Bilgrami on Marx, Gandhi & Chomsky.

In a recent interview, Professor Akeel Bilgrami says-

Gandhi’s studied indifference towards notions of rights and constitutions and codes of that kind came from his scepticism about a certain conviction of the political Enlightenment (perhaps the most fundamental commitment of the political Enlightenment, from which all other commitments to rights, constitutions etc., flow) that what was bad in us can be corrected by good politics. 

This seems strange. Gandhi was a lawyer- a disciple of Gokhale who in turn was a disciple of Justice Ranade- who took up social and political activism in South Africa where he explicitly based his demands upon certain inalienable rights Indians possessed by virtue of being British subjects. That is why Indians supported him. They didn't care a jot about any philosophy he might or might not have had.

On returning to India, his first overt political intervention was in Champaran, Bihar, whose cultivators had tried to personally petition the King Emperor when he visited the Terai on a hunting expedition. The leading Bihari lawyer/ politician, Brajkishore Prasad had already lobbied the Government on behalf of the Indigo cultivators and a Report had been issued which, after Gandhi's campaign, resulted in the Champaran Agrarian Bill.

Gandhi was very much part of a 'good politics' which sought to implement good policies which would remedy what was bad in the condition of the people and which drove them to evil courses.

Far from showing any 'studied indifference' to 'good politics' focused on bread and butter issues, Gandhi contributed greatly to many successful initiatives based on widening political representation on the basis of 'enlightenment values'- things like improving the lot of women, opposing drunkenness and addiction, extending education, removing discriminatory practices, extending the franchise and so forth.

It is quite true that Gandhi suffered many set-backs and also that his experiments with khadi and Basic Education proved wrong-headed. However, on balance, he was a part of a 'good politics' which sought the implementation of good policies on the basis of widening enlightenment and popular sovereignty. Far from being 'indifferent' to, or opposing, political changes defined in the language of Anglo Saxon liberalism (which, surely, represents at least one strain of 'political Enlightenment) Gandhi played a invaluable role in bringing them about.

Bilgrami thinks Indians supported Gandhi because of his philosophy. This is absurd. Gandhi was promoted by the Congress Party (and also by Khilafat, for a period) because he was very active in promoting their brand of 'good politics'. No doubt, his personal charisma and homespun syncretic eusebia also proved a tonic for individual Congress members when faced with disillusion and frustration. However, not a single Congress worker ever described Gandhi as a Philosopher though they would willingly concede this title to people like Aurobindo, Iqbal and Radhakrishnan. Why? It was because Gandhi never wrote a single word on any Philosophical topic though he admired Socrates's principled stand and translated a portion of the Apologia into Gujerati in 1908. However, he never reverted to that topic.
Mahadev Desai, it is true, compared Gandhi to Stoic writers like Marcus Aurelius. However, Stoicism was not seen as a philosophy in India at that time precisely because it would cash out as fatalism. What was attractive about Gandhi was his restless energy and willingness to plunge into the fray. So long as he was on the side of 'good politics' as demanding good policies, the people harkened to him
Bilgrami takes a different view-

As I put it there, Gandhi did not think (as the political Enlightenment pretty much did) that you could make human beings better by transforming them into citizens.

Bilgrami may believe that some writer or pedagogue possessed the power to transform people into citizens. But this has never been the case. A people can throw off an oppressive yoke and come together as free citizens of a self-governing Republic under the Rule of Law. It is likely that such people will develop civic and moral virtues conducive to the common weal.

Gandhi never suggested that Indians would not benefit similarly by ruling themselves.

When I said all this, I was, first of all, only suggesting that Gandhi did not think that what is bad in us could be put right by politics.

If 'satyagraha' was political then Gandhi did think that it could cure what was bad in a human being. Similarly, passive resistance would fail if its practitioners harbored some unacknowledged evil in themselves.

I was not, by any means, suggesting that he thought that harms and oppressions in the world should not be resisted by a political mobilisation.

Only if the resistance was not more violent and lawless than the original harm.

And second, I was also only suggesting that this amounted to a scepticism about the claimed efficacies of a certain kind of codified liberal politics that defined the notion of “citizenship” that typically evolved ever since Westphalia in the political Enlightenment. I wasn’t suggesting that he was not committed to all or any politics.

Gandhi, like everybody else, knew that no 'notion of citizenship had evolved ever since Westphalia'. That is a foolish, quite recent, availability cascade.
Gandhi was aware of the horrible misdeeds of the Europeans on their own continent and elsewhere. Nobody was claiming 'codified liberal politics' had any efficacy whatsoever. John Morley, the last Liberal, was very much a spectre at the feast through the Edwardian era down to the guttering of the lights in 1914.

There is a great tendency today to think that Gandhi’s political successes (as a historical figure who made a tremendous difference to the direction that Indian politics took) have an interest for us quite independent of his philosophy.

This tendency only exists amongst the most worthless sort of academic philosopher.

I think, actually, that this is a preposterous view. Not only would he not have had those successes in the effect his actions had on people and, therefore, on events, but I don’t think we would be talking about him incessantly today in classrooms and in drawing rooms in the way we do, not to mention writing about him in journals and books, if he wasn’t the philosopher he so manifestly was.

Gandhi is fascinating because was highly eccentric and made absurd claims. The simplest explanation is best. He had been whacked on the head in South Africa and suffered neurological damage. Like other cranks running an ashram, he was convinced his silly schemes were vital to the commonweal and this made him dependent on a narrow circle of financiers who did well out of the boycott of foreign cloth that he sponsored. It is noteworthy that every other nutter who pretended to be serving the very very poor in India made similar claims and came a cropper in a like manner.  Vinobha Bhave and Jayprakash Narayan ended up promoting a wholly mischievous 'bhoodan' scheme and took opposite sides regarding Mrs. Gandhi's declaration of Emergency. Even Harivallabh Parikh who was supposed to have created 'People's Courts' for tribals, ended up in Court accused of raping a tribal woman. It appears, he had the Gandhian habit of getting comely young girls to give him a bath. Later, his Ashram was accused of being the centre of anti-Muslim violence post Godhra. More recently, Anna Hazare is now regarded as a rustic shithead who paved the way for opportunists like Kejriwal.

He simply would not have had the impact he did on his colleagues and he would not have generated the prodigious mobilisations he did, if his political actions were not integrated with his philosophical ideas.

Really? What about Anna Hazare? What philosophy did he have? Yet, he received a lot of attention from the Media and was built up into a big figure. If Gandhi is a philosopher why not Khan Abdul Ghafoor Khan? What about actual philosophers- like Radhakrishnan? How come he had no political influence? Indeed, Maulana Azad can be said to have developed certain philosophical ideas. But his political influence waned as his philosophy waxed. Who actually read 'Ghubar-e-khatir'?
Consider the case of Aurobindo. He had some stupid sort of philosophy and wrote interminable poetry. But this  philosophy reduced rather than increased such sway as he retained on the minds of the rising generation of nationalists.

That integrity is undoubtedly an essential element in the appeal he had for the Indian masses.

Gandhi offered them a tamasha- just as Vinobha Bhave offered his Bhoodan workers the chance to invade houses and search for dirty pictures. Thus Gandhi and Bhave retained a certain influence even after it became obvious they would help nobody with bread and butter issues.

It is those who don’t see the mass of a country’s people as capable of responding to such integrity and who see them responding only to his political skills that have this cramped view of Gandhi; and I think it is a view that reveals an undemocratic understanding of mass politics, of what the mass of people are capable of and of what they are responding to.

Bilgrami is either saying that Gandhi had a philosophy which he never communicated but which the people nevertheless magically understood and found attractive- in which case Philosophy Professors need not give lectures or write books because people can magically receive their philosophy with no word spoken or sentence written down- or that his actions were the result of his philosophy. The problem here is that his actions were as stupid as shit- though, no doubt, they were profitable to his paymasters.

Bilgrami says Gandhi would not have had an impact if his political actions were not integrated with his philosophical ideals. This is nonsense. What philosophical ideal could cause a Hindu to agitate for Khilafat? Why try to recruit soldiers for the First World War? Yet these two very different actions were the reason that Congress elevated Gandhi to lead a struggle which, he promised, would deliver Swaraj within a year if one crore rupees were collected. The money flowed in, Independence did not. But that's politics- even good politics- for you. The Congress did create a machinery which successfully took more and more power and maintained enough decorous esprit de corps to make the transition to full multi-party Democracy under the Rule of Law. Gandhi was able to play a part in this because he had no 'philosophical ideals' as opposed to puerile beliefs. Thus Gandhianism was a sort of pedagogy revealing the worthlessness of simplistic solutions which, however, pointed to the complexity of conditions on the ground and thus the wisdom of putting off structural reform.

The Indian masses responded to lots of different people including Gandhi. But that response depended on what those people were saying- which was a function of their 'political skill' not their philosophy or integrity.
If Bilgrami were right, then an Indian who wished to liberate India from poverty would first develop a philosophy, but not bother to communicate it in any way because people can magically divine what it is by themselves; and then train himself in 'integrity' by which is meant acting consistently with that philosophy. This Indian would not need to have any political skill. The people would flock to him spontaneously and then he could do whatever he liked.

Apparently, Bilgrami thinks his bizarre view is 'democratic' whereas the common-sense view- viz. that voters chose the guy who promises to do what they want- is 'undemocratic'.
He may be right about America. Clearly Donald Trump is a philosopher and his integrity in always acting consistently with his philosophy is what has attracted the masses to him, which is why he is in the White House.
However, Bilgrami is wrong about India.
Why?
Well, Indians don't believe that one can 'unearth' whichever philosophy one likes from any given politician. Thus it is not possible for the masses- who have diverse preferences and world-views- to become attracted to a given politician's philosophy, and his integrity in acting according to it, on the basis of a 'factorisation' or other decomposition of that philosophy into one which pleases them most.

No doubt, this is the root of India's backwardness. Bilgrami, a successful American Professor, can easily find a Marxian Gandhi.

I do think that there is a very interesting and very original “radical” or left-wing Gandhi to be unearthed from his writings and many of his deeds as well.

The Daily Mail unearthed a homosexual Gandhi from his writings. Did Bilgrami find this very interesting? 

In doing so, one has to be selective, of course. But that is true of most important thinkers. Like all of them, Gandhi’s thought and writings contained inconsistencies, but in a way it is worse with him, no doubt because, though he was a remarkable philosopher, he was not a salaried philosopher who strives for consistency—he often said and wrote things in the context of immediate political demands from the world around him and those remarks were, as one should expect, sometimes at odds with what he said in more reflective writings.

So Gandhi was a philosopher because he wasn't a philosopher. Thus we can just say anything we like about him because some sentence he uttered or action he took could be consistent with the philosophy we impute to him.

Thus I could say Gandhi was a follower of the Marquess de Sade. He enjoyed raping and torturing people because he never did anything of the sort and would have been revolted by the very idea.

 Of course, Gandhi was not a socialist and didn’t seek, in his visionary hopes, a socialist future for India. I would go so far as to say that Gandhi had no serious understanding of the notion of “class”, as we have come to think of it. But he hated capitalism and what it did to human mentality and human society. 

Gandhi hated capitalism so much that he took money from capitalists and counselled them on their family problems. The capitalists- even the Bajaj family- gained greatly because Gandhi's patronage (or client status) ameliorated their Labour problems and, later on, enabled them to make a very profitable deal with Manchester- the Modi-Lees agreement- to the detriment of cotton growers who remained mainly excluded from the franchise.

 if I am right that Gandhi thought India was at the crossroads that Europe was in, in the Early Modern period, and that he wanted to pre-empt the developments in political economy (and their deleterious cognitive and social effects) that occurred in subsequent European modernity, then an equally good comparison is with other radical dissenting voices in Early Modern Europe.

Radical dissenting voices in Early Modern Europe challenged the Established Church and made economic and social demands. Gandhi did no such thing. He promoted khaddar- which was worthless- and 'Basic Education'- which Zakir Hussain declared to be a fraud.
The truth is Gandhi's magical ideas were more like the Chinese Boxer's belief that they had some 'Yin magic' which made them invulnerable to bullets, or the 'Maji Maji' rebels belief that smearing some paste over themselves would cause them to conquer German soldiers equipped with Gatling guns.

For that reason, I have situated a lot of Gandhi’s thinking as being in intellectual alliance, not just with Marx, but with pre-Marxian radical thinkers like Gerrard Winstanley in Early Modernity, who sought to pre-empt developments (in England, in his case) that he presciently foresaw as emerging from the enclosures movement and the privatisation of the commons and the converting of agrarian ways of life into what we would now call “agri-business”.

Gandhi did not think Europe had been at a crossroads in the Early Modern Period. Why? Nothing of the sort actually occurred. Some parts of Europe became powerful and subjugated more traditional parts. There was never a crossroads for the entire continent.

In any case, Gandhi neither knew, nor- quite sensibly- cared one jot for Medieval Europe. He'd had to cram for the Barrister's exam and knew that Medieval laws relating to land use were Byzantine and often wholly inutile. The same was true in Native States or the Presidencies. Dewans, like his Dad, and lawyers like his elder brother, dealt with stuff like this every day. Customary law under fragmented ownership was an enormous pain in the back-side and ended up protecting nobody. Moreover, it exposed figures in the Public eye- more particularly reformers- to all sorts of crazy harassment. If a particular neem tree is cut down because of a road widening operation on your watch, some fucking Charan will go on a fast or some fucking Baba will put a curse on your wife or some Hijras will turn up at your grand-son's tonsure and create a ruckus. The whole point about Gandhi's fasting was that it turned the tables on all those 'deleterious cognitive and social effects' connected, not with modernity, but the sewer of Medieval stagnation.

Why is Bilgrami mentioning Gerrard Winstanley? Does he not know that there are thousands of such nut-jobs in rural India who continually encroach all types of land in the name of religion? The thing is a fucking nuisance. No doubt, there may be some good Dera Chiefs- but look at the Dera Sacha Sauda Head currently in the news. It appears, he was raping girls, castrating boys and burying bodies in mass graves. Bilgrami, in America, may think 'Diggers' like Winstanley were different or better than this type of Dera Chief, but Indians- at least of Gandhi's class- have no reason to believe so.

Lawyers like Gandhi were fully aware, as indeed were late Nineteenth Century Viceroys, of problems related to communal rights in Forests and other tribal lands. If Bilgrami lived in India, he would know that the proper resolution to the underlying problem is effective legislation backed by grass-roots monitoring and accountability. All other approaches have been tried and have failed spectacularly. Vapouring about Merrie Olde England and the Diggers and the Levellers and the Witchfinder General is simply silly. One may as well say 'any usurpation of the commons will be resisted by the fairies'.

I do feel that one cannot have been anti-imperialist through the last century without having, in some sense, been anti-modern.

Because fairies are anti-modern.

I say “in some sense” and mean it. It’s not obvious at all what that sense of anti-modern exactly is and ought to be.

So, Bilgrami says and means something. But what it is he can't say precisely because...urm...

That is a very complex question. Many bad answers have been given to that question. A lot of my work has been struggling with that question. Though there are many more subtle things to say, the first and obvious thing to notice is an elementary transitivity: imperialism is essential to capitalism and since capitalism is an economic formation of modernity, being anti-imperialist in any fundamental way is necessarily to be opposed to capitalism and that would, eo ipso, mean being opposed to modernity.

Utter bollocks! Imperialism is not necessary to Capitalism at all. Rather, it retards it. Portugal remained backward because of, not despite, its vast Empire. America, as Marx recognized, was more modern than England because it didn't have any Empire. It was the first Nation State.

Empires existed in very ancient times. So did Capitalism. Everything was once modern, even the term modernity which only elderly pedagogues now use.

Capitalism is opposed to Imperialism because the thing is a money pit.

Of course, many who sought independence from colonial rule were not opposed to imperialism in any deep way, so they never accepted this simple point.

Wow! Guys who fight the colonial forces aren't 'opposed to imperialism in a deep way'. Only some worthless professors writing long after Colonies were liberated are opposed to imperialism in a deep way. Why? Because they can call up the fairy armies to defeat Capitalism! Yaay!

But it is this point that brought Gandhi and the Left together. The Left, of course, focussed much more directly on the economic structures of colonialism and an emerging capitalism in its opposition, whereas Gandhi’s opposition, as I said earlier, was more focussed on the cognitive and cultural fall-out of capitalist modernity.

When were Gandhi and the Left together? What did the Left ever do in relation to the economic structure of colonialism- viz. Indian trade and monetary policy? Gandhi's backers, by contrast, were able to make some changes in both which, over time, reduced Britain's economic interest in holding onto India.

The 'cognitive and cultural fall-out of capitalist modernity' is Science and Technology and the Simpsons on TV.  No doubt, this sort of stuff deeply disturbs the fairies at the bottom of the garden, but, nil desperandum!,  Bilgrami will marry their Queen and lead them in a Rebellion against every form of Rationality.

(Gandhi) asks a genealogical question about modernity that seems to be anti-instrumentalist, that seems to have located a very general instrumentality that he opposes: “How and when did we transform the concept of the “world” as not merely a place to live in but a place to master and control?”

Is Bilgrami right? Did Gandhi ask such a stupid question? No. He didn't think one could 'master and control the world'. That's why he did not go on a fast to force Indra to send rain. Nor did he demand that the Government prevent earthquakes by stabilizing tectonic plates.

Nobody, with a reputation to lose, does that sort of stuff- coz it would be stupid to do so.

But that question is so general, so omnibus, that one has no idea how to go about answering it.

There is only one way to answer a stupid question. Tell stupid lies.

In Gandhi’s work, we find that he breaks it down to four different detailed questions: How and when did we transform the concept of nature to the concept of natural resources?

Nobody who ever mattered or wanted to matter has ever done any such thing. Concepts like 'nature' don't matter at all. The term 'natural resource' is used in Economics too mean a fungible asset, not itself manufactured, which has an opportunity cost. It is worthwhile measuring and keeping an inventory of such assets as part of one's National Income Accounts. The statisticians and clerical staff tasked with maintaining such accounts are welcome to believe in Gaia or Queen Gloriana or the Celestial Spaghetti Monster or anything else they may wish.

How and when did we transform the concept of human beings to the concepts of citizens?

No such transformation has ever occurred. That is why not all human beings in any given polity count as citizens. Bilgrami might have noticed that a lot of people of a similar complexion to himself keep getting deported from his country. This is why.

How and when did we transform the concept of people into the concept of populations?

This has never happened. Actuaries are people too.

And, how and when did we transform the concept of knowledges (to live by) into the concept of expertise (to rule by)?

WTF? We hire people with specific expertise to solve specific problems. Where in the world do we see 'expertise' incarnated in the Head of Government? Does Bilgrami think Trump was elected because people believe he has 'expertise to rule by'?

Gandhi anointed Nehru as Prime Minister. Why? Was it because he thought Nehru had 'knowledge to live by' or 'expertise to rule by'? Nope. It was because Nehru was a Hindi speaker acceptable to other leaders precisely because he wasn't interested in building his own power base in their back yard.

One line of criticism I pursue in trying to understand the failures of modernity is to point out first (what is surely widely known) that its two chief sloganised ideals of “liberty” and “equality”, as soon as they were articulated by the political Enlightenment, were theoretically and methodologically developed in such a way that they were in tension with one another.

Bilgrami believes that modernity is not the description of something but a thing in itself. It has 'slogans'. This makes it very popular. But it fails because those slogans start fighting with each other. Why not? Fairies have magic powers. They can wave a wand and suddenly 'modernity' becomes a real boy able to raise slogans. But fairies can be mischievous as well; they wave their wand a second time and suddenly these slogans too turn into real boys able to punch each other in the face.

This is for reasons that have been well-studied such as, for instance, most conspicuously the fact that the possession of property bestowed on the possessor a notion of liberty that became erected into the law of the land as a fundamental right everywhere in the spread of liberal modernity.

But possession of property predates modernity by millenia. The thing existed before recorded history. Property owners were not bestowed with a 'notion of liberty'. It was anathema to many of them most of the time.

There is no necessary or other connection between Liberty and Property. Consider recent events in Saudi Arabia. A bunch of princes lost their personal Liberty till they handed over a lot of their Property.

Of course, Bilgrami may personally know of some fairy who has waved its wand so as to effect such a connection- at least in his own mind.

Bilgrami says that all this has 'been well-studied'? By whom? Smart people?  Nope.  They were shitheads teaching worthless subjects.

How this generates tensions with the goal of equality are so well-known and so well mined that I don’t need to say anything more about it.

But you will anyway because you too are a shithead paid to talk shite.

Much less well-studied is another source of the tension between liberty and equality, which comes from the incentivisation of talent that owes to liberty attaching to notions of desert. For centuries, when there was some excellence of production (say, a work of art), it was the zeitgeist which produced it that got the praise and admiration.

Utterly false! What actually happened was that people treated great artists as contemporaries even though they lived in different epochs. It was Nineteenth Century Teutonic pedagogues who invented the notion of zeitgeist- which is why English speakers have to use a foreign word to describe the phenomenon.

If you take the long historical view, it is relatively recently that individual talent began to get the praise and reap the reward for such productions.

Very true. That is why Indians never praised Kalidasa or Bhratrhari but spoke instead of...urm... fuck it... I don't know whether it was the Gupta Age or some other in which they flourished. But nor did most rasikas of Sanskrit poetry.

Far from individual talent not getting praise, the tendency was to attribute all generic work to the brightest star in that firmament.

And this happened partly out of a growing ideological view that to praise the zeitgeist for such excellence was to deny a person’s individuality, it was to see the individual person responsible for these productions as mere physical embodiments of the zeitgeist.

What is this shite? Hegel had a silly notion of Geist. But most people then and now thought the fucker was a fuckwitted pedagogue with shit for brains.

Thus, notions of desert became tied to the notion of individual liberty and talent thereby got incentivised.

Thanks to Bilgrami's fairy chum.

Indeed, it became part of a generalised liberty because it spread over to the idea of the liberty of others to enjoy the excellence of the productions of individual talent since the latter now was incentivised to be as excellent as it could be. So, by the time you come to our contemporary times, you have merit raises for salaried professionals, bonuses for bankers, endorsements for sportsmen, prizes for authors of books, on and on… all in the name of individual liberty; and it should be obvious how all this too gives rise to tensions with aspirations to equality. For these (and other) reasons, then, modernity’s main political tradition developed its two great ideals of liberty and equality in a way that they could not be jointly realised.

Utterly mad! Does Bilgrami think every poet received the same remuneration as a Firdausi or that every musician was as munificently rewarded as a Tansen? Is he wholly ignorant of history?

The reason great talent gets so highly rewarded is explained, if any explanation is necessary, by the theory of efficiency wages. Bilgrami is proposing a mechanism which requires fairies to wave magic wands incessantly over wholly descriptive terms so as to endow them with agency.

Why would anyone want to do anything so foolish? Bilgrami has this answer

if we remove liberty and equality—riddled with inner tension as they are—from the theoretical centre stage that they have had in European modernity and put on centre stage instead the ideal of an unalienated life, then one can bring liberty and equality back (from the back door, as it were) but no longer as central now, but only as necessary conditions for this more fundamental ideal that is on centre stage.

So what this is all about is some political theater which only exists in Bilgrami's own mind. To his credit, his interest in the Chorus line is not sexual. Still, it is a bit creepy. I suspect that he will only let Liberty become a necessary condition if she puts out. Equality, on the other hand, gets a pass- probably because it has a big dick and is going to come through Bilgrami's backdoor.

The idea is that if this is properly done, there would be a serious chance of removing the inner tension between liberty and equality that was present when they were the central notions.

There is no tension between liberty and equality at all. I personally saw them get a motel room together. Why is Bilgrami trying to alienate them from each other? Does it have something to do with his backdoor?

 So, everything turns on what is meant by “properly done” and much of my recent theoretical exertions have been focussed on that task. The first task, obviously, is to say something about what is meant by “alienation”, so that one can be clear about what one is seeking in seeking the ideal of an unalienated life.

The first task in resolving tension is having a wank or, in this case, getting up a circle jerk. There is not need to say anything about alienation or existential dread or repressive desublimation etc.

Right at the outset, it should be said that if you take up this dialectic that I’ve set up between these three ideals, “alienation” becomes an ambiguous term. How so?
It’s an interesting fact about alienation that all its most well-known theorists (Rousseau, Marx, Gandhi, Sartre, to name just a few) saw it as a malaise only of modernity.

The only interesting fact about Rousseau, Marx, Gandhi and Sartre is that though a few people admire them, everybody knows their ideas were stupid and unworkable.

Premodernity had many horrible defects but alienation was not one of them.

Because alienation is a meaningless made up term.

Even slaves and serfs had a sense of belonging, whatever else they didn’t have.

Slaves and serfs were belongings and felt sore as fuck about it. They ran away when they could.

In fact, the introduction of liberty and equality as central ideals in modernity was intended partly to address those defects and deprivations suffered in premodern societies. 

Does Bilgrami believe liberty and equality have been achieved in some modern country?

But now, if in my dialectic liberty and equality are supposed to be necessary conditions for the achievement of the unalienated life, what is meant by “unalienated life” cannot possibly be the unalienated life of premodernity since in premodernity it was precisely unaccompanied by liberty and equality.

Modernity does not feature liberty and equality at all. We can be sure of that because all modern societies have a history.
 Premodernity may have featured liberty and equality because it stretches back hundreds of thousands of years. It may be that some bunch of hunter gatherers enjoyed perfect liberty and equality. They certainly enjoyed an 'unalienated life' according to most definitions of alienation.

So, the term is being used ambiguously.
The theoretical task here is quite ambitious—because I’m trying to transform three concepts at once. I’m trying to transform the concepts of liberty and equality, as I said at the start, by removing them from the centrality they have had in the modern period and making them merely necessary conditions for the more central ideal of the unalienated life, but now I am also saying that I am trying to transform the notion of an unalienated life from what it was as exemplified in premodernity. So, it is a triangular transformation of all three concepts in concert, all at once, that I am seeking.

You are talking nonsense- not seeking anything. What is the point of taking up a descriptive concept which has a rigid designation in Jurisprudence and stripping it of its historical and legal meaning? Liberty is a bunch of Hohfeldian justiciable rights. Equality is something Economists try to measure. Modernity means 'periods similar to our present situation' whereas 'pre-modern' means 'periods unlike our own'.
Anyone can transform all these concepts simultaneously. I can say 'Liberty means making cat like noises'. Equality is achieved when everybody makes cat like noises and nothing else. Modernity is the condition of Society which promotes maximal cat-like noise production by all and sundry.

I won’t try and explain how exactly I’ve tried to do this. It would be hard to spell it out in a brief interview. I’ll just say that it involves a close look at and a critique of how liberal modernity in its theorising has presented the outlook and framework of political economy and politics, from Locke’s contractualist arguments for property down to more recent game-theoretic consolidations of Locke in multi-person prisoners’ dilemma style arguments about the “tragedy of the commons”, and trying also to get beyond the limited nature of the regulatory answers to such arguments that are found in Elinor Ostrom’s (superb) work on the commons, responding to these arguments.

One can look as closely as one likes at Locke's work or Ostrom's without having the first clue regarding mechanism design or incomplete contracts. Economics has moved on. Bilgrami hasn't.

It is very much a contemporary philosopher’s effort to address these issues, but in the end the ideas and arguments I present are really in the service of a critique of liberal modernity that can be found, in one or other form, in both Marx and Gandhi.

So they are in service to something decidedly old hat. People everywhere have rejected both Marx and Gandhi. Why? Because their ideas were silly.

Let me conclude my already too lengthy answer to your question by making one point that I feel quite strongly about, even though it may seem terminological. It is tempting to say that Marx is a figure of the Enlightenment and so how can I present him as the source of a critique of modernity?

Marx died long before our modern era began.  So did Gandhi- as far as millenials are concerned.

I think this is a tiresomely unhelpful way of thinking of intellectual history. It is simply to deny the weight and preponderance of liberalism in shaping modernity, which, to this day, has a dominant hold on society and is even entirely complicit, I would argue, with the so-called right-wing populist efforts to oppose it.

Liberalism died a long time ago. It didn't land on the moon. It didn't create the internet. It's just  some shite crap Professors from a worthless Department gas on about. By the Eighties, Reagan had infected even Dukakis type Democrats with a healthy fear of 'the L word'. Bilgrami was in America at the time. Where had he hidden himself to remain so oblivious of what was happening all around him?

The political Enlightenment and its legacy is massively shaped by liberal thought and ideals.

The 'political Enlightenment' was about disintermediating Religion from Politics. It had only a limited success.

It completely distorts things to see the Enlightenment as a mere ragbag of doctrines and ideas in which Locke and Mill and Hegel and Marx can all be thrown in. It is far more intellectually honest to say that there were radically dissenting voices such as Marx, and Marx was in many ways part of the Romantic tradition of thought. If you take a book like Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down in which he looks at early radical and communistic views during the period of the English Revolution, you will find antecedents to Marx who were presenting ideas that would have—if they had won out rather than been suppressed—pre-empted the path that England and Europe took from Early Modernity to Late Modernity.

So Marxism was stupid shit. No country which embraced that shit would move ahead. Rather, it would go backward and turn into some brutal medieval shit-storm.

These ideas were the antecedents to Marx and they are the start of a trajectory that goes via Romantic thought, both in England and Germany, to Marx.

Which is why both England and Germany turned their backs on it. East Germany, it is true, under Stalin's jackboot, was forced to play along with that shite- but they got rid of it once the jackboot was removed from their throats.

In fact, very often in that book, when Christopher Hill wants to present some of these radical ideas, he quotes Blake, as do other Left historians and intellectual historians like E.P. Thompson. But the Romantics often get counted as the “counter”-Enlightenment. Where does that leave one then, when a trajectory that some will describe as the counter-Enlightenment gets to fall under the label “Enlightenment”?

The Enlightenment only means the disintermediation of Theology and Eschatology and Priestcraft from a hegemonic role in Society.

Nobody bothers with that shite- all you have is some bunch of stupid, senile, pedagogues pushing an availability cascade whose credentials are now wholly worthless.

So, I think it is just a dogmatic hanging-on to the word “Enlightenment” to insist that figures like Marx and Gandhi and the Romantics must all be counted as part of the Enlightenment

as opposed to the Universal History of Stupidity.

. It makes for much greater clarity (not to mention intellectual honesty) to simply admit, what is in fact the case, that terms like “modernity” and “the Enlightenment” are self-congratulatory terms that surfaced when it became clear that liberal doctrine and institutions (including the institutions and policies that surround capital, as well as the constraints on capital that emerged with “social democracy”) had put their stamp on Europe from the seventeenth century on.

'Modern' means 'not hung up on Religious shite'. Liberal means holier than thou hypocrisy.

So, I insist and repeat: modernity is pervasively defined by liberalism and the social democratic ideas that constrain classical liberalism.And the fact is that modernity, so understood, though it has, as I said, been dominant, has not been and still is not totally comprehensive in its reach. There have been dissenting radical voices (going well beyond the social democratic constraints that liberalism takes well within its stride) against modernity from the early radicals of the seventeenth century through the Romantics and Marx down to Gandhi. To count these latter ideas as part of the Enlightenment and the modernity it defined, is simply to bloat our categories to the point that they are unrecognisable and unhelpful in coming to any clear understanding of the issues at stake.

No issues are at stake. This is just senile pedantry.

And worse, it has the double effect of, on the one hand, giving over the critique of modernity to completely reactionary outlooks and, on the other, giving the Left a kind of narrow orthodox stamp that prevents it from exploring these interesting affinities between thinkers like Marx and Gandhi.

The 'interesting affinity' between the two is that they both were used as emblems by corrupt political parties which fucked up big time.

We don’t know whether it is fair to differentiate philosophy country-wise. But in academic studies and other philosophic discourses, there is what is called Indian philosophy. Of course, every society would produce and would have its own philosophy. However, can you attribute and find out some basic characters and ideas of Indian philosophy. What actually constitutes Indian philosophy? How it is different from Western philosophy, which you have been trained in? How do you engage with other traditions of philosophy?
I must not venture opinions on a subject that I’ve never studied with any care and only have a glancing knowledge of based on secondary commentary.
My own instinct (it is not a scholarly judgment) is that different traditions of philosophy, whether in the English-speaking world or in German, French, Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit ... are all addressing more or less the same issues, even if they do so in dramatically different idioms (and I don’t mean natural language idioms, but conceptual idioms). Of course, the different historical and social contexts of these traditions sometimes make for different issues being salient in each, but that is equally true within the same tradition at different historical times. So, for instance, in the Francophone tradition, no one could understand Sartre’s Existentialism who did not situate it in the historical and social context of France under the Occupation, and there is not much resonance of the issues that preoccupy Sartre within the same tradition, say, in Montaigne or de Maistre.

Satre's Existentialism was a garbled version of that of Heidegger with a bit of Kojeve's Hegel thrown in. It would have existed even if there had been no Occupation. What mattered was that Husserl, back in those days, looked like a smart, sciencey guy whom you could get a Doctorate for studying.

But apart from such contextually determined differences, which can occur within and across traditions of philosophy, I really do feel that most philosophical traditions, however different their conceptual vocabularies and methods are, by and large focus on the same conceptual issues.
Though I am very much a product of philosophy in the English-speaking tradition, some of the more interesting discussions of philosophical ideas I’ve had are with those who are not scholars within that tradition. I’ve had very interesting discussions about philosophy with my colleague Sheldon Pollock (on aesthetic ideas as also on different ways of thinking of the concept of “truth”), or my colleague, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, in the French Department (with whom I’ve discussed ideas in Iqbal and Bergson and Senghor)—we have, in fact, taught graduate seminars together on the political philosophies of Gandhi, Nehru, Iqbal and Senghor.

Did you tell your students that all of these political philosophies were shite? No. The thing was too obvious to need spelling out.

I also taught seminars with Edward Said, who was not a philosopher at all, on the Philosophy of History from Vico through the “Verstehen” tradition to Hegel and Marx.

The  notion of Verstehen is post Hegelian.

No doubt, what I brought to these collective discussions and seminars was the perspective of an analytic philosopher trained in the English-speaking tradition, but none of this would really have been possible if different traditions of thought did not have the same concepts and conceptual problems that vexed them

In contrast with the Western societies, a subject like philosophy has not grown much as an academic discipline in India. Though it is highly relevant and needed, except here and there in some institutes, the subject has been largely neglected in India. This is also true with some other social science subjects. Why such neglect? As a philosopher, what do you have to say on this low regard for a subject like philosophy in India?One of the things that I had noticed in academic philosophy in India until a few years ago was the far greater weight put on the history of philosophy than on “doing” philosophy, if you see what I mean. I recall during the discussion after one of my talks in India, asking a question to a faculty member about how he thought we should analyse the concept of “freedom” and his response was “Sankara said…” He really had no inkling that what I was asking him was about what he would say. I think that has changed a lot in recent years. By contrast, for many decades, English-speaking analytic philosophy completely ignored the history of its own subject, putting all its focus on analysing concepts. All that has changed now. But while these biases existed, there was an impoverishment of the subject on both sides.

Sankara had a notion of 'Liberation' which relates to Freedom. The professor who was quoting Sankara was endorsing that notion. What is wrong with that?

Philosophy did impoverish its subject matter- no question about that- which is why it is now in such bad odour. The French, it is true, still make it a compulsory subject for High School students but they too seem to be having second thoughts on the wisdom of this course.

Let me just make two points about academic philosophy in India. The first is that we must admit that it is not and has not been, since Independence, anyway, as strong as subjects like history and economics. There is just no getting away from this. It would take too long to try and diagnose why this might be so. But it is just a fact. Having said that, I would like to point out that in the last couple of decades, basically since neoliberal policies and what is called “globalisation” got entrenched in our country, a subject like economics and, quite generally, the social sciences, lost the vibrancy and the independence of thought that they had shown in the decades immediately after Independence, and have taken to mimicking the curricular and ideological prejudices of Western universities, including their protocols for research. This has evacuated them both of the historically oriented and the value-oriented approaches to their subjects. I think of this as an appalling abdication on the part of contemporary scholarship in these disciplines. And I think, as a result, this is a moment for academic philosophy in India to pick up the slack created by this abdication in these disciplines and broaden out to consider philosophically, social, political, and economic issues that confront us and the history and intellectual history by which we have been landed with these issues. That would make philosophy a quite exciting thing to do in our time in India.

Sheer nonsense! One can do a PhD in Gandhian Economics or Gramscian stupidity and go on to teach that nonsense in some cow-belt campus. The result would not be 'exciting' at all. It would be as boring as shit.

There may be pressures from a globalised society that impoverishes economics and the social sciences in these ways I’ve mentioned, but philosophy does not face the same pressures and so it may well be a time for it to step up with this chivalrous reach to do things that other disciplines are manifestly failing to do within their departments.

Chivalrous reach? You mean rescuing fairies from evil wizards?

You are highly influenced personally and intellectually by Noam Chomsky. As a philosopher what is your take on the influence of Chomsky’s theory of language, the universal grammar, and so on?

Only recently, I had to write a long foreword to his book called What Kind of Creatures Are We, in which he elaborates his most current views on linguistics, philosophy, etc., and it would perhaps be best if I just directed you to that Foreword rather than try to spell out my understanding of his remarkable corpus of work in a short while now.

But let me just say one very general thing about his work in this area since there is so much unnecessary controversy about it. There is a lot of criticism of him that quite fails to understand what he means by “language”, and so the criticisms are quite beside the point. Even so thoughtful a philosopher as Charles Taylor is guilty of this in his otherwise very interesting recent book on language.
What one has to keep in mind about Chomsky is that one will never understand what his account of language is unless one is clear about the fact that he takes it to be first and foremost a biological phenomenon, not a social and communicative phenomenon. He starts with the idea that our (human) biology is unique in being the location of, or for, a capacity for language. And it is, as such, that he proceeds to analyse and explain that capacity. As a result, for him, the communicative function of language is quite ancillary. He is not primarily interested in the vocalised language that has a social purpose for human beings and with which words we produce refer to things in the world. He doesn’t have anything against studying those aspects of human life, but he does not think that those things are scientifically tractable and explainable. You can say scattered wise things about them, you can say very interesting things about them, but they can’t be what the science of language is about.

Because Science is about miracles- like the miracle which Chomsky believes in.

And Chomsky’s work is primarily the work of a scientist of language. He has nothing against other people being interested in other interesting things about language, but what he wants to produce is a scientific account in the way that scientists try to produce explanatory accounts in physics, chemistry, biology.... So, he is focussed on something relatively limited and he is very modest about these self-consciously imposed limitations. For him, language has a structure that is very close to the structure of thought or cognition and those structures are ultimately biologically grounded, though till we know more about the biological science involved, one has to track them at the cognitive and computational level. Chomsky was one of the two or three people who founded the subject of cognitive science.

He also then killed it off by pretending language is miraculous.

Even evolutionary accounts of language will get things wrong if they don’t identify the phenotype correctly in this way. We need an evolutionary account of a biological capacity, not of how we gradually came to develop the sophisticated communicative skills that we have.

So we need an evolutionary account of a miracle. Cool.

I am just pointing all this out because I think the incessant critiques of Chomsky by anthropologists and sociologists of language (and many others) are just off beam.

Because they don't say 'the guy is crazy. He believes in miracles.'

They are talking about a notion of language that he is not talking about at all. (I still remember hearing—as a graduate student—a quite brilliant anthropologist at the University of Chicago giving a shrill, almost hysterical dithyramb against Chomsky one day, and remember coming away from it thinking, “Is he talking about the same person that I’ve been reading in my theoretical linguistics class?”) They are just ships passing Chomsky by at night while pretending that they are engaging with him.

Why engage with a nutjob? 'Mysterianism' means nutjobs can be Prophets without actually knowing anything or saying anything useful. Why pretend there is any genuine process of thought occurring?

Which philosopher influenced you the most and which system of philosophy shaped you the most?No one philosopher or system of thought has shaped my thinking, though Marx’s thought has, in some loose sense, provided a framework within which to think about politics and society.

Marx stressed the economic determinants of culture and consciousness. Where is the Marxist element in Bilgrami?

Questions of politics and society interested me intensely when I was an undergraduate in Bombay [now Mumbai] and at Oxford and then again since the very late 1980s.

Mumbai has a different sort of politics and society to Oxford. If Bilgrami had genuinely been 'intensely interested' in Mumbai's politics, he would have stayed there.

In between, I was almost exclusively first studying and then writing about issues of language and mind, and I was relatively apolitical while doing that scholarly work, though I kept myself informed and, I suppose, opinionated on politics even through this period of more remote study.

How is Bilgrami political now? Saying Marx and Gandhi and Chomsky are somehow connected is not political at all. It is a proof of the worthlessness of one's academic oeuvre.

As a child, I grew up in a home with a vast number of books because my father was quite a serious and wide-ranging reader. There were many books on philosophy in my father’s library and I dipped into them from time to time. He was also a very engaging conversationalist and I’d speak to him at length about what I read. I read a lot of Bertrand Russell quite early on in my teens. I read a lot of Marx through my college days. Though my subject was English literature in Elphinstone College in Bombay, I was much influenced by a very articulate and quite brilliant philosophy professor called James Swamidasan. In England, I was influenced by two philosophers, P.F. Strawson and a very fiery, hellishly intelligent, much younger person called Gareth Evans, who died tragically early. In the United States, while I was studying for and writing a PhD, I worked with a philosopher called Donald Davidson, with whom Evans had advised me to go and study, and with whom I became close friends—and I learnt a lot from him.
At Columbia, I’ve been influenced, to some extent, by my conversations with my colleague, Isaac Levi. And, as you’ve noticed, Noam Chomsky’s philosophical work on language has been an abiding influence on me and we have kept up a steady conversation about some of those themes (as well as about a politics that we broadly share) over the years. I’ve admired his political activism ever since I was a student at Elphinstone College, but I only got to know about his work on language when I was first at Oxford and then later at the University of Chicago. Chomsky is a very rare sort of person, and I feel a sense of privilege (as no doubt, many others do) to be alive in the time he is.

Bilgrami is clearly a nice guy from a good family. But why on earth does he think he is 'political' in any way? Politics means connecting with people. Whom is he connecting with? So what if some duffers get worthless Professorships in shite Departments? How does that change anything?

Bilgrami writes of Chomsky in 3quarks as follows-

A tradition that goes back to Galileo and Descartes recognized the most fundamental feature of language that then got its most explicit articulation in Humboldt, which as cited by Chomsky is: “Language is quite peculiarly confronted by an unending and truly boundless domain, the essence of all that can be thought. It must therefore make infinite employment of finite means, and is able to do so, through the power which produces identity of language and thought.”[1] Darwin too is cited as repeating this in a more elementary form in the context of evolutionary concerns about language: “The lower animals differ from man solely in his almost infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas.” It is worth noting that there are three fundamental features observed here by Humboldt and Darwin. First the claim to an infinite power residing in a finite base, second the link of ideas with sound, and third the link of language with thought. All of them are gathered in what Chomsky declares at the outset as the ‘Basic Property' of language: “Each language provides an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions that receive interpretations at two interfaces, sensorimotor for externalization and conceptual-intentional for mental processes.” The hierarchical-structural element speaks to the first feature, the sensorimotor interface to the second feature and the other interface to the third feature.

Which language has this Basic Property? Not English. It can't do 'infinite employment' because using language is costly and, in any case, the Universe will end long too soon. One could just as well say that the hair on my head 'provides an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions' because some hashing technique linking it to the English language must exist.

Interfaces are costly and error-prone and get pruned by purely Economic or otherwise Material considerations.

What will account for this Basic Property is a computational procedure.

Not if this Basic Property involves uncomputable functions. It is perfectly possible that a simulation of an uncomputable function affords survival value. Thus language must be independent of this supposedly 'Basic Property'.

The philosophical significance of this is two-fold: a theory of language is necessarily a generative grammar and, moreover, the theory is necessarily about an object that individual human beings possess, internal to the individual subject and its mentality (i.e., intensional elements).

This is clearly false. A theory of language may be wholly economic and expressed in terms of coordination and discoordination games. Focal solutions may be uncomputable but work well enough in specific contexts.

I just received a call purporting to be from a woman with an attractive voice who was asking about an accident I supposedly have had. The truth is, if I really were concussed after getting hit by a car, I would have provided the information 'she' was asking for.
Thankfully, my thick South Indian accent baffled the computer program. Still, in a few years time I suppose these 'A.I's' will have better voice recognition and will be able to trick my increasingly senile self. But this does not mean such programs will have 'intensional elements'. They will work by purely extensional means.

It is not a theory about externalized utterances, nor is it, therefore, about a social phenomenon. The nomenclature to capture this latter distinction between what is individual/internal/intensional and what is externalized/social is I-language and E-language respectively. It is I-languages, which alone can be the object of scientific study, not E-languages.

But no I-language exists anywhere nor is there any A.I able to communicate with us on such a basis. Thus, 2001 has come and gone but no HAL type computer can be found anywhere.

And though such study is eventually to be redeemed in a biological account, until that eventuality the science captures the phenomena at a level of abstraction from the biology and speaks at the cognitive level of the computational power that satisfies the Basic Property.[3]

This is the crux of the problem. The field of Computational Complexity has burgeoned tremendously over the last four decades. Chomsky chose to remain outside the field. Thus he isn't doing science at all- rather his oeuvre is now defensive simply.

A different, more general, task is to discover the shared underlying features of all I-languages, which is determined again by the biological properties with which human beings are endowed (a theme whose wider significance for cognition in general, is discussed again in Lecture 2). This more general task is undertaken with a view to discovering the biological endowment that determines what generative systems can serve as I-languages; in other words what are the possible human languages.

Biological endowments can only be discovered by doing Biology- i.e. cutting up stuff in the lab. Again, Chomsky has kept out of this field.

Chomsky, then, points out that as soon as the study of generative grammars addressing the Basic Property of language was seriously undertaken, some surprising puzzles emerged, with far-reaching implications.

No puzzle emerged. People shat higher than their arseholes- as has always happened.

One is the “structure dependence” of linguistic operations: in all constructions, in all languages, these operations invariably rely on structural distance rather on the computationally far simpler notion of linear distance.

Linguistic operations don't 'rely on structural distance'. They occur on a fitness landscape which can be formalised, for certain purposes, in accordance with a topological notion of structural distance.

Language learners know this automatically, without instruction.

Nonsense. Baby is a language learner. It has no 'automatic knowledge' of how to calculate topological distance based on the contrasting spectrum of normalised graph Laplacians.

There is support for this from evidence from experimental neuroscience and psychology.

There is evidence that networks of a certain type have evolutionary relationships. There is none that some 'Basic Property' of a magical kind exists.

The result follows from the assumption that the order is simply not available to the operations that generate the structured expressions that are interpreted at the conceptual-intentional interface, for thought and organization of action. That follows in turn from the very natural assumption that I-languages are generative systems based on the most elementary computational operation, which is order-free.

No result 'follows' from absurd assumptions. If I-languages are order-free 'generative systems' then no hysteresis effects arise, everything is always ergodic. But, if this is so, why would people need to talk to each other to improve game theoretic outcomes? Everybody would automatically gravitate to the 'co-operative' Muth Rational solution. There would be no need for either 'cheap talk' or 'costly signals'. This is a theory of Language which says it isn't necessary at all. It is a waste of resources.

These and numerous other considerations provide substantial evidence that linear order is ancillary to language, not involved in core syntax and semantics.

True- but only provided language serves no social function. An avant garde poet might juxtapose words at random to please himself. The conscientious critic might be able to puzzle out some special beauty in the result. However, this would be 'art for art's sake'. It would have no social or alethic significance.

The same is true of the various external arrangements of sign language, which is now known to be remarkably like spoken language in its structure, acquisition, use, and even neural representation. Presumably these external properties reflect conditions imposed by the sensorimotor system. The option of using linear order does not even arise for the language learner. Linear order and other arrangements are relevant to what is heard, i.e., externalized, not to what is thought, which is interior.

Is this a reasonable view? Does 'Hitler was a Vegetarian' have the same valency as 'Vegetarians included Hitler'.

He then points out that these conclusions accord well with the little that is known about the origin of language. The sensorimotor system “appears to have been in place long before language emerged,” and there seems to be little specific adaptation for language. Cognitive properties of far deeper kinds than those possessed by apes, or presumably non-human hominins, are intrinsic to language. Apes have gestural systems adequate for signing and auditory systems adequate for perception of speech, but unlike human infants, they interpret speech just as noise, and even with extensive training cannot achieve even rudiments of human sign language. Aristotle had said that language is ‘sound with meaning', but these considerations just outlined, suggest to Chomsky that the priorities in the slogan might be reversed and language would be better understood as ‘meaning with sound'. In case this comes off as Platonist (something that was zealously propagated by Jerrold Katz), it must be kept firmly in mind that for Chomsky, ‘meaning' here is intended as a thoroughly psychological (eventually biological) category and thus not at all reified in Platonist terms.

In other words, Chomsky is only meaningful in the sense that he exists at a biological level and excretes stuff from which we can diagnose certain things about him. He hasn't really made any great discovery. If he had, there would be some cool gadget we could buy which would make our lives easier.

Such conclusions, in turn, fuel Chomsky's longstanding claim that language is not to be understood as it everywhere is among philosophers, anthropologists, and others, as in some defining way tied to communication.

In other words, Chomsky on language can't be understood by those who think he is talking shite. This is a convenient doctrine to hold. I may say 'I am the greatest constitutional lawyer in the world. But my arguments can't be understood by anybody. So the Judges should simply cede me victory in every court case I appear in without bothering with the other side's arguments or the evidence they present.'

If externalization of language is secondary, and the tie of language to thought is primary, then communication cannot be central to any answer to the question this lecture asks: What is language? Indeed, as he says, there is reason to think that most of language/thought is not externalized at all. If one firmly understands that language is not designed by human beings but part of their biological endowment, then as an object of study, whether scientific or philosophical, there might have to be considerable shift in our methodological approaches.

Quite true. I am biologically the greatest lawyer ever. Thus I don't need to produce any arguments at all.

The quotation from Darwin that Chomsky cited with approval had it that what is fundamental about language is a ‘power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas.”

Language has no such power. I am making the sound 'grux' when seeing a cloud with a particular shape.  It may be that you too, looking out of your window, see the same cloud. But 'grux' is meaningless for you- as, indeed, it is to me because I've forgotten which cloud I was looking at and, in any case, am off my head on Bacardi.

Except for the fact that, as we have mentioned, sound (along with other modes of externalization) has been demoted, Chomsky's own theoretical account of the Basic Property takes this point in Darwin for its word –though perhaps not the exact word since ‘associating' isn't exactly right in describing the central operation that the account posits. Associating happens, after all, even in classical conditioning (bell, food) and Chomsky has famously repudiated behaviourist accounts of language. Moreover associations between two objects, as even non-behaviourist psychologists understand association, may imply that the order of the objects is important in a way that the far greater weight put on the forms suited for semantic interpretation at the conceptual/intentional interface (rather than the sensorimotor interface) establishes it is not. So moving away from Darwin's misleading word ‘associate' for what Darwin himself wants to say, what Chomsky has in mind rather is to make central that we are unique in possessing the capacity to ‘put together' ideas and syntactic elements.

I think that notion is totally grux. So do you. You can't prove otherwise because grux gruxified the grux you would otherwise have gruxed.

And this fundamental conception of language is echoed in the theoretical account of the Basic Property, in which the crucial operation is given the name MERGE, which can operate externally on two distinct objects to create another, or it can operate internally from within one object to create another, yielding automatically the ubiquitous property of “displacement” (phrases heard in one place but understood also in a different place) in the form appropriate for complex semantic interpretation.

Grux gruxified MERGE because of grux- that's why this argument is like totally gruxed.

These are called External and Internal MERGE respectively and respect for simplicity in scientific method, applicable in linguistics as anywhere else, dictates that we keep the basic operation down to this minimum and not proliferate operations in accounting for the computational power that grounds the Basic Property.

Grux! How can you degrux the gruxification of the fundamental gruxiticity of the grux?

Working through some examples to present how language design is at its optimal if we stick to this methodological injunction, Chomsky presents changes in his own view, such as on the phenomenon of ‘displacement' which he once saw as an ‘imperfection', but which now, if one correctly keeps to the simplest methodological assumptions as just mentioned, is something that is simply to be expected. 

By displacement all things are grux and so it is utterly ungruxish to deny the ingruxification of  all non-grux.

The lecture concludes with a bold attempt to exploit these last methodological points to bring two seemingly disparate questions together: what account shall we give of the Basic Property? and how and when did language emerge? This confluence of simplicity of assumptions in accounting for the Basic Property and the accompanying claim of the optimal design of language may help to give substance to what is the most plausible hypothesis on the limited evidence we possess about the origins of language, viz., that language emerged not gradually, but suddenly (and relatively recently). Such a sudden ‘great leap forward' it may now be speculated was perhaps caused by a ‘slight rewiring of the brain that yielded MERGE in its simplest form, providing the basis for unbounded and creative thought', hitherto unpossessed.

What 'unbounded creative thought' has Chomsky ever displayed. He writes stupid shite. He hasn't invented anything. His political views are foolish. Is it coz he's just shite biologically? Or is it rather the case that he has made himself bullet-proof by abandoning any pretence of engaging with reality?

Lecture II consolidates some of these conclusions by first elaborating on another central theme in his work: the limits of human cognition.
There is a locution we have all used frequently: ‘the scope and limits of…. ‘. Chomsky takes it very seriously and gives it a crucial twist in elaborating his understanding of our cognitive abilities. These abilities, which in their scope are wider and deeper than those of any other creature we know, are so partly because they are also subject to limits, limits owing to our nature or, as the title suggests, the kinds of creatures we are—in particular, the fact that our cognitive abilities have a biological basis.

We know our species won't last forever. Why then speak of language as unbounded or infinite? Similarly, we know everybody who writes or talks about the origin of Language is bound to say the stupidest thing possible in context.  So why bother?

We had already implicitly come across this point in the first lecture, though it was restricted there to the human ability for language, in particular. The theoretical account of language presented there presupposed this notion of limits, i.e. presupposed that we are genetically endowed with innate structures that afford us our unique capacity for language, structures which at the same time constrain what language is for us, what possible I-languages there are. It is for the characterization of these innate structures that the technical term ‘UG' is intended; and it is within the framework of the scope and limits set by this genetic endowment, that language as a computational power is explained in the generative account summarized above.

If one is going to have a Universal Grammar then why not Althusserian Ideological State Apparatuses? Why stop there? How about Comrade Bala's JACKIE" (an acronym for Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna and Immortal Easwaran) – a type of dangerous, mystical machine that monitored all thought and could control minds?

Why devote costly cognitive or other resources to paranoid bullshit? Just set up a cult already.

What is true of language is just a special case of a perfectly general set of scopes and limits that come from the fact of being creatures with a biology. The idea seems to raise no controversy when it comes to physical ability: what makes us suited to walk limits us, so that we are not suited to slither like snakes.[4] Chomsky thinks that it is a prejudice to deny that what is obvious in the case of such physical abilities is not obvious (as the incessant controversies around innate ideas would suggest) in the case of cognitive abilities. To possess some cognitive abilities necessarily means that other cognitive abilities may be missing, cognitive abilities that other sorts of minded subjects could conceivably possess. It is only if we ignore the fact of our biology when we study human cognition that we would contrive to deny these limits. And the second lecture proceeds to look at the question of such limits on our cognitive abilities quite generally beyond the specific domain of language, though returning at various points to draw conclusions about language again.

So Chomsky has found an algorithmic method of producing more and more nonsense. So what? Even the most elementary gruxian analysis can gruxify the very limits of its gruxitude.

It explores the methodological upshot of this idea of cognitive limits by first recalling a distinction Chomsky made almost five decades ago between ‘problems' and ‘mysteries'. Invoking, Peirce's understanding of scientific method and scientific growth that appeals to the concept of abduction which puts limits on what count as ‘admissible hypotheses', he argues that innate structures that are determined by our genetic endowment set limits to the questions that we can formulate. The questions we can tractably formulate are called ‘problems', but given the limits within which their formulation is so much as possible, there will be things that escape our cognitive powers and to the extent that we can even think them we will, given our current conceptual frameworks and knowledge, find ourselves unable to formulate them in a way that a tractable form of scientific inquiry of them can be pursued. These he calls ‘mysteries'. The omnibus title of the lectures “What kind of creatures are we?” is directly addressed by this since other sorts of creatures, with a different biological endowment from ours, may be able to formulate problems that remain mysteries for us. Thus, for Chomsky, if not for Peirce, (who, in speaking of admissible hypotheses, may have given less of a determining role to the fact of our being biological creatures[5]) the distinction between ‘problems' and ‘mysteries' is an organism-relative distinction.

Why would a biological organism want to bother with 'mysteries'? The short answer is they don't. Aposematism, however, is a biological ploy. It involves pretending to have some attribute which is advantageous. Chomsky and Bilgrami are pretending they study worthwhile stuff. But they aren't really.

It is a very important part of this methodological picture that we should learn to relax with the fact of our cognitive limits and the ‘mysteries' that they inevitably force us to acknowledge. The lecture, along with the companion essay in this volume, ‘The Mysteries of Nature”, traverses vital moments in the history of science to draw this methodological lesson.
One crux moment is when Newton overturned the contact-mechanical assumptions of the Early Modern science that preceded him and posited a notion of gravity that undermined the earlier notions of matter, motion, and causality which were scientific consolidations of our commonsense understanding (presumably determined by the cognitive limits of our biology) of the world of objects. He points out that with Newton a new framework emerged in which –by the lights of those limits—something inconceivable was being proposed. Newton himself admitted to this inconceivability, even calling it an absurdity, and nobody since Newton has done anything to redeem things on just this score. Rather the absurdity has simply been subsumed into our scientific picture of the world. Newton never let it deter him, constructing explanatory laws, ignoring the lack of a deeper underlying understanding that would, if we had it, make sense of what were, by these admissions on his (and others') part, described as an ‘occult' force. It was sufficient to construct intelligible theories of the world. And to do so, it was not necessary to find the world intelligible in the deeper sense that our cognitive limits frustrate.

Newton was a smart guy who did useful work. That's why he is celebrated. He may also have indulged in some worthless psilosophy. So what?

It may be that 'gravitons' exist and that scientists will be able to fabricate an anti-grav skateboard like in 'Back to the Future'. Chomsky doesn't know if this can or can't happen. Why is he pretending otherwise?

Subsequent thinkers (Priestley, in particular, comes through as a most shrewd and comprehending commentator) made explicit this methodological outlook and drew consequences for issues in the philosophy of mind that vex philosophers today, but which, were they to take in what Priestley had to offer, might make them reconsider what they present as the mind-body problem or ‘the hard problem' of consciousness.

But Priestley did useful work. Who cares if he vexed philosophers? They are useless.

Philosophers have a tendency to stamp some issue as uniquely ‘hard' and rest complacently in that frustrated register. Chomsky appeals to precisely this history to show first of all that there is nothing unique about finding something ‘hard' in just this way. Thus, for instance, what the introduction of ‘gravity' did in physics was conceived to be just as hard in the aftermath of Newton, including by Newton himself.[6] The significance of this to the so-called mind-body problem is that it puts into doubt whether it can any longer –since Newton– even be formulated coherently. The initially anxiety-inducing introduction of something ‘mysterious' like ‘gravity' eventually became essential to our understanding of material bodies and their acting upon each other without contact and so it simply got incorporated into science, indeed the new common sense of science. From this, we should, if anything, conclude philosophically that everything is immaterial, so nothing clear can remain of a mind-body problem. In a memorably eloquent reversal of Ryle's slogan, he says that far from the ghost having been sent to oblivion, the machine was discarded and the ghost remained intact. As for consciousness, the philosopher's tendency to require that much of our mentality be conscious, a tendency explicit in philosophers as different as Quine and Searle, is brought into question by looking at the operations of the rule-bound abilities of both language and vision. Chomsky feels particularly strongly about this since even much of our conscious thought interacts with aspects of mind that are hidden from consciousness, and so to restrict oneself to what is conscious would hinder a scientific understanding of even the conscious mind.

Scientists, like Einstein, may sometimes sound like philosophers but they either make a useful discovery or moulder in oblivion. By contrast, no philosopher is anything but a fool.

Given his concern with a scientific account, he is concerned too to show that some ways of thinking about language, and thought more broadly, are not scientifically sound.

Any way of thinking which results in a scientific or technological break-through is scientifically sound. Only results matter.

There is, in particular, an extended discussion of the atomic elements of computation. Invoking points established in the previous lecture, he points out that these are misleadingly described as ‘words' and as ‘lexical' items in the literature because –as they feed into the conceptual-intentional interface, which has been shown to be primary in contrast with the sensorimotor interface—they are not constructed by the processes of externalization.

It does not matter whether Chomsky finds them misleading because Chomsky isn't doing anything useful. A guy defining 'atomic expressions' for a specific Wolfram type domain finds it useful and not misleading at all to think in terms of 'words' or 'lexical' items.

Even more startling for philosophers is the claim that, except for some explicitly stipulative exceptions in mathematics and the sciences, they don't have any referential properties and are not to be thought of as bearing constitutive relations to mind-independent objects in the external world.

Why would this be 'startling'? A silly man saying silly things is very unlikely to hit upon any 'constitutive relations' to 'mind independent objects'. That's why Society decided long ago that Philosophy was a shite subject.

I-language, which is the only scientifically accountable notion of language, thus, is thoroughly internal.

But it doesn't and can't exist if cognition is costly.

This point is explored via a discussion of historical views, such as those of Aristotle and Hume, and via a discussion of examples of such atoms, ranging from the relatively concrete such as ‘house' and ‘Paris' to relatively abstract such as ‘person' and ‘thing'. Reference or denotation is shown by these discussions to be too contextual to bear scientific study and should be seen as relevant to the use that language is put to rather than a constitutive aspect of language itself. All this leads to a different taxonomy than is found among philosophers, relegating almost all of what they have in mind by ‘semantics' to pragmatics.

This is perfectly sensible. Language is entirely economic and features coordination and discoordination games. No doubt there is a signal extraction problem such that a shithead- like Marx, or Freud, or Chomsky- is mistaken for a 'Scientist' in some sense of the term. However, economic forces prune back such systematic errors.

These conclusions are relevant to the question of the origin of language. Animal signals to each other are caused by direct links they have to objects in the external world. There is no understanding them if one left these causal links out, whereas, the burden of the discussion above was to show precisely that there are no such constitutive causal links to a mind-independent reality for the atoms of human computation.

Nonsense! People like Chomsky and Bilgrami get paid. If their students can get tenure, then their availability cascade trundles on. If not, they inherit oblivion.

This gives further reason to conclude that the kind of creatures we are, possessed of the kind of powers for language and thought we possess, should get an evolutionary account of the sort presented in the first Lecture rather than what Chomsky, citing Lewontin in this lecture, describes as the ‘storytelling' about gradual evolution from our creaturely ancestors, a mode of explanation that one would only indulge in if one does not pay enough prior and scientific attention to the nature of the phenotype being explained. It is storytelling partly also, as Lewontin is cited as saying, because of the ‘tough luck' of not having access to any evidence on which these explanations could be based. They are hidden from human cognitive access, another form of our limitation.

So this is just an exercise in story-telling which keeps saying it isn't really a story because...urm...gruxiticity is wholly scientific.

Thus limits on our cognition are inevitable for a variety of reasons, chief among which is the taking seriously of the sheer fact that we are biological creatures. Unlike Locke, Priestley, Hume, Russell, Peirce, and Lewontin, who are among the heroes of this lecture, Hilbert most explicitly (“There are absolutely no unsolvable problems”) and much of contemporary philosophy more implicitly deny that there are mysteries, thereby denying a truism based on this sheer fact. What is fascinating is that Chomsky, having presented all this, takes an interesting combination of attitudes towards it. On the one hand, the very idea of cognitive limits that lands us human beings with ‘mysteries', which other sorts of subjects may find perfectly tractable, is a commitment to what philosophers call a realist metaphysics. As he says, “Given mysterian truisms, what is inconceivable for me, is no criterion for what does not exist”. But on the other hand, taking his cue from Newton, his attitude, once this is acknowledged, is thoroughly pragmatist. Just because what we study, the world, may not be ultimately intelligible, does not mean that we should be inhibited from striving to produce intelligible scientific theories of the world.

Not getting paid for doing worthless shite would inhibit you quickly enough. This is the scandal of a tenure system designed for a world in which most people dropped dead in their Sixties.

Even the concept of free human action, he says, which may go beyond any of the concepts we possess (crucially, determinacy and randomness) might one day, he says, be scientifically tractable, though we are far from anything like that understanding at present. This is quite different from the attitude of Kant, who declared freedom to be thinkable but never knowable. Like Peirce and before him Newton, and unlike Kant, Chomsky does not want his own mysterianism and his own insistence on the limits of our cognitive powers, to place, as Peirce once put it, “roadblocks on the path to knowledge”.

Very good of him, I'm sure.

Lecture III lifts the restriction on our natures, considered in terms of individual capacities (for language and cognition), and considers us as social creatures, seeking to explore what is the common good and which political and economic arrangements promote or thwart it.
The Enlightenment figures large in the pursuit of these questions, though what Chomsky has in mind by the Enlightenment is capacious including the familiar ‘liberal' figures of Adam Smith[7] and Mill as well as those in a broadly Romantic tradition such as Humboldt and Marx. And its interpretation is capacious too, stressing not only the side of Adam Smith that is often suppressed by most of his liberal and radical critics as well as his conservative devotees, but also stressing principles that allow it to be seen as a precursor of a later anarchist tradition in Europe as well as John Dewey in America.

So dead white males are super duper iff you are white and going to die sooner rather than later.

The starting point of these inquiries is in fact individualist and has ties to the earlier lectures. Even within their biologically determined limits, the creative capacities that each individual possesses (and which were discussed in the first lecture in the specific domain of language) are precisely the sort of thing whose full development makes individuals flower as subjects.

Getting paid enables individuals to 'flower'. Not paying worthless shitheads may inhibit their flowering but, long term, that's the way to go.

The social question of the common good necessarily comes in when one asks what sorts of institutions hinder such development within the individual. Social frameworks such as capitalism that stress self-interest hinder rather than encourage the development of individual capacities.

How has Chomsky been hindered by Capitalism? His books sell well. He gets a lot of free P.R because he's always on tap with a sound-byte. There is a global market for shite and Chomsky has been busily catering to it in the belief that he is advancing the cause of Social Justice.

Adam Smith's vivid excoriations of what the division of labour does to destroy our creative individuality and Dewey's harsh words on the shadow cast by corporate interests on just about every aspect of public and personal life are both invoked to establish this. The tradition of anarchism (from Bakunin to Rocker and the anarcho-syndicalism of the Spanish Civil war period) combines socialist ideas with the liberal principles of the classical Enlightenment to construct an ideal –of cooperative labour, workers' control of the workplace and the means of production, and a social life revolving around voluntary associations– that, if implemented, would sweep away the obstacles to the goal of human development which come from both free market capitalism and Bolshevik tendencies to a ‘red bureaucracy'. Dewey's ideas on education reveal how by contrast with much of the contemporary practice found in educational institutions, the goal of human development can best be pursued from an early age.

Fair point. Disintermediate the Academy by banning credentialist requirements for entry into any profession. Get rid of rents by all means- but, in doing so, you are also getting rid of Chomskys and Bilgramis and meaningless availability cascades featuring words like 'Enlightenment' and a host of dead white men who weren't really particularly special at all.

There are touching descriptions of how many of these ideals were central to the activism of a wide range of grass roots movements from the early radical parliamentary tradition in seventeenth century England to the ‘factory girls' and artisans that Norman Ware wrote of in his study of the industrial workers in the American tradition to the liberation theologians in the Catholic tradition of Central America. These longstanding democratic labour traditions are contrasted in some detail with a different understanding of democracy in a tradition that begins in America with Madison's ‘aristocratic' strictures on who may govern and updated in the vision of Walter Lippmann's ideas of democratic rule by the ‘expert', the American version of Leninist vanguardism, ensuring –as Chomsky makes clear with a glance at the results of polls on various important issues such as healthcare– that what the people want is almost never what gets on the agenda of ‘democratic' politics.

Why? American voters also pay taxes. 'Liberals' engaging in competitive 'virtue signalling' have created the impression that any 'New Deal' will disproportionately benefit people unlike the median voter. The older type of Welfare State was highly discriminatory. That's why it succeeded. Once the impression was created that 'Welfare Queens' were 'marrying the State'- i.e. that government servants weren't vigilant racists- the 'L word' provoked fear and derision.

This latter understanding of democracy, of course, dominates the practice of societies and governments in much of the Western world and Chomsky is keen to point out that even at its worst, it never lets up on the claim to be pursuing high sounding ideals of the common good, showing how the common good is universal in a quite paradoxical way: it is preached as applying to all, even as it is everywhere violated by those said to be representing all and who mostly pursue the interests of a few.

Human beings are very naughty. What to do? Biology is like that.

Given the fundamental starting point in human creativity and the importance of its unhindered flowering, Chomsky's leaning towards anarchism is not surprising and his way of putting the point has always been to ask, as he does in this lecture again: any form of coercion that hinders it can never be taken for granted. It needs a justification.

Right! That is the crying need of the hour. Yet more 'justification'.

All arrangements that have coercive power, including centrally the state, must always be justified.

Because our heads will fall off if they aren't. Will no one think of the children! OMG! Their heads are falling off. Quick, darling, spout out a 10,000 word justification of the State immediately!'

The default position is that they are not justified –until and unless they are. And given the contingency of the ‘shoals of capitalism' (his phrase) in all corners of the world, there is indeed a justification of a notion of the state that protects the vast numbers who are pushed to the margins of society (echoing Adam Smith himself who thought only the state could alleviate the oppressive life that industrial capital forces upon labour), very different from the actual state in most societies which, as Dewey is cited as saying, largely do the bidding of corporations and in doing so remove the socialist element from anarchism and allow only the libertarian element –as a result of which democracy becomes ‘neo-democracy' (to match ‘neo-liberalism') in which if one suffers in poverty it is because, as Hobbes might have put it, one has chosen to do so. Thus to turn one's back on this and to justify the state as offering protections for those who suffer under capitalism, far from contradicting anarchism, is a consistent application of its principles in historical contingencies, a point that Chomsky presents with a marvelous metaphor which he says he has borrowed from the Brazilian rural workers' movement and extended –the metaphor of an ‘iron cage', whose floors one tries to extend as one tries to reduce the coercive power of the state, even as the cage protects one from the destructive forces outside the cage, forces which render us weak and impoverished and alienated, to say nothing of rendering our planet uninhabitable.

The 'iron cage' is from Max Weber. I suppose Brazilian 'rural workers' would want fungible title in land and justiciable entitlements. Did they get it? Or where they hoodwinked by Lula and Rousseff? The truth is that Capitalism itself holds that peasants should own land. American Ambassadors to Nehru's Delhi kept harping on that theme but Nehru was sceptical of the rationality of the Indian peasant. We all now know he was wrong. Farmers should pay taxes and gain incentive compatible rights and entitlements. A corrupt populism hurts them disproportionately. Indeed, all asset markets will perform better if property ownership is broad-based and characterised by free entry and exit.

Having a critique of Capitalism means knowing howto make capital markets more efficient and less volatile. Marx, Gandhi, Chomsky and Bilgrami have no such theory.  Availability cascades based upon their texts are bound to represent an 'alienated' type of labour because paranoia is a pre-requisite and manic protestation its stock in trade.  Neither a belief in fairies at the bottom of the garden, nor faith in heroic Brazilian peasants can cure a malaise which arises from the knowledge that one's oeuvre is worthless.