“The Matter With Things: Volume 2 What Then is True?” By Iain McGilchrist

The second volume of McGilchrist’s magnum opus focuses on philosophy more than neurobiology. He is still concerned with the left and right hemisphere split of the brain, but he goes into much greater detail discussing objective truth, morality, consciousness, the nature of the self, human values, and what makes life worth living. He begins by discussing reality, subjectivity, language and concepts, and the map and the territory, “The left hemisphere thinks reality is what it itself puts together, because that is all it knows – the theoretical construct in which it lives. For it, theory trumps life. If it therefore decrees that a state of affairs shall be a certain way, then reality will, it believes, bend to the decree. Since the left hemisphere uses language to label, this often involves a belief that changing the label will change the reality…. That there is no one fixed reality, and truth is not single or fully certain, does not mean that reality has been mysteriously abolished. That there is no one view that encompasses all truth about the world, does not mean that truth is made up, and can be whatever we want it to be.” He continues by discussing how the brain processes new experiences, “There is a reliable difference between the hemispheres in terms of their handling of fresh experience. They have shown that new experience of any kind – whether it be of real-life objects, sounds, skills or imaginary constructs – engages the right hemisphere. As soon as it starts to become familiar or routine, the right hemisphere is less engaged and eventually the ‘information’ becomes the concern of the left hemisphere only…. New experience tends to come from the periphery of the field of attention, and that is the province of the right hemisphere – which is, after all, on the lookout for whatever unexpected is happening, at the moment that it happens; whereas the left hemisphere is concentrating on what is already identified as of interest, known and familiar, and at the centre of the attentional field.” He also discusses uniqueness, “Uniqueness presents particular problems for the left hemisphere’s tool, language. Uniqueness brings everyday language to a standstill. Anything truly unique cannot be expressed in such language, which is why whatever is profound, personal, or sacred, if it is to be expressed in words, can be so expressed only in poetry…. Reductionist thinking, more typical of the left hemisphere, to which uniqueness is opaque, holds that all can be accounted for by breaking things down to further, and yet further, entities. Uniqueness, however, halts analysis: it is a standing rebuke to our ever-ready categories.”

One’s own conception of the nature of the self is an area where the hemispheric split plays a role, “The self as conceived by the left hemisphere, should be – and is – an entity that is relatively static, separate, fixed, yet fragmentary, a succession of moments, goal-oriented, with its needs at any moment perceived as essentially competitive (since others may similarly target the same resources), determinate, consciously wilful, circumscribed in the breadth and depth of what it sees, at ease with the familiar, certain and explicit, but less so with all that is fluid, ambiguous, and implicit, and unaware of the limitations of its own knowledge. The self as conceived by the right hemisphere should be – and is – more akin to a process than a thing, essentially fluid and less determinate, nonetheless forming a unique whole over time, aware that it is fundamentally inseparable from all else that exists, open to others and to experience, more concerned with co-operation than competition, less consciously wilful, more engaged in what one might call ‘active passivity’ (an open attendant disposition, in which one is ready to respond to what emerges), seeing the greater picture in space and time, and aware of the extent of its ignorance…. In other words, the self as intrinsically inseparable from the world in which it stands in relation to others, the social and empathic self, and the continuous sense of self, with ‘depth’ of existence over time, is more dependent on the right hemisphere; whereas the objectified self, the external self, and the self as an expression of will, is generally more dependent on the left hemisphere.”

McGilchrist discusses how the nature of time is essential to the human conception of reality, “Conceptualising time immediately puts one on the outside of the experience, rather than being within it, the standpoint alone from which it can be understood…. Time is no thing…. Time is adverbial, if it is anything that grammar recognises; an aspect of being (itself a verbal noun, or gerund) or of Dasein (also a gerund). Time is not separate from events or experience…. It is itself an aspect of experience…. Reality is what we experience – ever moving, changing, and continuous. Things, however, are secondary, static, products of perception which supervene on ‘from above’, not support ‘from beneath’, that field of flow.” The nature of reality is embodied and the human body is a creature always in motion, “Motion is at the core of every aspect of our experience, and of our ability to make sense of it, in a way of which we are normally unaware, because our analytic intellect cannot deal with it…. Mind and body are inseparably connected.” Conversely, “Analytic thought and language tend to immobilise the world…. The idea that perception is altered by, and may even be secondary to, activity is familiar from the Gestalt theory of perception, according to which we are co-operatively constructing the aspects of the world that we see…. Perception is an active, not a passive process – or better, it is a profoundly interactive process…. Movement is as foundational as space and time. Each requires the other. Space is the potential for something to move within it; time is the potential for something to change within it. Both become actualised in flow…. Analysis, the forte of the left hemisphere, ultimately yields stasis…. Analysis wants measurement, and measurement begins the process of immobilisation and fragmentation. Yet it is never quite equal to what it measures…. Motion can, of course, never be reached by aggregation of static elements.”

Relatedly, McGilchrist takes on the concepts of space, matter, form, and time and how each relate to lived reality. “Space and time are not containers in which we live, but aspects of being…. Time speaks profoundly to the human condition in a way that space, however fundamental it might be, simply does not. Time is relentless, like another being’s will, where space is pliable and may be fashioned, though not without limits, to our own. Time is emotive; space is bland…. Despite this, space has the means to be generative: it is the potential for motion, and gives rise to form, which is what we see, precipitated out of potential, in space…. While time shows us that aspect of reality which is always incomplete, space shows us that aspect of reality which has been achieved…. Forms are usually evidenced in matter, and matter in forms: no-one has seen matter without form…. I can see imaginary or abstract forms, with the mind’s eye, or in certain states of mind with the bodily eye. But matter is inconceivable without form…. The forms that are found in Nature are the result of motion, and embodied movement, not stasis; similarly, movements found in Nature enact forms, not structures.” He continues, “40 years of efforts to simulate the Standard Model on a computer have so far failed. To perform such a simulation, one must first take equations expressed in terms of continuous quantities and find a discrete formulation that is compatible with the bits of information in which computers trade…. If reality is such that our knowledge is intrinsically, not accidentally, incomplete; if it is intrinsically, not accidentally, uncertain; if it is intrinsically inexpressible in everyday language, requiring exceptional, non-denotative, highly metaphoric, ‘poetic’ use of language to get beyond the limits of language; if we must deal not with facts but with connexions; if entities are never wholly separable from other entities; if the process of a knower coming to know is interactive or reverberative, each changing the other – not distanced, inert and owing nothing to the presence, and possibly the nature, of the one who comes to know; and if any attempt to model it reduces what is continuous and moving, to what is static and discrete – if all of this is true, it is clear which hemisphere will be better suited to discerning it.”

McGilchrist next takes a deep dive into the nature of consciousness, “When I use the word ‘consciousness’, I refer very broadly to all that we might call ‘the experiential’. This covers all the activities that go on, for each of us, as we say, unconsciously and preconsciously, as well as consciously; but could not go on without what is conventionally referred to as subjectivity, or inwardness…. I discriminate, reason, make judgments, find things beautiful, solve problems, imagine possibilities, weigh possible outcomes, take decisions, exercise acquired skills, fall in love, and struggle to balance competing desires and moral values all the time without being reflexively aware of it. Note that these are not just calculations, but rely on my whole embodied being, my experience, my history, my memory, my feelings, my thoughts, my personality, even – dare I say it? – my soul: ‘psyche’ in the broadest sense…. Even Descartes derived the ego from experience, not experience from an ego. What can more conservatively be claimed is that something about me – in the ‘field of me’ – permits these particular activities: and that something is what, in the broad definition, I am calling my consciousness…. I would say that matter appears to be an element within consciousness that provides the necessary resistance for creation; and with that, inevitably, for individuality to arise. All individual beings, including ourselves, bring forms into being and cause them to persist: each of us is not, ultimately, any one conformation in matter, but, Ship of Theseus-like, the conformation itself, the morphogenetic field, which requires matter in order to be brought into being, but, once existent, persists while matter comes and goes within it…. The conclusion we should draw is – not that all that we can encounter are representations of something we cannot know – but the precise opposite: that we do actually deal with reality and know it, just with an aspect of it that we partly call forth ourselves by our approach. The fact that we play a part in its being what it is does not make it unreal…. Things, it seems, emerge from our descriptions of experience: they do not constitute it. Whether a thing enters our world or not depends on the scale at which it is seen, or sought…. It may be objected that, whether we see something or not, it still exists. But what that tells us is that a ‘thing’ is a category within our thought…. If Nietzsche was right in saying that ‘A thing = its qualities’, and qualities change unrecognisably with scale, so do things come and go from experience depending on how they are observed. As the perspective shifts so do the Gestalten.” McGilchrist concludes, “If matter is a product of primal consciousness, and is the creative element of resistance within it which causes ‘things’ – becomings and processes – to be precipitated out as differentiated entities in space and time, this requires no further purpose than itself. It is the never-ending coming into being of the cosmos, in which the primal consciousness comes to understand itself…. I believe that what exists is a locally differentiated, but ultimately single, field of potentiality, which is constantly actualising itself. Thus all is one, and all is many. Each differentiation is, however, also a Gestalt that is complete in itself – a new whole, not a fragment…. There is no reason to dub our full experience of the world an illusion, while ascribing to the very partial mathematical description of the world the reality. I also believe internalism is a mistake, and that consciousness is located not inside us, but in a non-spatial ‘betweenness’ created by our attention and the object of our attention. It is, therefore, always a partial revelation – and partly, also, a creation of the act of experiencing – but our part in it does not negate its reality: that is reality…. I do not claim to know what experience is any more than anyone else, except that it is the condition on which I know anything at all. And yet we all understand it directly. It is what we know (kennen) better than anything at all, and yet know (wissen) least of all about. It is therefore difficult to discuss, since neither language nor reason are well adapted to it. Language is already at a remove from direct experience.”

McGilchrist stumps for moral realism, “The main claim is that value, whether it is truth, goodness or beauty, is not, as our culture has come to regard it, an ‘add-on’, a human invention, some sort of extra that is not intrinsic to the nature of the cosmos, but is, rather, itself constitutive of the cosmos and is discovered by, and disclosed in, the encounter of life…. I think truth matters more than utility, because I see truth as an ultimate value, irreducible to anything else: that is part of my view of the cosmos as pregnant with meaning, soliciting our allegiance, rather than a place where it is good enough to get by with comfortable lies. For me, values are part of its very fabric, not optional adornments…. Truth is a moral value, like beauty, and goodness…. Values are not just validated by the outcomes they achieve: they are inseparable from our deepest emotional experience.” He next tackles human purpose, “Whatever creative energy underwrites the unfolding of the phenomenal universe is continually active and involved in that universe; that the future is tended towards, but not closely determined; rather it is open, evolving, self-fulfilling. This means that it seems ‘purposeless’ to some; richly ‘purposeful’ to others. To me, a universe with tendencies towards beauty, complexity, and the rich unfolding of uniqueness is already teleological…. Though purpose may be more or less apparent at different levels, the process of life cannot, in reality, be broken down in this way…. Living beings equally shape and are shaped by a world that is coming into being alongside them in a reciprocal, and reciprocally paced, process, not negotiating a path across its already pre-formed surface…. Interdependence means not just interaction, but mutual constitution.” Finally, he takes a stab at the nature of the sacred, “God, truth, and infinity are all processes, not things; comings into being, not entities that are already fixed. All three seem to me, however, like rivers, to combine stability with flux. ‘All things flow’; but ‘by changing, a thing remains the same’. Ultimately, Being and Becoming are aspects of the same thing…. Becoming is even more fundamental than Being.”

Finally, McGilchrist describes what is ailing modernity, “We are now in the grip of an obsession with human power and the subjugation of nature, at bottom of which lies our infatuation with technology: the power to manipulate. We have subordinated ends to means. We emphasise self at the expense of others, our rights rather than our duties, what we have rather than who we are, the material rather than the spiritual, and vaunt the reach of the unaided human intellect. In such a world God is a nuisance…. When our society generally held with religion, we might indeed have committed many of the same wrongs; but power-seeking, selfishness, self-promotion, narcissism and entitlement, neglect of duty, dishonesty, ruthlessness, greed, and lust were never condoned or actively and openly encouraged – even admired – in the way they sometimes are now. In other words, we have lost all shame.” He concludes, “The deep truths about reality are likely to appear initially paradoxical. What look like things – with inevitable suggestions of stasis, certainty and fixity – are processes; and all such thing-like processes are interdependent with others, bringing one another into being. Everything is changed by context…. There is absolutely no reason to believe matter to be ontologically prior to consciousness.”

“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. III” by Solvej Balle (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

This third volume of Balle’s novel departs from the first two installments in that Tara discovers that she is not alone. “In the eighteenth of November, people follow patterns, and as long as you don’t draw them out of their established routines, they will stay in their allotted places. They don’t walk down the steps one day and up the steps the next…. As the man in the green shirt was going up the steps, now wearing blue, it began to dawn on me that I might not be the only one at odds with the eighteenth of November.” She meets Henry Dale and they trade stories and commiserate. “I have met someone who remembers. This sentence has been buzzing around in my head since this morning, and now I am typing it here…. Now there are two of us. Two of a kind: remembering, trapped in the eighteenth of November and no longer alone.”

Eventually, Henry moves in with Tara and they discuss how they have been spending their eighteenth of Novembers, “He says he understands my interest in the Romans. That it’s no surprise the Romans brought us together—with a bit of help from coincidence, of course. We had both landed on the banks of the Rhine, at the border of the Roman Empire. We had both lost the futures which once stretched out before us: the nineteenth

and the twentieth and all the weeks and months we had imagined lay in store, but little by little had been erased. It’s hardly surprising that one turns to the past…. Henry believed that anyone paying attention to the world around them would inevitably become interested in the Romans—or at least in the fall of the Roman Empire…. When you inhabit the same day for so long, you start to see all the cracks. There’s nowhere to hide anymore. We have come to a standstill in a time that is starting to crumble. Europe in freefall. The final days of the West. It’s no wonder one feels compelled to

follow in the Romans’ footsteps. One wants to know what led them to their downfall…. We were bidding farewell to the Western world. Goodbye, aufWiedersehen, ciao, adieu. Buona sera, Evening Lands…. I had never been interested in the mechanics of history, in patterns and progress and necessity, periods and waves, glory and decline. I had been interested in

what brought the Romans to a halt…. It had always been about the things, I said. The objects. The material. I was interested in what existed. What had been carried through the centuries.”

At the end of this volume, Tara and Henry discover that it is not just the two of them who are stuck in the eighteenth of November. At first, they meet Olga Periti and Ralf Kern. “We’ve held a meeting about our future and where we should live. We are sticking to the agreement that we meet every hundred days. That we belong together. We have had a meeting about belonging together, and we do. We belong together when we agree and when we no longer agree…. Now we are searching for a place to live. We’ve looked at apartments in the city and houses on the outskirts. It isn’t easy, as we are four people who need to reach an agreement. Four people in the eighteenth of November. Who knows if there are others? Maybe we are five, or eight, or sixteen. Maybe even more. People who wake up every morning to the eighteenth of November. It’s not difficult to imagine. Not anymore…. Ralf has calculated the probability of there being others, and the odds are greater than you’d think. If there are only four of us, it’s a miracle that we managed to find each other…. And then suddenly there they were. Yesterday. As in, five people at the gate. They had parked their car, climbed out and buzzed the intercom…. This was an insistent noise, and the eighteenth of November doesn’t have any insistent noise from the buzzer at our gate. And yet it did.”

“The Life You Want” by Adam Phillips

In this short collection of essays, Phillips contrasts the methods that psychoanalysis and pragmatism use to help a person get the life that they “truly” want. “What ‘getting a life’ now involves has become an essential perplexity, partly dependent on the stories about lives that are available to us, but always beginning in the families or social groups we grow up in…. Beginning with our mothers, we are the targets and the recipients and interpreters of often confounding messages about what is wanted of us, what we are wanted for, and what we are encouraged and discouraged from wanting…. Without always knowing what they are doing, the people who look after children – mostly the parents, but not always – recognize and sustain the parts, the versions, the aspects of the child they prefer…. We then spend our lives seeking recognition for, and avoiding recognition of, the aspects of ourselves that our parents – and the societies they are part of – couldn’t face…. We are haunted by the versions of ourselves we have been unable to be.”

Phillips spends a lot of time deconstructing both Freud and Rorty’s thoughts: on the nature of the human mind, on the Self, and on the ways humans cope with living their lives in general. “Both Freud’s psychoanalysis and Rorty’s pragmatism tell us, in their different ways, why wanting matters…. Pragmatism wants us to ask: what is the life we want—or think we want (and then, sometimes as an afterthought, why we want it)? Whereas psychoanalysis wants us to ask: why do we not want to know what we want?” Phillips suggests both men were preeminently concerned with Freud’s conception of the unconscious. Funnily, they did not agree on what Freud meant. Or rather, Rorty had chosen to reinterpret Freud’s meaning to suit his own purposes, in pragmatic fashion. “The unconscious described by Freud was a ‘reservoir’—his word—of representations of instinctual life, and a form of thinking he would call primary process and that finds its most vivid exemplar and illustration in dreams…. Freud’s unconscious refers to our fundamental and founding unknownness to ourselves; to the bodily desire that ineluctably drives our development; so in Freud’s story we are not suffering from original sin, but from original frustration. His biologically based unconscious is, as it were, an enigmatic and insistent presence and pressure in ourselves, and in our lives…. The unconscious is in this story our hidden truth, our hidden drama going on behind the scenes; a truth and a drama we are often unable and unwilling to bear, and are by definition surprised if not shocked by…. For Freud, what keeps us and gets us going are our desires for our objects of desire; for Rorty, it is our purposes. These are two very different things; our purposes are made up by us, our desires not quite, or not only, made up by us…. Freud, as Rorty knows, redescribed our ideas about autonomy and the self in ways that virtually discredited them as in any way useful fictions, Rorty took them for granted…. Rorty is determined to reject the idea of the Freudian unconscious as some bewildering ‘primitive’ force driving us through our lives. A predatory voraciousness is replaced by what might be a visionary company; exploitation is made a virtue; an enemy is superseded by a potential friend…. Freud’s question is: what, if anything, can we do with our instincts? And then: what are our instincts doing to, and with, us? Rorty’s rather different question is: what do we want to make of ourselves?”

In Phillips’ view, it would seem that pragmatism and psychoanalysis are diametrically opposed, “What Rorty calls trying to get the life you want, to be what you wish to be, Freud could only be radically sceptical about; ‘the life you want’, for Freud, would be something you are by definition unconscious of – you have worked very hard not to know what the life is you want…. And in describing the life you want, you may be merely the ventriloquist’s dummy of your culture. Describing the life we want can sometimes be the most compliant – i.e., defensive – thing we ever do…. And not only are we unconscious of what we want and plagued by wishfulness, but there is a powerful force inside us, which Freud would eventually call the death instinct, that both wants us not to want, and wants us to harm ourselves and others; that wants the life we don’t want.” Phillips continues, “The pragmatist wants to assume that people want to get on, in both senses; the psychoanalyst assumes that people resist getting on…. In psychoanalysis, there is the unconscious and there are our ego-ideals; and psychoanalytic treatment is about how we fit them together, how we fit together who we seem to be with who we want to be…. Pragmatism tells us that we can only know, or surmise, who we want to be (not who we really are), and then make experiments in living to find out whether we are right…. So if pragmatism’s insistent preoccupation is about how we can, voluntarily, get the lives we want, then psychoanalysis’s preoccupation is about how we can survive and sufficiently enjoy our largely unconscious desires and determinisms…. Our nature as described by psychoanalysis – makes us radically unsuited to the lives we are capable of living (the very things that sustain us – our appetite, our desire – are the very things that torment us). And there is also, perhaps fortunately, a life instinct that contends with this death instinct in the unending war that, according to Freud, our lives really are.”

Finally, Phillips suggests that in fighting to get the life that we actually want we often use our interactions with others to offer up a kind of resistance as cope, “Ordinary everyday behaviour may be an unconscious probe to find out what the other person will do with what I do or don’t do, with what I say or don’t say, whether they can imagine and articulate the need in it; whether they can see something in it that I can’t. Whether they can see what is being resisted and what is being invited. As though ordinary life is a performance art in front of, initially, the parents and then anyone else who could be interested in one’s wants and needs, in one’s preoccupations…. So we don’t always know – are unconscious of – what we may be resisting, and that we are resisting; and we are dependent on the recognition of others who by their words and their actions show us our resistances…. We resist articulating our needs to ourselves and to others; and we resist the experiment in living that expressing one’s needs often entails…. We are most likely to resist what is most important to us. That is how we know it is important to us; we resist acknowledging it.”

“Transcription” by Ben Lerner

This short novel is Lerner auto-fiction at its best. So many crisp sentences; so much mystery about what is fact and what is fiction. The play of memory and how the past works on the narrative present. How much of this novel is about that Rosemarie Waldrop 2024 Paris Review interview on poetry? How much of the character of “Thomas” is actually Lerner’s other mentor and collaborator, Alexander Kluge? What details in the novel are true? Does it even matter?

The conceit of the novel is the narrator drops his iPhone into his hotel sink on the way to interview his mentor, in the age of post-covid, at his home just off Brown’s campus in Providence. Much of the novel revolves obliquely around humanity’s present relationship with technology. “I was almost due at Thomas’s…. To tell him the truth seemed impossible. How was it that even though I’d been concerned about bungling the technology I hadn’t borrowed a backup recording device from my anthropologist wife? In my head a poet friend who was retraining as an analyst suggested I’d been unconsciously driven to sabotage my interview.”

As the narrator, Lerner, walks across Brown’s campus to Thomas’ home, his relationships with time and technology synch, “I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.”

Thomas is a formidable presence in everyone’s life whom he touches. “I’d always encountered Thomas in medias res: when you visited, you were swept into some task or conversation, skipping over the conventional greetings. This was a relief because Thomas was one of those people I didn’t know how to touch; a handshake would seem too businesslike; a hug was impossible—the word in my head was French.” Thomas is not one for small talk, “We extend the dream when we share it. You call it fiction, but it is more…. But politics is when we sit around the fire and make the dream social, no? And that is a test of the fire, of the culture. This is better than psychoanalysis, which makes it property of the individual. So we should continue our dreaming now.”

The third and last section of the novel switches the narrator to Thomas’ son, with whom Thomas had a complicated relationship. The setup is that it is a chat between the son and Lerner, but it reads like a long monologue, with only the briefest of interjections interspersed. The son, Max, visits Thomas at Brown after he has been released from a Providence hospital after almost dying from covid. Max had said his last goodbyes over an iPhone call arranged by Thomas’ nurse, which has turned out to not have actually been the end. “All he recalled of the ordeal was being ‘awoken’ by the EMTs, as if he’d just been dozing in his chair, and then he recalled ‘the cacophony’ of the hospital, but mostly it was ‘empty space, just a long and dreamless sleep’ until he was off the ventilator, feeling sore and woozy. He wasn’t much changed, and yet he was utterly changed…. I remember thinking as I sat there drinking my coffee, scanning the walls, the piles of books, that the change might well have been in me—that I’d been altered by what I’d said, even if he’d never heard it or couldn’t remember it (are those the same thing?). I’d never had the chance to say goodbye to my mom and now I’d said goodbye to my dad but he’d come back from the dead and here I was to check on him.”

Finally, Max makes his own sort of mirrored confession to the Lerner character, “You’re not understanding. I’d already plugged my phone charger into the outlet near the table, one of those wireless chargers where you just lay your phone against the plate. I pressed record on my voice memo app and set it down on the charger. It was obscured from his view by the lamp—not that he would have paid much attention to it anyway…. No, I didn’t tell him that I was recording, I have no real reason to think he suspected anything, and I just lobbed some questions at him about his past—‘I can’t remember who cooked in your house growing up, was it only your mother?’—and then let him hold forth…. I was only half listening—I’d let my device do the listening as I sipped my wine and nodded—so I felt freed up to really look at him.”

“The Glance of Medusa: The Physiognomy of Mysticism” by Laszlo Foldenyi (translated by Jozefina Komporaly)

This book is a collection of Foldenyi’s essays on the common themes of transcendence, godliness, metaphysics, and myth. He introduces his own writings by quoting Heinrich von Kleist, “We would have to eat once more of the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence…. That is the final chapter in the history of the world.” Then Heidegger, “Ever since being got interpreted as Idea, thinking about the being of beings has been metaphysical, and metaphysics has been theological.” Foldenyi, himself, continues, “Traditional metaphysics is underpinned by a belief in a supposedly final and positive meaning, which meaning, by virtue of its very nature, also differentiates itself from everything that it invests with meaning. This traditional understanding of meaning, the abyss between Being and Be-ing, entices us with the prospect of a new world that, although available to all, can only be accessed if one renounces everything there is, and abandons what appears to be without meaning…. In lieu of an earthly, and hence fractured, Self-image, metaphysical thinking is fascinated by a solid and definitive, hence divine, Self-image…. Individuality is the endless reflection of mirrors reflecting one another, while, above all, actually reflecting the divine…. Human beings are doomed to metaphysics owing to their awareness of their own mortality.”

Foldenyi’s first essay is titled “Divine Experience and Divine Faith (Where the Bars of the Cross Intersect).” It begins with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “You go your own way of greatness; here no one shall sneak along after you! Your foot itself erased the path behind you, and above it stands written: impossibility.” Foldenyi begins by explaining mysticism, “The ‘personal encounter with God,’ known as the key characteristic of mysticism, is the seemingly moderate expression to convey the experience of mystics who have simultaneously lived a given moment (the moment of ‘conversion’) as deprivation and excessive fulfillment.” Heidegger asks, “Why are there beings at all, and why not nothing?” Foldenyi continues, “In the course of divine experience, what cannot be experienced becomes the subject of experience—excess appears within the parameters of moderation—while divine faith separates knowledge and experience, and differentiates moderation from excess…. Divine experience is intense, heated, momentary, and it makes no allowance for past or future, since it makes no allowance for time either…. Divine experience is incompatible with moderation…. In moments such as divine experience, when the individual breaks away from community and is all alone facing the incomprehensible, on the one hand, there are countless things to say, and, on the other, the mouth can barely utter anything.”

Many of Foldenyi’s other essays discuss juxtaposition and paradox. He is interested in the moment and the supremely personal. Foldenyi propounds, “Every live face conceals a mask—the mask of the impossible—into which existence as a whole is compressed, so that one can confront something that does not exist and yet is capable of subverting everything.” In another essay, he, again, discusses the concept of moderation, “The human being, by virtue of its sheer existence, is at the mercy of moderation, the limit and the world of order…. In moments of disruption, it becomes apparent that moderation is a prison, and, as its tenant, one is the prisoner of those who surpass existence altogether: Dike and Ananke; in other words, limitlessness and excess. Thus, one has to become limitless and immoderate in order to assess the totality of one’s own existence.” He quotes Heraclitus, “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul, though you travelled the whole way; so deep is its Law (Logos).”

In another essay, titled “The Impossible,” Foldenyi begins by quoting Plato’s uncle, Critias, “Nothing is certain, except that having been born we die, and that in life one cannot avoid disaster.” Foldenyi expands, “One experiences oneself as a banished God and, as a result, finds oneself bedazzled and tends to perceive life as a giant wound…. In unsettling moments, when one is touched by chaos and, having transcended everything, perceives oneself as the divine centre, it rightly feels that one has also become a victim of discord.” This is related to the concepts of Otherness and alienation. “In sacred moments, one gets to one’s inner self via the roundabout way of Otherness, initially moving away from oneself. Hence the expression ‘losing oneself’, since in such situations one is alienated from everything, including oneself…. Every historical period has encountered this alienation of the world from itself…. Relevant in this respect are the Gnostics, who interpreted alienation as a synonym for the so-called trans- or hypercosmic, and experienced an unsurmountable abyss between earthly existence and the alien and unknowable God in charge of this existence.” Getting back to Otherness, “The ‘Other’ is the expression of the impossibility that everything there is, mankind included, owes its origin to something that is not identical with itself. Every existence is charged with its own absence; in everything that there is, something Other is also inherently nestled…. Through existence, one is the depository of a ‘Being’ that guarantees all existence; at the same time, as an individual condemned to decay, one also has to endure the impossibility of this ‘Being’. The impossible, therefore, is not a noun, and is no equivalent to God, as proposed by theologians, or to Being, as perceived by ontologists…. The very usage of the word is misleading, since we are dealing with something that should not in fact be called impossible; a hyphen (-), free-standing brackets ( ) or three dots (…) would better illustrate this concept than words.” Foldenyi concludes by relating this explicitly back to the impossible, “One of the main aims of the European tradition starting with Plato and culminating with Christianity was to equip the individual to handle the temptation of the impossible…. Ideology teaches about the idea, or, to put it differently, about the sensorially visible…. By seeking an explanation for everything, ideologists find themselves attempting to leave aside the impossible, this defining characteristic of existence.” Friedrich Schleiermacher posits, “The more you fade from yourself, the clearer will the universe stand forth before you, the more splendidly will you be recompensed for the horror of self-annihilation through the feeling of the infinite in you.”

Foldenyi concludes, in his essay “The Power of Now,” by riffing, once again, on the essence of life and its momentariness. “What could human life entail if not a unique moment in which the impossible ruptures and something becomes possible? This moment between birth and death is like lightning; a luminous source that suddenly shoots off into the body of darkness. It surpasses everything while it lasts, appears indestructible and timeless, and is destroyer and creator of time. And then it disappears, just as suddenly as it came about, annihilated by the same immeasurability that led to its birth…. While endowed with the gift of life, the individual also feels short-changed, a feeling for which mortality is the most eloquent proof.” We are all out there in this world, but all on our own for this ever-brief moment of time. “In extraordinary moments, it becomes obvious that there is no society to alleviate the burden of the fleetingness of human existence, and that one cannot rely on other in the end.”

“The Marginal Revolutionaries” by Janek Wasserman

This is a history of the Austrian School of economics, starting with Carl Menger and running through the non-Austrian Austrians, such as Israel Kirzner and Murray Rothbard. As such, it details the milieu of fin-de-siecle Vienna, as well as the mass emigration of economists from Austria in the 1930s, as fascism encroached. As a school, Austrian economics focuses on methodological individualism, subjective value, capital and the role of time in that process, uncertainty and the role of the entrepreneur, and, of course, marginal utility. Along with Walras and Jevons, in 1862, Menger rediscovered the marginal utility of value in contradistinction to the prevailing labor theory of value of the day. He explained, “Hence the value to this person of any portion of the whole available quantity of the good is equal to the importance to him of the satisfactions of least importance among those assured by the whole quantity and achieved with an equal portion.” His student Friedrich Wieser would simplify, “Simply put, the value of an individual unit [of a good] is determined by the least valuable of the economically permitted uses of that unit.”

Another student of Menger’s, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk added the role of time preference, particularly in reference to capital structure and roundabout methods of production. Bohm explained, “That roundabout methods lead to greater results than direct methods is one of the most important and fundamental propositions in the whole theory of production.” In doing so, he posited a reason for a natural rate of interest and the value of present money over future claims on money.  Wasserman also explains that Bohm was one of the first economists to give a prime role in the economy to the entrepreneur. “He defined the entrepreneur sociologically as the class of individuals engaged in speculative ventures. They earned their wealth not through the exploitation of labor or land but through their far-sighted commitment to the production of goods. Their dedication to roundabout production methods for future gain distinguished them from other market participants.”

Ludwig von Mises’ approach to all economics could be boiled down to just one a priori principle, the action axiom: all human action is rational and a purposeful consideration of means and ends. He wrote, “Choosing determines all human decisions. In making his choice man chooses not only between various material things and services. All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another.” This was his theory of praxeology, human action. “Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori.” The writer Edward Dolan summarized, “The Austrian method, simply put, is to spin out by verbal deductive reasoning the logical implications of a few fundamental axioms. First among the axioms is the fact of purposeful human action.”

One of Mises’ greatest contributions to business cycle theory was the non-neutral role of the money supply and inflation. Depending on where in the economy the new money was injected, it distorted relative prices, while not adding overall value. Money injection created artificially low interest rates, which precipitated boom and bust cycles, as entrepreneurs were mistakenly signaled into starting capital projects that the natural Wicksellian rate would not have warranted. Mises explained, “The moment must eventually come when no further extension of the circulation of fiduciary media is possible. Then the catastrophe occurs, and its consequences are the worse and the reaction against the bull tendency of the market the stronger, the longer the period during which the rate of interest on loans has been low below the natural rate of interest and the greater the extent to which roundabout processes of production that are not justified by the state of the capital market have been adopted.” Mises was also the Austrian School’s most vociferous critic of socialism. “Once society abandons free pricing of production goods rational production becomes impossible. Every step that leads away from private ownership of the means of production and the use of money is a step away from rational economic activity.”

Friedrich von Hayek stressed the impossibility of calculation in a socialist economy. Calculation of the value of goods is impossible without relative market prices. It is also impossible under socialism because individuals’ subjective values are constantly shifting. There is no objective data of value to compile. The division of knowledge, both technical and of subjective value, is dispersed throughout all of society. In a market economy, Hayek stated, “The spontaneous interaction of a number of people, each possessing only bits of knowledge, brings about a state of affairs in which prices correspond to costs.”

The modern Austrian School of economics is often conflated with the libertarian political persuasion. However, Austrian economists qua economists wanted to keep economics a value-free science. Israel Kirzner explains, “It is quite true that for many in the U.S. the term “Austrian economics” is synonymous with laissez-faire. And I suppose it happens to be true the Austrian economists are generally “in favor of” the free market. But it can, I believe, be maintained (at least I hope so) that Austrian economics by itself does not embody those judgments of value without which, I believe, a case for non-intervention cannot be built.”

“Stubborn Attachments” by Tyler Cowen

This is a book of moral philosophy, with an emphasis on political (or at least communal) issues. It is a treatise about values and what humanity, as a whole, needs to care about. As such, it is a forward looking book. Its aim is to influence humanity’s future. Cowen suggests, “there exists an objective right and an objective wrong. Relativism is a nonstarter.” However, while clearly not a moral relativist, he is a moral pluralist, perhaps in the traditions of Isaiah Berlin, Alexander Herzen, and Giambattista Vico. Cowen affirms, “I hold pluralism as a core moral intuition…. Pluralist theories are more plausible, postulating a variety of relevant values.” He states his philosophical starting points as “1. “Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force. 2. We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind. 3. Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others.”

Cowen’s theme, throughout this book, is that sustained economic growth should be an over-arching policy rule, except in extreme rights-based exceptions. He asks to “look for social processes which are ongoing, self-sustaining, and which create rising value over time.” His term “Wealth Plus” refers to basic measured GDP, plus values such as leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities. Cowen comes around to three major questions- “1. What can we do to boost the rate of economic growth? 2. What can we do to make our civilization more stable? 3. How should we deal with environmental problems?”

The simple reason that sustained economic growth is so important is that the mechanism of compounding is so powerful in adding to the betterment of all lives in society over time. “At a growth rate of ten percent per annum, as has been common in China, real per capita income doubles about once every seven years. At a much lower growth rate of one percent, such an improvement takes about sixty-nine years.” The growth of wealth, an end in itself, is also a means to other ends. “The more rapidly growing economy will, at some point, bring about much higher levels of human well-being—and other plural values—on a consistent basis…. If the gains to the future are significant and ongoing, those gains should eventually outweigh one-time costs by a significant degree, and they will likely carry along other plural values as well.” These gains might come in fits and starts, but, with a long enough time horizon, they can be assured and they will be massive. “When a higher rate of economic growth is at stake, the relevant comparisons become quite obvious after the passage of enough time…. At some point these cumulative benefits will be sufficiently robust to outweigh particular instances of irrational or misguided preferences.”

This rule favoring sustained economic growth should be tempered by human rights. “Rights—if we are going to believe in them at all—have to be tough and pretty close to absolute in importance if they are to survive as relevant to our comparisons.” There are some things that we just should never do, even in the name of higher growth. Rights, therefore, should be negative, not positive in nature. “Numerous violations of the rule or law may seem harmless enough, but enough of them can be dire once we consider the longer-run expectation and incentive effects.”

Cowen claims that we, in the present, do not value humanity in the distant future enough. With Derek Parfit, he wrote, “Why should costs and benefits receive less weight, simply because they are further in the future? When the future comes, these benefits and costs will be no less real.” The future cannot influence today’s decision makers and, therefore, is neglected. “When it comes to non-tradable and storable assets, markets do not reflect the preferences of currently unborn individuals…. Future generations cannot contract in today’s markets.” Time preference and discounting should be greatly reduced. The temporal distance of a human should be viewed with the same moral regard as the spatial distance of a human. However, “discounting for risk is justified in a way that discounting for the pure passage of time is not. If a future benefit is uncertain, we should discount that benefit accordingly because it may not arrive.”

Cowen makes the case that the further we look out into the time horizon the less wealth redistribution makes sense. “The case for redistribution would be stronger if the world were going to end in the near future. If the time horizon is extremely short, the benefits of continued higher growth will be choked off and the scope for compounding over time would be correspondingly limited…. A high degree of redistribution also makes sense in a lot of “lifeboat” settings…. [where] these examples typically involve an implicit assumption of a zero or negative rate of return on investment.” No one plans for the next generation’s wealth when drifting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. To this end, Cowen feels, “the attitude of historical pessimism is therefore one of the most important critiques of my arguments. If historical pessimism holds true…. expected rates of return are negative.” Finally, Cowen compares the Solow model of growth with the increasing returns model. “Under the increasing returns model, a one-time negative shock harms the long-run rate of growth, which implies that we must take great care to avoid or limit each and every possible negative shock. The Solow model suggests a picture of greater resilience, since catch-up effects prevent each and every mistake from compounding over time…. Individuals who believe in the increasing returns model should be much more skeptical of non-growth enhancing redistribution than individuals who believe in the Solow catch-up model…. The key question is whether gains and losses compound over time or dwindle into longer-run insignificance.”

Cowen ends by addressing the uncertainty humanity faces as it confronts its more distant future. “We don’t know whether our actions today will in fact give rise to a better future…. The effects of our current actions are very hard to predict…. The epistemic critique suggests that the philosophic doctrine of consequentialism cannot be a useful guide to action because we hardly know anything about long-run consequences.” Therefore, “consequentialism is strongest when we pursue values that are high in absolute importance.” Cowen suggests this utmost value should be a very strong intuition towards sustainable growth. “Anything we try to do is floating in a sea of long-run radical uncertainty, so to speak. Only big, important upfront goals will, in reflective equilibrium, stand above the ever-present froth and allow the comparison to be more than a very rough one. Putting too many small goals at stake simply means that our moral intuitions will end up confused…. Given the radical uncertainty of the more distant future, we can’t know how to achieve preferred goals with any kind of certainty over longer time horizons. Our attachment to particular means should therefore be highly tentative, highly uncertain, and radically contingent…. Our attitudes to others should therefore be accordingly tolerant…. There are many such opposing views, so even if yours is the best, you’re probably still wrong.”

“Effingers” by Gabriele Tergit (translated by Sophie Duvernoy)

This is an epic novel that spans four generations of a few branches of two Jewish families in Germany, intertwined by blood and marriage. The story begins in 1883 and continues to the tragic end of World War II. The Effinger pater familias is a watchmaker in Kragsheim in Bavaria. He marries his daughters off in the nearby countryside, but his sons leave to seek their fortunes on the road, in London, and in Berlin. Two marry sisters and into a family of wealthy Berlin bankers, the Oppners,  while setting up a manufacturing factory on the outskirts of the city, starting with screws and eventually producing cars, as the years go by. While two of the brothers from Berlin, Ludwig and Emmanuel work at a private bank, the third, Waldemar is a practicing lawyer, barred from a professorship because of his faith. A liberal, he has lost his religion, except culturally. “Instead of religion, we now have the laws of nature, which promise ever-greater happiness. Science is our religion. What you call eternal life, we call the permanence of matter…. Fear of God, and the belief that the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the third and fourth generations, breed false morality, rather than an honest consideration of right and wrong. True morality can only come from true freedom.”

Emmanuel’s son, Theodor, like many of his generation and class, was a dilettante and aesthete, who preferred to gaze at art than be tutored at the family bank. “Theodor, who was seventeen and an apprentice at his father's firm, was in the process of tying his tie. He found their home life deeply distasteful. He was disgusted by these businessmen, their silly pastimes, their childish games, their idle tinkling on the piano, their dreadful hypocrisy in a time in which the struggle for existence was paramount, and the evolution of the species was the great philosophical topic of the era.”

Waldemar, urged on by his more liberal colleagues, is tempted to convert for his career, but quickly dismisses the notion. “I could imagine accepting baptism because I take the view that Christianity represents the evolution of the ancient religion of the Prophets into a milder, gentler ethics, centuries later. But the moment baptism confers material benefits, these considerations become irrelevant. It is morally repugnant that an act that should spring from one's deepest personal conviction can lead to professional advancement. They've put a premium on men who lack principles.”

The two Effinger sons, married into the Opener banking clan, could not be more different in disposition. “Karl probably wasn't saving a penny. Paul considered this a moral failing. Karl and Annette frivolously ignored the Effingers' age-old principle of saving money. The Effingers had always prayed, worked, and saved as much as possible for old age, hard times, and their children. But these people no longer believed in hard times. Paul felt this whole business went against everything his ancestors had taught him.” Theodor, now stuck in a loveless marriage but still consumed with art, reconsiders his life’s path, as well. “Here we are, the tired children of this fading century. We try to be good sons to our strong fathers, to lead their factories and banks and affairs of state. I'm only a subject, but even the man on the throne, the Kaiser, twirls his mustache, raises his baton, and thunders at the world, yet he secretly listens to refined, decadent counts who compose sweet songs. Hasn't a bohemian succeeded the bourgeois queen in England? I wanted to be healthy, productive, good, and strong. But what has that led to? All our efforts are futile; we've done the wrong thing. I will need to wear a mask—perhaps many. "We all must act; those who know it are wise." I will be good to Beatrice, that stupid, frigid child, and keep up appearances, buy paintings and be a good subject to the Kaiser.”

As nationalism, fascism, and socialism are on the rise worldwide, the true classical liberal is having hard time making it in the world. Nonetheless, Waldemar stays true to his beliefs and tries to caution the youth of his family. He cautions his grand-nephew, Erwin, “For half a century, we believed in Darwinism, that man is a product of his environment, in human progress. The world is now taking a disastrous turn toward pessimism. It now believes in the completely opaque concept of race, which is common currency among Pan-Slavists and Nietzschean blond beasts alike. It believes in the inevitable impoverishment of the masses through capitalist greed. We believed that fundamental ethical concepts were not up for discussion. But people have abandoned the desire for truth—they value self-interest and power instead. The will to power has led man beyond good and evil. Every worldview now considers itself infallible. And Zionism doesn't resist this new evil, and instead uses every argument of this dreadful new time for its own purposes. It's fighting on a false front. From the point of view of blood and extreme nationalism, antisemitism is justified.”

Waldemar gives words of wisdom to his grand-niece, Marianne, a socialist, as well, “Intellectuals are always unwanted. They must work to make themselves heard. But if you prefer to live in an ivory tower rather than be a speaker, a teacher, or a revolutionary, don't be surprised when the fools or the masses come to tear it down without knowing what they should build instead…. Socialism is only a better form of bureaucracy. It began as a religion, but now it's turned into social welfare. People can get excited about religion, but welfare? It's just collecting coupons, nothing more. Religion has moved on to communism.”

By 1933, Marianne has given up the socialist cause in the face of Hitler, turning, instead, to Zionism. Waldemar again cautions, while reminding her of her true Jewish and German heritage, “Where is our enthusiasm for equality, the same equality our ancestors upheld in ancient times, despite their hardship? We may be powerless, but we carry the knowledge of the injustice we have endured throughout history. This knowledge has ennobled our people for centuries and given it the unparalleled power of passive resistance. We are optimists. 'And God saw all he had made, and behold, it was good.' The secret to our immortality lies in our optimism and our commitment to peace. But across the world, optimistic, liberal ideas are dying. A mystical blood brotherhood is now considered more significant than the air you've breathed for thousands of years or the language you've spoken for centuries. The peaceful coexistence of people who are not all alike is considered intolerable. The facts are plain: The rule of law is gone. The man with better party connections is the man who is right. And what follows? Everyone who doesn't belong to the party is exterminated, and we're thrust back into the Stone Age…. Your grandfather fought on the barricades for the rights of the powerless in 1848, and I, my child, have devoted my life to the rights of individuals and peoples. I have never believed in a personal God, but I believe that the ethics of the prophets, indeed, of all world religions, are more important than ever today. A lie must be called a lie. That is the difference between those who worship power and those who believe in justice, between those who justify the persecution of other people with slogans, and those who fight for the laws of Sinai, no matter their people or nation. This is not the difference between today and tomorrow; this is eternal. It's the difference between Yahweh and Amalek.”

“The Methods of Ethics” by Henry Sidgwick

This treatise is Sidgwick’s attempt to reconcile intuitive ethics, egoistic hedonism, and utilitarianism with common sense morality. He begins by clarifying his terms, “I propose therefore to define Pleasure—when we are considering its “strict value” for purposes of quantitative comparison—as a feeling which, when experienced by intelligent beings, is at least implicitly apprehended as desirable or—in cases of comparison—preferable.” Next, Sidgwick defines his purpose, “The question then remains, whether any general theory can be attained of the causes of pleasure and pain so certain and practically applicable that we may by its aid rise above the ambiguities and inconsistencies of common or sectarian opinion, no less than the shortcomings of the empirical-reflective method, and establish the Hedonistic art of life on a thoroughly scientific basis.”

Next, Sidgwick spells out his meaning of the utilitarian Good, “Each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainable by him. I before observed that the duty of Benevolence as recognised by common sense seems to fall somewhat short of this. But I think it may be fairly urged in explanation of this that practically each man, even with a view to universal Good, ought chiefly to concern himself with promoting the good of a limited number of human beings, and that generally in proportion to the closeness of their connexion with him.”

After debating the pros and cons of each of the moral systems, Sidgwick makes up his mind, “I find that I arrive, in my search for really clear and certain ethical intuitions, at the fundamental principle of Utilitarianism…. Utilitarianism is thus presented as the final form into which Intuitionism tends to pass, when the demand for really self-evident first principles is rigorously pressed.” He continues by detailing principles that square utilitarianism with intuitionism: the axiom of justice/equity (similar cases deserve similar treatment), prudence (equal rational concern for all temporal parts of one's life), and rational benevolence (the good of any one individual is of no more importance than the good of any other). “In short, the only so-called Virtues which can be thought to be essentially and always such, and incapable of excess, are such qualities as Wisdom, Universal Benevolence, and (in a sense) Justice; of which the notions manifestly involve this notion of Good, supposed already determinate. Wisdom is insight into Good and the means to Good; Benevolence is exhibited in the purposive actions called “doing Good”: Justice (when regarded as essentially and always a Virtue) lies in distributing Good (or evil) impartially according to right rules.”

Finally, Sidgwick details some caveats to utilitarianism, “The doctrine that Universal Happiness is the ultimate standard must not be understood to imply that Universal Benevolence is the only right or always best motive of action. For, as we have before observed, it is not necessary that the end which gives the criterion of rightness should always be the end at which we consciously aim…. By Greatest Happiness is meant the greatest possible surplus of pleasure over pain.” He surmises that Common Sense morality might be the system that actually works best for the everyday affairs of the masses, “Common-Sense morality is really only adapted for ordinary men in ordinary circumstances—although it may still be expedient that these ordinary persons should regard it as absolutely and universally prescribed, since any other view of it may dangerously weaken its hold over their minds. So far as this is the case we must use the Utilitarian method to ascertain how far persons in special circumstances require a morality more specially adapted to them than Common Sense is willing to concede: and also how far men of peculiar physical or mental constitution ought to be exempted from ordinary rules.”

Sidgwick's conclusion leaves him flummoxed: he cannot rationally reconcile the claims of egoism (rational self-interest) with the claims of utilitarianism (universal good). Both rest on principles that appear self-evident, and reason alone cannot adjudicate between them. He calls this a fundamental contradiction at the heart of practical reason. Sidgwick’s most enduring contribution is not merely his refinement of utilitarianism, but his argument that ethics confronts a final unresolved tension between the rational pursuit of one’s own happiness and the equally rational demand to promote universal happiness impartially. This “dualism of practical reason” prevents the book from being a simple utilitarian victory lap. It is instead one of the great demonstrations of how difficult it is to ground morality in reason alone.

Furthermore, Sidgwick admits, “On Utilitarian principles, it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right to do, if it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to in the face of the world…. Similarly it seems expedient that the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept esoteric.”