Reflections
On "Bourgeois" Philosophy
A lot of the work I’ve done in academic philosophy (such as it is) has straddled the boundary of so-called “analytic” and so-called “continental” philosophy. I like the precision and clarity of analytic philosophy but so much of the time it feels unimaginative and unadventurous. (The expectation of precision and clarity might be part of what nudges people in the direction of the unimaginative and unadventurous.) Especially on matters of value, it often seems settled from the outset that our minds or our hearts aren’t actually supposed to be changed in the process of reading or writing philosophy.
I’ve come to think of this style of philosophy as “bourgeois.” I don’t mean that the philosophers who do it belong to the middle classes, although that’s often the case. I’m thinking of the way that “bourgeois” has become a byword for a kind of small-souled, conventional orderliness that wants to squeeze the whole world into the confines of its limited purview.
This kind of bourgeois worldview is culturally and politically dominant and it supposes that its values are the only real ones. You find a bourgeois outlook in a form of blinkered compassion for the working classes and the global poor, seeing them deprived to exactly the extent that they’re deprived of middle-class comforts, as if these people, if only they could, would aspire to a savings account, a second home, and a collection of Phil Collins records.
The philosophical equivalent involves taking one’s own basic suite of values as a default, as “intuitions” that serve as the tuning fork against which philosophical theorizing can be tested. This theorizing can effect shifts in behaviour—sometimes dramatic ones. But it doesn’t make room for the possibility that one’s entire way of making sense of life and its value could be wrongheaded. I’m more attracted to philosophy that does.
I’ll spell out what I mean here by way of two extended examples. Then I’ll conclude with a few short thoughts about what seems to me to be missing in this kind of philosophy.
"Animals are people too!": The case of animal rights
The two dominant frameworks for thinking about animal ethics are the utilitarian or welfarist framework and the rights framework. Both of these frameworks urge us to expand the domain of moral consideration beyond its habitual anthropocentric pale.
You don’t think people should be made to suffer?, the utilitarian asks. If you think suffering is so bad, you know who else suffers? Lots of other animals. If suffering is bad, what on earth are we doing cramming sensitive animals into cramped facilities, artificially forcing them to grow at a pace that their physiologies can’t support, and then killing them as soon as they’ve reached sufficient bulk? We should be consistent about our abhorrence of suffering and renounce human practices that make animals suffer.
Rights theorists extend the idea of universal and inviolable human rights to the animal kingdom. It’s not in virtue of being human that humans deserve rights, but in virtue of being a someone, of being a subject, having a life, having a self for whom things could go better or worse. Theorizing about rights often involves questions about how best to accommodate animals within our legal and political institutions.
Both of these frameworks are principally interested in the treatment of domesticated animals. They have principled reasons for this emphasis. Animals in factory farms are subjected to nightmarish treatment and billions of them are killed each year. But that also means that the ethical question of what we should do about the factory farming of animals has a pretty straightforward two-word answer: just stop. The question of what you do after you stop is a little more complicated—do we sterilize the survivors and then let them live out a comfortable old age until there are no more broiler chickens or Broad Breasted White turkeys left?—but the moral horror of the current situation is pretty stark.
Things get trickier when you think about wild animals. This isn’t an incidental point. By “wild,” I mean all the animals that haven’t been selectively bred to serve human purposes. In other words, I mean all the animals whose existence isn’t already conditioned by an anthropocentric worldview. All the animals, that is, that might challenge our sense that we and our conventional value system is the default by which all of creation is to be judged.
When wild animals come into view, animal ethics gets weird. You think animal suffering is bad? Then the natural world offers up an endless parade of atrocities. It’s not just that wolves kill caribou or lions kill antelopes. They eat them alive. The poor animal has to sit there, slowly dying, as another animal tears into its entrails with its teeth. And don’t even get me started on the insect world—but if you’re looking for inspiration for that horror screenplay you’re working on, try googling “parasitoid wasp” or “zombie-ant fungus.”
This is enough for some philosophers to argue that we basically need to cancel nature. If animal suffering is bad, then predation is bad. If we can bring predation to an end in a way that doesn’t lead to worse harm in the longer run, we should.
It’s a radical conclusion but it comes from a deeply conservative place. It’s the sort of conclusion that follows when you’re determined at all costs to hold on to the ethical framework that’s familiar and comfortable to you and don’t want to set any limits to its applicability.
Here’s an alternative (one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens). Contemplating the natural world can prompt the recognition of just how parochial your values are, how dependent they are on a very particular set of social conditions. “Don’t harm others” is a pretty good principle for getting along okay in a crowded human community. But it isn’t the law of the jungle. And as much as we try to keep the jungle at arm’s length, the jungle doesn’t keep us at arm’s length. Like every other animal, we survive by eating other living things. We can choose to be vegan and not eat anything that has pain receptors. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think that allows us to opt out of the churn of nature in which all of us eat and all of us are food.
Reflecting on wild nature provides an opportunity to widen our perspective and drop our pretensions. Whatever else I might be, I’m also an ape. I eat, metabolize, and die. These facts aren’t the basis for some alternative ethics. They’re objects of contemplation. I can be changed by my encounter with wild nature if I allow myself to be. Bringing the ethical stance I devised in the city out into the forest is a way to resist being changed.
Give sainthood a chance?: Meaning in life
In the last few decades, analytic philosophy has discovered the meaning of life. It’s not as if the topic was ever totally absent—no less a logic-head than Moritz Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle, wrote an influential essay on the meaning of life—but it’s now an established subfield of research. In particular, it’s generally accepted that meaning in life represents a distinct domain of value that can’t just be folded into ethics.
Susan Wolf’s 1982 paper “Moral Saints” played an important role in this shift. I think it’s a really great paper. Wolf asks how much we should devote ourselves to doing good and says that the answer can’t be that the demands of moral goodness override every other consideration. Part of what I find great about the paper is that Wolf acknowledges a difficulty here. I shouldn’t let the demands of moral goodness drown out every other aspect of a good life. But how do I set a principled limit on how good I ought to be? No matter how good I am, presumably it would be better if I were morally better—right? And yet if you dial up the moral commitment indefinitely, you end up with someone who seems a little inhuman. As Wolf says at the outset, “I don’t know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them.”
In short, it’s good to be good but it’s bad to be Gandhi. Or is it? I’ll come back to that.
A large part of what I like about “Moral Saints” is the way it ends without a clearly settled conclusion about what we should make of its argument against moral sainthood. One thing Wolf thinks she’s shown—and here again I’m inclined to agree with her—is that there are dimensions to value besides the ethical. Maxing out moral goodness means missing out on other varieties of value. In other writings, she expands on some of those other varieties, notably meaning. I’m less impressed with her positive account of what makes for a meaningful life.
Wolf works toward a cozy conception of a meaningful life that involves being actively engaged with some measure of success in projects of positive value. And she thinks the value of those projects needs to have both subjective and objective components: it’s important that the project matter to you but it’s also important to its mattering to you that it matter in some way that transcends your own subjective sense of fulfillment.
I have some bones I could pick with her account of value. Her examples of lives that have subjective but not objective meaning are too unrealistic to prompt serious reflection and meaning doesn’t have the same kind of motivating force as moral goodness (I might volunteer my time “because it’s the right thing to do” but I don’t spend time with family “because it’s the meaningful thing to do”). But it’s more the overall spirit with which she approaches the question of meaning that puts me off.
In effect, Wolf begins her investigation with the supposition that life as it is for most of us is basically fine. We know what a meaningful life looks like so it’s just a matter of making those basic intuitions explicit. Some of us some of the time struggle to make meaningful lives for ourselves but enough people seem sufficiently fulfilled that Wolf thinks she has a solid intuitive foundation to build from.
There’s a question that just doesn’t seem to occur to Wolf, but which occurs to pretty much everyone who’s grappled seriously with the problem of meaning in life, from Job to Sartre: what if everything I think my life is about turns out to be wrong?
This question expresses a special form of skepticism. Just as Wolf wants to hive off questions of meaning from questions of morality, I think we can hive off skepticism about meaning from skepticism about morality. I don’t want to say moral skepticism isn’t worth discussing but I don’t find it especially compelling. That may be because I mostly encounter it among undergraduates who are impatient about their inability to find any solid answers to difficult questions. But skepticism about meaning in life is an interesting problem, to my mind. In the existential tradition, it goes by the name of anxiety.
One of the alarming things about meaning, when you reflect on it, is that it lacks secure anchors. There are various activities I find meaningful—not just fun, but genuinely enriching in a meaning-making sense—from hiking to sitting here and writing blog posts about philosophy. But none of it seems to come with any guarantees. What if I wake up one sunny summer morning with the mountains calling—and just don’t see any point in going for a hike? Maybe I can pull myself together and get out there anyway, and maybe I’ll rediscover my love of the outdoors. But maybe I won’t. When I’m in the midst of an activity that feels meaningful, I don’t need to ask myself why it matters to me. But if, at a loss, I have to explain why it once felt meaningful, I won’t be able to reason my way back into inhabiting that sense of meaningfulness.
(Side note: this is why I think skepticism about meaning is more interesting than moral skepticism. To the moral skeptic, who just doesn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t do whatever he pleases, you can point to other people as a reason. It seems psychopathic to think that other people’s interests are irrelevant to me in weighing what I should do. But whether I find an activity meaningful or not doesn’t seem to invite the same “don’t be a psycho” response.)
Existential anxiety isn’t about announcing that life is meaningless or counselling despair. It’s about holding oneself open to the exquisite vulnerability of our lives to sliding into meaninglessness or despair. Life is precious and life is precarious; life is precious in no small part because it’s precarious. Existential anxiety is like a modern memento mori, holding that precariousness before us in spite of a strong temptation to look away.
Wolf wants to look away. Her delicate advice to those who are troubled by the meaninglessness of their lives is “Get Over It.” Look, she seems to say, finding meaning in what you do isn’t such a difficult thing. Stop stressing over it. Other people manage it. Why can’t you?
Which brings me back to Gandhi. In his youth, Gandhi was doing all the right things to establish a life for himself as a successful lawyer. It was good work, meaningful work. But it wasn’t enough. So Gandhi undertook to become a saint. Like with any would-be saint, there are questions about just how saintly he actually was, and various anecdotes expose just how creepy this would-be saint could be at times. But he wouldn’t have wandered around in a dhoti talking about satyagraha if he hadn’t been deeply troubled by the shape his young adult life was taking.
Gandhi is an easy example. More generally, though, that sense of trouble seems a common feature of most remarkable lives. It’s precisely when life as it’s ordinarily lived comes to seem like a problem to you that you start experimenting with alternatives. It might lead you in a direction that’s outwardly humble and innocuous. It might lead you to find God. It might lead you to become a moral saint. But it starts with a sense of trouble.
Wolf seems hostile to trouble. I became less impressed with “Moral Saints” when I realized that her objection to sainthood could apply to any life in which someone stakes themselves in a bold and risky way. Wolf doesn’t want to explore existential anxiety; she wants to explain it away.
The less interesting thought
I am not what you would call a “trained actor,” but in my younger life I was exposed to a number of acting techniques. One common challenge is to get actors out of the habit of trending toward the “safe” middle ground. For example, the Viewpoints method as taught by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau (drawing on the work of Mary Overlie) breaks movement into various dimensions, explores those dimensions, and encourages actors to explore the extreme ends of each dimension to get a feel for it. When talking, people typically stand about six feet apart from one another. What if they’re at far ends of a room? What if their faces are pressed up against one another?
What I’ve been calling bourgeois philosophy seems to me to exhibit that tendency to occupy the “safe” middle ground. It takes our everyday intuitions—or more precisely, the everyday intuitions of fairly comfortable middle-class people in rich and stable countries—and uses them as the reliable base from which to gaze out upon the more abstract questions about what matters and why. This kind of thinking is willing to contemplate some pretty zany thoughts—let’s put an end to predation!—but only with feet firmly planted within that zone of safety.
I suggested earlier that animal ethics deals more comfortably with domesticated animals than wild ones. In a sense, I want to say that this “bourgeois” philosophy I’ve been discussing is a kind of domesticated philosophy. It takes the domain of comfortable, domestic intuitions as the measure of all things, and to the extent that it looks beyond that home base, it expects of the wilderness that it conform to the norms of domesticated thought.
Instead of thinking, I’m an animal and one day I’ll be compost, it thinks, I should treat animals with the same respect as I treat my barista.
Instead of thinking, Life is a mystery and at times I don’t know what to make of it, it thinks, Some people find fulfillment in practicing piano so life can’t be so much of a mystery.
Domesticated thought has its place. But it’s good to leave some room for wild thoughts as well.
J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals is a powerful example of non-bourgeois thinking about animals. The central character, Elizabeth Costello, describes a series of experiments designed to test the intelligence of a chimpanzee named Sultan. Sultan is presented with various problems he needs to solve in order to get access to a bunch of bananas. In each case there’s a solution, and the only question the experimenters are interested in is whether his mind can work its way to the solution they’ve devised. She says of these experiments:
At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought. From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled toward lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus toward acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied.
It’s not a bad description of all too much analytic philosophy about value. It’s clear, it’s precise, and it drives us to think the less interesting thought.