Offerings, Plans, Reflections

Relativism and more Relativism; Paul Feyerabend on Evil;

Dear all,

No events for the next month! I hope you enjoyed the winter series. It felt like it went really well. If winter has been hard for you, I hope the weekly events made it a bit easier.

There is not a whole lot of news to report this week. The new print issue will be out in around a week, so I will be discussing that a fair bit in next Sunday’s newsletter. Other than that, I am looking forward to a fairly quiet March before things get busy again from 27th with the opening event of the new series.

Offerings

Your Sunday Reads!
Yes, we have uploaded 2x new essays for you today! After I received this week’s reflection from Carl Hutchinson on Paul Feyerband and relativism (see bottom of this newsletter), we thought it would be good to upload two fantastic essays on relativism that we have been sitting on for a while. Relativism is such a massive topic. So many people think it is just the worst idea, opening the flood-gates for all manner of bad things from post-truth and science denialism to the wholsale collapse of western civilisation. But a lot of smart people have defended some version of it for the past few millennia, so there must be something to it. Right?

“The Politics of Relativism” by Maria Baghramian offers an extremely clear and compelling account of the various ways in which relativism interacts with different political ideologies, from liberalism to fascism. While being sympathetic to many of the stated reasons for being a relativist (greater tolerance of opposing views etc.), Baghramian rejects the temptations of relativism.

“Was it Always True that Slavery was Wrong?” by Catherine Wilson takes us on a journey through Dogmatic Realism, Anthropological Antirealism, and the possibility of moral progress as she attempts to answer the titular question and the relativistic challenge it presents.

Events
For those of you who missed the final events in our recent series or would like to re-watch them or share them with others, we have now uploaded the video recording of:
"The Good-Enough Life": Avram Alpert in conversation with Chi Rainer Bornfree
"Hannah Arendt and The Human Condition": Samantha Rose Hill in conversation with Brad Evans
"Wonder’s Politics": Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and Misty Morrison with Danielle Celermajer

Plans

We will be continuing our collaboration with Brad Evans this autumn with a series of digital events on “States of Disappearance”. The series will ask what forced absence and total human denial means for societies and how we might better understand such violence in the 21st Century. Speakers will include Bret Davis, Adrian Parr, and Gil Anidjar.

We will be announcing the line-up for our spring/summer classes/groups shortly. Hopefully in next Sunday’s email.

Reflections

This week’s reflection from Carl Hutchinson inspired us to upload the two essays on relativism mentioned earlier. In it, he explores Paul Feyerabend’s unusual/outrageous/brilliant/obvious/scandalous (pick one!) ideas about evil:

Paul Feyerabend was one of philosophy’s more colourful and exhilarating characters, described by Gilbert Ryle as “mischievous like a bag of monkeys”. Indeed, Feyerabend’s penchant for posturing, polemic and rhetoric often concealed the more serious questions he was addressing. Primarily a philosopher of science, Feyerabend was famed for attacking the idea that there is such a thing as a scientific method that set science apart from other modes of inquiry. To drive home this point, he would liken science to voodoo, witchcraft, and astrology. However, his underlying idea is an important one and is well explained by John Horgan:

The human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble, too often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he truly believed that it had no more claim to truth than did astrology. Quite the contrary. Feyerabend attacked science because he recognized – and was horrified by – its power, its potential to stamp out the diversity of human thought and culture. He objected to scientific certainty for moral and political, rather than epistemological, reasons.   

Feyerabend was horrified by the urge to confer objectivity and necessity onto that which he considered to be subjective and contingent: “Most of the misery in our world, wars, destruction of minds and bodies, endless butcheries, are caused not by evil individuals but by people who have objectivised their personal wishes and inclinations and thus have made them inhuman”.

We tend to think of evil as demonic evil, i.e., evil done for evil’s sake. Terry Eagleton suggests that one of the reasons the popular idea of demonic evil is so useful for some people is that it serves as a “pre-emptive strike against those who might appeal to social conditions in seeking to understand” why a person committed a particular act. Demonic evil, as Eagleton puts it, “has no relation to anything beyond itself, such as a cause”, so “the less sense it makes, the more evil it is”. Demonic evil tries to capture something that exists beyond very, very bad, and thus beyond simple immorality. This is part of its sublime appeal. And yet it is precisely this move to partition off demonic evil as a kind of separate ontological category that Feyerabend, like Eagleton, objects to as it blinds us to the evil that we do, often stupidly, but more often idealistically – in the name of the good. As Feyerabend puts it:

I say that Auschwitz is an extreme manifestation of an attitude that still thrives in our midst. It shows itself in the treatment of minorities in industrial democracies; in education...which most of the time consists in turning wonderful young people into colourless and self-righteous copies of their teachers; it becomes manifest in the nuclear threat, the constant increase in the number and power of deadly weapons and the readiness of so-called patriots to start a war compared with which the holocaust will shrink into insignificance. It shows itself in the killing of nature and of “primitive” cultures with never a thought spent on those thus deprived of meaning for their lives; in the colossal conceit of our intellectuals, their belief that they know precisely what humanity needs and their relentless efforts to recreate people in their own, sorry image; in the infantile megalomania of some of our physicians who blackmail patients with fear, mutilate them and then persecute them with large bills; in the lack of feeling of many so-called searchers for truth who systematically torture animals, study their discomfort and receive prizes for their cruelty.

Feyerabend suggests that “there exists no difference whatsoever between the henchmen of Auschwitz and these ‘benefactors of mankind’ – life is misused for special purposes in both cases”. We may baulk at the extent of Feyerabend’s relativism, but he is at least prepared to formulate a general philosophical principle arising from the horrors of Auschwitz: when people objectivize their personal wishes and inclinations, thus making them inhuman, they are far more likely to misuse life in ways that we come to term evil.

Carl Hutchinson (not the comedian) is based in Dublin and is studying philosophy via the Open University. He is interested in ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

Ending

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Thanks for taking the time to read this. Comments and feedback about any of this always welcome.

Anthony Morgan
Editor