doing right now, but I'll always love you. August Baker: That's been misinterpreted a lot, of course, because people don't read Rogers and they think he's saying I like everything... Barry A. Farber: What you do. Right. You and I agree entirely on this. August Baker: Okay. Barry A. Farber: Rogers would actually be asked that a fair amount in small groups. How can you accept someone who's openly racist? For example. He would give the answer that you and I are deliberating on now, which is I don't accept the racism I accept the person and, ultimately, to the extent that the person feels accepted by me he will have not only a better view of him/herself, but of others in the world as well. August Baker: He said it about himself also. He says, I find that the first way for me to change is to accept myself the way I am. Barry A. Farber: Exactly. August Baker: Yeah. Barry A. Farber: Right. August Baker: This is a really current issue, because a lot of people who are psychotherapists would be a really heightened, have heightened, awareness of racism, for example. The question is what is your advice to someone who is treating a patient who's racist and wants, and feels it's their responsibility to respond to this, not just acquiesce to it. I can see it would be really frustrating to think, "Well, if I accept it eventually the person may come out of it themselves." It's not immediate. And it seems to be... Barry A. Farber: I think you're a hundred percent right. There's a certain irony in the extent that ultimately that working from a Rogerian person-centered perspective, the person would change his/her point of view. The irony I'm pointing to is that Rogers rarely, if ever, did long term work. Especially, the whole second half of his life. It was mostly demonstration interviews. He also remembered, and it reminded your audience, that a good deal of the last few decades of his life he spent with what we would now call social justice pieces. Working in South Africa, working in Northern Ireland trying to get warring factions to speak to each other by hearing and accepting your points of view. The notion is consistent with what you're suggesting. That once a person feels heard, once a person feels truly heard, that he or she can begin to let go of some of the anger and frustration. That ways, it's a psychoanalytic piece too. That the psychoanalyst who believe that underneath anger there is always... There's inevitably sadness in that. What's manifest is not really what we need to get to, but the sadness underneath the anger. Rogers of course doesn't hold... He never liked psychoanalytic meta psychology, but implicitly he believes something like that. That if you go beyond the surface of what a person was saying by accepting the person and letting the person consistently know that I care about you, I support you, that the person would give up the more aggressive, mean spirited pieces of both... Toward themselves, toward any self-defeating behavior, as well as toward rank or toward others. Did it work? To a certain extent. People who are at the conferences in South Africa have written reports that people began to talk to each other with more respect after working with Rogers. Did it lead to any long lasting changes? Hard to know. There's no follow... 10, 20 year follow ups on his social justice work. Not enough work, in general. Not just in person center Rogerian tradition, but this too. One of the limitations of psychotherapy research is how little follow up work we've done, whether psychotherapies affects when door 1, 5, 10 years later. What we're left with. What's the half life of psychotherapy person centered or otherwise? August Baker: It occurs to me that one area where.... Again, I don't know how much credit is given to Rogers, but this sounds also very much like a technique or an approach to couples counseling or family work. Where the therapist wants to get the people to be heard. Barry A. Farber: A hundred percent August. To be heard. In a somewhat similar fashion, there are people who suggested all of Rogers conditions really could be consolidated into one, which is the therapists need to be responsive, and respectful, and that these are all variations on the same thing. That people want to be heard. August Baker: If you can, even provisionally, bracket your own views on it, and at least understand it, and show that you do that somehow leads to something positive for Rogers. Barry A. Farber: I couldn't have said it better. August Baker: Let's talk about the empirical results, because Yalom has this quote expresses his frustration with empirical work. Not that he doesn't value empirical work, but that he finds it frustrating. He says, "In psychotherapy research the precision of the result is directly proportional to the triviality of the variables studied." Barry A. Farber: Isn't that wonderful? I didn't know that quote, but I love it. August Baker: You're picking here a variable that is very difficult to capture. Barry A. Farber: Right. August Baker: The other thing that Yalom says is look, this is the nature of the field where we can't be looking for precision. We have to live in uncertainty. Still, it would be nice to be able to say no to someone who says, "Oh, positive regard. There's no evidence that correlates with anything." Barry A. Farber: Actually, there is good evidence. August Baker: That's what I'm saying. It's nice that... Yeah. Barry A. Farber: There are. At this point, there's a hundred or so studies that taken together... I'm not going to get into the statistical piece, but you throw all the studies into a blender, and you look at outcome, and there's a moderate correlation between positive regarding and outcome. To take in a larger look, there's only positive correlations between any variable in outcome. Probably, the largest correlation is between the alliance and outcome. Even that is in the high point, maybe 0.28, something like that range.Any variable taken by itself only is accounting for a small proportion of the variance in outcome. I like Yalom's quote. Let me get to your point. August Baker: Yeah. Barry A. Farber: What Yalom is suggesting, and Yalom and Rogers actually liked each other and respected each other's work, they're suggesting that the way that outcome is measured in psychotherapy research is almost always in terms of reduction in symptoms. Saying the brief symptom inventory or multiple other variations on that. That doesn't per Rogers, per Yalom measure what they're doing. It's not about reduction in symptoms it's something far more humanistic and existential than that. It's more about how the person regards him or herself. It's the way that you accept yourself. It's the way that you accept others. It's the way that you connect with others. I think Yalom and Rogers would agree as saying the way that outcome is measured is not what I have in mind about what psychotherapy is about. August Baker: But I want to do the best I can. Barry A. Farber: Absolutely. August Baker: The other thing that a lot of people may not know about Rogers was that he was very committed to empirical research. Barry A. Farber: There are a lot of people who think Rogers is the first significant psychotherapy researcher. As you know, the first person who made his recordings available to the research community. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: The first fully published transcript. August Baker: Right. Yeah. He was just very committed to... People think of, "Oh, he's touchy feely," but he was... Barry A. Farber: No he was a theorist. August Baker: Yes. Barry A. Farber: He was very open to doing psychotherapy research. He really wanted to identify the elements that worked. He specified what he thought were the necessary and sufficient conditions, which by the way are probably not neither necessary nor sufficient, though they were significant. August Baker: He certainly framed it in a testable way. Barry A. Farber: A hundred percent, August. Couldn't agree more. He was a... Right. Which by the way is in great contrast to Freud, that I don't have the exact quote, but Freud is often cited as one person interested in doing hard research on Freudian psychoanalysis in the turn of the 20th century. Freud saying something like, I guess it couldn't hurt, but it doesn't matter what you find, because I know I'm right. August Baker: Right. Also, those concepts were not... He didn't have an eye at all on testing. Melancholy is aggression turned inward. What are you going to do with that? Barry A. Farber: Not much. August Baker: Yeah. Here's the thing. We can say there is evidence... Barry A. Farber: There is. Right. August Baker: ...that there is hopeful. The question is now, if you have a therapist who is not feeling positive regard... Barry A. Farber: What do you? August Baker: ... with their patient do they... Barry A. Farber: Fake it. August Baker: ...try to cultivate it? Do they fake it? Do they...? Roger's response would be, well, they need to accept it in themselves and that's the first step. Barry A. Farber: That's right. August Baker: But it's not... Barry A. Farber: I have a whole section on the book as that deals with this. What happens when the mandate to be positive regarding seems to conflict with the mandate to be authentic. August Baker: Yes. Right. Barry A. Farber: That's a incredibly hard issue. I think the way that you just posed it now is essentially what Rogers would say. I'm going to try to accept my sense of what you're trying to say here, but Rogers is quoted at least once as saying something on the order of "If I really didn't like the client. I would hope that I would have the courage to say as much and to be authentic in my interactions with that client." In one sense, that's virtuous. In another sense, there's something ironic about it, because like Will Rogers, he never met someone he didn't like. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: It was never tested. August Baker: It was easy. Right. Barry A. Farber: Right. You have all these clients and he has probably more than any other therapist living or dead, he has more case studies available to study than any other person, but there's essentially no evidence of him being angry or disappointed in a client. August Baker: Right. Except we do have this one case. I don't know. Did you get a chance to read the description I sent you? Barry A. Farber: Yeah. August Baker: For our listeners, there was this one case which was really affected Rogers. Barry A. Farber: Very much so. August Baker: Could you describe it in your terms? I didn't know what to make of it. Barry A. Farber: Well, yeah. Again, for your listeners, August and I had this wonderful email correspondence about this case. You're right, the paragraph before I'd forgotten that and saying... He did struggle mightily. In fact, he struggled so mightily working with this woman who he regarded a schizophrenic that following that he did two things. He went into treatment and he also took a long vacation... August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: with his [inaudible 00:30:11]. He was incredibly upset with himself for not being able to be helpful to this patient. He really didn't look forward to working with her and felt he was not a good therapist, because of that. He became quite self-deprecating. Both you, August, and I agree that he probably misdiagnosed his patient based on her presenting symptoms. Virtually everyone now would not diagnose her as schizophrenic, but rather borderline. Although very technically, we talked about borderline patients as early as Robert Knight and Manager Clinic in the 40s, people really weren't talking much about borderline patients when he was writing about his work with her in the 50s. He misdiagnosed her and now we would have a much greater understanding of why he was struggling with her. She was pushing the boundaries. She was showing up in his doorstep without having appointments. August Baker: Going to his house. Yeah. Barry A. Farber: Yeah. What I... Doorstep, literally. Not as professional room. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: His personal, yeah, exactly, home. He didn't keep the boundaries that we would now regard as fundamental in working with someone who would be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. There's a bit of a glib statement that people working in inpatient hospital units have uttered over the years, including even 40 years ago when I was an intern. 45 years ago. Something like if the hospital ward feels absolutely overwhelming and psychotic it's not because there are schizophrenic patients on the ward. It's because there are borderline patients on the unit who tend to push buttons, and push boundaries, and be provocative. This is one of those instances where Rogers, as you know, didn't like diagnoses. Really believe in diagnoses. In this case, had he understood more about diagnoses, including what patients diagnosed now with borderline personality disorder were presenting, he would probably have a better sense of what he didn't do sufficiently well. You're right, absolutely. That was an important case in which he didn't like. He didn't say he didn't like it, but he did say he didn't like himself for... August Baker: True. Barry A. Farber: ...for not being a good enough therapist for this person. He certainly implied that he didn't enjoy working with her and he almost escaped from her quote clutches. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: He stopped working with her. He did, to his credit, reassign her to someone else in his clinic, but... August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: Yeah, she certainly pushed his buttons mightily. August Baker: Right. He says, "I started to feel it was a real drain on me. Yet, I stubbornly felt that I should be able to help her..." Barry A. Farber: That's right. August Baker: "...and permitted the contact to continue long after they had ceased to be therapeutic and involved only suffering from me. I recognized that many of her insights were sounder than mine and this destroyed my confidence in myself. I got to the point where I could not separate myself from hers. I literally lost the boundaries of myself." Barry A. Farber: Terrible. August Baker: He says, "This situation's best summarized by one of her dreams in which a cat was clawing my guts out, but really did not wish to do so." Does this have anything to do with positive regard with a borderline patient? Is the positive regard to stimulating or...? Barry A. Farber: It certainly can be. There's another section of the book that speaks about, for some patients who've grown up feeling is that the only thing they deserve is hurt the positive regard feels disingenuous. They don't deserve to be positive regarded. It's a little more complicated than, actually, the sentence I just made, because, as you know, the primary defense mechanism for borderline patients is splitting. On the one hand, borderline patients want to idealize and be idealized, but on the other hand, it doesn't take much for them to turn on you. When you go from being idealized to being completely criticized and being seen as worthless. Particularly, for novice therapists to working with borderline patients often there's a vacillation between wanting to save them. I'll be the first person in a long line of people, long line of therapists, to work effectively with this person diagnosed with borderline person disorder. Versus, I can't tolerate the feelings that I have for, I'm going to use female pronoun here, for her or for myself. Or Rogers feeling totally ineffective. Yeah, I think one has to be very careful in what one offers to borderline patients. Almost from many theoretical perspective. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: Positive regard, one has to be particularly careful about, one accepts the patient. In fact, borderline patients need to feel accepted, because per almost any theoretical tradition it's the fact that they were, many anyway, were abused, traumatized, invalidated, in Marsha Linehan's terms growing up. The notion of the quick digression, Marsha Linehan's notion of validation has much in common with Roger's notion of positive regard. Yes, it's important to validate why a borderline patient would act as, I'm going to use female pronoun here, she does or would, but one has to be very careful about going over the top and being overly supportive, because then you're setting up the stage for the person always wanting that. Particularly, patients within this diagnosis are going to feel deprived if you're not sufficiently giving them that and push for more. I think your point is, and it's very well taken, I do note this in the book, we I should say, because I have authors, of course, note this in the book. Positive regard like almost any variable needs to be offered in part with a notion of who this person is diagnostically, terms of identity, understanding there are cultural differences. All of these need to be taken into consideration. One should be thinking about not just that I'm accepting, but what forms of positive regard am I offering at this time, to this person with what potential consequences. I ask people to be mindful. I think in positive regard is incredibly significant and important virtually all forms of psychotherapy. Again, it's an attitude that needs to be thought about in terms of dosage, timing, the exact type one is being offered. Now we're in the realm of what Bill Stiles calls responsiveness. One has to think about what's the best way of offering, what kind of intervention, at what point in the therapy, for this particular patient. August Baker: I see that here's a case where we separate the acceptance and the support. Right. Barry A. Farber: I think that's right. August Baker: Something about the support, that patient wanting to go into his house. Barry A. Farber: I accept the fact that you want to do this... August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: ...but I simply can't allow it. I certainly don't support your behavior in this regard. August Baker: Right. Barry A. Farber: No positive reinforcement for your doing it. I'm not seeing you. August Baker: Right. The caring, liking, it's like, "Oh my gosh. You care and like me, we should be living together." Is that another possibility. Barry A. Farber: That's certainly true of borderline patients who will continue, of course, as you know, to push boundaries. Right? I accept the fact that you want this, but my authentic self, and my need to protect myself, and protect the relationship says we need to talk about this, but we can't have this. That's a little psychodynamic rather than person centered. When I say, we need to talk about this, but I think at Roger's best except the roots of the need, but certainly not offer any support for the behavior per se. August Baker: Excellent. Well, this has been a privilege to speak to you today Barry. This is a great book, Understanding and Enhancing Positive Regard in Psychotherapy: Carl Rogers and Beyond, Barry Farber, Jessica Suzuki, and Daisy Ort, 2022, American Psychological Association. Thanks for joining me. Barry A. Farber: My pleasure, August. August Baker: Thanks very much.