Category Archives: Thinking About Philosophical Methodology

In Defense of (Some) Binary Oppositions

Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile (2000), the collection in which “The Politics of Knowledge” (1991) appears.

HumCore inaugurated the cycle’s foray into empire and its ruins with Edward W. Said’s “The Politics of Knowledge”—with good reason. Said emphasizes the role that binary oppositions play in constituting politics of power-knowledge vis-à-vis the epistemology of imperialism, including nationalism and the discourse of orientalism.[1]

Correlatively, HumCore’s examinations have highlighted structural inequities generated by binaries and concatenations thereof—including order/chaos, man/woman, civilization/barbarism, white/black, freedom/enslavement, enlightenment/self-incurred-minority, and so on—to reject and resist unjust hierarchies.

The role that binary oppositions play in generating unjust hierarchies has led some humanists to believe that we should reject and resist all binary oppositions or “binarism” generally, depending on how one defines that notion.[2] Yet, from the fact that specific binaries are iniquitous or generate unjust hierarchies, it does not follow—without further argument—that all binary oppositions are problematic. Nor does it follow that binary oppositions are inadequate to the task of characterizing personal and political realities in conceptual terms. Nor does it follow that all hierarchies generated by binary oppositions are unjust.

This blog post, qua attempt, argues that there is nothing inherently wrong with binary oppositions. Only some are detrimental, whereas others are beneficial—and, indeed, can facilitate the pursuit of justice for all, without exception. The spectra of difference, diversity, and multiplicity that many humanists value can find expression in conceptual systems grounded by clear, precise, and subtle distinctions, including binary oppositions of the this/that kind.[3] Consequently, we should reject and resist unclear, imprecise, and simplistic binary oppositions, especially those involved in iniquitous hierarchies; but we should not reject and resist all binary oppositions.

(There is a foundational and extraordinarily consequential philosophical question at issue here. It concerns whether an “analytic logic of contraries” enables us to adequately represent the complexity of personal and political realities. Some humanists think not and maintain that we should employ a “dialectical logic of narratives” to help account for the personal and political. This post does not attempt to settle this contentious issue, but raises it to underscore its significance.[4])

A binary opposition is binary, in that it is a relation involving two items. The meaning of “item” is intentionally open-ended. An item might be an object, process, name, description, etc., depending on relevant theoretical and practical interests.

A binary opposition is an opposition, moreover, in that it involves difference. The meaning of “difference,” too, is intentionally open-ended. A difference might be objectual, categorial, referential, descriptive, etc., depending on relevant theoretical and practical interests.

Binary oppositions both include and exclude, though humanists tend to accentuate the latter operation. Consider the toy model of apples and oranges. Binary oppositions such as apples/oranges include, in that one “side” of the opposition constitutes one item: the item specified by the first term, e.g., “apples.” The other “side” of an opposition constitutes another item: the item specified by the second term, e.g., “oranges.” The binary opposition apples/oranges, accordingly, purports to represent all apples, on one side, and all oranges, on the other. Thereby, we can compare apples to oranges, despite idiomatic implications of the everyday expression.

Such inclusions on each “side” of a binary opposition immediately exclude other items. The category of apples excludes oranges; the category of oranges excludes apples: one entity cannot be both an apple and an orange. The opposition apples/oranges, moreover, facilitates supplementary distinctions pertaining to color, taste, etc. Yet, apples and oranges are similar in some respects: instances of each kind are fruit, have color, are spatiotemporally located, and so on. Hence one can invoke additional binary oppositions, such as fruit/vegetable and tart/sweet, to help limn reality and the constitution thereof.

Note that, unlike the mutually exclusive opposition fruit/vegetable, tart/sweet is not mutually exclusive: some foods are both tart and sweet—a particular apple or orange, for instance. A binary opposition, therefore, does not automatically entail the total exclusion of the items that it represents. Only some binary oppositions purport to be mutually exclusive and exhaustive: spatiotemporal-entity/non-spatiotemporal-entity, for instance.

Things become more complicated and contentious when we move away from toy models and consider foci of humanistic inquiry. Even so, binary oppositions can be explanatory and personally-politically useful, if they (and their parsings) are clear, precise, and subtle. To see how (and why), let us consider a fresh example before we examine binaries already treated in the course.

Consider the phenomenological distinction between the object and meaning of your present experience. The objects of phenomenal perception as your experience unfolds here, now, are the words of this sentence; and your experience “tracks” these (!) perceptual objects as you grasp their individual and collective meanings. The words on this page are not identical to the meanings that they express. Similarly, the objects of your experience are not identical to the meanings in virtue of which your experience is significant—not only for you, but also for others.

This raises a question: Does distinguishing between the objects and meanings of experience enhance language’s explanatory power?

Having postulated an opposition between experience’s objects and meanings, the object/meaning binary enables us to explain how one and the same object can figure into experiences with different meanings. When one is sufficiently hydrated, a glass of water presents itself as an object of potential action (phenomenally speaking): one could drink, or… When one is extremely parched, in contrast, the same glass may present itself as an object of necessary action (phenomenally speaking): one must drink, or…[5]

Giving one and the same object as a gift, to take another example, can mean radically different things in different contexts: a tactful expression of generosity in some, a tactless faux pas in others. The same piece of art, moreover, can inspire or infuriate; the same lecture can illuminate or obfuscate; the same gesture can supplicate or remonstrate. In each case, the same object means (or signifies) differently, depending on contextual considerations.

“Which animals are most like each other? Rabbit and Duck,” originally appeared in Fliegende Blätter (October 23,1892)

A canonical example of this phenomenon is the duck-rabbit illusion, pictured above. While the sketched object of the duck-rabbit remains the same, experienced meaning fluctuates between <duck> and <rabbit> as attention shifts.

The objects of experience, therefore, can remain the same even as their meanings—the ways in which they present themselves—shift. This suggests that experience’s objects and meanings are formally distinct: they play structurally dissimilar, albeit complementary, roles in the constitution of experience.

(Note that the object/meaning opposition is not mutually exclusive. In humanistic inquiry, we often take up meanings as explicit objects of thought, without violating the structurally distinct roles that objects and meanings play in the constitution of experience.)

Concordantly, the following meanings present the same object: <Morning Star>, <Evening Star>, <Venus>, <second planet from the sun>. The meaning or mode of presentation of the planet Venus differs in each case. When navigating, “Evening Star” may be more informative than “Venus”; whereas, when memorizing the order of the planets, “second planet from the sun” may be more informative than alternative meanings. The fact that the phrases “Morning Star” and “Evening Star” co-refer to the same celestial body, moreover, represents an epistemic achievement. We did not always know, but discovered, that the Morning Star is the Evening Star; or, more precisely, that the phrases “Morning Star” and “Evening Star” refer to the same celestial body.

So far, the object/meaning opposition seems well-suited for enhancing the clarity, precision, and subtly of our expressive capacities.

The object/meaning binary also enables us to explain how different objects can be presented via one and the same meaning. Take the meaning, <compassion>, for example. One can manifest compassion for a multitude of “objects,” in the formal sense (which includes fellow human subjects): oneself, one’s mother, one’s father, one’s partner, one’s friend, one’s friends, one’s acquaintance, one’s acquaintances, one’s “enemy,” one’s “enemies,” one’s institutions, one’s block, one’s city, one’s county, one’s state, one’s country, one’s continent, one’s world…

All of these objects are accommodatable by the meaning, <compassion>; for that meaning can play a preeminent role in presenting whatever manifests in the flow of experience. Compassion, in other words, does not have one and only one “proper” object, but can present an astoundingly diverse range of objects. Compassion can literally be the mode of presentation—the meaning—of all objects of experience, in this sense.

These examples help illustrate the way in which the binary opposition, object/meaning, is useful for explanatorily and (potentially) personal-political purposes. The opposition does not do violence to or reduce the complexity of experience, but enables us to express it in clear, precise, and subtle terms.[6]

One might object that the object/meaning opposition is not binary, but presupposes a range of other items, such as the background, phenomenal character, act-character, and intersubjective constitution of experience.

This objection presupposes the explanatory efficacy of what it criticizes: binary oppositions between object/background, meaning/background, object/phenomenal-character, meaning/phenomenal-character, object/act-character, meaning/act-character, object/intersubjective-constitution, meaning/intersubjective-constitution, and so on. The important point is that, since our central thesis concerns the explanatory efficacy of some binary oppositions, introducing additional oppositions does not threaten, but may even strengthen, the argument for that thesis.

Unfortunately, unclear, imprecise, and simplistic binaries (and their parsings) circulate widely in contemporary culture. They are always ready-to-hand—which, fortunately, entails that their critique is always present-at-hand.

People who have not thought critically about sex and gender, for example, might use those terms interchangeably, as if the concepts were neither distinguishable, nor worth distinguishing, let alone parsing in ways that facilitate difference.[7] If one were to parse gender into two simplistic and mutually exclusive items, such as man/woman, then that parsing—though not necessarily the concept of gender itself—would be worth rejecting and resisting.[8] The binary, as parsed, dichotomizes people into only two categories, thereby doing violence to them and their complexity.[9]

But there are many ways to parse a binary opposition and the items that it involves. Some parsings not only allow for, but facilitate, difference, diversity, and multiplicity. This brings us back to the essay’s central thesis: From the fact that one, many, or even most binary oppositions are problematic, it does not follow that binaries are inherently anathema to conceptual articulations that facilitate difference and preserve radical multiplicity. Nor does it follow that binaries are inherently anathema to the pursuit of justice. Here, as elsewhere, the devil is in the detail.

Arguably, even the relatively fluid socio-cultural identities that we have encountered in HumCore, such as those exemplified by Zitkála-Šá, José Gabriel Túpac Amaru, and Martín Chambi, are adequately describable via binary oppositions, including the opposition relatively-stable/relatively-fluid—assuming relevant parsings are sufficiently nuanced and complex to preserve the multiplicities that they express. Indeed, one might deploy specific binaries to oppose (!) hierarchies that privilege certain categories and identities over others, or any category or identity over any other.

This brings us back to Said, who employs the exclusive-identity-politics/inclusive-worldliness binary to argue that identity politics is ultimately incapable of achieving what Aimé Césaire refers to as “a place for all at the Rendezvous of Victory.” For, while temporarily identifying as (say) Indian could play an instrumental role in resisting the British Empire (à la Vinayak Savarkar) or modern civilization (à la Mohandas Gandhi), Said argues that any nationalist identification ultimately participates in, and thereby strengthens, the logic of imperialism, founded as it is on fundamentally excluding, dividing, and conquering people. Thus, Said’s argument employs a clear, precise, and subtle binary opposition to reject and resist the unclear, imprecise, and simplistic binary oppositions that ground the epistemology of imperialism, including nationalism and the discourse of orientalism.

President Bush declares the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast (May 1, 2003 file photo). J. Scott Applewhite, AP Photo.

Many binary oppositions are anathema to the humanistic values of equality, equity, inclusivity, and compassion. When George W. Bush claimed that, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make; either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” the with-us/with-the-terrorists opposition that drives Bush’s “reasoning” is unclear, imprecise, and simplistic: it asserts a false dichotomy. Problems of this kind are not only logical, but also personal and political. The with-us/with-the-terrorists binary suggests that one supports either the U. S. War in Iraq or terrorism—as if this categorization were informative, exhaustive, and adequate justification for impeaching anyone who opposed the war on moral grounds.

The difference between the exclusive-identity-politics/inclusive-worldliness opposition, on the one hand, and the with-us/with-the-terrorists opposition, on the other, helps demonstrate that “the difference that makes a difference,” if I may, concerns the clarity, precision, and subtly of relevant oppositions and their parsings, not binaries themselves.

Some humanists remain attached to the belief that rejecting and resisting inequitable hierarchies requires rejecting and resisting all binary oppositions or “binarism.” Ironically, this belief is not only unjustified, but self-undermining: it destructively interferes with our ability to defend difference, diversity, and multiplicity, whether one prefers an analytic logic of contraries or a dialectical logic of narrative developments.

Binary oppositions are meaningful in virtue of their relationships to other terms. All oppositions function within “larger” logics, including discourses of power-knowledge, which help shape their significance.

Barbara J. Fields and Karen Elise Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012)

Having distinguished race from racism, for example, we can concatenate race/racism with another concept that helps explain their relation, while remaining distinct from each: racecraft. The oppositions between race/racism, race/racecraft, and racism/racecraft allow for the schematization: <racism + racecraft = race>. This conceptual schema allows us to articulate the way in which race, which might appear to be a natural-biological-physical category, is in fact a socio-political product of the discourse of racism, inextricably interwoven as it is with the machinations of racecraft.[10] Our ability to articulate this subtle point seems to presuppose there being relations of interdependence and contrariety (distinctness) between racism, racecraft, and race.

If there are possibilities for which a conceptual system fails to account, we may introduce additional or alternative oppositions, thereby adding clarity, precision, and subtly to our expressive resources. An unclear, imprecise, or simplistic opposition often calls for a more clear, precise, and subtle opposition (or set thereof).

Nuanced distinctions can facilitate more effective forms of resistance and manifest more encompassing forms of compassion. Some never recognize differences between the objects and meanings of experience; between sex and gender; between race and racism; between identity politics and worldliness; and so on. Once one does, however, it is as if reality shifts. A new world emerges, or can emerge, which fosters difference, diversity, and multiplicity as far as possible—far enough, perhaps, to create a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.[11]

Notes

[1] Edward W. Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 372-85; “Introduction,” in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 1-28.

[2] This is especially evident in scholarship influenced by dialectical logic, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to invoke a paradigmatic example, claim that, “There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to a ‘change in values,’ the youth, women, the mad, etc.” (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 216). Note, however, that Deleuze and Guattari also recognize a kind of “supple segmentarity,” whereby binaries result from multiplicities of n dimensions, as opposed to (!) “rigid segmentarity,” whereby binaries claim to be totalizing and self-sufficient (ibid., 212).

[3] More precisely, I would argue that clear, precise, and subtle binary oppositions help facilitate conceptual articulations of relative truths regarding phenomenal reality.

[4] Thanks to Ermanno Bencivenga for reminding me of this point. For a lucid explication of the distinction between analytic and dialectical logic, see Bencivenga’s Hegel’s Dialectical Logic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6-42.

[5] For details regarding relevant modalities, see David Woodruff Smith, “On Basic Modes of Being: Meta-metaphysical Reflections in Light of Whitehead, Husserl, Ingarden, Hintikka,” in Themes from Ontology, Mind and Logic, Part and Present: Essays in Honor of Peter Simons, Ed. Sandra Lapointe (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2015), 217-42.

[6] Furthermore, as simple as it might seem, the object/meaning opposition helps ensure that, when we disagree about issues concerning the personal and political, the target of our disagreement is substantive, and not merely linguistic. Substantive disagreement, after all, concerns notions themselves, not the words we use to refer to those notions.

[7] Thanks to Rodrigo Lazo for accentuating this point.

[8] Thanks to Larisa Castillo for helping me clarify this point.

[9] Consider, again, Deleuze and Guattari: “[Sexuality] is badly explained by the binary organization of the sexes, and just as badly by a bisexual organization within each sex. Sexuality brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings; these are like n sexes, an entire war machine through which love passes” (A Thousand Plateaus, 278).

[10] For details, see Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields, “How Race is Conjured”: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/karen-barbara-fields-racecraft-dolezal-racism/

[11] In addition to the aforementioned, I am grateful to Tamara Beauchamp, Sharon Block,  Christine Connell, Susan Morse, and Valentina Ricci for their candid comments and criticisms, even and especially where they disagreed.

Dan Siakel received his bachelor’s degree (with honors) and first Master’s degree from the University of Chicago, then a Master’s degree and Ph.D. from UCI, all in the discipline of philosophy. His research focuses on issues in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, early modern philosophy, the history of 20th-century philosophy, and, more recently, Shambhala Buddhism and Meditation. Dan’s pedagogical interests have found expression in his capacities as a Senior Pedagogical Fellow for UCI’s Center for Engaged instruction and more recently as a Pedagogical Fellow for the Andrew W. Mellon Teaching Institute. He has previously shared his work with the HumCore Research Blog as part of the program’s Friday Forum series.

Rousseau and the Nature of Human Freedom

Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Portrait of Jean Jacques Rousseau (replica of 1753 portrait, image dates to the last third of the 18th century). Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Portrait of Jean Jacques Rousseau (replica of 1753 portrait, image dates to the last third of the 18th century). Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Rousseau’s thought experiment on the state of nature[1] produces some interesting insights into our moral psychology and the social mediation of identity, as well as offering some provocative claims about the nature of human culture. And Rousseau’s influence on subsequent political theory has been substantial, in directions that might seem surprising, given the focus in the First and Second Discourses on the individual and the value of independence. As one of the editors of our edition points out, some accuse Rousseau of being “the author of a totalitarian political theory.”[2] This is precisely Bertrand Russell’s view, asserting that “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau.”[3] Such an assessment clearly points to the arguments presented in Rousseau’s essay On the Social Contract, published in 1762, principally the view presented there that the citizen of a polity must identify absolutely with the infallible general will of the state, and that whoever refuses to obey the general will must be “forced to be free.”[4] How does Rousseau get from his utter rejection of human society in the first two discourses to an enthusiastic, absolute affirmation of the state? The answer must lie in Rousseau’s account of the crucial transition from the state of nature to civil society.

Frontispiece to Continental European edition of Rousseau's The Social Contrast (1762)

Frontispiece to Continental European edition of Rousseau’s The Social Contrast (1762)

But on this point there is also significant ambivalence in Rousseau. Despite his insistent privileging of the state of nature as the site of natural virtue, and his characterization of human society as depravity in essence, Rousseau ultimately asserts that early life in society “must have been the happiest and most durable epoch” in human history.[5] In The Social Contract, one finds this thought even more profoundly and emphatically stated, where Rousseau argues that entrance into the civil state results in the transformation of the human being “from a stupid, limited animal into an intelligent being and a man.”[6] Although in both passages he still considers the potential for abuse and corruption to be a significant concern, the exit from the state of nature also eventuates in the development of the human faculties and the acquisition of moral liberty, “which alone makes man truly master of himself. For to be driven by appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is liberty.”[7]

Bracketing the possible inconsistencies of Rousseau’s account here, what I find most problematic about this conjectural picture of the entrance of human beings into society are the conditions on which the social compact depends. Rousseau defines human beings as distinct from other sentient beings by virtue of two essential characteristics, which are already present in the state of nature: 1) human freedom, and 2) perfectibility.[8] But just what are the features of human freedom in the state of nature, and how can a human possess a faculty of perfectibility without possessing the category of the moral? Remember that the moral conception is one of the products of the social world in Rousseau’s account, and that solitary human beings would have no sense of moral duty, just as they would lack all other categories of judgment.

Bertrand Russell in 1965. Photo from Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Bertrand Russell in 1965. Photo from Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

To put it plainly, the quality of freedom that Rousseau attributes to human beings in the state of nature does not sound like freedom worth having. More importantly, it does not seem to offer a basis for the radical reconfiguration of the world effected by entrance into this contract with other consenting human beings. Other than the impulsive aversion to suffering, which Rousseau terms the natural virtue of pity, and from which all other social virtues derive, it is hard to see just what freedom a human being is supposed to possess. Indeed, as quoted above, Rousseau ultimately suggests that true freedom is only a result of the binding together of individuals into society, but freedom is also a necessary precondition of the founding of society. What is called for is a robust account of human freedom divested of the circularity that I have tried to describe in Rousseau. True human freedom would have to be self-legitimating, self-authorizing, in order to offer sufficient ground for the developmental account that Rousseau wants to offer: the liberty that Rousseau describes as “obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself.” This is a thought that German Idealism (e.g., Fichte, Kant, Hegel) will take to be the central problem of modern philosophy—it is also this line of thinking that results for Russell[9] in the terrific destruction of the Second World War, at the hands of totalitarian empires.[10]

Notes

[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, ed. David Cress (Cambridge: Hackett, 2011), p. 40. Rousseau repeatedly admits that his speculations about natural man are pure conjecture, thus a thought experiment, and this thought-experimental framework had been used many times before him (e.g., Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu) and after him (e.g., Rawls, Nozick). More generally, thought experiments have become a conventional genre is the practice of philosophy, although there is some dispute as to just what these contrived, fantastic narratives are actually capable of establishing. For an example of resistance to this type of theorizing, see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1985).

[2] David Wooton, “Introduction” to Rousseau’s Basic Political Writings, ed. David Cress (Cambridge: Hackett, 2011), p. x.

[3] Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 685.

[4] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 167. The point is also made very emphatically in the “Discourse on Political Economy,” where he suggests that ideally citizens would be educated from birth to accept total identification with the state, “never to consider their own persons except in terms of being related to the body of the state, and […] not to perceive their own existence except as part of the state’s existence” (137).

[5] Rousseau, p. 74.

[6] Rousseau, p. 167.

[7] ibid.

[8] Rousseau, p. 53.

[9] Russell wrote his monumental, Nobel Prize-winning History of Western Philosophy in the midst of that war, with no certainty as to the outcome.

[10] Hitler’s “Third Reich” [Drittes Reich] literally means the Third Empire.

Kurt BuhananKurt Buhanan earned his PhD at UC Irvine, and has published on German literature and film, visual culture, and critical theory. He has articles on the poet Paul Celan and the contemporary filmmaker Christian Petzold forthcoming in the journals Semiotica and The German Quarterly, respectively. Unlike Bertrand Russell, he does not hold Rousseau responsible for the rise of Hitler, but he would be happy to discuss the point.

 

 

Empire and the Nation-State Before the 18th Century

“What is my nation? Who talks of my nation?”
Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 3, Scene 2

What separates an empire from a nation?

Hans Ulrich Franck, Der Geharnischte Reiter [Knight in Armor] (1603-75). Etching.

Hans Ulrich Franck, Der Geharnischte Reiter [Knight in Armor] (1603-75). Etching.

When I asked my students this question during our first seminar, they offered two very apt responses. First, they suggested, empires are relics of the past, and now we only talk seriously of nations. Second, if and when we do use the word “empire” today, they observed, it’s almost always negative: a label you attach to political or cultural entities that you consider corrupt or undesirable (e.g. when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” during the Cold War); whereas “nation” evokes positive feelings of belonging and encourages pride in your ethnic or cultural heritage.

Both observations accurately capture our contemporary attitudes and assumptions, and they reveal the great extent to which the nation-state – “an area where the cultural boundaries match up with the political boundaries” – is now regarded as the most natural and efficient form of political organization possible. But as should be apparent from our lectures in HumCore thus far, this has not always been the case. In fact, the concept of the nation-state itself did not even come into being until the 17th century, and its elevation to the preferred form of political community didn’t happen overnight but instead progressed slowly over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. So, as we transition from Professor Zissos’s lectures on the Roman Empire to Professor Steintrager’s on the European Enlightenment, it will be helpful to think about how this thing we call the nation-state came into being and how it conditioned European attitudes toward empire that would ultimately influence our own. In doing this, we will be following a scholarly method pioneered by the preeminent French philosopher Michael Foucault called genealogy, which is an attempt to discover the origins, and explain the historical evolutions, of our contemporary concepts, social behaviors, and values.

Population loss in Germany during the Thirty Years War

Population loss in Germany during the Thirty Years War

As it happens, the origin of the nation-state was a topic covered in the last cycle of Humanities Core, which centered on the theme of “War.” In that cycle, Professors Jane Newman and John Smith, both from UCI’s Department of European Languages and Studies, gave a series of lectures on the legacy of the Thirty Year’s War (1618 – 1648), a devastating conflict that ravaged central Europe (mostly in the area of present day Germany) and killed almost a third of the continent’s population before hostilities ceased. (NB: all the previous cycles of HumCore are archived on the program’s website, so you can find the materials for these lectures here if you’d like to explore the subject further.) And as Professors Newman and Smith explained, the extremity of the Thirty Year’s War arose from a number of factors.

First, it was a war based on religious identity, where Protestants and Catholics both refused to recognize each other’s right to rule their own lands and assumed a kind of divine sanction for invading the other’s territories. Though both forms of Christianity, Protestants and Catholics saw each other in antagonistic and apocalyptic terms during the 16th and 17th centuries, with each defending their own doctrines as absolute truth while attacking their opponents as sinfully corrupt, almost demonic. In the context of England, which is my area of research, this extreme religious prejudice can be seen in the title page of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), a history published under Queen Elizabeth I that chronicled Catholic persecutions of Protestants.

John Foxe

John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1563). Houghton Library Collection at Harvard University.

Starting at the bottom of the image (right), we can see how the two forms of Christian practice (Protestant on the left, Catholic on the right) are contrasted. Moving up the page, the Protestants on the left undergo holy martyrdoms celebrated by a trumpeting chorus of saints and angels. On the right, the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist is literally figured as devil worship, by its positioning beneath a cloud of jeering demons.  Christ himself sits in judgement, blessing the Protestant side with his raised hand, while condemning the Catholic with a lowered one. Within the pages of the Acts itself, Foxe, like many other Protestant propagandists of the age, equated the papacy with the biblical figure of Antichrist, claiming that the Catholic Church had falsely usurped the ancient authority of the Roman empire and had used it to unlawfully tyrannize over the whole of Christian Europe. As Foxe writes in Book 1 of the 1576 edition of the Acts:

Insomuch that they [the Popes] have translated the empire, they have deposed Emperors, Kings, Princes and rulers and Senators of Rome, and set up other, or the same again at their pleasure; they have proclaimed wars and have warred themselves. And where as Emperors in ancient time have dignified them [popes] in titles, have enlarged them with donations, and they receiving their confirmation by the Emperors, have like ungrateful clients to such benefactors, afterward stamped upon their necks, have made them to hold their stirrup, some to hold the bridle of their horse, have caused them to seek their confirmation at their hand, yea have been Emperors themselves. (29, original spelling and diction modernized)

To call this an attitude leaving little room for compromise or diplomacy would be an understatement.

Second, the Thirty Years War was fought mostly by mercenary forces in the pay of various European noblemen, rather than by the kinds of well-disciplined and publicly funded armies that characterize modern nation-state militaries. As a result, soldiers were given to unrestrained rape and pillage of the civilian population, taking food and other resources that they needed to sustain their campaigns from local farms and towns. In short, it was the kind of total, chaotic war comparable to the conflicts involving Syria and ISIS happening today.

The Treaty of Westphalia (1648)

The Treaty of Westphalia (1648)

But the lasting significance of the Thirty Year’s War, as Professors Newman and Smith argued, came from how it ended. Weary of the prolonged carnage, the various sides finally came together to negotiate the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. With 109 signatories, the treaty settled a number of key issues for international relations in Europe. First, it defined (and thus ended disputes over) a number of contested borders, producing an exact map of European national territories for the first time. Second, it upheld the principle that each country had the right to abide by whatever religious identity its ruler chose, a principle encapsulated in the Latin phrase cuius regio, eius religio (“whosever realm, his religion”). Finally, it acknowledged that each nation had sovereignty over its own domestic affairs, which should not be subject to interference by any outside power. And thus, the nation-state was born: the “nation” part coming from the common identity produced by the relatively homogenous cultures and religious affiliations contained within the borders of each country; and the “state” part coming from this inchoate principle of sovereign self-determination.

The Treaty of Westphalia also signaled the weakening of religion’s hold over the political, moral, and intellectual outlook of European society – a trend that would reach full expression in the Enlightenment a century later. Take, for example, the concept of sovereignty that Westphalia established. In some ways it is similar to Roman imperium, as both denote a kind of absolute authority to command and order society it rules over, but importantly sovereignty claims neither to be universal (i.e. it applies only within the recognized borders of an individual nation) nor divinely sanctioned. Moreover, it was during the period of the Thirty Year’s War that the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes developed his influential theory of government and politics, a theory that based political authority, which Hobbes calls sovereignty, on materialist reasoning rather than religious belief.

Abraham Bosse, Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. London (1651). Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Abraham Bosse, Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. London (1651). Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

According to Hobbes’s account, humans form governments in order to escape the “state of nature” – a condition in which there are no laws and individuals are in a constant state of war with each other for resources and dominance. In his most important work Levithan (1651), Hobbes offers the following description of what life in this state of nature would have been like:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (Book I, Chapter XIII)

Thus Hobbes argues that, In order to escape the miseries of the state of nature, individuals come together to form a “social contract,” an agreement whereby they give up their liberty to do whatever they want and place themselves under a common power (i.e. sovereign), who will keep the peace, enforce laws, and maintain order. In Leviathan’s striking title page (right), or frontispiece (which has been an endless source of scholarly interpretation itself), we can see the basic principles of Hobbes’s new philosophy rendered visually, as the sovereign’s body is allegorically composed of all the individual subjects that have legitimized his power through the social contract.

Moreover, by looking at the iconography of Hobbes’s earlier work, we can appreciate the extent to which Hobbes consciously intended for his philosophy to pry European ideas about government from the religious foundations upon which they had previously rested.

Jean Matheus, frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (Paris,1642). Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Jean Matheus, frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (Paris,1642). Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Consider, as evidence for this intention, the frontispiece to his work De Cive (“On the Citizen”) (left), which was published a few years before Leviathan and is where Hobbes’s most important concepts, like the state of nature and social contract, were first articulated. Note how the work’s title page includes a Christ in judgement at the very top, similar to the religious iconography that animated Foxe’s title page we saw earlier. But here a horizontal division is created in addition to the vertical one, whereby the lower half of the image offers Hobbes’s conceptual replacements for the apocalyptic dualism above. On the left, the figure of Imperium – representing government, order, and civilization – stands with sword and scales before a background of cultivated fields and industrious production. On the right, Libertas, figured as a Native American with bow and spear, represents the state of nature, before a background depicting scenes of war and competition. Thus, Hobbes visually replaces the theological categories of salvation (i.e. an eternal reward for correct religious belief and practice) and damnation (i.e. the eternal punishment for failing to believe and practice correctly) with the secular categories of civil society and the state of nature, and what he’s essentially saying to his European readers is that state authority, and each individual’s loyalty to it, should be determined by its observable ability to prevent worldly disorder, rather than its uncertain relationship to religious truth.

So, now that we’ve sketched a brief genealogy of the nation-state, how might we use it to enrich our understanding of the material that we will be encountering during Professor Steintrager’s series of lectures?

One way is to ask ourselves how the legacy of Westphalia and the Hobbesian emphasis on natural origins were taken up and re-interpreted by our assigned Enlightenment writers. For example, consider Kant’s definition of enlightenment as “the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority,” which is in many respects a translation Westphalian sovereignty to the level of the individual. Rousseau, on the other hand, offers a mixed set of attitudes toward the legacy of 17th century thought. He would himself take up the question of social contract, but unlike Hobbes, who considered human life in the state of nature to be wretched, Rousseau elevates nature to such an extent that he perceives greater virtue in those untouched by civilization.

Second, as we move into the topic of the British empire, it’s important to remember that it was an empire that developed after the invention of the nation-state, meaning that its organization, administration, and ideology should offer interesting distinctions from the kind of empire practiced by the Romans. What does it mean to have an empire with a nation-state at its center? Does the nation-state produce an empire that is more colonial in nature than the empires that existed before the nation-state? How did the sovereignty of the British monarchy operate differently within the borders of the United Kingdom than it did in the greater territories of the empire?

Or perhaps, even after producing our historical genealogy of the nation-state, might we still consider that nation and empire may not be that different after all?

Works Cited

Kant, Immanuel. “What is Enlightenment?” Political Writings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 56-60. Print.

Robin StewartRobin S. Stewart received his Ph.D. in English from UC Irvine in 2013, specializing in early modern British literature and Shakespeare. In its various forms, his research focuses on how pre-modern and early modern texts can offer productive opportunities for rethinking the origins of, as well as supplying alternatives to, our contemporary cultural assumptions and values. His most recent publications are “Last Judgment to Leviathan: The Semiotics of Collective Temporality in Early Modern England” in Temporality, Genre, and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare: Forms of Time, Ed. Lauren Shohet (Arden Shakespeare, Forthcoming 2017) and “Early Modern Drama & Emerging Markets,” in Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics, Ed. Michelle Chihara & Matthew Seybold (Routledge, Forthcoming 2018). In addition to teaching in the Humanities Core Program since 2014, he teaches upper-division courses on Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, as well as writing courses in UCI’s Program for Academic English/ESL. He spent this past summer giving a talk on Chinese adaptations of Shakespeare in Hong Kong, seeing a lot of local theater, and preparing for the birth of his first child, due this December.

What is Enlightenment?

Last Friday, Humanities Core hosted the first Friday Forum of our new cycle: a presentation and conversation entitled “What is Enlightenment?” by two of our resident philosophers and seminar leaders, Valentina Ricci and Daniel Siakel. As many students in the Tuesday/Thursday seminars were unable to attend the event and the discussion time was limited, Dr. Siakel has graciously provided a quick redux of the event and posed some questions in hopes of continuing the conversation here in the comment section. The Powerpoint slides for the presentation are available here.

The Friday Forum concerning Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” consists of three phases, each of which means to model one mode of philosophical methodology:

(1) understanding another person’s position;
(2) critiquing that position; and
(3) dialoguing about questions that arise in relation to the position or relevant critiques.

The audiences’ questions and comments raise crucial clarifications and complications.

One of these is that, while philosophers aim to understand, this is consistent with there being circumstances in which acting, rather than inquiring, is paramount—in response to racist or sexist discourses, for example.

Another is that, when charitably interpreted, one can employ Kant’s conception of enlightenment to critique Kant (the man) himself and thereby underscore the explanatory power of Kant’s conception, despite Kant’s racism and sexism. If becoming enlightened involves liberating oneself from superstition and prejudice, then Kant himself was not enlightened, according the standards of the position he introduces; for his articulations are rife with extreme prejudice against women and persons of color.

Let’s continue the conversation.

  • What questions arose as you read through Kant’s text and watched my and Valentina’s lecture? Do you find’s Kant’s conception of enlightenment compelling? Does an alternative view seem preferable? Why or why not?
  • Do you see traces of Kant’s conception in contemporary discourse(s)? Is ours an enlightened age, an age of enlightenment, or neither? Why?
  • What strikes you as being distinctive about Kant’s writing? What strikes you as being distinctive about philosophical methodology? What is your sense of how the disciplinary approach of philosophy compares with others?

We welcome all questions, comments, and criticisms that may arise.

s200_valentina-ricci

Valentina Ricci received a M.A. and a PhD from the University of Padua (Italy), where she focused on German idealism and specifically on the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. She published articles on Hegel’s psychology and on the Phenomenology of Spirit, and co-edited a volume on the notion of recollection in Hegel’s philosophy. After moving to UC Irvine for her second Ph.D., she started working on social and political philosophy as well, and wrote her second dissertation on the ontology and ethics of violence. Valentina has strong interests in feminist philosophy and critical race theory, hence her emphasis on the themes of gender and race in this lecture.

Dan SiakelDan Siakel received his bachelor’s degree (with honors) and first Master’s degree from the University of Chicago, then a Master’s degree and Ph.D. from UCI, all in the discipline of philosophy. His research focuses on issues in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, early modern philosophy, the history of 20th-century philosophy, and, more recently, Shambhala Buddhism and Meditation. Dan’s pedagogical interests have found expression in his capacities as a Senior Pedagogical Fellow for UCI’s Center for Engaged instruction and more recently as a Pedagogical Fellow for the Andrew W. Mellon Teaching Institute.