Posts Tagged ‘ethics’
“Not in utter loneliness to live / Myself at last did to the Devil give!”*…
With an excerpt from his new book, Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, Ed Simon on “the most important story ever told”– the story of Humanity’s transactional relationship with evil…
The legend of the Devil’s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told. It concerns a humanity strung between Heaven and Hell, the saintly and the satanic; how a man could trade his soul for powers omnipotent, signing a covenant with the Devil so that he could briefly live as a god before being pulled down to Hell. Frequently associated with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, that Elizabethan play wasn’t the origin of that myth, but his is certainly a sterling example of that eternal script. Yet long before that Renaissance play and long afterwards, we can find the inky traces of Faust’s damned signature in a multitude of works both high and low, canonical and popular. More disturbing than that is the way that the Devil’s hoof-prints can be found across the wide swatch of history, in our willingness to embrace power and engage in exploitation, to summon self-interestedness and to conjure cruelty…
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… Tamburlaine the Great’s iconoclasm and The Jew of Malta’s irreverence aside, no work of sacred heresy in Marlowe’s oeuvre is as profound as Doctor Faustus. His quisling scholar selling his birthright for the pottage of trickery and illusion may be modernity’s operative metaphor, but Marlowe was hardly the originator of the myth. As you’ll read in the chapters ahead, Marlowe adapted the historical Johann Faust from German folkloric tradition, though the myth of a contract with Satan existed centuries before that unfortunate alchemist first crossed potassium nitrate with sulfur. Nor of course was Marlowe’s rendition the final word, as thousands of permutations of the basic story have been produced over the half-millennium, from Goethe to the musical Damn Yankees, Thomas Mann to the Dixie-fried pablum of the execrable Charlie Daniels Band number “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” High culture like Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8; pop culture from the comic book Ghost Rider to the Jack Black flick Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny.
“The figure of Faust is—after Christ, Mary, and the Devil—the single most popular character in the history of Western Christian culture,” writes Jeffrey Burton Russell in his classic Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World. And of those characters, Faust is the most fully human to us, in his arrogance and his failure, his negotiations and his capitulations, in the whole litany of abuse which the cankered soul is capable of inflicting upon itself. Russell’s contention is far from hyperbole, and amending the word “character” to “narrative,” I’d say that there are few archetypal scripts in our culture as essential as the legend of a man selling his soul to the Devil. Thousands of works of literature and film, music and art, grapple with the bargain whereby somebody trades what’s most human for power or wealth, influence or knowledge. Only the myth of Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden competes with Faust in terms of influence, and that story is arguably an early variation on the Devil’s contract…
… though it is ostensibly a history, and this narrative moves onward rather chronologically, I prefer to think of the story it tells as being about a character who is outside of time, who lives parallel to past, present, and future. An eternal story. Because what this book is concerned with are the implications— culturally, politically, theologically—of these highly symbolically charged narratives concerning the abjuration of a soul, of the ceding of what’s intrinsic to us, of the capitulations and negotiations which make up any failed life, which is to say every life. More than a history, then, Devil’s Contract is an account of what it means to be human in all of our failings.
Increasingly an account of humanity right now. For all the legend’s archaicism, the muttered Latin and the alchemical conjuration, Faust’s story has always been estimably modern, perhaps the first modern story. Unlike Adam and Eve, with their inscrutable Bronze Age story composed in an idiom so ancient and foreign that centuries of theologians have disagreed on what the implications of each facet of the tale might mean, the details in the Faust legend are inescapably of our time. This is, after all, the story of a contract. The dénouement of most versions of the Faust story involves the signing of a legally binding document, an experience foreign to the authors of Genesis but replete in our own lives, whether interacting with human resources or clicking on an agreement with our phone company. Faust’s tale may deal in the numinous and the transcendent, but it’s also about bureaucracy and paperwork, our contemporary hell and its sacrament, respectively. We recognize Faust in a manner that no character in the Bible can ever be our contemporary…
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… Marlowe staged his play at the very beginning of what is increasingly being called the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which humanity was finally able to impose its will (in an almost occult manner) upon the earth. There are costs to any such contract, as the wisdom of the legend has it, so that it’s worth considering after five centuries of human domination of the planet that we might now be facing our own collective appointment at Deptford. We seem to finally be facing the final act, the apocalyptic tenor of our times, from climate change to nuclear brinkmanship making the continued survival of humanity an open question, our sad predicament the result of hubris, and greed, and vainglory. It may be appropriate to rechristen this age the Faustocene. Because whether or not the Devil is real, his effects in the world are. When it comes to “truth” and “facts,” the two words are not synonymous, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if I could make out the smoke of some devilish chimera beyond the neon-line of the Rose Theater, deep within a darkness so all-encompassing that not a squib of light is capable of escaping…
“A Deal With the Devil: What the Age-Old Faustian Bargain Reveals About the Modern World” in @lithub.
See also: “You Are Equal To The Spirit You Understand,” Nathan Gardels‘ consideration of the lessons in Goethe’s Faust, in @NoemaMag.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
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As we reconsider our contracts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that slavery was abolished in the British Empire, as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force (though it remained legal in the possessions of the East India Company until the passage of the Indian Slavery Act, 1843).
“Men have become the tools of their tools”*…
Visionary philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that it’s not our technology that makes humans special; rather, it’s our relationship with that technology. Bryan Norton explains…
It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.
But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics.
According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē. The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.
This is Stiegler’s legacy. Throughout his life, he took this idea of technics, first explored while he was imprisoned for armed robbery, further than anyone else. But his ideas have often been overlooked and misunderstood, even before he died in 2020. Today, they are more necessary than ever. How else can we learn to disentangle the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences? How else can we begin to grasp the history of our strange reality?…
[Norton unspools Stiegler’s remarkable life and the development of his thought…]
… Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal. The problem, for Stiegler, is that when we pay too much attention to our tools, rather than how they are developed and deployed, we fail to understand our reality. We become trapped, merely describing the technological world on its own terms and making it even harder to untangle the effects of digital technologies and our everyday experiences. By encouraging us to pay closer attention to this world-making capacity, with its potential to harm and heal, Stiegler is showing us what else is possible. There are other ways of living, of being, of evolving. It is technics, not technology, that will give the future its new face…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Our tools shape our selves,” from @br_norton in @aeonmag.
Compare and contrast: Kevin Kelly‘s What Technology Wants
* Henry David Thoreau
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As we own up, we might send phenomenological birthday greetings to Immanuel Kant; he was born on this date in 1724. One of the central figures of modern philosophy, Kant is remembered primarily for his efforts to unite reason with experience (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], 1781), and for his work on ethics (e.g., Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797) and aesthetics (e.g., Critique of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft], 1790).
But Kant made important contributions to mathematics and astronomy. For example: his argument that mathematical truths are a form of synthetic a priori knowledge was cited by Einstein as an important early influence on his work. And his description of the Milky Way as a lens-shaped collection of stars that represented only one of many “island universes,” was later shown to be accurate by Herschel.
Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means.
“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”*…
Altruists seek to understand how their actions will affect others—while willful ignorance can free people to act selfishly. Linh Vu and Margarita Leib explain…
Willful ignorance abounds in daily life. People regularly look the other way rather than examining the consequences of their actions. Despite the plethora of scientific evidence for climate change, for instance, many people still avoid engaging with facts about global warming. They don’t always want to know about the harsh living conditions of farm animals. And consumers often put aside ethical concerns about how the products they purchase were sourced.
As behavioral scientists, we wanted to understand just how prevalent willful ignorance is—as well as why people engage in it. Together with our colleagues, we pooled data from multiple research projects that collectively involved more than 6,000 individuals. We discovered that willful ignorance is common and harmful, with 40 percent of people choosing “not to know” the consequences of their actions to free themselves of guilt while maximizing their own gains. But we also found that about 40 percent of people are altruistic: rather than avoiding information about the consequences of their actions, they seek it out to increase the benefits to others…
[The authors unpack their findings…]
… Our findings hint at ways to combat willful ignorance. In the studies we analyzed, decision-making occurred within a moral framing: you could benefit yourself at the expense of your partner. This presentation is fertile ground for willful ignorance because it poses a threat to one’s self-image, heightening the sense that—if you know what’s really going on—you will have to make harder choices to be a good person.
If we can avoid putting a strong moral emphasis on decisions, it may make people feel less threatened and, as a result, be less willfully ignorant. Other research groups have found promising ways to do this. For instance, we can present choices in ways that highlight ethical options first, such as making vegetarian menus the default, while still allowing people to opt for meat, as part of an effort to promote sustainable food choices. Or we could encourage people to think more positively about good deeds rather than guilt-trip them for what they have failed to do. Highlighting recent global achievements, such as healing the ozone layer, for instance, can inspire people to keep up the good work rather than feeling like the battle is lost and that the situation is all gloom and doom.
In short, we can encourage one another and ourselves toward more selfless and generous actions…
Addressing the all-too-prevalent problem of willful ignorance: “Why Some People Choose Not to Know,” from @scientificamer. Eminently worth reading in full.
Apposite: “How David Attenborough Went From Delighting at the Natural World to Pleading for Its Future.”
* Proverb (originating in Japan in the 16th century)
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As we encourage inquiry, we might spare a thought for Rachel Carson; she died on this date in 1964. A pioneering environmentalist, her book The Silent Spring— a study of the long-term dangers of pesticide use– challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind relates to the natural world.
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
– Rachel Carson
“A translator’s primary work isn’t knowing what it means (that’s a prerequisite, not the work itself). Translation is working out how to say it, how to write it. Translating is writing.”*
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: the estimable Damion Searls argues for a literary approach to translating rigorous philosophical texts…
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s [here] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a book with an aura. His name, let’s admit it, is already a vibe; the title sets an extremely highbrow tone; the paragraphs are all numbered, promising a very impressive logical rigor, even if questions linger. (Is 6.2322 really exactly one level more primary than 5.47321? What does “3.001” mean since there’s no 3.0 or 3.00?) And then the text itself has a kind of cryptic grandeur, awe-inspiring opacity, Olympian disregard for normal human understanding that gives us what we expect, what we want, from such an iconic philosopher. It’s an exciting challenge. A lot of the reason why the book has been so widely read in the century since its English publication in 1922, by philosophers and philosophy students and nonphilosophers alike, is how it makes its readers feel.
Several similarly forbidding-yet-thereby-thrilling books were published in English that same year—T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; James Joyce’s Ulysses—but unlike those, the Tractatus was a translation, and the question arises how much of its style was a byproduct of bringing it into English. The book’s title did not come from Wittgenstein: it was an esoteric pun on Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus from 1670, suggested by G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher who was the fourth most important figure in getting the book into English, after the credited translator C. K. Ogden, the actual translator Frank Ramsey [here], and Bertrand Russell [here]. Wittgenstein’s own German title was the far more humble and straightforward Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, something like Essay on Logic and Philosophy. Russell’s introduction, included in the first edition and every subsequent one until this one, firmly placed the book in the context of technical academic philosophy. And the book’s language in English was simply not at all like Wittgenstein’s forceful, earnest, fluid, subtle German.
Yet the book in English is what it is; should it just stay that way? This same debate came up around the retranslation of yet another iconic book from 1922: C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. He too completely changed the title (from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to the Shakespeare quote Remembrance of Things Past); he too created an English-language voice, lush and purple, that wasn’t the original’s. And yet his writing was what generations of English-language Proust readers knew and loved; his translation was modified slightly over the years but largely preserved; when Lydia Davis came along with a new translation faithful to other aspects of the original, such as Proust’s analytical rigor, many readers didn’t care whether or not her version was more like the real Proust—Scott Moncrieff’s Proust was the real thing as far as they were concerned.
The situation with the Tractatus is clearer and less debatable, for two reasons. First, the earlier translations are more deeply flawed than Scott Moncrieff’s Proust ever was. Second and perhaps more important, Wittgenstein’s book is explicitly about the relationships between language and thought, between language and the world, making it imperative to get these relationships right in translation. And so I have retranslated the book, paying special attention to where the assumptions of typical academic philosophy translation would lead us away from expressing Wittgenstein’s thought in English. Implicitly, I am making the case for a certain kind of approach that is generally called “literary”—attentive to emotional nuances, subtle connotations, and expressive power—even when translating rigorous philosophical texts…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Translating Philosophy: The Case of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in @wwborders.
* The equally estimable Emily Wilson, paraphrasing Searls
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As we emphasize essence, we might spare a thought for the creator of the inspiration of the title of Wittgenstein’s work, Baruch Spinoza; he died on this date in 1677. One of the foremost thinkers of the Age of Reason, he was a philosopher who contributed to nearly every area of philosophical discourse, including metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. His rationalism and determinism put him in opposition to Descartes and helped lay the foundation for The Enlightenment; his pantheistic views led to his excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.
As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude … that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honored save justice and charity.
– Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670
“Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas”*…
Further to last week’s piece on Samuel Arbesman‘s “incremental humanism,” Jennifer Banks unpacks the differences between the two leading “flavors” of humanism afoot today: one akin to Arbesman’s; the other, not so much…
In 2003, Edward Said wrote in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and in the context of the United States’ war on terror that ‘humanism is the only, and, I would go so far as saying, the final, resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.’ The moment, he felt, was ‘apocalyptic’, and the end was indeed near for him; he died of leukaemia later that year.
So why was it humanism that he held to so tightly as war and sickness cinched time’s horizon around him? Humanism, an intellectual and cultural movement that emerged in Renaissance Europe emphasising classical learning and affirming human potential, had been subject to decades of critique by the time Said was writing this. Among its many detractors were postcolonialists who argued that humanism’s elevation of a particular kind of human – Eurocentric, rational, empiricist, self-realising, secular and universal – had provided thin cover for the exploitation of large swaths of the world’s population.
But Said, one of the founders of postcolonial studies, hadn’t given up on the term, despite its imperialist entanglements. He imagined a humanism abused but not exhausted, an –ism more elastic and plural, more subject to critique and revision, and more acquainted with the limits of reason than many humanisms have historically been. Humanism, he argued, was more like an ‘exigent, resistant, intransigent art’ – an art that was not, for him, particularly triumphant. His humanism was defined by a ‘tragic flaw that is constitutive to it and cannot be removed’. It refused all final solutions to the irreconcilable, dialectical oppositions that are at the heart of human life – a refusal that ironically kept the world liveable and the future open.
At stake in his defence was not only the survival of the humanistic fields of study he had devoted his academic career to, but the survival, freedom and thriving of actual people, including those populations that humanisms had historically excluded. Various antihumanisms had gradually been eroding humanism’s stature within the academy, but it was humanism, he believed, with its positive ideas about liberty, learning and human agency – and not antihumanist deconstructions – that inspired people to resist unjust wars, military occupations, despotism and tyranny.
Humanism, however, fell further out of vogue in the two decades that followed. Humanities enrolments dropped dramatically at universities, and funding for departments like comparative literature, women’s studies, religion, and foreign languages got slashed. Increasingly, however, it wasn’t just the inadequacies of any –ism that were the problem. It was the subject at the heart of humanism that came under widespread attack: the human itself. Given that history could be read as a catalogue of human greed, blindness, exclusions and violence, the future seemed to belong to someone – or something – else. The humane in humanism seemed to be missing. Alternative ideologies like antihumanism, transhumanism, posthumanism and antinatalism seeped from the fringes into the mainstream, buoyed by their conviction that they might offer the planet or even the cosmos something more ethical, more humane even, than humans have ever been able to. Humanity’s time, perhaps, was simply up.
In his book The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us (2023), the American critic Adam Kirsch identifies the contested line between humanists and non-humanists as one of the defining faultlines of our political and cultural moment. The debates between them can feel merely semantic, the stuff of graduate seminars, but the revolt against humanity is likely to have major implications for our future, Kirsch argues, even if its prophecies about our imminent extinction don’t come true. ‘[D]isappointed prophecies,’ he writes, ‘have been responsible for some of the most important movements in history, from Christianity to Communism.’ Anyone committed to the prospect of a liveable future should pay close attention to what’s going on here.
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I might have never put too much stock in a term like humanism if I had not read around in the transhumanist literature. I came to this work while researching a book on birth that explored the relationship between birth, death and the question of a human future. Does humanity have a future? Do we deserve one? What will that future look like? The answers to those questions will be determined by many forces – technological, economic, political, environmental and more – but also by how we experience and think about our own births and deaths. Despite large areas of convergence, humanists and transhumanists can end up with wildly different visions of our future, based on dramatically different understandings of birth and death, as one can see by comparing how a novelist (Toni Morrison) and a philosopher (Nick Bostrom) have explored these themes. Morrison offers us a prophetic celebration of Earthly, ongoing, biological generation and a future that allows for human freedom, while Bostrom points us toward a highly controlled surveillance world order, organised around a paranoid fear of human action, and oriented toward the pristine emptiness of outer space. Which future, we should ask ourselves, would we willingly choose?
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Do read on for her analysis: “What awaits us?“, from @jenniferabanks in @aeonmag.
Apposite: “The Philosophy Of Co-Becoming” from @NoemaMag and “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work,” @LMSacasas on Illich.
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As we ponder possibility, we might spare a thought for Dandara, “the Warrior Queen” of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of Afro-Brazilian people who freed themselves from enslavement during Brazil’s colonial period. She was captured by colonial authorities on this date in 1694 and committed suicide rather than be returned to a life of slavery.
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