71. Judgments of good and bad

 I insert this extra item to follow up on comments on recent posts

In a comment on my discussion of forms of identification (in item 70 in this blog), Noud te Riele proposed that judgments of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are a primitive simplification of the world around us. My response was that while I would not readily judge people as good or bad, surely we can judge actions. We need such judgments for the expression of conflicting opinions in debates that are the source of the good life. In the present item I want to look at this issue more closely.

What might be the basis for this debate? It seems straightforward to look for it in ethics. In item 39, discussing the good life, I aligned myself with the virtue ethics of Aristotle, as opposed to the consequentialist, most often utilitarian view and the deontological, duty based ethics of Kant. In a consequentialist approach an action would be good if it is effective, if it yields intended or desirable outcomes. That makes sense, I think, but it is not enough, there is more. I would not go so far, however, as deontological ethics to proclaim a certain type of action to be universally bad or good, regardless of outcomes or circumstances. I would look at the action from the perspective of virtues that are relevant to the situation.

Now Aristotelian virtues, or variations upon them, are multiple and not necessarily commensurable: depending on the specific conditions of action, one virtue can enter into conflict with another. I gave examples, such as the terrible choice that Agamemnon had to make between the army he commanded and his daughter.

This means, then, that there can be several, perhaps many, sometimes conflicting aspects of good and bad, and in that sense the simple-minded notion of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ is indeed crude, as Noud claims. But one can still, and in fact does, consider good and bad in the light of each of the relevant virtues. What would be good and what bad concerning Agamemnon’s responsibilities as a commander? And concerning his responsibilities as a father? And then the terrible choice: which of the two should prevail? Here there is indeed no indubitable, clear choice of good and bad. But judgments of good and bad still play a role in the quandary. Agamemnon's wife judged differently and had him killed for his choice.

I return to the example that Fransje Broekema brought into the discussion earlier, of the parent who in trying to protect and educate her child (in protective identification) imposes her norms and rules (in projective identification), which can fetter the child too much, robbing it of the opportunity to discover its way for itself. Here there is a mix of good and bad. Being a parent myself I know how difficult it is to find a good balance between the two.

I refer also to my earlier discussion (in item 7) of the spirit of geometry vs. the spirit of finesse. In human affairs one argues in terms of good and bad, but in the spirit of finesse. It is not rocket science. 

70. Forms of identification

 In the preceding item I proposed that while empathy is needed for trust, identification can go too far, in that it may lock up or freeze the relationship, by being blind to conditions that require the relationship to be ended or revised. One reader of this blog, Fransje Broekema, indicated that there might be different forms of identification. I think she is right, and here I pick up that point.

Identification can become possessive or imposing, robbing the other of the freedom to go its own way. Fransje mentioned projective identification, where one imposes one’s own morals, rules or solutions on the other. This may be out of genuine concern, as a parent towards a child. Here projective identification is also protective identification. From emotional attachment and a feeling of responsibility it may be very difficult not to do so. That is why in puberty children sometimes have to take drastic action to wrest themselves loose to gain independence.

While in projective identification one tries to let the other align with oneself, it can also go the other way around, in submissive identification where one aligns with the other. This may be mimicry out of admiration or idolatry.

It can also be defensive identification. Here one identifies with someone who exerts negative power, in enforcement, coercion, or terror. A classic example is ‘Father Stalin’. His exercise of arbitrary, paranoid terror was too much to bear, and rather than facing it for what it was people convinced themselves that ‘the little father’ must have his good reasons for what he is doing, and his victims must somehow have deserved their fate. Out of this perverse identification, some people trusted Stalin to the end.

A similar case is the ‘Stockholm syndrome’, derived from a hostage situation in Stockholm, where hostages started to identify with the hostage taker, not only to placate him but also to convince themselves that he is in fact benevolent if only one understands his motives. This may have the beneficial effect of mollifying the hostage taker.

While empathy is necessary for trust, it is not sufficient, even though it should not go as far as identification. Feelings and words of empathy must be followed by commitment in deeds. It is not enough to say to someone in distress ‘I know how you feel’, but one should follow up with further discussion and suggestion what the other might do and how one might help. But one should not let this slide into projective identification.

I should also mention that empathy is not necessarily benevolent. By understanding how the other thinks, and ‘what makes him/her tick’, and perceiving the feelings of the other in reaction to one’s deeds, one is also better able to do him/her harm. Violent psychopaths can be very sensitive, very perceptive of feelings and emotions, apparently tender even, sometimes.

69. Sources of trust

Trust is emotional, since it is related to vulnerability, risk, fear, and hope. It depends on character. With less self-confidence one feels more vulnerable and less inclined to trust. It depends on experience. Disappointments reduce trust. Trust can also be rational, in an analysis of the motives and conditions for people to be reliable.

Trust depends on conditions. Under threat of survival trust will be less. If there is no alternative for partners, and they ‘are condemned to each other’, there is pressure to make trust work, as among marriage partners, and government departments.   

Rational analysis goes as follows. As indicated in the previous item in this blog it is useful to distinguish between reliance, which includes both control and trust beyond control. Control can be based on formal hierarchy (the trustor is the boss), a contract, dependence of the trustee on the trustor, or the need for the trustee to maintain his/her reputation. In one-sided dependence the most dependent submits to the power of the least dependent, and while this is not necessarily fatal, it is wise to aim at a balance of mutual dependence. 

There is also the possibility of a hostage: the trustor has something of value to the trustee and can threaten to treat it badly unless the trustee acts reliably. In old times that took the form of family or nobility surrendered to the trustor. Nowadays it typically takes the form of information that is sensitive to the trustee, such as knowledge concerning a product or technology. The trustor can threaten to make information public or to pass it on to a competitor of the trustee. Ït is a form of blackmail.

Beyond control, trust can be based on norms, morality or ethics, or on personal empathy or identification, or simply on routine: a relationship has become habitual and the question of reliability no longer comes up. Empathy is the ability to put oneself in the shoes of the partner, to understand his/her position and how he/she thinks. Identification goes further, in feeling a bond, thinking like the other, or making his/her fate part of one’s own. Empathy is needed for trust, but identification may go too far, locking a relationship up.

Trust and control are both complements (they go together) and substitutes (they replace each other). Control can never be complete and where control ends one must surrender to trust. And vice versa: trust can hardly be absolute, trust should not be blind, and where it ends one may want to have some control. But the more trust one has the less control one needs to exert, which gives more room and flexibility for the relationship.

The greater uncertainty is, concerning behaviour and conditions, and the more difficult it is to monitor conduct of the trustee, the more difficult it is to exert control, and the more one needs trust. That is the case, in particular, in innovation. There, one must leave room for the unexpected. And uncertainty limits the scope and force of contracts and monitoring of compliance.

I remind the reader that you are very welcome to post a comment, to which I will then respond. 

68. Trust: what is it?

Here I start a series in which I try to clarify the rich and slippery notion of trust: what is it, what is the basis for it, what are its limits, how does it work? Much is derived from my book Trust: forms, foundations, functions, failures and figures (Edward Elgar 2002).

Trust is a psychological state, a disposition that can lead to trusting behaviour.

What can one trust? The subject of trust is the trustor, the object is the trustee. One can trust things (the car) but it becomes interesting and more difficult when the object has a will of its own. One can trust a person but also an organization (e.g. on the basis of its reputation) or an industry (banking) or an economic system.

To trust one needs trust on all levels. People with good intentions may be caught in larger, countervailing interests. One needs trust in the people, the organization they work for and one has to take into account the pressures of survival on both. Will teaching ethics to bankers eliminate their misconduct? Bankers claim that they would prefer not to misbehave (taking too much risk and hiving it off on society; paying exorbitant bonuses) but can afford to do so only if other banks go along, and since all banks argue like that they lock each other up in their misconduct (in a prisoners’ dilemma). Thus one will either have to impose a way out of that dilemma or change financial markets to eliminate the incentives for misconduct. Ethical reform may help but does not suffice.

A distinction has been made between confidence and trust. With the first, one has no choice; one cannot regret to have become dependent, it was inevitable. Thus one speaks of confidence in the economy, or God, or the legal system.

Another important distinction is that between trust in competence, the technical ability to act in line with agreements, and trust in intentions, the will and commitment to do so according to the best of one’s ability, and not to cheat. Failure in competence requires a different response from failure in intentions.

A preliminary definition of trust may be: one is vulnerable to actions of an other and yet one feels that no great harm will be done. That leaves open many reasons to have trust.

A useful notion is that of reliance, which includes trust and control. The trustor may exert control over the trustee, for example with a contract, or as ‘the boss’. Trust goes beyond control, where the trustee is trustworthy on the basis of morality, ethics, friendship or custom or habit.

A narrower, tighter definition of trust then is that one expects no great harm to be done even though the trustee has both the opportunity and the incentive to cheat or to neglect the relationship, because his ethical stance will prevail. However, it is too much to expect the trustee to be loyal even at the cost of his/her own survival. The extent to which the trustee foregoes advantage at the expense of the trustor depends on his/her moral strength and on pressures of survival.

In sum, trust is a four-place predicate: the trustor (1) trusts the trustee (2) in some respect (3, competence, intentions), under certain conditions (4, pressures).

I will elaborate on these points in upcoming items.    

67. Problems of collaboration

 What are the risks of collaboration? First, there are risks of dependence. Collaboration is no problem as long as partners do not become dependent on each other and can easily step out when dissatisfied. But relationships without dependence are usually shallow. Dependence can arise from unique value of the partner, for which there is no replacement, from specific investments that have value only in the relationship, or because one is not allowed to step out (as in public administration). When dependence is one-sided the least dependent partner is tempted to use the resulting power to exact a greater share of jointly created value.

One remedy is to equalize dependence, in shared ownership of specific assets, offer of unique quality, or market position. One-sided dependence may also be mended by building coalitions with others to build countervailing power.

A second risk is that of spillover: unintended transfer of knowledge or competence that is expropriated or imitated and used to compete. This risk can be direct, in the partner becoming a competitor, or indirect, in spillover through the partner to a competitor with whom the partner collaborates. This risk has often been overestimated. The issue is not only whether sensitive information reaches a potential competitor, but also whether he then has the absorptive capacity for it, and the resources needed to exploit it, and the incentives to do so. If by the time all those conditions are fulfilled the information has become obsolete, the risk disappears.

One instrument of control of spillover is to demand exclusiveness: to forbid application in collaboration with third parties. For this one pays a price of locking the partner up in a conceptual prison. It is important for oneself that the partner keeps on learning and improving, and it is by engaging in relationships with others, also one’s competitors, perhaps especially one’s competitors, to tap from more varied sources of knowledge and competence, that the partner learns.

An important factor is reputation: partners are withheld from doing damage because it will affect their reputation and thereby options for future collaboration, also with others. . For this, it is important that a reliable reputation mechanism is in place.

Beyond control, one can aim for trust on the basis of values, ethics, morality or empathy, identification, friendship and routinization. Trust is a slippery and complex notion that I will discuss in some detail later in this blog.

In view of the problems it is tempting to integrate the collaborating parties under an overarching management with the authority to demand information, resolve conflicts and impose sanctions, in ways that would not be possible between separate, autonomous organizations. However, unified hierarchy mostly reduces variety as a source of ideas, reduces speed of decisions and implementation, and reduces the motivation to perform that comes from independence and one’s own responsibility to survive. The challenge is to resist this reflex of integration and to learn the art of managing the risks of collaboration between autonomous parties.

66. The value of collaboration

In preceding items I indicated the cognitive, ethical and spiritual value of collaboration. Here I go into its economic value. Contrary to common opinion, markets are not only about competition but also about collaboration. Conversely, collaboration is seldom free from rivalry and tension of conflicting interests. Here I discuss the advantages, in the following item the problems of collaboration.

Organizations, including firms, must have some focus of knowledge, competence, purpose, and governance (as I discussed in my book A cognitive theory of the firm, 2009). One should not aim to do everything. The task of organizations is to achieve efficiency in performing a set of specific tasks. For that, one cannot afford, to have to learn to understand each other, negotiate goals and procedures at every step. Some things need to be taken for granted. As a result, cognitive distance within organizations must be limited. However, that yields a form of myopia. To avoid that, in order to identify all relevant threats and opportunities, especially for innovation organizations need collaborative relationships with other organizations at a larger cognitive distance, to repair their myopia, in complementary cognition.

However, between organizations that need each other, in complementary cognition, mutual understanding and adjustment needs to be built, and as discussed in items 57 and 59 that requires so-called relation specific investments that require some minimum duration of the relationship to be recouped. Therefore I argued for optimal, not maximum flexibility of relationships. As a result, partners become mutually dependent, and a system of governance is required to deal with it, and that must be a system of give and take, acceptance of difference, and empathy for each other’s position and problems.

All this is far from the usual rhetoric of competition in markets that demands that one take every bit of advantage from others that one can. Rather than ensuring one’s survival it can jeopardize it. This does not mean that there is no competition, but that a trade off should be made between one’s own advantage available in isolation and one’s share in a greater advantage achieved in collaboration. Admittedly, the latter requires give and take, and reciprocity, which entails that at times one gives more than one takes, and when competition is so fierce that in order to survive one cannot afford that even for a moment, then indeed this type of collaboration becomes impossible.

However, competition is seldom so fierce. Especially when collaboration yields specialty products with high profit margins that competitors find it difficult to replace. That reduces competitive pressure, allowing for the give and take of collaboration to take place. 

That has consequences for prosperity. The usual argument for markets is that competition enforces maximum efficiency. But the other side of the coin is that it excludes the collaboration that is needed for innovation. Since so much emphasis is now laid on innovation the option of collaboration may contribute most to prosperity.

65. Otherhumanism

Traditional western humanism is focused on the self. I turn to another humanism that is oriented more towards the other, which I call otherhumanism. In this blog I developed arguments for it and I now bring them together.

In item 49 on freedom I argued that the self needs others to achieve the highest possible level of freedom: the freedom to escape from the prejudices of the self about what it should want.

In item 57 I argued that there is more or less cognitive distance between people, and that this difference yields a problem, in lack of mutual understanding, but also an opportunity for learning. If objective knowledge is impossible then testing our insights on what ‘others have made of it’ is the only chance we have to correct our errors.

In item 31 I summarized a cycle of invention in which application of existing knowledge and competence to novel contexts, with new challenges and opportunities, can lead to new knowledge and competence. In item 58 that insight was applied for a deeper insight into how communication, by fitting each other’s different insights into each other’s cognitive structures can lead to their transformation. That yields deeper insight into the importance of the other for learning by the self.

In language, there is Wittgenstein’s argument of the impossibility of a private language. The self needs the other to establish meaning and for making sense. In item 37 on the change of meaning I applied the theory of invention to change of meaning. Universals derive their meaning from specific cases and as abstractions from them are only temporary, forming a platform for application in novel contexts by which universals and their meanings shift.

In item 60 I discussed Nietzsche’s (mostly implicit) assumption that the self can rise above itself without the need for any other. In item 61 I discussed Levinas, as a polar opposite to Nietzsche, in recognition of the need of the self to open up to the other as a source of transcendence.

In sum, my argument for otherhumanism is as follows. Any hereafter as life after death is an illusion. The hereafter is not you yourself but the people and their environment that you leave behind. If you want to make your life worthwhile and dedicate yourself to the hereafter then the only way is dedication to others and to the society of the future. Dedication to others is not at the expense of yourself and life. The self needs others to escape from illusory certainties as well as doubt, to achieve the highest possible level of freedom, to achieve its potential, to develop and transcend itself, and thereby to utilize the unique gift of life.

This leads to a notion of the flourishing of life that goes beyond the life of the self, not in a claim to any absolute, universal good beyond the world, but in participation and contribution to the flourishing of others, during and after our life. 

The views and analyses that I present in this blog are perhaps more congenial with Eastern, in particular Chinese, philosophy than with Western philosophy. Later, in a sequel to the present blog, I will consider that in some detail. For the moment, let me just give a few indications. My otherhumanism seems close to the social humanism of Confucius, with its perspective of benevolence (although I do not much like the importance assigned to propriety, ritual and respect for authority). In Buddhism and in Chinese philosophy I find interest in change and impermanence, in different ways, which is congenial to my imperfection on the move. The Chinese notions of yin and yang, and later developments in neo-Confucianism (e.g. in the notions of opening and closing in the philosophy of Xiang Shili) seem to have some resemblance to my cycle of invention. There is a strong tradition of integrating thought and action, which is congenial to the pragmatism that I preach and practice.   

64. Nietzsche, Levinas and me

Both Nietzsche and Levinas wage opposition, as I do in this blog, to a number of fundamental intuitions in Western philosophy, going back to Descartes, concerning being, rationality, knowledge, the self and the relation between self and other. The self is seen as autonomous, self sufficient, and disconnected from its environment. The world, including the self, is supposed to be ‘present’ to consciousness. Knowledge is seen as ‘seeing’, ‘grasping’, ‘comprehension’. Knowledge is reduction of experience into universal categories of thought. The pretension of the self is that thus it can contain everything from its environment, including itself. This idea has the pernicious ethical consequence that one also looks in this way to fellow human beings as something that one can absorb and ‘make one’s own’.

Levinas is to some extent an existentialist philosopher in the sense that like Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Gabriel Marcel he sees human existence as a process, as a participating, acting, being involved in the world. Acting is more fundamental than thinking. Abstract knowledge in the form of the assimilation of experience into categories, universals, is preceded and trumped by a much richer form of knowledge as experience in the practical handling of things in interaction with specific people in specific situations. His bent towards specific, individual people and their circumstances, and his mistrust of abstractions, universals, and the impersonal forces of ideology, state, market and technology that they produce, which lead to alienation of the human being, are a characteristic of existentialist philosophy.

 With Nietzsche and Levinas I share the perspective of the bodily, physiological, emotional roots of cognition and ethics, the question what to do with human suffering, and the relinquishing of God as a way out. With Nietzsche I want to preserve, not subdue the life force and creativity of the human being, and I share his ‘Dionysian’ striving to transcend the self. With Levinas I share the idea that openness to the other forms the foundation of the self and a source of transcendence of the self. I radically disagree with Nietzsche’s often-tacit presupposition that the self can do this by itself. On the other hand in my view Levinas goes overboard with his idea of the self as a hostage for the other. In my view the self not only has the right but also wisdom on his/her side to distance him/herself from the other when that seems needed. I even claim that this is a consequence of Levinas’ thought itself.

 The point is this. If the other in his/her opposition to me and in the ethical appeal to me to have concern for him/her is a source of transcendence for me, then I should also grant the same to him/her, in my opposition and appeal to him/her. I should be passive in the sense of being receptive to him/her but also active in helping him/her to receive me. Paradoxically perhaps, it would be egotistic of me to completely subject myself to the other.

63. Nietzsche and Levinas

 At first sight few views are so much opposed as those of Nietzsche in his rejection and Levinas in his radical acceptance of responsibility of the self for the other. At second sight there are also commonalities.

First, both use the perspective of embodied cognition, as I do in this blog. Impulses, perceptions and feelings precede cognition and ethics and form the basis for them. Second, both turn away from God. Third, both accept that God was invented as consolation for human vulnerability, and now we must find another way to deal with inevitable suffering. Fourth, for both the making of sacrifices for others is not a moral duty or limitation of freedom, but arises autonomously from inside, either as an overflow from the fullness of life (Nietzsche), or as a deep-seated feeling of responsibility that precedes the self (Levinas). Fifth, both try to say the unsayable, beyond established categories of thought and language. Sixth, both are suspicious of universals that cause neglect of diverse, individual, unique human beings. Seventh, both try to escape from the limitations of the self (transcendence). Eighth, for both identification between people, in reciprocation that results in a merging and equalization, is both impossible and undesirable. Ninth, both turn away from the conatus essendi, the drive to survive and manifest oneself, though in very different ways. Tenth, both (but Levinas more in his earlier than in his later work) take the sensual, feeling, exuberant self as a starting point.

But then begins the big difference. Nietzsche begins with the exuberant self, the child, and thinks he can find transcendence from within the autonomous self, from an internally generated fullness, without regard for claims from others or demands for self-constraint, a self that dissociates itself from the other, and in his philosophy he ends up again with the child. Starting with the self, Levinas veers away to the other and its ethical call on the self. For Nietzsche that is treason to the life forces of the self, in a hypocritical and crippling Christian morality of compassion. For Levinas, however, the ethical call to the other is not an appeal to asceticism, not a denial but an affirmation of the self, in being elected.

According to Nietzsche the self experiences a primitive excitement at the suffering of another, and no one benefits from pity, which only multiplies suffering. For Levinas the suffering of the other is unbearable and brought under the responsibility of the self. For Nietzsche suffering is a condition for transformation of the self by the self. For Levinas suffering is a condition for ethics and an escape from the self by the suffering of the other. For Nietzsche separation between self and other yields protection of the self in his emergence from himself, for Levinas it opens the self to the other. Thus, at third sight, in spite of the commonalities between Nietzsche and Levinas the difference is as big as it appeared at first sight.  

62. Levinas: justice?

Levinas posited his extreme surrender to the other as a counterweight to the absolute evil of Nazism and of other ideologies that subjugated the individual human being, and to be strong enough it must be absolute.

However, Levinas repeatedly recognizes that in the transition from the ideal, isolated relationship between self and other to a society of third and more parties charity towards the single other must make a transition to justice in society, with rules that are universal and impersonal. There I must also feel responsible for third parties and ask myself whether the single other does not damage the other others. There the asymmetry of the ideal relation disappears and reciprocity and equality under the law appear. How that compromise of the ideal relationship for the sake of justice can still reflect the ideal is problematic. How can we maintain the ethical force that Levinas considered necessary as a counterweight to absolute evil in the world? Levinas struggles with this tension and never completely resolves it.

The idea of justice and its content are not elaborated. However that is developed, of crucial importance remains the claim that the rights of people are in the first place rights not of the self but of the other. Justice and the law are not a social contract necessitated by the threat of war of all against all (as Hobbes proposed), but emerge from a feeling of responsibility for the other. Equality under the law is needed for justice but we must not forget that it does not do justice to the uniqueness of individuals. Note that this is in line with my critique of universalism, in item 17 of this blog. Where the other is concerned we remain anarchists at heart. The law must not forget its inspiration and ideal from the responsibility of individual to individual. In that sense justice has a ‘bad consciousness’ of never quite achieving its ideal and it must remain aware of its shortcomings, and stay open for improvement. The Levinassian relation to the other must be maintained as a source of inspiration and a standard, for personal relations and for social justice.

How can we ensure that law and justice, with all the institutions and power holders associated with them, remain inspired by the responsibility of the self for every suffering of the unique other? According to Levinas it is a task for ‘prophetic voices’ to remind the powerful. I quote from Among us, essays on the thinking of the other (1991): ‘One sometimes hears them in the cries that rise from the folds of politics that, independently from official institutions defend “human rights”, sometimes in the songs of poets; sometimes simply in the press and in the public spaces of liberal states ...’. And where justice can never be complete, the ‘small good’ that people can individually and personally muster for each other creeps into the holes that justice cannot fill. The disappearance of the asymmetry of responsibility in the law need not keep people from bringing that asymmetry of responsibility back into their conduct and their charity.

61. Levinas: philosophy of the other

From the traditional centrality of the self in Western philosophy it is difficult to find a foundation for benevolence or altruism. Emmanuel Levinas turns it around: the ethical call for benevolence is primary, precedes the self and all consideration of self-interest, and protection of one’s interests is a compromise on that. One can and in conditions of real life in society inevitably does compromise on the ethical call, but the call remains valid to maintain an ideal of conduct that we should not forget.

For Levinas the feeling of responsibility for the other is not a rational choice but something that happens to you and that you experience as being chosen or ‘elected’ and that makes you unique, irreplaceable for the unique other. The ethical call is to surrender to the other, and to suffer from his suffering, an imperative that precedes all other consideration. Levinas speaks of giving oneself as a ‘hostage’. With this he means that the self becomes ‘victim without being guilty’. Responsibility and dedication to the other go so far that they apply also when the other obstructs or even persecutes one.

In the earlier work of Levinas (Totality and the infinite, 1987), to which I limit myself here, the self is, in first instance, tied to itself, which is in due course experienced as frightening, oppressive, or generates boredom, and evokes an urge to escape. ‘Evasion’ he calls that in one of his earliest works (1982). In his novel More die of heartbreak Saul Bellow speaks of the ‘claustrophobia of consciousness’. The self needs the other to escape from himself not only for cognitive reasons, as I have emphasized earlier in this blog, but also for emotional, spiritual reasons. The opening to the other is, in other words, not only a search but also a flight.

Levinas concludes that the flight from the self requires that we must not judge or approach the other from the perspective of our existing views. If we do that we never get away and beyond our present self. As long as one takes oneself as point of departure in the approach to the other we remain locked up in ourselves. We must be open to the other without evaluating or judging in advance and without the pretension to ever completely grasp the other.

Levinas says that this opening is not ‘receptivity’, in which one remains as one is while receiving the other. We require what Levinas calls ‘passiveness’: one should not determine the terms but surrender to the terms of the other. Levinas uses a metaphor of breathing, and letting oneself be literally inspired (breathed into) by the other. Breathing also is not based on a choice on the basis of an evaluation of what it will yield. It is something you undergo. That is the spirit in which one should set oneself aside. 

60. Nietzsche’s error

 I endorse Nietzsche’s passionate plea for an affirmation of life, in the flourishing of

the creative and intelligent force of the human being, and transcendence of

the self as the highest expression of the will to power. However, this path is blocked

by his overestimation of the self and his condemnation of morality.

In his Genealogy of morality Nietzsche reconstructed the morality of compassion, altruism and self-sacrifice as a revolt of the weak (‘slaves’) in their resentment against the strong (‘masters’). With the power of the majority, the slaves have appropriated morality, in an alliance with religion, in an exercise of their own will to power. Individual will to power of ‘the strong’ is curtailed by external forces of custom, law and punishment, and thus restrained it turns upon the self, to overwhelm it and to torture it in self-denial. The result is suffocation of the forces of self-realization. The shame that this brings about is diverted to a feeling of virtue in the claim that self-sacrifice is a sacrifice for the sake of a higher religious purpose.

Benevolence is particularly perverse when it turns into pity, which is demeaning to both the subject and the object of pity. It is often an expression of the will to power, in a revenge on the weak, in further degrading the weak, in elevating oneself above the object of pity, and imposing the demand of gratitude and obedience, and inviting applause. For the object of pity the feeling that he has a right to pity deflects attention from his weakness and efforts to overcome it. While in contrast with pity compassion may be genuine, with a concern for the dignity of its object, that still undermines the potential of the strong, detracts from the realization of his potential and negates life.

At a few places, Nietzsche recognizes that the self needs the opposition of others, friends and foes, to escape from illusions of the self (in Human all too human). He makes allowance for altruism between friends who may sufficiently know each other to achieve empathy. This is accompanied, however, by an equilibrium of power. He also allows for benevolence from the master to his slave, in a spontaneous overflow from the bounty of his supremacy. However, these points are swamped by an avalanche of diatribe against compassion, altruism and orientation towards the other. In the preface to his Genealogy of morality Nietzsche says that the ‘regard outside, instead of back to the self, is part of slave morality. …. The real, noble spirit seeks opposition only in order to say yes to himself even more gratefully, with more alacrity’.

The error in this is the following. As I have argued in preceding items of this blog, and will argue further in later items, for transcendence of the self the self needs the other to oppose it, to correct its prejudice and errors, and to extend its mental and spiritual scope. And for that to work one must become a master in empathy and compassion. 

59. Flexibility, but not too much         

We are told that everything has to be flexible, because that is good for innovation and innovation is needed. It should be possible to easily break relationships, fire workers, and sell parts of firms, and organizations must continually turn themselves around. There is something to that. Flexibility is needed to prevent rigidity, to allow room for novelty.

But flexibility can go too far. Revolving door employment is not good. For a fruitful relationship, within and between firms, one must invest, and that takes time. Often, the investment is specific to the relationship, i.e. cannot be recouped outside it, so that the relationship must last sufficiently long to make the investment worthwhile. Otherwise, the investment will not be made and the relationship remains shallow. Specific investment is needed when one makes the high level, specialized products, with unique combinations of features, which yield the highest profit.

Flexibilization is often accompanied; see the US, with legalistic relationships. Shorter relationships are less personal, less based on personal trust. They require a more contractual control of relationships. That increases costs, and the irony of it is that it reduces the flexibility of relationships by locking them up in the straightjacket of a contract.

Ironically also the drawbacks apply especially to innovation, while that is where flexibility is most advocated. Innovation typically arises from surprising novel combinations, from people and firms with different capabilities. As a result, people do not immediately understand each other. They must invest in sufficient mutual understanding and that requires patience and is also a specific investment.

Relationships entail risks. First, the risk of mutual dependence, especially when one makes specific investments for the quality of the relationship. Second, the danger, especially in innovation, is that knowledge or the innovation is captured by a competitor.

Especially under the uncertainty of innovation it is difficult to cover the risks with formal, contractual means. Firstly, the uncertainty is too large for one to be able to specify all relevant contingencies. Secondly, a contract can impose a straightjacket that stifles initiative and leaves no room for the surprising turns that innovation can take. Thirdly, the demand for a detailed contract is readily seen as a sign of mistrust, which evokes further mistrust, in a vicious circle that is difficult to turn around in the building of trust.

When contracts are difficult, as in innovation, trust is more needed. Where it is not present at the start it has to be built up and that again is a specific investment that requires the perspective of a sufficiently durable relationship to make it worthwhile.

In sum, especially in innovation one should not strive for maximum but for optimum flexibility, in relationships that last sufficiently long to evoke investment in mutual understanding and trust, but no so long as to obstruct the change and renewal of relationships. 

58. Innovation by interaction

In the previous item in this blog I discussed the importance of cognitive distance for learning and innovation, in collaboration between people or organizations. Such distance should be large enough to tell or show each other something new but not so large that there is no mutual understanding and tolerance. How, more precisely, does that work? Here I apply my theory of invention (nr. 31).

In the previous item I also showed that at any cognitive distance, people are faced with the need not only to fit their ideas into one’s own, but also the need to help others to fit one’s own ideas and practices into their cognition. Thus people can help each other to cross cognitive distance and trigger shifts of thought.

In terms of the cycle of invention discussed in item 31, this positing of one’s ideas into the minds of others entails generalization, the attempt to apply one’s ideas into novel areas. Depending on cognitive distance, this yields misfits in understanding that require adjustment. People will try to ‘put it differently’, thinking back to how they came to grips with the idea, what other ideas they tried, and what other ideas are related to it, in their experience. In terms of the cycle of invention, this entails differentiation. As people do this reciprocally, they are stimulated to try and fit elements of the other’s thought into their own thinking, in hybrids of thought and practice (reciprocation), which stimulate a novel integration of joint thinking and action (accommodation).

One can increase abilities to cross cognitive distance by an accumulation of knowledge and experience in the practice of crossing distance.  However, as one accumulates knowledge one needs to search at increasing cognitive distance to still encounter something new, finding fewer and fewer sources of further novelty, and increasingly one has only oneself to counsel. Geniuses and wise people are lonely.

The two-sidedness or reciprocity of the process of learning by interaction yields immense leverage, compared to interaction with non-human nature, since in the mutual adaptation of discourse the ‘receiver’ can shift his stance and outlook to catch a meaning and the ‘sender’ can adapt to such stance in pitching his meaning, and revising his metaphors and bringing in meanings from yet other contexts.

The cycle of invention is my answer to the old problem of object and subject, or of the outside and the inside, as I discussed in item 23. Are objects in the world causes of the cognition of the perceiving subject, in the form of representations in the mind, as empiricism claims, or are objects perceived in terms of prior cognitive categories of the subject (such as time, space and causality), as idealism claims, or are object and subject inseparable (as Schopenhauer claimed). According to the cycle all three are right. Objects are perceived and made sense of in terms of categories employed by the subject but those may be changed (in accommodation) in the process of absorbing perceptions into mental categories (in assimilation).    

57. The value of difference

Differences in knowledge, perception, emotion, feeling, views, ethics and culture, which I have called cognitive distance in my scientific work, are bothersome, because they are a source of misunderstanding and prejudice and make collaboration difficult. On the other hand they are also interesting as a source of learning. The challenge is to find partners with optimal difference: sufficient to be able to tell or show each other something new but not so much that one cannot understand each other or cannot deal with each other.

Empirical (econometric) research (that I did with associates) shows that such optimal difference yields economic advantage through improved performance in innovation. The ability to work together with people who think differently yields economic advantage. That yields hope for diversity and tolerance, because if those were economically disadvantageous they would hardly be viable.

The ability to collaborate has a cognitive component in the narrow meaning of intellectual understanding (absorptive capacity), and a cognitive component in the wider, also affective sense of ethics and morality, of views on good and bad. One should not only understand each other but also have empathy for each other.

The complement of absorptive capacity, the other side of the coin, is the ability to help others understand one, with the use of illuminating examples or metaphors that help them to absorb one’s thought into theirs. One can develop both types of ability, for absorption and for communication, by accumulating knowledge and experience in collaboration with people who think differently. This enables relationships at larger cognitive distance, offering a higher degree of learning and innovation. The positive effect of that has also been demonstrated in empirical research.

One can also make use of go-betweens that help to bridge cognitive distance, preventing or eliminating misunderstandings, clarify views and habits, and take away suspicion.

To the extent that relationships last longer and are exclusive, i.e. closed off from relationships with other, more distant parties, cognitive distance will in due course decline. One becomes so familiar with each other that one begins to see, think and act in the same way. That is convenient, in fast and easy agreement, but it can also yield intellectual incest and lack of learning and renewal. However, long lasting relationships can retain their cognitive vitality when parties also maintain relationships with different others that can feed the relationship with fresh ideas and perspectives.

In communities, the advantage of strong local connections is that they enable close cooperation, with social control, reputation effects and mutual trust, but they can also lead to rigidity and stagnation. Isolated, cohesive groups are in danger of losing the impulse of novel ideas and experience, and to prevent that from happening bridges should be built to connect with other groups. And for that one must overcome the inclination to distrust outsiders.

This analysis serves to give more substance to the claim from evolutionary theory of the economy (see item 30) that variety matters for innovation. Variety is not only needed for selection to work, but also to generate novelty and produce new variety.

 56. Humanism

One definition of humanism is that it takes principles for human action and life not from nature nor from the supernatural but from humanity itself.

There are varieties of humanism. The term was applied to a stream of intellectual activity in the Renaissance. The term ‘rebirth’ refers to a renewed inspiration from especially the Greek classics. Earlier, classical thought had already had a large influence. First that of Plato, especially in neoplatonism that was a major source of inspiration in Christian thought. Later, in the 13th century, Aristotelian thought, which had reached Western Europe via the moors in Spain, gave a new impulse to Christian thought, e.g. in the work of Thomas Aquinas. From the 14th century philosophy was no longer only a handmaiden to theology. Earlier, in the 11th and 12th centuries, there was a development of cities, emergence of commerce and free professions, and a beginning of capitalism. That yielded a need for knowledge and contributed to the development of individualism and of science. In the 14^th and 15^th century disastrous failures, moral, political and military, notably in the 100 years war between England and France, of the church and the nobility, contributed to the long-term demise of those old authorities.

The early humanism of the 16^th century, with Montaigne, Erasmus, Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, had two characteristic features. First, and above all, it was oriented towards the individual and its flourishing and freedom. It was not antireligious. Second, it had an Aristotelian appreciation of diversity, tolerance, change, intellectual modesty, individuality and context-dependence of judgement, with the intuition that human life does not lend itself to abstract generalization.

In the Enlightenment, the drive towards the freedom and flourishing of the individual, and criticism of suppressive authorities of state and church, acquired a new dynamic. Humanism acquired the connotation of a rejection of divine and other supernatural powers. The humanism of the Renaissance was criticized for its distortion of classical texts in subordination to convention and maintenance of Christian faith. In what some have called a Counter-Renaissance much of classical thought was rejected, such as the Aristotelian idea that processes in nature strive towards a goal (the final cause). There was a development of abstract thought, and especially English philosophers turned to empirical foundations of knowledge. The Aristotelian perspective of practical philosophy was replaced by a more Platonic one, in a striving for universal, immutable, context-independent truths, in clear and distinct ideas (Descartes) or adequate ideas (Spinoza). The Enlightenment was not, however, platonic in seeking the source of the true, the good and the beautiful outside the subject but sought it inside, and that became part of humanism.  

Nowadays the most current meaning of ‘humanism’ is an attitude to life based on reason, autonomy and self-knowledge of the human individual, and belief in the betterment of the human being, mostly on the basis of its own efforts. Also, everyone has the right to be treated with dignity and to have the opportunity for the flourishing and authenticity of the human being. 

55. Self and other

 With this item I start a series on the theme of self and other. There, I will use bits and pieces from my book Beyond humanism: The flourishing of life, self and other (2012, Palgrave-Macmillan). In the preceding series, on morality and ethics, I gave a prelude to this theme, in the history of the self, a discussion of individual and collective egotism, and narcissism. If those are rejected, how, then, could the relationship between self and other be? In the present item I outline the subjects to come.

In the series I will deviate from the focus on the autonomous, rational self that can shape its own future, which is characteristic of humanism, with its roots in the (radical) Enlightenment, to arrive at what I call otherhumanism, a transformed humanism that focuses more on the other. I will start with a characterization of humanism.

Next, I will proceed with a few practical considerations. First, I will consider the intellectual and economic value of the other for the self, and of variety of insights and opinions, in contrast with universalistic notions of equality and universality of ideas. Second, I will consider the need for stability versus flexibility of relationships, arguing for an optimal, not maximum flexibility. That is part of the overall theme of stability and change that appears and re-appears in this blog.

Next, I will delve into philosophy, with a discussion, first, of Friedrich Nietzsche as an outspoken philosopher of the self that strives to manifest and develop itself, in its will to power. The appeal of Nietzsche lies in his call for the flourishing of life. But for him concern for the other human being, benevolence forms an obstruction. By contrast, I will then consider Emmanuel Levinas, an outspoken philosopher of the other. His appeal lies in a call, not for a vertical transcendence to God, but for a horizontal transcendence of the self, liberation from the prison of the self, by opening to the other. I will then try to find a path between those two extremes of Nietzsche and Levinas, in my proposal of otherhumanism.

How can one have a flourishing life and be a good person for others, without help from God and the threat of hell and the promise of heaven? The answer is simply that in order to have a flourishing life one needs others and one needs to have empathy for hem. I already gave an indication of that in a previous item, on freedom (nr. 47).

While this claim does not sit easily in Western philosophy, in Indian and Chinese philosophy, from ancient times (some 600 years BC) onwards, it was a mainstream view, in particular in Buddhism and Confucianism. When the present blog ends, after some 80 items, in a sequel I will take up Eastern philosophy. 

In the present series I will next look more in detail into opportunities and problems of relationships and into how they may work and develop, in give and take, also under pressures of competition in the economy.

That leads on to an analysis of trust: what is it, on what is it based, what are its limits, and how does it develop. But that constitutes a theme in itself.  .             

54. Self-interest?

Economic thought has its roots in utilitarianism, but originally the utilitarians (Bentham, J.S. Mill, Adam Smith) were oriented to the common good, and accepted that at times individual interest had to be sacrificed for the greater good of all, while in economic thought the self has increasingly become disconnected from the common good.

Economists do recognize enlightened self-interest, defined as taking interests of others into account, so long as after deduction of any sacrifice to the other it yields net advantage. I define altruism as making a sacrifice even if, within limits, it yields net disadvantage. The source of it can be love, morality, habit or instinct. In economics, altruism is almost always ruled out. The argument for that is that under competition in markets altruists would not survive. However, competition is seldom so stark, or ‘efficient’, as economists call it, as to leave no room for any altruism. I do grant that altruism is limited by conditions of survival. The sharper competition is the less room there is for it.

It is standard practice in economics to refer, in assumptions of self-interest, to Adam Smith’s argument of the ‘invisible hand’ (in his Wealth of nations), but Smith pointed out that self-interest can go against collective interest and then must be subjected to constraints. He also (in his Theory of moral sentiments) gave arguments against the notion that compassion (he calls it ‘sympathy’) is in fact self-satisfaction and further says  ‘That whole account of human nature, however, which deduces all sentiment and affections to self-love, which has made so much noise in the world, but which, so far as I know, has never yet been fully and distinctly explained, seems to me to have arisen from confused misapprehension of the system of sympathy’. That ‘noise’ in economic thought has resounded far in politics and policy and has carried us away from good sense and from humanism. It has institutionalized egotism in society. Everything had to go via the market and that was seen as a surrender to egotism. Erroneous notions in economic science have misled us. This is a scandal. I wish economists had read Smith better.

Earlier in this blog, in an item on freedom (item 47), I indicated that for the highest level of freedom, in determining what we find that we should want, we need others to coach us from our prejudice and misconceptions. Adam Smith (of all people) already said this: ‘We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us.  But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them’. Smith already recognized the need for the other. Again, I wish economists had read Smith better.

53. Narcissism

With this item I deviate, for once, from the task I set myself of not using more than 500 words. 

While in Romanticism (e.g. Rousseau) the self is seen positively as a source of the good, for Schopenhauer (1788-1860) the self is the seat of an insatiable, uncontrollable, egotistic will to exist, possess and consume. It were better if we did not exist. One should try to escape from the self and its will in a Buddhist-like ascetic discipline. One can temporarily escape in art, in particular music, as a contemplation of the universal, from the will-driven individuality of the self.

By contrast, there is also a line of thought in literature (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Dostoyevsky) that wishes to accept darkness and depravity as part of the existential force of humanity that can manifest itself in a raw beauty. In philosophy we find this acceptance of humanity as it is, with all its passions, and the acceptance, even love of human fate (‘amor fati’) with Nietzsche.

Both Schopenhauer (2010) and Nietzsche (2006) emphasize the self-sufficiency of the self. They both make the distinction between pride, as the perception of self-worth based on one’s own conviction, which they approve, and vanity, as the seeking of recognition of worth by others, which they despise. However, pride is based on the assumption that the conviction of self-worth is valid and free from delusion, while both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche themselves exhibit such delusion.  

By this time we have strayed far from benevolence as part of a providential, God given nature, and we arrive at a demasking of benevolence as hypocritical and suppressive of human flourishing. Such honesty about human nature cannot simply be brushed aside in moral distaste. Nietzsche demands an answer, and later in this blog I will give it.

According to Lasch (1991) mentality has shifted from devotion to work as a contribution to both self-interest and the good of all to devotion to personal wealth and prosperity by achievement. Next it shifted to status and the winning of competitions with others as a goal in itself, a profiling of the self even without achievements, rhetoric above truth, opinions above arguments, glittering in public attention above grey, anonymous mediocrity. If one cannot achieve this by oneself, then in the reflection of the glitter of idols. This satisfies yearning for a heroism that was lost in modernity.

Our culture has regressed into narcissism. Narcissism is not a synonym for egotism or selfishness, an excess of self, not a manifestation of personality but on the contrary a lack of self, a collapse of personality, an experience of inner emptiness and senselessness. That must then be filled with delusions of greatness that must be mirrored and confirmed in the environment, or by images of heroes to whom one mirrors oneself. Lasch (1991, p. 37) speaks of a ‘sense of heightened self-esteem only by attaching himself to strong, admired figures whose acceptance he craves and by whom he needs to feel supported’. The inner voice of nature turned out not to have much to say. There turned out to be no sources of authenticity present.

Lasch ascribes narcissism to the inability to learn to live with one’s shortcomings and with the fact that others don’t only exist to satisfy one’s wants. That shortfall increases as one sets one’s ambitions higher, beyond one’s limitations, regardless of the interests of others, to satisfy one’s ambitions and longings. Advertising and other pressures to consume have contributed to this, with an appeal to a craving for luxuries, beauty, glitter, power, and self-realization. Lasch even ascribes our obsession with technology to a narcissistic urge to lift limitations in the satisfaction of longing and protection (Lasch 1991, p. 244).

According to Lasch (1991) we have strayed into widespread narcissism in which the self no longer has a self from itself but finds an emptiness in itself that it fills with delusions of superiority that it demands to see reflected and confirmed in its environment.

52. History of the self

In his Sources of the self, Charles Taylor traces the appearance in history of what he called the ‘disengaged self’. There are three forms of disengagement. First, disengagement of the soul from the body, and rationality from passions. Second, disengagement of the self from its natural and social environment. Third, disengagement from ‘higher’, transcendent values, in a denial of values that transcend individual human well-being.

After the classical views of Plato and Aristotle that the good and true lie outside the self, in universal ideas that we can try to grasp (Plato) or in forms to which life tends (Aristotle), the church father Augustine took a turn to the self as a source of inner light, generated by God, in which the self is transparent to itself, and which illuminates the path to God. The internal light is a gift from God and by turning inwards we reach God. We move, so to say, inward in order to turn outward.

With his turn inside Augustine can be seen as a precursor of Descartes but with the latter the self stays in itself, as a source of morality. Our capacity to reason construes both knowledge and morality, and is master of the passions. Here we see a double disengagement of self, from passions and from the world.

While in classical thought (Plato, Aristotle) rationality was substantive, i.e. referred to the making of good choices from a hierarchy of good things for a virtuous life, from Descartes on rationality increasingly becomes more procedural and instrumental, for the pursuit of optimal pleasure as the only good.

In humanism, emerging from the end of the 15th century, autonomy of the human being, in its capacity to form and give direction to its life, played a central role.

With the Reformation, around 1500, according to Taylor religion shifted from collective experience of being in the same boat, in which everyone had his place and where individual deviance jeopardized the salvation of all, to a direct personal relation to God and dedication to Him, without intervention by the church.

In contrast with the Augustinian view that love for the higher is granted us by the grace of God, Rousseau proposed that our inner nature is fundamentally good but, instead of the biblical fall, there is a perversion of this natural good by human culture. The root of evil lies in what others think and expect from us, and the pressure towards the satisfaction of pleasure. This turn of Rousseau deepens the look inside. Sentiments are no longer the movers of deeds for the good life but have intrinsic value as part of the good life. The realization of nature in us shows itself in the expression of feelings. The self, not the social, is the source of the self.

For Nietzsche, the self is not a given but something to be overcome and to be developed, created. There, even change of the self is up to the self.

51. Will to power

 Plato said that reason must manage a team of wild horses: the horse of passion (eros) and the horse of self-manifestation (thymos). Now (as happened before in history) reason has let loose, the horses have bolted and the chariot bounces behind in shambles.

Many philosophers, Spinoza among them, claimed that the fundamental drive of nature is conatus, the drive to survive and manifest the self. 

Nietzsche argued that the fundamental drive of nature is will to power, not survival. People often risk survival in order to manifest their will to power. For him, Christian morality is perverse in overruling the flourishing of life, and the demand for self-sacrifice is a ruse of the weak to control the strong.

So let us see. Does a teacher exert power over a pupil? The developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed the notion of the Zone of proximal development. A teacher draws a pupil into the next (‘proximal’) stage of development, to which the pupil by itself would not be capable. That can be negative, in forcing a child in certain direction, but mostly it is beneficial.

In the preceding piece I distinguished between positive and negative power, but the line between them is not always easy to draw. Suppose one wants to criticize a friend, because it seems needed to draw him away from trouble. How can one be sure that one is genuinely helping the friend, rather than, as Nietzsche predicts, asserting oneself, competing, or trying to establish superiority? To begin with, one should ask oneself that question, but crucial is the opportunity for the friend to disagree and set one right.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her plea for A morality of ambiguity asked: should one try to restrain someone at the point of suicide, by force if needed? Her conclusion is positive, provided one then also shares responsibility in what happens next. One may not then just leave the other to itself. Negative power to restrain the other should be accompanied by positive power to help find a new perspective.

In markets there is both competition and collaboration. In competition there is negative power in constraining the other’s options, in collaboration there is positive power to develop new shared options. In collaboration there is power in creating mutual dependence, and even in the best of collaboration there seldom is a precise equilibrium of dependence, but there is a willingness to go far in a process of give and take, renouncing opportunities to exploit imbalance of power. I will come back to this in a later discussion of trust. 

Imperialism, the striving to apply over there what one has developed over here, can be a step on a path to transformation and learning, as I argued in item 31 in this blog, but it succeeds only when it fails, when it cannot impose itself on others and is forced to adapt or break through familiar structures and assumptions that were taken for granted. Imperialism triumphs only when it is defeated. 

50. Power

A customary definition of power is: the ability to influence the actions of others, by influencing the options from which they can choose or the choice they make. Such power can be negative in reducing options or by imposing the choice, but it can also be positive in creating more options by offering others new insights, means and room for choice. Power becomes negative when it becomes coercive, eliminating freedom by lock-in or exclusion. A monopoly excludes competing producers and thereby locks in consumers.

The exercise of influence on others is inevitable and happens all the time and everywhere. It contributes to subjugation but also to creative tension and the flourishing of life. Nietzsche’s philosophy is a celebration of that. A debate without power for which Jürgen Habermas strove is an illusion and is undesirable. People need each other’s opposition and opposition also is power. However, power relations must not be pre-determined, institutionalized or unassailable, and there must remain the opportunity of opposition, for the creation of counter-power or escape from power. 

Power arises not only on the level of individuals but also on the level of collectives such as markets, professions, industries, regions, and states. In other words, power is also a matter of systems. In a preceding item (nr. 48) in this blog I showed how people get swept up in collective interests. It goes further. People are carried along in tacit presumptions, notions, visions, habits, practices, norms, values, and expectations that are part of cultures on different levels. These are what Said in his Humanism and democratic criticism called the ‘cultural structures of reference and attitude’, and what Foucault in his technologies of the self called ‘power of habit’. Repression or exploitation are culturally sanctioned and made immune to criticism, expelled from the arena of legitimate discourse. Foucault showed how cultural systems are internalized, how both those who exert power and those subjected to it may take it as self-evident.

What now? First of all, absolute freedom and justice cannot exist. One cannot abolish all limitation of means and possibilities. Everything that enables people to think and act also entails limits to them. One cannot look in one direction and at all others at the same time. That limitation one also imposes on oneself. There is no life without constraint.

How, then, can one escape from negative power? One can try to form countervailing power with arguments or with coalitions. That is the way of democracy. However, often arguments will not work because they go against what is taken as self-evident. Under the Soviet regime critics were seen as lunatics and put away in asylums. In democratic countries one is not imprisoned but simply ignored. Only if one commands a significant package of votes can one command attention. Ultimately, one can step outside and walk a path of one’s own. That is what entrepreneurs, intellectuals and writers do. In the end that was also the way out for Michel Foucault: build your own life as a work of art.

49. What freedom?

Centuries of philosophical debate on freedom have led to a distinction between different forms or levels of freedom.

First, the freedom of action: in freedom from and freedom to. Freedom from, also called negative freedom, is freedom from external constraint, coercion, intimidation, manipulation, etc. Freedom to, also called positive freedom, is access to resources, competencies, economic, political, social and cultural processes, etc. These freedoms of action differ from freedom of will. Freedom of action may mean that one is at the mercy of unconscious desires, drives, impulses, instincts, addiction, etc.

Hence there are ‘higher’ levels of freedom, concerning the will that lies behind action. A second level of freedom is that of self-reflection and self-restraint. Here one has the internal freedom to ask oneself what one should want on the first level (desires, impulses …) in agreement with a ‘higher’ level of the will. The question then is not ‘what do I want’ but ‘what should I want’. Freedom on this level does not imply that it is good what one wants. One can be convinced that certain bad conduct is good. One can have the self-restraint to do evil. For example, in a violent ideology, for which the fanatic renounces pleasure and comfort.

Freedom of self-reflection and self-restraint are not as self-evident as they may seem. Neural research and social psychology have shown how dominant the unconscious is in our choice and action. Much is determined by unconscious impulse, intuition, instinct, and feelings, and often that yields effective decisions. I discussed this in a previous item (item 5) of this blog, on freedom of the will.

The third level is the freedom for self-perfection, to change what you want that you want, in an adaptation of norms of good and evil. Of course, the question then is where those come from. An important source is Christian morality of self-restraint, altruism, and sacrifice for the weak. The philosopher Nietzsche rejected this with gusto, as hypocritical, a false self-denial, and as a suppression of the forces of life and creativity.

A fourth level is freedom of the self to form the self, in a re-evaluation of values, in a shift of higher (third level) convictions of good and bad. This freedom to transcend and form the self could perhaps be called the freedom of Nietzsche, and earlier it was an ideal of romanticism. Many think that one cannot have this highest level of freedom, or at least not fully, because ultimately everyone is determined by genetic properties, life course, and character that emerges from them. It is like the baron of Munchausen lifting himself from the morass by his bootstraps.

For the formation of the self, escape from the self, freedom from the self, one needs the other who offers opposition and contradiction and thereby offers new insight into what one might want. The good life requires that one grasp this opportunity. And that is different from Nietzsche, who shoves the other aside in the exercise of the will to power. 

48. Immorality of the group

In his Moral man and immoral society, Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out that while for the individual the egotistic instinct for survival may be mitigated by a countervailing instinct for altruism, on the level of groups that largely falls away. A salient case of group egotism is the recent one of bankers.

Niebuhr gives four explanations of group egotism. First, according to him benevolence is a personal, not a collective characteristic. Second, in a group people can mask their personal egotism as a collective interest. The dictator Mubarak was authoritarian, he claimed, not for his personal interest but to protect Egypt from Islamic radicalism. Third, in groups the mediocre person can project and compensate his/her frustrated personal ambitions in the glory of the group, the nation, religion, or a political ideal. Fourth, there is a cognitive effect. After a while, an isolated elite can honestly perceive its perspective as the only viable one, having become blind to the injustice it creates, and sees protest as ungrateful, ignorant, perverse and self-destructive. When political power also generates economic interest, in corruption and appropriation of parts of the economy, this yields increased vulnerability to its loss, and the consequent need for more power to guard it, which further isolates the elite.

I think there are further causes. First, there is the phenomenon of prisoner’s dilemma’s: individually one would want to take a less egotistic course of action, but one cannot afford to as long as others do not go along, and this is what they all think, so that no one takes the step. ‘The others do it as well’, is the excuse. Think again of the bankers. And national governments are themselves involved in a prisoner’s dilemma of keeping an industry (banking) from leaving the country. 

Second, the needs that people have in common in a group are of a ‘lower’, more egotistic nature, of physical needs, money, and security, rather than more individualized needs for social legitimacy, responsibility and ‘higher’ values.

Third, according to my hypothesis, discussed previously in this blog, the good of loyalty within the group was not viable in evolution without the bad of suspicion against outsiders. The demand for in-group loyalty makes it very difficult for a single voice to dissent. 

However, there are also a few rays of light. First, with state power one can help to break through the stalemate of prisoner’s dilemma’s by imposing a solution that participants claim they would favour if only the others went along. Second, there can be countervailing power with organizations that take social responsibility as their goal (such as Amnesty International, Geenpeace, etc.). Third, moral isolation of the group may be lessened by stimulating, or demanding, more diversity within the group, and by shaking it up with a higher turnover of entrance and exit. Think of boards of directors of large firms. That is also one of the virtues of democracy: preventing governments from lasting too long and exposing them to the challenge of outsiders. 

              

47. How nazist is present populism?

What are the sources of present rightist populism, in the Netherlands, Denmark, France, and other countries? It has been compared to Nazism. How valid is that? From various work (by John Gray, Rüdiger Safranski and Menno ter Braak) I identify the following characteristics of Nazism:

1. Romantic nationalism, with myths of national character and a glorious past, demanding subordination to national culture.
2. Charismatic, autocratic leadership: the leader gives a pure and unmediated interpretation of the will of the people.
3. Demonology: dark forces threaten ‘our’ society and culture.
4. Grievance against the ruling elite of ‘soft’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ intellectuals that ‘denies the problem’ and ‘fails to take action’.
5. An imminent apocalypse, from outside (our race and culture are destroyed), or from inside (we shall eradicate them all).
6. Racism: the demons form an inferior race.
7. Inevitability of violence against the demons to realise a nationalist utopia.
8. A fascist glorification of violence as an existential kick.

The first five points can be attributed to rightist populist movements, but the last three only to an extremist fringe. However, present populism might shape the conditions for them to spread.

Nationalism is romantic in the desire to be absorbed in a higher, organic unity of the nation, as a safe haven from external threat. The rhetoric is romantic in the primacy of feelings and opinions over facts, and in rebellion against cosmopolitan universals that neglect national and individual identity. In present populism the demonology arises in the rabid condemnation of the Islam: the Apocalypse arises in a ‘tsunami’ of Islamic immigrants that will destroy our western values.

We underestimate populism if we disregard the validity of some of its views. Earlier in this blog I criticized universals, but I recognized that we cannot do without them. The resistance to universals should not fall into anti-intellectualism. Reasonableness, with respect for facts and arguments is indispensable for democracy.  But we should demand that universals be tested, corrected and enriched by the individual, the general by the specific. Politics must be inspired by the people, science by practice, and rules must leave room for the richness, diversity, and unpredictability of insights, opinions, practices and initiatives.

Another, deeper source of populism is an innate instinct towards mistrust of outsiders. Outsiders are identified by clear characteristics of difference, in appearance and lifestyle.

This instinct forms a rich vein for populist vampires to sink their teeth into. Particularly if it is attached to deep feelings of religion, race, ethnicity or nation.

So why this populism now? First, present economic and financial crises, with loss of jobs, pensions and property, are attributed to globalised markets that are blamed on the elite that engineered it, for example in European integration. This yields a trigger for retreat into nationalism. Second, problems with integration of Muslim, largely Moroccan immigrants, in several European countries, used to trigger the instinct of xenophobia, yielding the stuff for creating demons and the threat of apocalypse.