“Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius” by Ray Monk

This is pretty much a straight biography of Wittgenstein, dealing in equal measure with the personal details of his life and expositions of his philosophy. It does great work putting his ideas into the context of his life. Though Wittgenstein reneged on much of his previous work in the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, some of his basic philosophical tenets remained unchanged throughout his life. In Notes on Logic, Wittgenstein states, “In philosophy there are no deductions: it is purely descriptive. Philosophy gives no pictures of reality. Philosophy can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigations. Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics: logic is its basis. Epistemology is the philosophy of psychology. Distrust of grammar is the first requisite of philosophizing.” His philosophy was always concerned with language, meaning, grammar, and propositions. Monk states, “A proposition serves as a model, or picture, of a state of affairs, by virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world. The way in which the parts of the proposition are combined—the structure of the proposition—depicts a possible combination of elements in reality, a possible state of affairs…. Wittgenstein developed the consequences of this idea, which he called his ‘Theory of Logical Portrayal’. Just as a drawing or a painting portrays pictorially, so, he came to think, a proposition portrays logically…. It is this commonality of structure which enables language to represent reality.”

One neglected area of Wittgenstein’s life that Monk brings into focus is his strained relationship with religion. He was brought up a Catholic in a secular Viennese household. However, depending on who you ask three (or two) of his grandparents were Jews. He seemed to have never wavered in his belief in God, although his conception of the deity might have been unique to himself. Wittgenstein wrote in his diary, “What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life. I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of the world—and so in a certain sense master it—by renouncing any influence on happenings.” Later, he would further interrogate his own belief, “To believe in a God means to understand the meaning of life. To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning. The world is given to me, i.e. my will enters the world completely from the outside as into something that is already there. (As for what my will is, I don’t know yet.) However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God. In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world—which is independent of our will. I can make myself independent of fate. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I…. When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it the world? Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.” Later in his diaries, Wittgenstein again wrestles with the meaning of life, “The solution to the problem of life is to be seen in the disappearance of the problem. Isn’t this the reason why men to whom the meaning of life had become clear after long doubting could not say what this meaning consisted in?” More than just keeping a belief in a deist God, Wittgenstein continued to consider himself a faithful Christian, though no longer a Catholic. “Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith.”

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein famously states, “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” Ethical truths, for him, were unspeakable. But they were the most meaningful part of life. Of many important things, they cannot be said, they can only be shown. Monk remarks, “The nonsense that results from trying to say what can only be shown is not only logically untenable, but ethically undesirable.” Wittgenstein explains of the Tractatus, “It is quite strictly speaking the presentation of a system. And this presentation is extremely compressed since I have only retained in it that which really occurred to me—and how it occurred to me…. The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary, but there is no babbling in it.” He never tried to prove his statements or defend himself. He cut out everything until only the core of his philosophy remained. Monk continues, “Whereas the Tractatus deals with language in isolation from the circumstances in which it is used, the Investigations repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the ‘stream of life’ which gives linguistic utterances their meaning: a ‘language-game’ cannot be described without mentioning their activities and the way of life of the ‘tribe’ that plays it.” Wittgenstein was intent that he had no theory. He tried to dig towards what he called atomic propositions, realizing that he had not, and probably would never, reach them. “We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions. We don’t get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.”

Wittgenstein was worshipped by the positivists of the Vienna Circle led by Moritz Schlick. Despite this, he was highly skeptical of them and of positivism more generally. He feared it led to scientism. In a speech to the Heretics at Cambridge he expounded, “Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” In Vienna, speaking to Schlick and Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein repeated, “I think it is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics—whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable.” Going back to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is clear, “The correct method of philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.” Wittgenstein did not have much faith in modernity. “It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.”

For Wittgenstein, the hard questions were the ones that cannot be said, much less written about. These problems were hard enough just to think to oneself about. Writing to one of his proteges, Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein beseeches, “I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people’s lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important…. If we live to see each other again let’s not shirk digging. You can’t think decently if you don’t want to hurt yourself. I know all about it because I am a shirker.”

“Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism” by Larry Siedentop

Siedentop is a fellow at Kebble College, Oxford. In this book, he posits that it was Western Europe’s Christian roots that paved the way to the preeminence of the individual as the hallmark of the liberal tradition. He begins by contrasting modernity with the basis of society in Ancient Greece and Rome. “At its origin the ancient family was both the focus and the medium of religious belief. It was an instrument of immortality, at once a metaphysic and a cult…. A family was a group of persons whom religion permitted to invoke the same sacred fire, and to offer funeral repast to the same ancestors.” Family was very much the basis of separation and the most basic unit of society. French historian Fustel de Coulanges informs, “In the house of every Greek and Roman was an altar; on this altar there had always to be a small quantity of ashes, and a few lighted coals. It was a sacred obligation for the master of every house to keep the fire up night and day. Woe to the house where it was extinguished.” At the state level, Siedentop continues, “The successive worships into which the ancient citizen was initiated left no space for individual conscience or choice. These worships claimed authority over not just his actions but also his thoughts. Their rules governed his relations with himself as well as others. There was no sphere of life into which these rules could not enter—whether it was a matter of dress, deportment, marriage, sport, education, conversation or even ambition…. The king was hereditary high priest of that association of associations that was the ancient city. The king’s other functions, as magistrate and military leader, were simply the adjuncts of his religious authority…. Later, when kingship gave way to republican regimes, the chief magistrate of the city—the archon in Athens, the consul in Rome—remained a priest whose first duty was to offer sacrifices to the city’s gods…. Laws were the necessary consequences of religious belief. There was nothing like the modern notion of sovereignty, of a merely human agency with the authority to create new law. The priests jealously guarded the laws of the city, for the laws were understood to be the work of the gods.” Ancient liberty meant the liberty of the citizen to partake in the political process. It did not serve as a restraint against the State, the masses, or communal tradition. Fustel states, “If we wanted to give an exact definition of a citizen, we should say that it was a man who had the religion of the city.”

Siedentop makes the case that the advent of Christianity was a huge paradigm shift. “Through the story of Jesus, individual moral agency was raised up as providing a unique window into the nature of things, into the experience of grace rather than necessity, a glimpse of something transcending death. The individual replaced the family as the focus of immortality.” An important adjunct to the rise of Christianity was the democratization of reason. “Rationality loses its aristocratic connotations. It is associated not with status and pride but with humility which liberates. Paul’s conception of the Christ overturns the assumption on which ancient thinking had hitherto rested, the assumption of natural inequality. Instead, Paul wagers on human equality…. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus amounted to the discovery of human freedom—of a moral agency potentially available to each and everyone, that is, to individuals.” Paul, himself, states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Christianity broke down the hierarchy of the ancient family. “By transferring religious authority from the father to a separate priesthood, the Christian church removed the religious basis of the paterfamilias.” There was, therefore, an elevation of the woman into a role as an independent individual and not just a cog in the family machine. “By the third and fourth centuries this new role was confirmed in the role of the ‘dedicated virgin’, a role which did not make any sense unless it was assumed that the woman had a mind and will of her own…. Declarations of independence by women seem to have been especially frequent in upper-class families. It is as if the confidence engendered by the superior status of a family was appropriated by some women and put to a new use…. They became patronesses, disciples and travelers.” Christianity also began the long process of breaking down class distinctions, in word if not in deed. “In contrast to the segregated spaces of the ancient city, the Christian population of the cities began to share the same spaces, hearing the bishops’ ex cathedra words in the basilica or principle church, and taking part in the same rites, that is, baptism, the mass and funerals. Processions to the tombs of local martyrs were for everyone.”

The Holy Roman Empire was by no means liberal. However, Siedentop makes the argument that the Carolingians instituted some policies that further nudged the way towards the increased status of the individual. “Charlemagne’s call for a universal oath of allegiance led to the first serious impinging of Christian moral norms on social roles, a precarious attempt to distance the self (or ‘soul’) from inherited statuses, in order to give those statuses a sanction in consciences.” Bishop Theodulf of Orleans would admonish, “The rich get their riches because of the poor. But nature submits you to the same laws. In birth and death you are alike. The same holy water blesses you; you are anointed with the same oils; the flesh and blood of the lamb (the Christ) nourishes you all together.” Siedentop continues, “Charlemagne tried to combine two visions of the foundations of social order in his rule—lordship and ‘the care of souls’. In the course of pursuing the second vision he had created a far better educated and more cohesive higher clergy, a disciplined Christian elite. It was the elite that survived the decay of his empire…. It pursued that vision with determination, struggling against the consequences of increasingly hereditary local lordships, which were helping to destroy centralized government…. The solidarities of an ancient and urban Christianity were making way for a faith with an increasingly individualist bias.”

It was the Christian notion of the soul and a personal afterlife that gave precedence to the individual after death. “Scenes of the passion of Christ and his resurrection—testified that the immortal soul, rather than the immortal family, was the primary constituent of reality…. But it was not only emphasis on the day of judgement, the new notion of purgatory and wall paintings that drove home a message of hope. Largely illiterate congregations also heard tales of saints’ lives, stories which demonstrated that salvation did not depend upon social status…. The lives of the saints offered a kind of imagined mobility, a moral standing that could be achieved rather than inherited…. They democratized the ancient cult of the hero.”

Another aspect of Christian theism was the concept of natural law. In 1140 AD, Gratian wrote in his Decretum, “Natural law [jus] is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel by which each is to do to another what he wants done to himself and forbidden to do to another what he does not want done to himself.” It was a restating of the Golden Rule in the context of legalism. “By identifying natural law with biblical revelation and Christian morality, Gratian gave it an egalitarian bias—and a subversive potential—utterly foreign to the ancient world’s understanding of natural law as ‘everything in its place’…. An underlying moral equality was now deemed natural.” Pope Innocent III would expand, “But it may be said that kings are to be treated differently from others. We, however, know that it is written in the divine law, “You shall judge the great as well as the little and there shall be no difference in persons.””

Canon law began to assert itself on society at large and with that came greater rule of law and greater rights for the individual. “Canon law became, in that way, the original vehicle of modernity…. The development of canon law and a hierarchy of courts administering it—with the papacy at the apex—created a system that offered litigants coherence, relative predictability and other benefits. It was a system that stood in contrast to the secular courts, in which the application of customary and feudal law allowed recourse to Roman law only intermittently…. Roman law was distrustful of and, indeed, avoided abstractions…. The habitual turn of the canonist mind was different. It sought to identify the shared features of particular legal decisions and raise them to the level of a concept. Behind the rules it sought to identify principles…. Canon lawyers brought to bear not just legal techniques they acquired from the study of Roman law, but a ‘democratized’ interest in generalization and abstraction, an interest combining knowledge of Aristotelian logic with Christian moral intuitions…. The difference sprang from the new concern that law should be understood as applying to ‘all (souls) equally’. Hence it needed to be systematic.”

Another feature of Western modernity was the push towards urbanization. Initially formed as centers of trade, free cities eventually gained in wealth and autonomy. The urban bourgeoisie slowly asserted their rights against kingship, but, particularly, against local feudal lords. “Only later did townspeople relate their new liberty to the moral equality proclaimed by Christian beliefs. Yet that relationship emerged almost immediately in the language they adopted when ‘swearing the commune’ and defending its interests. It was language of brotherhood. Thus, a twelfth-century Flemish borough charter prescribed: ‘let each help the other like a brother’. This language of equality and reciprocity—of moral transparency—was not the language of the ancient polis, but rather of St. Paul…. Unlike in the ancient city, liberty was being claimed, not merely for the borough, but also for the individuals who lived and worked in it…. The first feature of the borough charters was to secure self-government by lodging final authority in the assembly of all citizens. Secularism introduced a formal equality of status for citizens, who had the right to take part in the assemblies. Popular assemblies had the right to legislate, levy taxes and make war…. Boroughs were usually exempt from feudal services and dues, as well as from royal taxes, except those that had been agreed in advance. Their independence emerges especially in the absence of obligation except by prior agreement.” In 1219, the citizens of Marseilles wrote in a joint proclamation, “It is to Jesus Christ that we owe the development of the laws and advantages of our city.”

Theologians and philosophers also played a large part in advancing the notion of individualism in Western society. “The Franciscans Duns Scotus and Ockham put into place the basic building blocks of modern secularism. In refining the idea of Christian liberty—separating the idea of freedom from that of justice and making both conditions of morality as well as distinguishing rights of ownership from a right to rule—they prepared a revolution in the understanding of the ‘proper’ ground of all authority.” Ockham and the Franciscans also fought with Aquinas and the Dominicans over fundamental matters of theology. “Was it plausible that a ‘sovereign’ God’s actions be subject to necessity? As we have seen, Ockham and his Franciscan followers thought not. For them, the core of Christian revelation was the ‘grace’ which the Christ offered to all equally. That grace held out the prospect of an individual relationship with divinity which transcended social relations and required a new understanding of the role of reason. It was this conviction that turned Ockham and his followers into harbingers of ‘modernity’…. They reconstructed the idea of justice and revised the test for scientific truth…. Taking the moral autonomy of individuals as their weapon, the nominalists broke through a set of assumptions which had confined the structure of society and the pursuit of knowledge within an hierarchical or corporate framework. Ockham replaced those assumptions with the assertion of individual rights (justifying a private sphere of choice) and the verification principle (which made knowledge of the external world always subject to disproof by further experience)…. The nominalists, in effect, began to separate ‘culture’ from ‘nature’—emphasizing the central role of reasons and intentions in the former, while driving explanations in terms of purpose from the latter…. Ockham’s emphasis on faith and freedom confronted Aquinas’ rationalist account of natural law…. First is Ockham’s emphasis on natural rights and liberty rather than on traditional natural law…. Second is his insistence on the difference between demonstrative reasoning and causal explanation, between ‘rational science’ and ‘experimental science’…. Ockham’s understanding of justice emerged as the claim for ‘equal liberty’. Freedom became a birthright, a right founded on the nature of human agency…. Thomists fail to understand what Ockham understood, that the theory of natural rights involves subjecting the ancient idea of natural law to a new distributive principle, the biblical golden rule, with its stipulation in favour of equality and reciprocity. Human autonomy is authorized ‘by God and nature’. The golden rule introduced a principle of justice which overthrew the assumption of natural inequality. And, in Ockham’s eyes, that move is at the heart of Christian revelation. It is God’s will…. Individuals cannot alienate their moral autonomy because it is God-given.”

A final piece of the modernization project was the usurpation of authority from feudal lords to the central monarch. For the individual at the bottom of the social order this was not necessarily a loss of rights. “‘Equal Subjection’ to a sovereign was perceived not as loss but as gain…. The church had projected the image of society as an association of individuals, an image which unleashed the centralizing process in Europe…. In the process of centralizing laws, manners and ideas—forging a single society out of what had been separate, parochial societies—the monarchs not only created states, but also the foundation for a ‘public’ or ‘national’ opinion…. If we look at the word ‘individual’ in historical dictionaries of the English or French languages, we will find that it first became current in the fifteenth century. The word ‘state’, with its stipulation of a sovereign authority, became current at about the same time.” The individual’s rise in autonomy was intimately intertwined with the rise of the modern nation-state. Siedentop concludes, “Secularism can be seen as Europe’s noblest achievement, the achievement which should be its primary contribution to the creation of a world order…. Secularism is Christianity’s gift to the world.”

“The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han was raised in South Korea, currently teaches philosophy and cultural studies at the University of Arts in Berlin, and writes his published works in German. This book is a study on the nature of time and how its conception has changed over the ages. He begins, “This regime change from God to human is not without its consequences. It de-stabilizes time because God is the authority which confers finality and the seal of eternal truth upon the prevailing order. God stands for a lasting present. With the regime change, time loses this hold…. Historical time can rush ahead because it does not rest in itself, because its centre of gravity is not in the present…. Time is meaningful insofar as it moves towards a goal…. Mythical time is restful, like a picture. Historical time, by contrast, has the form of a line which runs or rushes towards a goal. If this line loses its narrative or teleological tension, it disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction. The end of history atomizes time into point-time. Myth once gave way to history: the static picture turned into a progressive line. Now, history gives way to information. The latter does not possess any narrative width or breadth. It is neither centred, nor does it have a direction. Information falls down on us, so to speak…. Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn, produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety.” From a static sense of ever-lasting religion to the Whig Theory of history marching ever forward to secular points floating about randomly in the universe, humanity’s relationship to the movement of time has defined our conscious embodiment of ourselves in space.

Han suggests that our perception of time’s progress has accelerated in modernity. “The feeling that time passes more quickly now than before is also due to the absence of a pronounced articulation of time. This feeling is intensified by the fact that events follow each other in quick succession without leaving lasting traces, without becoming experiences…. Nothing carries weight.” The dots no longer connect into a meaningful whole. Han starts by riffing on Heidegger, “Modernity is a time of de-factualization and freedom. It frees itself from the throwness whose thrower or projector is called God. De-factualization and secularization rest on the same premises. The human being elevates itself to become the subject of history, confronted by the world as an object that can be produced.” The arrow of time is a modern construct. Time used to move in a cyclical pattern, revolving with the seasons. “In pre-modern times… the human being followed a pre-given path, which, like orbits of the heavenly bodies, repeated itself eternally. The pre-modern human found things which he or she accepted or suffered, into which he or she was thrown: a human being characterized by facticity and repetition.… Modernity remains a narrative age, where the narrative is one of history as progress and development. This age, with its gaze turned towards the immanent world, expects a salvation that lies in the future.” Because God has been replaced with scientific progress, modern man is always in a rush to get where he is going. We cannot accelerate fast enough because the future is bound to be better than the past (and even the present age).

We are no longer content to linger in our experiences, but rush on to the next one. “The impression that time moves considerably faster than before also has its origin in the fact that today we are unable to linger, that the experience of duration has become so rare.” For Han, this is a tragedy. “Whoever tries to live faster, will ultimately die faster. It is not the total number of events, but the experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling. Where one event follows close on the heels of another, nothing enduring comes about. Fulfillment and meaning cannot be explained on quantitative grounds. A life that is lived quickly, without anything lasting long and without anything slow, a life that is characterized by quick, short-term and short-lived experiences is itself a short life, no matter how high the ‘rate of experience’ may be.” One sensation that slows you down is your sense of smell. “Scents cannot be presented in as fast a sequence as optical images. In contrast to the latter, they can also not be accelerated. A society dominated by scents would probably also not develop any inclinations towards change or acceleration. It would live off its recollections and its memory, off those things that are slow and long-lasting.” The joy of lingering has that same effect on the mind. “Contemplative lingering presupposes things which last. It is not possible to linger for long on events or images which quickly succeed one another.”

Modern man is dissatisfied because he is atomized. He is unconnected and unmoored. He is bored with his life because he is always acting, always working, and never at rest. He is always rushing about. He never pauses to reflect and absorb. “In the end, the responsibility for profound boredom lies with a life that is fully dominated by the determination to act. Profound boredom is the flip side of excessive activity, of a vita activa that lacks any form of contemplation. A compulsive activism keeps boredom alive.” Modern man has become infected by Weber’s Protestant ethic. He lives for work and does not know what to do without it. When not at work, he wants to be distracted, amused, and entertained. His leisure is mindless. Han contrasts the model of Aristotle where work “takes away freedom, because it is subject to the coercive force exerted by the necessities of life. As opposed to leisure, it does not rest in itself, because it must produce what is useful and necessary…. Aristotle also situated the beautiful and noble outside of what is useful and necessary, that is, outside of work. Only need forces work upon us…. The nature of human existence is not care, but leisure. Contemplative rest enjoys absolute priority…. Aristotle distinguishes three forms of life (bioi) of the free man: the life of striving for pleasure (hedone), that of producing the beautiful and noble deeds in the polis (bios politikos), and that which is dedicated to the contemplation of truth (bios theoretikos). All three of them form the needs and compulsions of life. The life dedicated to making money is set aside on account of its compulsive character. The bios politikos is not dedicated to the organization of communal life, because this would involve man in necessary and useful things. Rather, it strives for honour and virtue…. The highest form of happiness has its source in the contemplative lingering on beauty, the activity that used to be called theoria. Its temporal dimension is duration. It turns towards things that are imperishable and unchanging, the things that rest entirely in themselves. Only the contemplative devotion to truth, not virtue and not prudence, brings man close to the gods…. Thinking, as theorein, as the contemplative consideration of truth, is based on leisure.”

It is activity which holds man’s ambitions back. He is cut off from beauty because he never stops to pause and admire life. What he thinks of as leisure is mere recreation. What he thinks of as work is rushing towards death. Han concludes by contrasting two types of life—the life of the slave and the life of the freeman. “Life dominated by work is a vita activa which is entirely cut off from the vita contemplativa. If the human being loses all capacity for contemplation, it degenerates into an animal laborans.” Modern man has lost sight of the goal. He has become enchanted by consumption, by amassing the devil’s trinkets. “Consumption and duration contradict each other. Consumer goods do not last. They are marked by decay as their constitutive element…. The compulsion to consume is immanent to the system of production…. In the consumer society, one forgets to linger…. What lasts and is slow, however, evades being used up and consumed. It founds a duration. The vita contemplativa is a practice of duration.”

“The Concept of the Political” by Carl Schmitt (translated by George Schwab)

Like Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt was a German philosopher who became a prominent member of the Nazi Party. Because he was a political philosopher and jurist, in many ways, his academic views had much more practical import to the Third Reich. Today, Schmitt remains decidedly relevant as he is actively read and often cited by the Chinese Communist Party inteligencia. In this short book, Schmitt is concerned mainly with external politics—the politics between nations. His philosophy is political realism on steroids.

Schmitt begins by stating that society and the State are not synonymous. Neither is the State exactly politics. “The equation state=politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.” For Schmitt, the State is always above society, “German political science originally maintained (under the impact of Hegel’s philosophy of state) that the state is qualitatively distinct from society and higher than it. A state standing above society could be called universal but not total,” necessarily.

The single idea that pervades all of Schmitt’s work is the friend versus enemy dichotomy. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy…. The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation…. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor…. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible…. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence…. The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols.”

Politics, for Schmitt, stands above all other cultural standards and those other standards, in fact, cannot exist absent the political. “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.” That is because the political unit, the State, holds the life and death of each of its subjects within its hands. This is the case no matter its form—monarchical, democratic, theocratic, or socialist. “By virtue of this power over the physical life of men, the political community transcends all other associations or societies.”

For Schmitt, it was the pessimistic political philosophers who were on the right track. “Political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and often Fichte presuppose with their pessimism only the reality or possibility of the distinction of friend and enemy. For Hobbes, a truly powerful and systematic political thinker, the pessimistic conception of man is the elementary presupposition of a specific system of political thought. He also recognized correctly that the conviction of each side that it possesses the truth, the good, and the just bring about the worst enmities, finally the war of all against all…. [Pessimist] realism can frighten men in need of security…. As long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists.” However, in the case of any emergency, man reverts to his beastly nature.

In Schmitt’s system, the political entity is opposed by the liberal individual. He stands for his own rights beyond and above the political fray. “The negation of the political, which is inherent in every consistent individualism, leads necessarily to a political practice of distrust toward all conceivable political forces and forms of state and government, but never produces on its own a positive theory of state, government, and politics…. [There exists] absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics. The systemic theory of liberalism concerns almost solely the internal struggle against the power of the state.” The demands of the State cannot help but be anathema to the true liberal for “the political entity must demand the sacrifice of life. Such a demand is in no way justifiable by the individualism of liberal thought.”

According to Schmitt, by way of its self-seeming neutrality the economic sphere has tried to encroach upon the demands of politics. “A domination of men based upon pure economics must appear a terrible deception if, by remaining nonpolitical, it thereby evades political responsibility and visibility.” However, it will not work when push comes to shove. “State and politics cannot be exterminated. The world will not be depoliticized with the aid of definitions and constructions, all of which circle the polarity of ethics and economics…. This allegedly nonpolitical and apparently even antipolitical system serves existing or newly emerging friend-and-enemy groupings and cannot escape the logic of the political.” In the end, pure economic relations merely put on a show, serve the interests of the ruling status quo powers, and sneak politics in through the backdoor.

“The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous” by Joseph Henrich

Henrich attempts nothing less than to trace the roots of cultural progress and how that evolution has shaped human psychology individually, as well as, more importantly, the structures and institutions that have molded modern societies. It is an ambitious project. First, WEIRD stands for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Henrich makes the case that such people are the exceptions throughout human history, not the rule. To study their psychologies and generalize to all of human nature has been a huge mistake prevalent in academic research. Henrich breaks down his thesis in a nutshell, “The spread of a religious belief that every individual should read the Bible for themselves led to the diffusion of widespread literacy among both men and women, first in Europe and later across the globe. Broad-based literacy changed people’s brains and altered their cognitive abilities in domains related to memory, visual processing, facial recognition, numerical exactness, and problem-solving. It probably also indirectly altered family sizes, child health, and cognitive development, as mothers became increasingly literate and formally educated. These psychological and social changes may have fostered speedier innovation, new institutions, and—in the long run—greater economic prosperity.”

What makes WEIRD people weird? “We WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves—our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be “ourselves” across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility…. We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time…. We simplify complex phenomena by breaking them down into discreet constituents and assigning properties or abstract categories to these components…. We often miss the relationships between the parts or the similarities between phenomena that don’t fit nicely into our categories…. WEIRD people are also particularly patient and often hardworking. Through potent self-regulation, we can defer gratification—in financial rewards, pleasure, and security—well into the future in exchange for discomfort and uncertainty in the present…. WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative towards strangers or anonymous others…. We WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do…. WEIRD people are often racked by guilt as they fail to live up to their culturally inspired, but largely self-imposed, standards and aspirations. In most non-WEIRD societies, shame—not guilt—dominates people’s lives…. Guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation, while shame depends on societal standards and public judgment.”

One trait that Henrich highlights is impersonal prosociality. “Impersonal trust is part of a psychological package called impersonal prosociality, which is associated with a set of social norms, expectations, and motivations for impartial fairness, probity, and cooperation with strangers, anonymous others, or even abstract institutions like the police or government. Impersonal prosociality includes the inclinations we feel toward a person who is not tied to our social network at all…. Impersonal prosociality also includes motivations, heuristics, and strategies for punishing those who break impartial norms…. [WEIRD people] are also more inclined to punish anyone who violates their impartial norms of fairness and honesty even if the violation isn’t directly against themselves…. Countries where people show more impersonal prosociality have greater national incomes (GDP per capita), greater economic productivity, more effective governments, less corruption, and faster rates of innovation.”

Another trait common among WEIRD societies is the emphasis on people’s intentions, rather than real world outcomes. “Intentions, beliefs, and personal dispositions are so central to WEIRD moral judgments that the idea that people in other societies judge others based mostly or entirely on what they did—the outcome—violates their strong intuition that mental states are primary. But, putting relatively little importance on mental states is probably how most people would have made moral judgements of strangers over most of the last 10 millennia.”

Humans are one of the only species who make use of a cultural toolkit. “Unlike other animals, we have evolved genetically to rely on learning from others to acquire an immense amount of behavioral information, including motivations, heuristics, and beliefs that are central to our survival and reproduction. This ability to learn from one another is so powerful compared to other species that we alone can accumulate increasingly complex bodies of cultural knowledge, related to everything from sophisticated projectile technologies and food-processing techniques to new grammatical tools and expanding packages of social norms.” Humans have also coevolved genetically and culturally, each building upon the other. “We have evolved genetically to learn adaptively in ways that calibrate our minds and behavior to the environments we encounter…. Our evolved capacities for cultural learning have been honed to figure out who to learn from, what to learn, and when to use cultural learning over other informational sources like individual experience or innate intuitions…. To figure out who to learn from, adults, children, and even infants integrate cues related to a potential role model’s skill, competence, reliability, success, prestige, health, age, sex, and ethnicity, among others. By preferentially attending to more successful or prestigious people, learners focus their attention and memory on those individuals most likely to possess useful information…. By combining cues like prestige and success with self-similarity cues like sex and ethnicity (e.g. speaking the same dialect), learners can target their attention on those who possess the skills, strategies, and attitudes most likely to be useful to them in their future roles or communities…. When problems are difficult, situations are ambiguous, or individual learning is costly, people should rely more heavily on learning from others…. The sharpening of our cultural learning abilities further fueled cumulative cultural evolution to generate an ever-broadening array of more complex adaptations, thereby generating autocatalytic feedback between genes and culture. As the importance, diversity, and complexity of cultural products ratcheted up, natural selection gradually strengthened our inclinations to rely on cultural learning over our instincts and individual experiences because the tools, protocols, and practices that we acquired from others became far superior to anything that any single individual could possibly figure out on their own…. Human societies, unlike those of other primates, are stitched together by culturally transmitted social norms that cluster into institutions.”

Within humanity’s great variation, different societies and cultures evolved over time, who then competed with each other evolutionarily at the group level. “Norms that favor success in competition with other groups tend to survive and spread. Such intergroup competition can occur through violent conflict…. But it can also occur when less successful groups copy the practices and beliefs of more successful groups or when more prosperous groups simply grow faster, through higher fertility, lower mortality, or greater net immigration.” The key innovation was agriculture, which allowed societies to scale up exponentially. “The potential for agriculture and herding—food production—created the conditions for fierce intergroup competition to drive up the scale and complexity of societies, generating a coevolutionary interaction between agriculture and societal complexity: the more societies relied on agriculture and herding, the more they needed to scale up…. As populations increasingly relied on farming, archaeological studies reveal that the less nutritious diets derived from cereals and other crops produced people who were shorter, sicker, and more likely to die young. However, the effects of sedentism and the productivity of unskilled (young) labor were such that farmers reproduced more quickly than did mobile hunter-gatherers…. Early farming spread not because rational individuals prefer to farm, but because farming communities with particular institutions beat mobile hunter-gatherer populations in intergroup competition.” 

Henrich makes the case that religion was a crucial aspect of cultural evolution. “Religions have fostered trade by increasing trust, legitimized political authority, and expanded people’s conceptions of their communities by shifting their focus from their own clans or tribes to larger imagined communities…. Cultural evolution, driven by intergroup competition, favored the emergence and spread of supernatural beliefs that increasingly endowed gods with concerns about human action and the power to punish and reward…. By roughly 200 BCE, universalizing religions included variants of three key features, which were psychological game changers. First contingent afterlives…. Second, free will…. Third, moral universalism.”

WEIRD societies have less strong kinship ties than traditional societies. These ties are both fewer and weaker. “Five of the kinship traits that characterize WEIRD societies [are] (1) bilateral descent, (2) little or no cousin marriage, (3) monogamous marriage only, (4) nuclear family households, and (5) neolocal residence.” The weakening of kinship bonds was a long process in the West. “First, between about 400 and 1200 CE, the intense kin-based institutions of many European tribal populations were slowly degraded, dismantled, and eventually demolished by the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church…. Then, from the ruins of their traditional social structures, people began to form new voluntary associations based on shared interests or beliefs rather than on kinship or tribal affiliations…. The dissolution of intensive kin-based institutions and the gradual creation of independent monogamous nuclear families represents the proverbial pebble that started the avalanche to the modern world in Europe.”

Henrich calls the set of marriage decrees by the Roman Catholic Church the “Marriage and Family Program.” Of most import, these rules prohibited marriage to blood relatives, prohibited marriage to affinal kin, prohibited polygynous marriage, prohibited marriage to non-Christians, created spiritual kinship, discouraged the adoption of children, required both the bride and groom to publicly consent to marriage, encouraged (and sometimes required) newly married couples to setup independent households—neolocal residence, and encouraged the individual ownership of property and inheritance by personal testament.

Why was breaking down kinship ties so important? These ties tended to foster conformity. “By embedding individuals within dense, interdependent, and inherited webs of social connections, intensive kinship norms regulate people’s behavior in subtle and and powerful ways. These norms motivate individuals to closely monitor themselves and members of their own group to make sure that everyone stays in line. They also endow elders with substantial authority over junior members. Successfully navigating these kinds of social environments favors conformity to peers, deference to traditional authorities, sensitivity to shame, and an orientation toward the collective (e.g. the clan) over oneself.” This was the opposite of what traits were selected for in proto-WEIRD societies. “Success in these individual-centered worlds favors the cultivation of greater independence, less deference to authority, more guilt, and more concern with personal achievement.”

The Roman Catholic Church, whether it was intentional or not, did effectively break down European kinship bonds over time. “National populations that collectively experienced longer durations under the Western Church tend to be (A) less tightly bound by norms, (B) less conformist, (C) less enamored with tradition, (D) more individualistic, (E) less distrustful of strangers, (F) stronger on universalistic morality, (G) more cooperative in new groups with strangers, (H) more responsive to third-party punishment…. (I) more inclined to voluntarily donate blood, (J) more impersonally honest (toward faceless institutions), (K) less inclined to accumulate parking tickets under diplomatic immunity, and (L) more analytically minded.” Henrich makes the convincing case that this has nothing to do with Christianity as a religion. “The difference between the Orthodox and Western Churches is important, because it shows that psychological variation, and later economic and political differences, aren’t due to something about exposure to Roman institutions or Christianity per se…. The long-term impact of the Western vs. Orthodox Churches lies in policies about, and implementation of, marriage and family practices, especially those related to incest taboos.”

One of the first downstream effects of proto-WEIRD societies was the gradual conception of the rule of law in society. “In assembling these new associations and organizations, the emerging proto-WEIRD psychology—analytic thinking, individualism, and a non-relational morality—would have favored the development of both impartial rules that granted privileges and obligations to individuals (not clans) and impersonal mechanisms for enforcing trust, such as accounting records, commercial laws, and written contracts.” In Europe, this went hand-in-hand with increased levels of individualization, the growth in the formation of voluntary networks, and the urbanization of the population. “The breakdown of intensive kin-based institutions opened the door to urbanization and the formation of free cities and charter towns, which began developing greater self-governance. Often dominated by merchants, urban growth generated rising levels of market integration and—we can infer—higher levels of impersonal trust, fairness, and cooperation. While these psychological and social changes were occurring, people began to ponder notions of individual rights, personal freedoms, the rule of law, and the protection of private property. These new ideas just fit people’s emerging cultural psychology.” In a Europe dominated culturally by the rules first laid down by the Catholic Church, kin-based institutions found it nearly impossible to stay powerful or even relevant. “The Church suppressed nearly all the basic tools of intensive kinship. Under these constraints, family businesses struggled to outcompete other organizational forms. At the same time, politically or economically powerful family lineages were simply more likely to die out without polygyny, customary inheritance, remarriage, and adoption.”

Canon law was another aspect of the Roman Catholic Church that helped shape WEIRD societies. “As analytical thinkers from a moralizing religion, the canonists went looking for universalizing principles…. Since analytical thinkers hate contradictions, much of the development of Western law has been about ferreting out and resolving the contradictions that emerge when one tries to isolate a set of principles and apply them more broadly…. In many [traditional] societies, law is about restoring harmony and maintaining the peace, not, as it is for more analytic thinkers, about defending individual rights or making sure that abstract principles of “justice” are served.”

Henrich concludes by reemphasizing the importance of the ratcheting effects of culture. “The larger the population of engaged minds, the faster the rate of cumulative cultural evolution. That is, the larger the network of people learning or doing something, the more opportunities there will be for individuals to produce improvements…. The greater the interconnectedness among individuals—among learners and their teachers over generations—the faster the rate of cumulative cultural evolution…. Innovation can emerge even in the absence of conscious invention…. Complex innovations almost always arise from the accumulation of small additions or modifications, so even the most important contributors make only incremental additions…. Most innovations are really just novel recombinations of existing ideas, techniques, or approaches…. Lucky mistakes, fortunate misunderstandings, and serendipitous insights play a central role in invention…. Necessity is certainly not the mother of invention. Over the course of human history, people often ignored life-saving inventions for years, sometimes only realizing how much they needed an invention long after its arrival…. Cumulative cultural evolution—including innovation—is fundamentally a social and cultural process that turns societies into collective brains. Human societies vary in their innovativeness due in large part to the differences in the fluidity with which information diffuses through a population of engaged minds and across generations as well as to how willing individuals are to try novel practices or adopt new beliefs, concepts, and tools.”

Henrich makes the case that the cultural evolution of western Europe was uniquely built on circumstances that started with the Roman Catholic Church’s marriage and family program, which then evolved from there to form today’s WIERD societies. Catholic marriage laws were just the first stone in the foundation, however. A unique culture built up from there. “Four voluntary associations—charter cities, monasteries, apprenticeships, and universities—all contributed to broadening the flow of knowledge and technology around Europe…. Breaking kin-groups down into nuclear families would have had complex effects on the collective brain…. Unconstrained by the bonds of kinship, learners can potentially select particularly knowledgeable or skilled teachers from this broader network…. There are many economic and geographic factors that matter too, but if there’s a secret ingredient in the recipe for Europe’s collective brain, it’s the psychological package of individualism, analytic orientation, positive-sum thinking, and impersonal prosociality that had been simmering for centuries…. People’s psychology is influenced not only by the communities they grew up in but also by the ghosts of past institutions—by the worlds faced by their ancestors around which rich systems of beliefs, customs, rituals, and identities were built.”