Whorf

Fire inspector and linguistic philosopher Benjamin Lee Whorf was born on this day in 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

An intellectually curious but nonetheless average student of chemical engineering at MIT, following his graduation Whorf became a fire prevention engineer and inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. While working for the insurance company in 1924, Whorf became interested in linguistics, exploring philosophical conflicts between science and religion through the work of a long-forgotten linguist, early 19th century dramatist and mystic Antoine Fabre d'Olivet.

Whorf began to study the Aztec language in 1926, and by 1928 was publishing Aztec translations in academic publications. Although he did not posses a doctoral degree in linguistics, Whorf's writings and visionary approach to problems of language sufficiently impressed the Social Science Research Council that it granted him a research fellowship to study manuscripts in Mexico in 1930. With the arrival of famed linguist Edward Sapir at Yale in 1931, Whorf's remarkable accomplishments in the field of linguistics were allowed to flower: Whorf wasted no time in enrolling in Sapir's courses at Yale, and Sapir encouraged Whorf to expand his inquiries and assisted in providing Whorf a background in classical linguistic thinking.

By 1937, Whorf was a part-time lecturer in linguistics at Yale. His Language, Mind and Reality (published in 1941) became a highly influential work among linguists, anthropologists and structuralist literary critics such as Roland Barthes; although it was an attempt by Whorf to popularize linguistics for the lay reader, it also advanced the revolutionary notion (which he co-formulated with Sapir) that the "shape" of a culture's language imprints itself firmly on that culture's experience of the world, containing the ideas about what a culture's environment or universe consisted of -- and therefore that objective reality is not really something that is "out there" but rather that our experiences are manufactured by us within and through our linguistic system.

Like composer Charles Ives, Whorf continued to work full-time in the insurance business while he produced the works by which he would be remembered in another field; just a year before his death on July 26, 1941, Whorf was promoted to Assistant Secretary of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, even as he became in high demand for articles and lectures on linguistics.

Benjamin's younger brother Richard Whorf was a Hollywood film actor and director, noted for his biopic of songwriter Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By (1946). Apropos of nothing, critic James Agee wrote that Till the Clouds Roll By was "a little like sitting down to a soda fountain de luxe atomic special of maple walnut on vanilla on burnt almond on strawberry on butter pecan on coffee on raspberry sherbert on tutti frutti with hot fudge, butterscotch, marshmallow, filberts, pistachios, shredded pineapple, and rainbow sprills on top, go double on the whipped cream" -- although it does lead me to wonder whether you can translate that into Aztec.

Nasty, Brutish and Short

The pessimism of Thomas Hobbes' political philosophy is perennially summed up in a single "soundbite" from Hobbes' groundbreaking justification for the existence of sovereignty, Leviathan (1651): he argues that the natural human condition is a state of perpetual war in which "the life of people [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." In the 21st century, his words are altogether too compelling in the light of modern Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, or any number of other brutal battlegrounds. His more generic point, however, was that in a civilized world, the fear of violent death causes people to create a state by contracting to surrender individual rights to the authority of an absolute sovereign.

In his own day, Hobbes was accused of concocting a secular excuse for the absolute authority of any successful strong man (i.e. Cromwell, contemporarily), as contrasted with the religious excuse of the "divine right of kings" advanced by Robert Filmer, but what is better remembered about Hobbes today is his glumly mechanistic view of human social behavior, in which beings are compelled by their nature to act selfishly in an atmosphere of fear, mistrust and appetite.

He self-consciously blamed his outlook on his mother's fears of the Spanish Armada while she was pregnant with him, but one can as easily see the brutality of the Puritan Revolt as a fitting backdrop for his philosophy. Born on this day in 1588 in Westport, Wiltshire, Hobbes grew up in financially secure surroundings (despite the fact that his father, a vicar, deserted the family after getting into a brawl with some of his parishioners) and studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford before becoming attached to the Cavendish household as tutor and secretary in 1610. He made several trips to the Continent, meeting with Descartes, Gassendi and Galileo among others, and shortly thereafter published a treatise on motion. He also wrote and privately circulated Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640), a defense of the royal prerogative of Charles I, on the eve of Cromwell's rise, and as Cromwell took power, Hobbes (describing himself as a "man of feminine courage") fled to France. There he was appointed tutor to young Charles II (who called Hobbes "the bear"), and continued his philosophical writing, principally an anonymous critique of Descartes' mind/body duality in which Hobbes introduced his materialistic view that the soul dies with the body.

In 1642, he published De Cive, an inkling of his theory of government which he described in greater detail in Leviathan 9 years later. The publication of Leviathan, which emphasized naked human motivation to the exclusion of the hand of God in its analysis of social organizations, raised the suspicion of the French clergy as well as English royalists in exile, so Hobbes returned to England and tried to keep a low profile, busying himself with mathematics. Upon the accession of his ex-pupil Charles II in 1660, Hobbes was again in favor, but in 1666 the House of Commons ordered an investigation of Hobbes due to the apparent atheism of Leviathan. In some measure proving his own thesis, fear of persecution drove Hobbes to "repair" Leviathan by adding an appendix to bring it into line with church doctrine, and to write a logical analysis of the law of heresy by which he concluded that no earthly court could judge the crime.

At 84, he wrote an autobiography in Latin verse (!), and by 1675 had published translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey before retiring to the estate of the Cavendish family. Although the conclusions of his political philosophy resembled those of the empty-suited Filmer in that they recommend an absolute monarch, his practical analysis of what moves humans to form governments was a revelation in its time, an early explication of modern psychological principles which paved the way for John Locke's less bleak view of the social contract, and provided a basis for a secular ethical framework. The ever-fearful Hobbes managed to act to preserve his own life until the ripe age of 91, when not even a lifetime's worth of sheepish diplomacy could save him; he died on December 4, 1679 at Hardwick, England.

Pico's Dignity

Pico della Mirandola was born on this day in 1463 near Ferrara.

A precocious child, Pico was sent to Bologna to study canon law at the age of 14. Canon law began to sicken him, however, and he moved to Ferrara to study philosophy and theology, soon afterward meeting the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. At Padua, he gained a reputation as a public lecturer on scholarly topics, acquired a deep knowledge of Greek and the Semitic languages, and encountered ancient Greek texts by Plato and Aristotle as well as the literature of medieval Judaism. By 1484, under Ficino's influence, he was an avowed Neo-Platonist, employing Plato's methods of inquiry to a critique of the Church.

He studied in France briefly, and upon his return to Florence in 1486, he published his "900 theses" (or, Conclusiones Nongentae in Omni Genere Scientarum), a mélange of dialectics, metaphysics, theology and magic, and brashly announced that he was prepared to defend them in public debate against all the great scholars of Europe. For the impending occasion, he wrote what would become his most famous piece, the Oration on the Dignity of Man, one of the principal statements of Renaissance humanism -- stressing a return to the centrality of man in the universe.

Within a year, 13 of his theses were declared to be heresy by Innocent VIII, who forbade public discussion of the work. Pico recanted, but came back two months later with a a retort addressed to Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Apologia. In the Apologia, Pico took the extraordinary position that the Hebrew Kabbala, the Jewish mystical tradition which provided a means for approaching God directly, was the best logical basis for the belief in a divine Christ.

With Innocent still hot on his trail, Pico fled to France and was arrested there. Innocent died in 1492, and was succeeded by Alexander VI, who absolved Pico of the charge of heresy. With Alexander's blessings Pico returned to his roots in his work the Heptaplus, a mystical interpretation of the Creation. He fell away from Ficino and Lorenzo near the end of his life, when he submitted to the influence of the monk Savonarola and began a period of meditation.

He died young, on November 17, 1494 in Florence, without leaving a synthesized philosophy, but his critiques were influential: they encouraged scholars to penetrate long-ignored Hebrew texts and enriched theological discussions with an approach to mysticism derived from classical literature. His critique of astrology influenced the work of astronomer Johannes Kepler.

Studying by Forgetting

"There is an easy way to become a Buddha: refraining from all evils, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient beings, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying or lamentation -- this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it." -- Dogen.

One of the most important religious thinkers in Japanese history -- the man who articulated for Japanese Buddhists the relationship between the life of the model monk and the quest for spiritual enlightenment -- Dogen was born at the beginning of the 13th century into the luxuries of a noble household. He was a child prodigy, lovingly encouraged by his elders, although his father died he was 2 and his mother died when he was 7. At the age of 4, he was reading Chinese poetry, and by the age of 9 he had become deeply immersed in Chinese Buddhist treatises.

Through the indulgence of an uncle, he entered monkhood at 13, but found monastic life in Japan at the beginning of the 13th century lacking in discipline and depth of thought; by and large, Japanese Buddhism at that time held that salvation lay in merely following a set of simplified tenets. After traveling through Japan looking without success for a great teacher, in 1223 he went to China. There, under the tutelage of the Ts'ao-tung Buddhist master Ju-ching, he began to see for the first time the expression of religious practice through daily chores, as well as through the practice of zazen (Zen meditation in a cross-legged sitting position).

While receiving instruction from Ju-ching, Dogen experienced enlightenment when Ju-ching noticed a sleeping monk and quipped, "In Zen, body and mind are cast off. Why do you sleep?" He stayed on with Ju-ching for two more years, and before returning to Japan, Dogen received the seal of succession from his master, thereby bridging the traditions of Chinese Zen Buddhism with a young Japanese master and marking the beginning of the Japanese Soto Zen sect.

Back in Japan in 1227, Dogen gained a reputation as a virtuous character and severe training techniques, and attracted many followers during the 1230s, monks as well as laymen. He was the first major Zen master to deliver homilies in Japanese instead of Chinese.

Dogen's essential message was that practice, in the form of zazen, and enlightenment were one, and in his treatise Fukanzazengi (1227), he described in minute detail the correct posture for sitting in meditation and gave specific instructions for proper practice. Through concentration on one's posture and other physical regimens, Dogen's notion of practice was to obliterate the self, or as he articulated it with almost mathematical rigor: "To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between one's self and others."

Beyond practice, Dogen also concerned himself with metaphysics and ethics. While he shared the view of other Buddhist philosophers that there is an eternal consciousness, his original contribution to a Buddhist metaphysics (in his major work, Shobo-genzo, 1235-38) was his recognition of impermanence, the ever-changing reality (a unity of being and time, expressed similarly by the 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger) in which the Buddha nature could be revealed. Out of his metaphysical observations about unity of all beings grew an ethical system, recognizing a unity and equality among all men and women and calling for altruistic love for humanity.

Otherness

Philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas, whose most original work focused on the ethical implications of one's experience of the Other (Time and the Other, 1948; Ethics and Infinity, 1982), was born on this day in 1906 in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Levinas grew up in a Jewish family at the confluence of the rich cultural currents of Lithuania just after the beginning of the 20th century: since Lithuania was a center of Talmudic scholarship, yet strongly within the orbit of Russia, Levinas read Lithuanian, Hebrew and Russian (in particular Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy). His experience of Russian literature led him to Strasbourg to study under Charles Blondel, but soon, by way of Bergson and Proust, Levinas became attracted to Husserl's lectures in Freiburg, and studied Heidegger's Being and Time (although later regretted being taken up by it).

Receiving French citizenship in 1930, he served in the French Army during World War II as a Russian and German interpreter, but was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Germany while most of his family in Lithuania were killed by the Nazis. After the War, he began to devote himself to philosophy, ultimately with a chair at the Sorbonne.

His philosophical works (Totality and Infinity, 1961; Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, 1974) mainly concerned the experience of Otherness (alterity) and the ethical experience inherent in the recognition of a relationship with the Other. For Levinas, the conscious self is by definition separate and apart from the fact of being -- the "there is" -- while the unconscious self is completely united with the "there is," and therefore oblivious to it. For the conscious self, then, "there is" represents a deeply frightening ambiguity; but it is only in the epiphany of this horror, and the recognition of an Other's being, that the conscious self is challenged into developing a sense of justice and responsibility for the Other. A concept of Self is, indeed, only possible through a recognition of the Other, according to Levinas, and so it is common to say that ethics precedes ontology in his thought.

In addition to his works of ethical philosophy, Levinas also published a series of confessional writings, often concerned with Judaism after the Holocaust and intertwined with commentaries on the Talmud, in which he famously observed while discussing the concept of forgiveness, "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."

Levinas died on December 25, 1995 in Paris.

Voltaire

"When truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and factions to arise. There has never been a dispute as to whether there is daylight at noon." -- Voltaire.

One of the key figures of the Age of Enlightenment, Voltaire was known and admired throughout Europe by such diverse figures as Bolingbroke, Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin and James Boswell as France's great philosopher, satirist and wit. At the same time, he lived the life of a revolutionary for much of his career, spending years in exile and months inside the Bastille for sedition, waging a running battle with the Catholic church and settling in a French border town (Ferney, near Switzerland) so that he could escape the country easily in the event of another state crackdown. As he himself put it, "Philosophers should always have two or three underground holes in case of dogs hunting them."

As to his "philosophy," Voltaire never developed a systematic political theory, but rather he popularized, through poems, plays and essays, what he viewed as enlightened thinking -- characterized by a rational, scientific approach to political matters and technological progress, condemnation of superstition, and an uncompromising devotion to freedom of thought, speech and religion.

Born Francois-Marie Arouet on this day in 1694 in Paris, his father was a conventional bureaucrat who sent him to a Jesuit college (where he learned "Latin and nonsense" as he put it), but Voltaire's earliest intellectual guidance came from his godfather, the free-thinking Abbe de Chateauneuf, who introduced him to scientific skepticism. Voltaire, although educated to practice law, settled down to write plays and poems in a writing style that was brutally logical, trenchant and almost always bitingly humorous, and became the light of Paris society.

In 1717, however, he was falsely accused of lampooning the regent, and was thrown into the Bastille for a year. While there, he wrote his first play, Oedipe (1718) which was hugely successful, as well as an epic poem about Henry IV called the Henriade. Henry IV, as well as Louis XIV (about whose reign Voltaire later wrote in Le Siecle de Louis XIV, 1751), represented Voltaire's ideal of the enlightened despot, an absolute ruler who promoted rational discourse, kept the clergy in its place, and promoted religious tolerance; political liberty, in Voltaire's view, was not necessary if the king is enlightened.

Almost as instantly as his success took hold in France, he was forced into the Bastille again and into exile due to a quarrel with an important French family. He went to England in 1726, mixed in the intellectual society of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, learned English so that he could read and study Shakespeare, John Locke and Isaac Newton in their native tongue, and developed a great admiration for the religious tolerance and freedom of speech practiced there.

He returned to France 3 years later, consolidated the fortune he had begun to amass through the success of his writings and wise investments, and wrote works popularizing the Empiricism of Locke (Lettres philosophiques, 1734) and the scientific principles of Newton (Elements de la philosophie de Newton, 1738), who became his intellectual heroes. Fleeing a warrant for his arrest for sedition in 1734, he took refuge at the country chateau of Madame du Chatelet, a well-read woman with a passion for metaphysics and science, with whom he enjoyed his longest relationship despite the fact that she was married.

During another period of exile Voltaire answered the invitation of the newly-crowned king of Prussia, Frederick II (the Great), to join him in his court at Potsdam. Frederick collected Voltaire almost as he would have collected a painting, for his sparkling wit at court and literary achievements, but their relations became strained as the Prussians treated Voltaire as a demi-god of sorts, and Voltaire soon departed. Nevertheless, they remained friends after Voltaire left.

In the 1750s, Voltaire began to write stories, including Micromegas (1752), arguably the first story in which the Earth is visited by alien beings from another planet. In 1758, Voltaire wrote his masterpiece, Candide (about a Romantic philosopher who experiences a conversion to science and rationalism after suffering misfortune), in response to the "anti-rational," Romantic positions of his intellectual enemy Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire assumed the role of activist during the infamous Calais Affair in 1762, in which a Protestant shopkeeper was brutally tortured and executed for murder following the suicide of his son, who was despondent over not being allowed to practice his trade due to his religion. The incident was fertile ground for Voltaire's critique of Catholicism, but he also became personally involved in the matter, conducting his own investigation into the matter, paying expenses for a new inquest and providing financial support to the widow.

When Voltaire died on May 30, 1778, crowds gathered in mourning outside his Paris apartment; and although the Catholic church attempted to deprive him of a Christian burial, some local church officials defied the church and provided him with one anyway at the Abbey of Seillieres. After the French Revolution, Voltaire was again declared a hero and his remains were moved to a position of honor in the Pantheon in Paris.

Locke

It sometimes comes as a surprise to modern readers that John Locke, whose political theory had a direct influence on such movers and shakers as Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was a leading thinker in his day in such fields as the theory of knowledge, education and medicine; yet almost everywhere he applied his gifts, he sought to advance a natural foundation for liberation and tolerance.

Born on this day in 1632 in Wrington, Sussex, England, Locke grew up in the midst of Oliver Cromwell's turbulent Puritan Revolt against Charles I, and his father fought in the service of Cromwell's Parliamentarians. Young Locke attended Christ Church College, Oxford University, where his eyewitness experience of the Puritan Revolt no doubt led him to chafe within the scholastic confines of Oxford. While Oxford bred classical scholars, Locke was more interested in modern thought, chiefly the writings of Rene Descartes, whose star was rising on the continent. Locke graduated in 1656, obtained his master's degree in 1659, and sat in on natural science lectures given by Robert Boyle.

In his first philosophical work, Two Tracts on Government (1660-62), written at a time of political crisis and instability, Locke argued the conservative position that the formation of the state requires citizens to abandon their natural liberty and obey the commands of the sovereign, even where such edicts were not required by the laws of nature. In 1665, Locke acted as secretary on a diplomatic mission to Brandenburg, where he saw the success of a society founded upon religious toleration. Locke embraced the necessity of religious tolerance, except for atheists (whose aim, it seemed, was to strike down all morality) and Catholics (who were intolerant of other faiths by nature and constantly contradicting sovereign power by claiming superior authority).

On his return to Oxford, he found it in disarray due to the onset of the plague, and began to engage in medical research. Although he was not a physician, he was asked to become personal physician to Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury, and in fact Locke successfully supervised an operation on Shaftesbury to remove a cyst from his liver.

Shaftesbury was convinced that Locke had saved his life, and the two became fast friends as well as philosophical comrades; Shaftesbury was also an avid proponent of religious tolerance. For better or worse, Locke found his fortunes tied to Shaftesbury: when Shaftesbury became lord chancellor in 1672, he named Locke his secretary of presentations, the lord chancellor's proxy for ecclesiastical matters; when Shaftesbury was dismissed, Locke lost his job. As Shaftesbury fell into increasing disfavor for his anti-Catholic brand of religious tolerance, after receiving his medical degree Locke escaped to France in 1675.

In and out of England, France and Holland during the next decade and a half, Locke was suspected of sedition by Charles II for his close ties with Shaftesbury, but Locke would not speak freely enough in the presence of Charles' spies to build a case for his arrest (although he was expelled from further privileges at Oxford). Nonetheless, by 1689, Locke had indeed shifted from the unquestionably loyal positions he took in the Two Tracts, and with the succession of William and Mary in 1688 he felt safe for the first time to publish the views he had been cultivating since the 1670s.

In his Two Treatises of Government (published 1689), he took on Robert Filmer's notion of the "divine right of royalty" to rule, advancing instead the notion of government as a relationship of trust. Outside of the state, humans are in a perfect state freedom, restricted only by natural law. In order to secure one's natural rights vis-a-vis others with competing interests, humans will forego their natural condition and, by "contract," enter a civil society in which personal freedoms are protected by the state and the will of the majority is otherwise followed. For Locke, the only end of government was to secure fully the natural rights of life, liberty and property, and governments which infringed upon these natural rights could rightfully be overthrown (he cited the "glorious, bloodless revolution" and arrival of William III in England as a worthy example of this principle at work).

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (published 1690), Locke performed a revolutionary critique on philosophical traditions of knowledge espoused by the Cambridge Platonists, who held that logical principles were innate tools of the human mind. In the spirit of ideological tolerance, Locke dismissed this somewhat authoritarian notion as a threat to freedom of thought; instead, he argued that humans are born as blank slates, and that experience (in particular, sensation and reflection) is the source of all ideas, even that which we understand as pure logic. Locke also analyzed, for the first time in the history of modern philosophy, the subjects of language and meaning as instruments of knowledge, observing that words imperfectly signify our imperfectly interpreted, imperfect sensations of the material world, but that we communicate ideas nonetheless through a practical tolerance of individual perceptions.

Locke had returned to England in the company of Mary II in 1689, and retired to the home of Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham (his some-time lover) and her husband Sir Francis Masham, settling in as the intellectual leader of the Whigs in Parliament. In his later years, he wrote shorter works on education, Christianity and economics. He died on October 28, 1704 in Oates, England.

Kongfuzi, or Confucius

American pop culture, in its habitually rude and fuzzy way, tends to place Kongfuzi somewhere between a temple deity worshipped by "Confucians" in China, and a caricature of a bearded old wise man who writes fortune cookies or punch-lines for Earl Derr Biggers.

Notwithstanding the gradual stimulation of a temple-going "cult of Confucius" among nobles in China (something Jesuit missionaries mistook for an organized religion when they reported on the phenomenon to the West in the 16th century, renaming Kongfuzi "Confucius"), Kongfuzi was a minor bureaucrat but an honored teacher, whose ideas came to dominate Chinese ethical and political philosophy for much of the last two and a half millennia. At the height of his official influence during his own lifetime, he served as chief of police, staring down thugs on the mean streets of Lu.

Dirty Harry he was not, however; soon after his appointment, beleaguered by the jealous back-stabbing of other bureaucrats and minor nobility, Kongfuzi was forced out of his position and driven into exile, wandering through the states of Wei, Song, Chen, Cai and Chu looking for an enlightened ruler who would value his ideas, but instead meeting indifference during a period of heightened factional violence and unrest.

He returned to Lu in 484 B.C.E., settling down to teach his political philosophy and to edit what have come to be known as the "Confucian classics," including The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, and the Analects. As a teacher, he was a great popular success, attracting more than 3,000 students and 72 official "disciples," as well as earning the title "Ultimate Sage-Teacher"; still, it was not until the Han Dynasty (beginning 206 B.C.E.) that the Chinese nobility began to distinguish Kongfuzi's thought from other thinkers of his time and to canonize his works as officially-favored doctrine, assisted by the elaborations of Mencius, Xunzi and other subsequent disciples.

Kongfuzi's ideas must be seen as having grown out of the period of social and political chaos that robbed the Chou dynasty of emperors of their legitimate authority, ceding it to factions controlling each of the states of imperial China. In his own view, Kongfuzi merely sought to re-establish the social order in the way that the so-called "ancient kings" had established it, and that by introducing the ancient values Kongfuzi was merely acting as the messenger of older ideas.

The key concept in Kongfuzi's thought is ren, translated as "love of man" -- a humanitarian insight into the society that surrounds one, the highest virtue and the ultimate goal of receiving a proper education in "gentlemanly ways." To attain ren, good citizens practice li, a combination of rituals, customs, manners and protocols that, for Kongfuzi, were not necessarily fixed, but represent the acceptable social rules for one's time and place. The higher principle that helps to shade these proprieties is yi, or righteousness premised upon rationality. Thus, guided by reciprocal, practical respect and empathy for others within one's community (yi), one cultivates virtue (ren) by practicing good moral habits (li). However, ren was not, for Kongfuzi, merely a system of self-realization; his view was that the purpose of education was to guide individuals to the attainment of ren in order to create a governable, peaceful society.

In his teachings on the best practices of rulers, Kongfuzi de-emphasizes legislation and traditional law enforcement in favor of governing "with morality, as if he [the ruler] were the Northern Star, staying in his position, surrounded by all other planets." Ultimately, the ruler who governs with morality and as a moral example will be more effective, in Kongfuzi's view, than one who governs by strict law enforcement. As he writes in the Analects: "If you lead people with political force and restrict them with law and punishment, they can just avoid law violation, but will have no sense of honor and shame. If you lead them with morality and guide them with li, they will develop a sense of honor and shame, and will do good of their own accord."

Marcuse

Probably the most prominent "New Leftist" in American academia during the 1960s and 70s, Herbert Marcuse was born on this date in 1898 to prosperous Jewish parents in Berlin, and served in the German Army in World War I. He looked on approvingly as the rule of Wilhelm II was replaced by a Social Democratic government, although he grew disillusioned with its progress in light of the murders of Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

In 1922 he received his doctorate in literature from the University of Freiburg, and after working in a Berlin bookshop for a time, he returned to Freiburg to study with Martin Heidegger. There he began to weave together strands of Marxist thought with existentialist and phenomenological themes, asserting that socialist principles ought to inspire individual liberty, not just collective freedom from capitalist exploitation. He found particular inspiration in Marx's previously unpublished "1844 Manuscripts," in which Marx described a form of psychological alienation as a key ailment within capitalist society.

In 1933, Marcuse formed the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, with the aim of developing a "critical social theory" to articulate arguments at the nexus of Marxist economic analysis, social theory and cultural criticism. The Nazis were particularly affronted by this, and by the following year, Marcuse fled to the U.S., where he would house the Institute at Columbia University. In 1941, he published his first major work, Reason and Revolution, in which he argued that Hegel's philosophy of state did not provide a rationale for German fascism. In the same year, Marcuse joined the U.S. Office of Secret Services, eventually working as head of the Central European bureau of the Department of State by the end of World War II, submitting a report on the cultural aspects of Nazism ("Presentation of the Enemy") and authoring a civil handbook on de-nazification before leaving the government in 1951.

He obtained a chair at Brandeis and began his most productive period as a philosopher. In Eros and Civilization (1955), he synthesized Marx and Freud (less suspiciously than Wilhelm Reich had tried to) and postulated a non-repressive society in which self-fulfillment could be naturally cultivated through libidinous play, non-alienating labor and open sexuality; the book became a touchstone for 1960s New Left intellectuals. He became the first leftist to openly criticize the politically paralyzing Marxist dogma of the Soviet Union in Soviet Marxism (1958), staking out his position as a social Marxist. In One Dimensional Man (1964), he elaborated on his social Marxism, showing how advanced industrial societies create false needs, integrating individuals into an unbreakable cycle of production and consumption and eradicating dissent through industrial management, advertising and a corrupted mass media; with the seductive power of capitalist toys, luxuries and affiliations, according to Marcuse the revolutionary potential of the working class had been eradicated and the allegedly impending "capitalist crisis" predicted by orthodox Marxists had been averted.

He retired from Brandeis in 1965, and became the sole elder statesman of a youth-oriented radical movement while teaching classes at UC San Diego -- the tall, charismatic, white-haired European, smelling of fine cigars and driving a used Peugeot, the only mature inductee of long-haired peace and liberation movements. His "Essay on Liberation" (1969) celebrated the current campus causes, from opposition to the Vietnam War to the general liberation of the "hippie" movement, while Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) offered a more darkly realistic assessment of the potential success of such movements in light of the "counterrevolution" of the right-wing establishment. His final book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1979), he saw art as an essential component of emancipation, celebrating "bourgeois" art for its indictment of bourgeois society and criticizing the typical Marxist aesthetics that promoted a sterile notion of "proletarian culture." He died on July 29, 1979 on a visit to Starnberg, Germany.

Marcuse's work is now often considered marginal within 20th century American philosophy, although the availability of unpublished material seems poised to reveal Marcuse as a multi-dimensional critic of the intermingling forces of economy, culture and technology, one whose conclusions perhaps offer greater hope than the despairingly deterministic views of his French counterparts such as Baudrillard and Ellul.

Derrida

Jacques Derrida was born on this day in 1930 in El Biar, Algeria. He grew up in an atmosphere of terror as a Jew confronted by anti-Semitism, especially within Vichy-controlled Algeria during World War II. When he was 10, in fact, all Jews were expelled from Algeria's public schools, and violence against Jews was officially sanctioned.

In France from the age of 18, he was moved to pursue philosophy after hearing a radio broadcast about fellow Algerian native Albert Camus, and enrolled in philosophy courses at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Although he was initially attracted to the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, he later repudiated it and immersed himself in the writings of Edmund Husserl. By the 1960s, Derrida was teaching philosophy in Paris universities and became director of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales.

With Speech and Phenomena (1967), Derrida began to launch his critique of Western philosophy's treatment of "writing" as a poor stepchild of the "voice," which was typically thought to have a more intimate connection with thought and the essence of external philosophical truth. Employing an analytical method he called "deconstruction" (coined by Martin Heidegger), with close textual analysis of philosophical writings which attempt to dismiss the significance of "writing," Derrida revealed the internal inconsistency in attempts to define some higher reality: they are always built on metaphors and literary euphemisms. His rather nihilist proposal was that "there is nothing outside the text."

Language is a system, Derrida argued, not of objective connections between word and meaning, but of differences in sounds, as Saussure proposed. The task of the philosopher, in Derrida's view (expressed in Writing and Difference, 1978), is to analyze the system of language for its own properties rather than to imagine a reality beyond; to understand, for example, the expectations inherent in the way a writer organizes the differences which produce meaning in language, and the dynamics by which the writer seizes the reader's deference to his or her use of the text in order to transact communication (or fails to seize it). Although Derrida is not a literary critic, his use of "deconstruction" and his elevation of the status of the text spawned a popular movement in literary criticism. Derrida continued his campaign against transcendental truth outside of texts with an analysis of Plato in Dissemination (1972), focusing on the inherent indeterminacy of language.

Much of the rest of his writings have consisted of playful variations of deconstructive analysis. In Glas (1974), Derrida employs three columns of text to achieve a "discussion" among Derrida (in the center), Hegel (on the left) and Genet (on the right), illustrating that texts are distinguished primarily by the structure of their metaphors. He similarly took on Nietzsche in Spurs (1976); Freud in The Post Card (1980), using metaphors of postal communication to deconstruct psychoanalysis; and Heidegger in Of Spirit (1987). Derrida died on October 9, 2004 in Paris.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, critic, novelist and poet, was born Charlotte Anna Perkins on this day in 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut. The great-granddaughter of theologian Lyman Beecher and the great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, Charlotte Perkins' father left her mother shortly after Charlotte's birth. After a spotty education, culminating with a stint at the Rhode Island School of Design, she earned a living by designing greeting cards and, less happily, teaching children; in her spare time, however, she was a voracious reader, particularly of Social Darwinist tracts.

Against her better judgment she married artist Charles Stetson in 1884, gave birth to a daughter, and quickly sank into a deep depression. Her consulting neurologist, S. Weir Mitchell, prescribed a "rest cure," forbidding her ever to write again and limiting her reading severely. Horrified, Charlotte fled to California, where she turned to writing and lecturing as her career. She eventually divorced Stetson, who married her best friend Grace Ellery Channing.

Fueled by her readings of such commentators as Lester Ward, in countless articles and lectures (and even in poems) Charlotte Perkins began to articulate a critique of gender relations, proceeding from Ward's assumption that humans are set apart from other animals in that they are able to determine their own laws of social behavior. Perkins' further observation was that human volition had been twisted over time; women were denied autonomy, and thus their ability to define social relations had atrophied, whereas men's personalities were distorted by lazy habits learned from having uninterrupted dominance over women. The goal of a reorganized society, she asserted, would be to transform the prevailing "masculinism" into a humane social order, equally informed by nurturing and collaborative female values.

Perkins' breakthrough work, Women and Economics (1898), was a sensation; in it, Perkins declared that the sex relationship is an economic relationship. In that both men and women are essentially defined by the way they make their living, she argued, the lack of occupational autonomy suffered by women meant that they were almost completely in the service of the men who take care of them, creating the underpinnings of all gender-based social imbalance. Her subsequent social critiques developed the theme in other contexts: Concerning Children, 1900; The Home: Its Work and Influence, 1903; The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture, 1911; His Religion and Hers, 1923. While such works were influential among later academic feminists, she is perhaps better known today for her fiction, especially the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892, based on her experience with Mitchell's "rest cure") and Herland (1915, describing a world of women only).

In 1900, having established herself as a leading feminist critic, she married her cousin George Gilman and lived relatively happily until his death in 1934. Shortly thereafter, Perkins, who was suffering from inoperable breast cancer, took her own life on August 17, 1935 in Pasadena, California, leaving behind a note in which she explained: "When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one."

Plato

The thinker about whom Alfred North Whitehead observed that all subsequent philosophy served as a footnote was born around 427 B.C.E. into a comfortable, privileged class (his mother was a descendant of the statesman Solon), during a time when order was crumbling: 5 years before Plato's birth, Athens and its allies locked itself in a bloody war with Sparta for supremacy in the Greek world, a conflict which lasted until Plato was 23. It would not be unreasonable then to imagine that Plato's lifelong fixation on a perfect, "real" world beyond the realm of workaday sensations and perceptions was born out of a longing for the tranquility arising from just consensus and selfless abstraction.

As a teenager in Athens, Plato began to sit at the feet of Socrates. While other teachers in Athens, generally identified as "Sophists," taught young men how to be materially successful in life by instructing them in the arts of public speaking and emotional persuasion, Socrates pressed Plato and his other students to examine the roots and depths beneath the plastic surfaces of Athenian political performance and its avid marketing machinery, through the active and lively use of reason. (Think Noam Chomsky vs. Tony Robbins.) After the authorities caught on to Socrates' penetrating brand of subversion and condemned him to death in 399 B.C.E., the 29-year old Plato fled Athens for Italy (where he studied the mathematical theory of Pythagoras), Sicily and Egypt, briefly served in the military, and may have been captured, imprisoned and sold at a slave market before being freed by a sympathetic philosopher with a pocketbook.

At the age of 40, Plato returned to Athens and opened his Academy (named for its proximity to a park dedicated to the Athenian hero Academus). Stepping into the empty sandals of his late mentor Socrates, Plato became the primary teacher of a student body of both men and women (Aristotle among them), his interests focused upon philosophical inquiry, mathematics and law in the service of training young Athenians to be ethical public officials.

Plato's Dialogues, which remain among the most dramatically compelling works of philosophy ever written, give us a sense of his teaching style, stressing an exchange of ideas over book learning and placing himself within the center of the action as a fellow truth-seeker, one who had literally been through the wars. His earliest surviving dialogues (among them Protagoras, which asserts that virtue is knowledge and can be taught; and Gorgias, on ethics) are thought to be faithful representations of Socrates' thought, but the later dialogues (including Crito, on obedience to laws; Apology, a dramatization of Socrates' defense at his trial; Phaedo, the death scene of Socrates, which includes a discussion of Plato's theory of the Forms; Symposium, discussions of beauty and love; Parmenides and Sophist, further analyses of Forms) show Plato's own thought maturing.

The central metaphor which Plato uses to describe his theory of Forms is that of prisoners bound face-first against the wall of a cave, unable to move their heads to see anything but dim shadows on the wall in front of them projected by a fire behind them (a flashback, perhaps, to his own time in captivity?) -- the point being that all we are able to perceive in life is a mere shadow of an abstract, perfect reality that exists beyond perception. For Plato, concepts such as Beauty, Goodness and Love transcend their everyday usages in their abstract Forms, providing a fixed and permanent reality which may be experienced only by emerging from the cave and leaving the fickle world of perception behind.

Another of Plato's metaphors is perhaps even more instructive in understanding Plato's aims: in the Republic, Plato spins a tale about how the human soul lives in a perfect realm before it enters the human body, and that before it enters the body it must cross a dry desert before crossing the river Lethe (the river of forgetfulness); the more the soul gives in to the temptation of drinking from the river, the less of the perfection of the Forms it will remember upon entering the body. The myth perhaps reveals Plato's sense of nostalgia for an unknown time in which Justice, Goodness and Truth were uncomplicated by the layers of ego, prejudice and stratagem which existed in Athenian society after the Peloponnesian Wars, showing an awareness of how the sense of oneself in one's own body within chaotic times interferes with ethical living.

Yet in nostalgia, for Plato, there was a sense of hope. If one of the prisoners in that dim cave should escape and see the light, it would be his duty to return and lead the rest of the cave-dwellers toward perfection -- hence Plato's dedication to teaching future leaders of Athens to become "philosopher-kings," to look beyond ego, prejudice and stratagem in an effort to build a more perfect society.

Plato engaged in one experiment along these lines: at the age of 60, Plato went to Syracuse to become the tutor to the young Dionysius II, but due to what he perceived to be Dionysius' weakness of character and the treachery of Syracuse political institutions, Plato would not realize the ideal "city-state" in Syracuse. Even after the disappointment of Syracuse, Plato continued to teach young people in Athens, hoping to free a few young souls from the cave.

After Plato's death in 347 B.C.E., his Academy lived on for another 900 years in Athens, until it was closed by Justinian for its supposed pagan leanings. Interestingly enough, Plato's invitation to ascend beyond perception on an intellectual and emotional level became a point of departure for many theologians, from the Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus to St. Augustine, in addition to countless later philosophers within the secular tradition.

Freud

"Sometimes a male river eel is just a male river eel." -- Felix Blueblazes.

A loud war rages over Sigmund Freud and his legacy -- was he a scientist, or a fantasist? a healer or a charlatan? -- but the fact that no cease fire has emerged in the multiple decades since his death, nor any cozy nor cool detente been reached, indicates the staying power of his oeuvre. Freud's grip on us extends far beyond the realm of the academics, however, as Freudian concepts such as "anal-retentiveness" and "phallic symbol" have become easily absorbable constituents of the pop lexicon.

Born on this day in 1856 in Freiburg, Moravia, Freud was an exceptional student. He initially considered going into law or literary criticism -- both disciplines known for their interpretive manhandling of texts and utterances -- but instead turned his attention to natural science, entering the University of Vienna in 1873 and working with Brücke and Helmholtz. His earliest scientific paper was on male river eels (1877), but he later turned to human pathology, studying aphasia and infantile cerebral paralysis.

He graduated in 1881 and began a clinical research fellowship at Vienna General Hospital, where his research on the effects of cocaine prompted a colleague to embrace its use as a substitute for morphine in eye surgeries. In 1885, Freud went to Paris on scholarship and studied with the neuropathologist Jean Charcot, who was interested in the condition of "hysteria" -- then thought to be a nervous disorder linked to gynecological conditions and therefore afflicting only women. When he returned to Vienna, Freud presented a lecture on "male hysteria" which he claimed to have observed in Paris, but he was roundly humiliated by his colleagues for his outlandish view that such a thing could even exist.

At that point, Freud "withdrew from academic life and ceased to attend the learned societies," although as a practicing neuropathologist he would continue his research on nervous disorders. With Josef Breuer, he used hypnosis to treat "Anna O.," a young "hysteric." Their account of the experiment was published as Studies in Hysteria (1895), and in it, they described a treatment method called "catharsis," in which a patient relives a traumatic event under hypnosis; they posited that the resulting emotional discharge could relieve the patient of certain types of neuropathological blindness or paralysis. Freud's fruitful partnership with Breuer fell apart, however, over Freud's insistence that neurotic symptoms were produced as a psychological defense against repressed unacceptable sexual fantasies and drives.

In the half decade following Studies in Hysteria, Freud embarked on a "Project" to confirm this theoretical neurophysiological basis for psychology, aided by his exploratory correspondence with physician Wilhelm Fleiss as well as a period of intense "self-analysis" over ambivalent feelings toward his recently deceased father. On the therapeutic side, he abandoned hypnosis in favor of "free association," the provocation of stream-of-consciousness utterances from his patients that Freud believed provided a window on the unconscious mind.

From this period of isolation, although he failed to complete his "Project" successfully (he abandoned the desire to find observable, quantifiable biological causes for neuroses, although his methods would continue to have the buzz of biological determinism about them), at the age of 44 he emerged with the beginnings of a comprehensive theory of psychoanalysis, first in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), a philosophical memoir in which he theorized that dreams contained symbolic clues to unconscious conflicts -- initiating the kind of textual interpretation and search for meaning in what would otherwise be seen as casual phenomena that would inhabit his analytical approach for the rest of his life. He continued to define his new "science" in The Psychology of Everyday Life (1904), in which Freud analyzed slips of the tongue (known today as "Freudian slips") and other mental "accidents" as further clues of inner conflict, and in Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), in which he boldly contended that adult neurosis was generated by unconscious crises of childhood sexual identity, embodied in the "Oedipal complex," an unarticulated childhood desire for sexual validation from one's opposite-sex parent.

While his theories were denounced by the old guard of mind-scientists, they were compelling enough to win a host of youthful admirers, such as Alfred Adler, Carl Jung and Otto Rank. Although all 3 of these star pupils would eventually bitterly break away from Freud (Adler would downplay the relative importance of unconscious sex drives in favor of the conscious drive for self-betterment; Jung would subordinate Freud's sex drive analysis to a consideration of the higher calling of the "collective unconscious"; and Rank would move on over the autocratic style of psychoanalytic treatment methods), Freud's views would continue to hold sway over an army of psychoanalysts around the world; and history tends to show the essential influence of Freud's habits of interpretation on his ex-Freudians, evidencing the propagation of Freud's thought through the protesting theories of his critics and former followers. In short, his definition of a relationship between the unconscious mind and one's observable behavior changed everything.

From 1905 to the early 1920s, Freud published numerous elucidations and applications of his theories (including Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, in which he proposed eros, the life instinct, and thanatos, the death instinct, as the two principal, opposing and interlocking, motivating forces in humans) as he settled comfortably into the role of cigar-smoking, anecdote-telling Father of his own Movement. In 1923, coincident with being diagnosed with cancer of the jaw (launching 16 years of surgery, culminating in his jaw being replaced with a prosthesis), Freud further delineated his topography of the unconscious in The Ego and the Id. In it, he detailed his influential theory of human personality, involving the clash of the "id" (the infantile, biological engine of pleasure) and the "superego" (the regulating conscience) on the battlefield of the "ego" (the conscious personality) -- resulting in a new definition of therapy as an attempt to mitigate the harshness of the superego.

With the rise of the Nazis, psychoanalysis was banned in Germany, and when Hitler invaded Austria in 1938, Freud fled and resettled in London, where he died on September 23, 1939.

Freud's hobby of turning his theories on the creators and objects of art and literature has been amply rewarded (or avenged) over the years: in works by D.M. Thomas (The White Hotel), Irving Stone (The Passions of the Mind), John Irving (Hotel New Hampshire), Anthony Burgess (The End of the World News: An Entertainment) and E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime), Freud has taken a turn as protagonist or colorful cameo personality; and Freud himself has been portrayed in films by the likes of Montgomery Clift (Freud, 1962), Alan Arkin (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, 1976) and Alec Guinness (Lovesick, 1983), most often for cartoon effect, such is the pop cultural stickiness of his image and his interpretive constructs.

Marx

Much maligned by the post-Soviet world as a symbol of what the Soviets stood for, if Karl Marx were alive today he would no doubt be flattered by the attention, energized by his critics, but probably mystified by his identification with the Soviets, as he was when he learned before his death that a party in France had called itself a "Marxist" party; his response: "I, at least, am not a Marxist."

Born on this day in 1818 in Trier, Germany, Karl Marx was descended from a long line of rabbis on his mother's side. Marx's father Heinrich had changed his surname from "Levi" to "Marx" shortly before Karl's birth and converted to Lutheranism, hoping to take his place as a lawyer and community leader in Trier. While taking pro-monarchial stands in public, Heinrich privately raised his son Karl on the revolutionary, democratic writings of Locke and Voltaire. Young Karl devoured it all, in addition to all of the literature and poetry he could get his hands on, becoming, in his teens, a precocious scholar of Homer and Shakespeare with the encouragement of the Marxes' aristocratic neighbor, Baron Ludwig von Westphalen.

While words became his passion, Marx also developed an intense affection for Baron von Westphalen's daughter, a pretty and popular girl 5 years his senior named Jenny; and by the time Marx left Trier for the University of Bonn in 1835, they were secretly contemplating marriage. Heinrich Marx's plan was for his son to follow him into the law, but at first Marx seemed intent only to study beer, as co-president of Bonn's Trier Tavern Club; brawling (one scuffle with a Bonn gang resulted in a sword slash over Marx's eye); and the composition of love poems to Jenny, who consented to be his fiancée in 1836. His father, irked by the engagement and angry about his son's "rampaging" in Bonn, called for Karl's transfer to the University of Berlin. There, Marx did manage to come to the realization that he had no future as a poet, but yet the study of the law still took a back seat to his newly-found passion, the controversial philosophy of the late Berliner, G.W.F. Hegel. Embracing a new regimen that would last for most of the rest of his life, Marx eschewed company and poured over academic texts all night by candlelight, smoking cheap cigars and sipping cheap ale. With the idea of becoming a professor, Marx completed a doctoral thesis likening the debates over Hegel to the disputes between followers of Epicurus and Democritus.

Marx's literary antics, however -- anonymously penning a spoof against the Prussian monarchy, for one -- undermined both the pursuit of his doctorate (he finally received one from Jena, on a correspondence basis, in 1841) and his dreams of landing a job as a professor, so in 1842 he moved to Cologne and took over the helm of a small liberal newspaper, Rheinische Zeitung. Within 5 months, Marx's paper was shut down by the government for his complaints about local housing conditions and his criticism of the Czar Nicholas I.

He married Jenny in 1843, and moved to Paris, where he became aligned with the communists (then supporters of the utopian socialism of Etienne Cabet) and assumed the editorship of a journal-in-exile that opposed the Prussian government, which failed shortly thereafter when distribution in Germany became impossible. In Paris, Brussels and Cologne, he earned a reputation as a combative, intellectually acute "wild boar" (to paraphrase Jenny Marx), and was kicked from city to city by impatient officials (at least once on the direct intervention of Frederick William IV).

Among his Paris admirers was Friedrich Engels, the son of a rich industrialist, who would become Marx's lifelong colleague, apologist and benefactor. In an effort to set forth the principles of a burgeoning anti-bourgeois radical movement, Marx and Engels wrote the 21-page Communist Manifesto (1848), a utopian polemic, published in the midst of the riots leading to the abdication of Louis Phillippe in France and similar unrest in Berlin, Prague and Vienna, which called for workers to throw off the bourgeoisie and establish a property-less, classless society. Ultimately booted from Cologne and banished to a town in Brittany after using part of his mother's inheritance to buy "blood-red ribbons" for the Paris Communists, Marx finally moved his family to London's Soho district in 1849.

Living in dire poverty, he eked out a living as a journalist, occasionally speaking out as a leader of the First International (a group of radicals who had played a small role in the Paris Commune of 1871), while tending to his true calling -- occupying a dark corner of the British Museum, reading Adam Smith and David Ricardo and countless econometric studies and tracts, in preparation for the writing of his life's work, which would come to be known as Das Kapital (1867-94). In effect, it would be a top-to-bottom study of capitalism with an eye toward exposing its inherent structural flaws.

Picking up where the Communist Manifesto left off, much of what became influential in Marx's thought among the Russians, the Chinese and their constituents can be found within its dense pages. His "historical materialism" was simply a theory about history in which Marx held that the history of society is the history of class struggles -- contemporarily, in 19th century Europe, the struggles between the bourgeoisie (big capitalists) and the property-less proletariat. Impinging on this class conflict and the social relations inherent in the activity of producing goods were "production forces" -- not just human labor, but technological advancements and other popular currents. For the production forces that exist in a given economy, according to Marx, there is a set of social relations which will, as a result of conflicts or otherwise, naturally coalesce around them, ultimately inspiring an enabling superstructure of laws, political institutions, religion, art and philosophy. Thus, for Marx there is a kind of self-feeding inevitability, or "historical determinism," to human processes that arises out of conflict.

In Das Kapital, Marx further defends and elaborates this thesis, introducing the "labour theory of value" and the "theory of surplus value" to illustrate how the engines of capitalism deprive the worker of the true value of his or her labor, showing the chinks in the armor of 19th century capitalism that would result in the next big change. Marx's most passionate writing describes the rise of capitalism, its inherent miseries, and its trend toward the centralization of production and socialization of labor which ultimately will cause capitalism as we know it to "burst asunder."

Although it was clear to Marx that the activism of the proletariat would be an essential ingredient in the demise of capitalism, Marx also suggested that for change to take hold, there could be no skipping of steps: the next phase, the hoped-for classless society, could only occur as capitalism reached its most mature, hopelessly self-immolating zenith. Impatient disciples such as Lenin and Mao summarily ignored this aspect of Marx, of course, taking barely post-feudal agrarian societies and violently yanking them to a version of a communistic society Marx never actually envisioned. Indeed, Marx never actually described the post-capitalistic society in any detail, arguing that it wasn't his job to "draw up recipes for the cookshops of the future." When asked who would shine shoes in a post-capitalist society, Marx replied (with tongue firmly in cheek), "You should."

Two of Marx's indelicate phrases -- "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and "religion is the opiate of the masses" -- were writerly impertinences: in the former, he was describing what he saw as an inevitable temporary state of affairs as the institutions of capitalism violently came tumbling down, to wither away completely upon the emergence of a classless society; in the latter, he merely referred to the comfort workers take in worship when all else is drudgery. Although not religious himself, Marx did charitably observe, "We can forgive Christianity much, because it taught us the worship of the child."

Marx's influence on the West, apart from the radical activities of party regulars, was to form the basis of a critique of the social superstructure, enabling the Western Left to trace the ideological roots of Western law, politics, literature and other institutions back to the economic structures on which they are based. To those who would argue, say, that the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights are autonomous embodiments of "liberty," Marx might say that this was a "false consciousness" and that the point of view fails to understand or acknowledge the ways in which those laws are designed to promote the economic status quo in the service of the ruling bourgeoisie.

Also essential to the Marxist critical arsenal was Marx's concept of "alienation," first articulated in his unpublished "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" (1844) -- the notion that human beings are not "themselves" in a capitalist society in which they lose the full value of their labor, that they are not permitted to fulfill their full human potential. In Marx's view of alienation, those who continue to see Marx as a prescient thinker on economic issues -- one who would have been unsurprised by globalization, accounting scandals or the rise of Wal-Mart -- find a hopeful vision of a post-capitalist society in which humanity takes precedence over property.

Marx himself was, however, an abject slave and victim of capitalism -- always behind in his bills, relying on Engels' handouts, losing some of his children to illnesses of poverty. He died poor and relatively obscure on March 14, 1883 in London -- but at his funeral in Highgate Cemetery, Engels, at least, knew that his friend's name would not be forgotten.

Categories: Philosophy, Economics, Marxism

Kant

David Hume had left the upper floors of Western philosophy in a most untidy state with the publication of An Inquiry into Human Understanding in 1740: standing ruthlessly on the principle that all knowledge is based on experience, Hume argued that the concept of Causation, among other bedrock concepts, was an unsupportable belief, since it could never really be experienced. While this (almost nihilist) declaration might have been akin to a market crash leading a number of weakly diversified philosopher-investors to jump out of the tower windows, Immanuel Kant would not be so easily disheartened. He would simply pick up a broom and start sweeping.

The son of a genial leather cutter and his uneducated but practical and intelligent wife, born on this day in 1724 in Konigsberg, East Prussia, Kant grew up in relative poverty. At 18, he began studying theology at the University of Konigsberg, but soon his mind wandered to Newton, mathematics and the sciences. When his father died in 1746, Kant and his 5 sisters were penniless, and Kant was forced to leave the University without a degree and to eke out a living as a tutor to the children of the country-gentry. Although the pay was meager, the little man was dressed well by his patrons and encouraged to mingle, all of which drew him out of his cold, hard shell long enough for him to practice at dry wit and a diffident social grace.

At 31, he left the comfort of his patronage and returned to the University to finish his degree, taking up as a junior lecturer in the sciences at large for 15 years -- often drawing a crowd from outside the University who came to enjoy his shrewd and vivid use of language (characteristics which were regrettably not present in his notoriously turgid written works). During this period he immersed himself in the works of Newton, Leibniz, Hume and especially Rousseau, and cheerfully simmered in them while developing his eccentric daily routine which he would maintain for the rest of his life -- dining, writing, walking, and so on, all at an unvaried, precise time of day, come sun or storm. He grew impatient with Leibniz, and began to be convinced by Hume's destruction of metaphysics, until one day, in a flash, he believed he knew how he could restore order to the post-Hume world.

In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant agreed with Hume that innate ideas were a myth, but countered that experience could not be accessed without knowledge; Space, Time, Quality, Quantity, Relation and Causality might be subjective concepts, but without them experience would not be sensible. Kant promoted these "categories" as articles of "pure" or "a priori reason," things that could be known prior to experience. Kant also distinguished between "analytic" judgments (assertions which by their meaning alone are logically absurd if denied, e.g., "all wives are married") and "synthetic" judgments, often cast as laws of nature (such as Newton's third law of physics, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction") which we cannot know through experience alone -- they can be denied without logical absurdity, but their truth and necessity are evident without exhaustive observation of "every action."

Hume had argued that all judgments are either "analytic a priori" or "synthetic" and based on experience ("a posteriori"), but Kant holds, in support of the metaphysically knowable, that concepts in geometry and mathematics, for example, are synthetic judgments that are known prior to experience ("synthetic a priori") -- in effect, that geometry represents a set of not exhaustively experience-able rules about Space, and mathematics represents a set of not exhaustively experience-able rules about Time or Quantity.

Underlying all of that was Kant's highly influential rendering of human psychology, showing the distinction between perceiving (sensing and apprehending particulars) and thinking (understanding and applying concepts to particulars), and the view that because of the conceptual overlays which are necessary in order for humans to understand the things they experience, that we can never know the real world (the "thing-in-itself"), only the thing as perceived and processed.

In 1786, Kant found himself the target of a witch hunt in the court of Frederick William II for denying proofs of the existence of God in Pure Reason, leading him to promise to the king that he would refrain from writing about religion. The king died in 1787, however, and Kant broke his silence in Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in which he studies the metaphysical grounds for morality, in effect to bring God back into the equation. There he stated his famous "categorical imperative": "Act only in accord with a principle which you would at the same time will to be a universal law."

In 1790, he published Critique of Judgment, which dealt with aesthetics and attempted to articulate an a priori principle that makes judgments about beauty possible. He never finished his final project, a patently unreadable fragment he intended to call Transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics, succumbing following a stroke at age 78 on February 12, 1804.

Kant's resurrection of metaphysics from the clutches of Hume's deadening skepticism launched the next wave of German Idealist philosophy, which culminated in the work of Hegel; his categorical imperative is a concept which lingers through the work of Rawls and Habermas; and his approach to perception and thought contributed to the development of Gestalt psychology and laid the groundwork for major movements in experimental psychology.

Stone Cold Jefferson

"Doesn't it give you chills?," asks a woman standing inside John Russell Pope's justly praised memorial to Thomas Jefferson on the south side of the Tidal Basin in Washington.

Yes, that about sums it up: we admire Jefferson-the-icon enough to give him a breathtaking monument, but as a man he leaves us a little cold. Sure, there are Jefferson cultists among us, but as much as we Americans adore our innovators, we sometimes rebel against our icy know-it-alls, especially when we get a whiff of their intellectualism; we love our founding fathers, and square-jawed Jefferson is principal among them, but few among us can identify with the kind of nation he wanted to create. We even hold a special place in our hearts for our presidents, but Jefferson himself regarded this status so poorly that he neglected to mention it among his achievements on his self-written epitaph.

Even among today's political philosophers, there is disagreement about the meaning and significance of Jeffersonian thought -- ranging from the depiction of Jefferson as a founder of modern American conservatism (based on his opinion that "that government is best which governs least"), to the idea that he is the father of progressive liberalism (for statements such as "laws and institutions . . . must advance to keep pace with the times" and "a little rebellion now and then . . . is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government"), to the view that Jefferson was at best a woolly-headed dilettante as a theorist without anything resembling a coherent philosophy -- to the bizarre notion, advanced by one lunacritic, that the 20th century leader who best embodied Jeffersonian values was Pol Pot.

Then, of course, there's the story of his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and the slave children he supposedly sired with her after the death of his wife (a charge that recent DNA tests have established to be "highly probable," although this is still a matter of dispute); mix these circumstances with his then-radical assertion that "all men are created equal," his periodic calls for the end to the slave trade, and his simultaneously harsh assessments of the character of African-Americans, and we cannot help but come away with a disturbing sense of his asymmetry as a man, at best -- or of his hypocrisy, at worst.

These paradoxes, his apparent feet of clay, tend to move us here in the 21st century to try to understand him as we do the national politicians of our own time -- flawed giants we hate to love, and love to hate, in whose hands we place our collective fate. It is perhaps best to remember him as a multi-faceted man, in a poetic echo of John Kennedy's famous tribute, that an assembled gathering of Nobel prize winners was "the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Born on this day in 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, the son of a social climbing Virginia planter, young Thomas Jefferson studied Greek, Latin and French with local parsons until, shortly after the death of his father, at age 17 he enrolled at the College of William and Mary. At 19, he began reading law with George Wythe, and after an extraordinarily long clerkship, entered the Bar at age 24.

After 2 years of law practice (during which he spent a good deal more time focusing on the initial design and construction of Monticello, his neo-Palladian plantation manse, with which he continued to tinker throughout the rest of his life, adding weather devices, clocks, retractable beds and innumerable other features of his own design), he followed in his father's footsteps by getting elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he quickly aligned himself with the anti-British faction. In 1774, around the time that he inherited his father-in-law's acreage and 135 slaves, he penned A Summary View of the Rights of British America, drawing upon the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers -- an assiduously well-reasoned argument against control by British Parliament which was intended as a set of instructions for Virginia's first delegates to the Continental Congress; published anonymously, as his authorship came to be known it earned him a minor following as a theoretician of liberty among other anti-British politicians throughout the colonies.

Shortly thereafter, as a member of the Continental Congress, he was the logical choice of a specially charged committee (consisting of Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Sherman and Robert R. Livingston) to draft what would become America's Declaration of Independence; his 1,322-word text (in final form, after some minor wordsmithing by his congressional colleagues, as well as the deletion of his condemnation of the slave trade at the demand of Southern delegates) was, in his own words, an attempt "to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent."

The Declaration made him famous, or rather infamous in some quarters, and he returned to the Virginia legislature with greater political clout during the Revolution, pushing through reforms abolishing primogeniture and establishing religious freedom in Virginia. The war came to Virginia as Jefferson entered the statehouse as Virginia's governor in 1779, a period which would not prove to be Jefferson's finest hour: when the British invaded Richmond in 1781, Jefferson resigned as governor and fled on horseback to Monticello; with the British now in pursuit of Jefferson as one of the foremost of the traitors to the crown, Jefferson and his family fled again, this time to Poplar Forest, near Lynchburg, Virginia (the later site of his neoclassical octagonal retreat, which he completed in 1812), where he remained in seclusion until 1783 -- humiliated and accused by some of cowardice under fire (although an official inquiry later cleared him of the charge).

There he devoted himself to writing Notes on the State of Virginia (published in 1786). Ostensibly a statistical snapshot of the demographics and economic conditions of the state, Jefferson also devoted a large section of the work to natural history, countering the prevalent European view that the flora and fauna of the New World were inferior to those of Europe. Furthermore, throughout the finished product he provided a more comprehensive view of his ideas for political and social reform -- touching upon slavery, native Americans, education, religion and his desire to cultivate and encourage a decentralized, minimally-governed agrarian society, with gentlemen farmers, ample elbow-room and workshop-sized industry, without the plague of a corporate aristocracy; it would be the touchstone of Jeffersonian philosophy, largely written in the detached manner of a man who had given up on his own ambitions to effect change.

With the death of his wife Martha in 1782, however, he cut short his premature retirement and spent another term in the Continental Congress, where he helped to establish the decimal system of American coinage that we use today. He sat out of one fundamental phase of post-Revolutionary America -- the drafting and enactment of the Constitution -- while serving as minister to France (1785-9), although he cast his lot with his colleague James Madison on the scene, ultimately supporting the idea of a strong federal government in exchange for the reservation of the freedoms contained in the Bill of Rights, perhaps in reaction to the excesses he saw in the French Revolution.

Jefferson returned to the newly formed United States to become the first Secretary of State, under President Washington, in 1790, but as his disagreements with Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton over dealing with Britain and France grew more intense, Jefferson resigned in 1793.

He returned to Monticello, content to farm and tinker, but as Washington looked forward to retirement, Madison began to agitate for Jefferson's election as president, hoping to avoid Vice President Adams' imminent favoring of Britain over France; although Jefferson lost the election in 1796, under the Constitution, as the second highest vote-getter, he was elected vice-president -- a position Jefferson loathed, but nonetheless used as a platform to criticize aspects of Adams' Federalist program, including the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Portrayed as the friend of individual liberty and states' rights, Jefferson beat Adams in the 1800 re-match, and was reelected for a second term as president in 1804. It is surmised that Jefferson's greatest accomplishment as president was his purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803, doubling the size of the U.S. for a mere $15 million. In 1806 he dispatched his private secretary Meriwether Lewis and soldier William Clark to explore the territory and provide a comprehensive report on its flora, fauna and ethnography, an executive act still celebrated as the grandest of national gestures to the spirit of discovery, for the benefit of science and knowledge. He also signed into law a bill that abolished the importation of slaves beginning in 1808; but his effectiveness was called into question with the disastrous economic results of his embargo against Britain and France, and when his second term was complete, he was relieved to be retiring to Monticello for the last time, to engage in winemaking and other agricultural and scientific pursuits.

He was, however, deeply in debt due to bad business decisions, and it was not until he sold his 6,500-volume book collection to the Library of Congress (recently gutted when the British burned Washington during the War of 1812) that he was able to recover a comfortable financial footing. His final years were devoted to his establishment of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville (an attempt at fulfilling his vision of an education enabling every citizen "to know his rights" under government), for which he designed the buildings, chose the faculty and served as rector.

As every schoolchild knows, Thomas Jefferson died a few hours before his alternating friend-and-foe John Adams, the other surviving founding father, on July 4, 1826 -- the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence -- a poetically well-ordered conclusion which cannot help but direct our eye back to what is fundamental about Jefferson's message: the unassailable common sense of liberty.

I Think, Therefore I Am

"The view of nature which predominated in the West down to the eve of the Scientific Revolution was that of an enchanted world. Rocks, trees, rivers, and clouds were all seen as wondrous, alive, and human beings felt comfortable in this environment. The cosmos, in short, was a place of belonging . . . Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it . . . I do not wish to suggest that Descartes is the lone architect of our current outlook, but only that modern definitions of reality can be identified with specific planks in his scientific platform." -- Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World.

Rene Descartes was born on this day in 1596 in La Haye, Touraine, France.

Educated at a Jesuit school founded by Henry IV, during a commemoration of the assassination of Henry's death, young Descartes became intrigued by references in one of the eulogies to Galileo's discovery of certain moons of Jupiter. Galileo soon became Descartes' intellectual hero -- a pioneer thinker and mathematician who sought objective answers, leaving dogma and the morass of moral uncertainty behind in the service of knowing what was knowable, but hidden.

At 21, Descartes' impatience with scholastic texts led him to military service, where he had a mystical awakening of sorts. On November 10, 1619, after a day filled with reflection as he waited for active duty, Descartes had a dream that he was destined to found a unified scientific movement based on a method for the proper management of human reason. From that point on he was single-minded in his pursuit of reason. Preferring to learn from travel and encounter rather than dusty, hopelessly muddled books, Descartes arrived in Paris and stunned a gathering of scholars there with a first, furtive attempt to free philosophical inquiry from scholastic rigidity through logical analysis, offering "12 evident reasons" for the falsity of a statement which was widely considered to be true. He then apologized to the thoroughly convinced crowd that his methodology was not yet mature.

Despite the danger of such independent thinking, he was encouraged by a Roman Catholic cardinal who was present at the gathering to complete his methodology, that it was "God's will" that he do so. In 1633, as Galileo and his solar-centered view of our planetary system were being condemned by the Inquisition, Descartes had completed an astronomical treatise called Le Monde. He considered burning his manuscript, because it too reflected the Copernican cosmology which the Church had condemned, but instead he set it aside with the idea of having it published posthumously.

In 1637, Descartes published The Discourse on Method, which articulated his method of systematic doubt for the first time, distilled as follows: (1) admit as true only what is free from all doubt; (2) divide all difficult problems into analyzable elements; (3) pass synthetically from the easy to the difficult; and (4) record the steps of your reasoning without omission, so they can be retraced like a trail of bread crumbs back into the darkness if necessary.

Descartes' aim was to blow away the old science, which started with axioms and assumptions, and make humans the possessors of their own universe by pushing reason to calculated, practical effects. "I think, therefore I am," seemed to be the only proposition which was free from doubt (because one must exist in order to doubt at all) in his metaphysical inquiry, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641); it became his first principle. Further meditations led him to conclude that thinking is what defines the essence of the individual, the body being a separate, distinct and perhaps illusory substance, accessible only through one's intellect. Perhaps it is not surprising that a man who could find his future framed so vividly in a dream should have exalted 'the mind' over the 'the body' so definitively.

Descartes' Meditations were celebrated throughout Europe; although theologians found Descartes' questioning of what were once considered to be basic principles to be discomforting, despite the fact that the Meditations contained Descartes' proof of the existence of God, and scientific empiricists, led by Pierre Gassendi, did not appreciate Descartes' distrust of the senses and experimental method. The opposition of organized religion posed the more serious threat at the time. One theologian, Reformed pastor Gysbertus Voetius, had Descartes tried in absentia for "libel," after which he was sentenced to be burned at the stake.

Meanwhile, encouraged by his friendship with Elizabeth of Bohemia while in exile in the Hague, Descartes wrote Principles of Philosophy (1644), proposing, as he had once dreamed, a science with metaphysical reasoning as its foundation, physics as its set of logically derived regulations, and all of the other branches of science, from medicine to astronomy, as its beneficiaries.

His final work, The Passions of the Soul (1649) takes his "Cartesian duality" to its logical extreme, proposing that all psychological manifestations can be traced to mechanical causes -- that human bodies are, in essence, automatons with souls located in the pineal gland. (Meanwhile, Descartes viewed animals as soulless, giving a justification for using animals in scientific research which to this day brands him as an enemy to animal rights activists.) These views had a profound effect on medicine, which for hundreds of years afterward officially ignored the potential impact of psychological stresses back onto physiology; it also foreshadowed the notion of artificial intelligence, thinking conducted by robots.

Legend holds that Descartes had himself built a "life-like" hydraulic robot-servant which he called "Francine" (named after his only child, an illegitimate daughter by one of his servants, who had died at age 5) whose realistic movements so scared a ship's captain on Descartes' journey to Holland that the captain, believing that the Brigitte Helm-like puppet was the creation of the devil, had it thrown overboard.

In 1649, Descartes was invited to the court of Christina of Sweden, who became his enthusiastic pupil in the new science and philosophy. Within a year, however, Descartes grew deathly ill from pneumonia, and died on February 11, 1650 in Stockholm holding the Queen's hand.

In addition to the profound effect he had on the shape of philosophy and science, Descartes employed his own advice to divide difficult problems into analyzable elements by founding analytic geometry, by which he plotted algebraic equations as points on a grid.