Socrates vs. Anytus

 Anytus is considered the main prosecutor of Socrates. Apparently, he had a personal grudge against the philosopher because the latter had advised his son not to follow his father into the leather business from which the family had grown rich and been promoted into the equestrian order. Another accuser of Socrates, Lycon, may have been angry that the philosopher encouraged his young son to maintain a homosexual relationship with a much older man. More generally, the allegation of 'corrupting youth' had to do with Socrates's relationship with Alcibiades and some of the 'Thirty Tyrants'. We may say he was being scapegoated from the crimes of much richer men some of whom had first made his acquaintance as impressionable youths. In particular, Socrates was blamed for the misdeeds of the Robespierre-like Critias, who was his cousin.

Thanks to a general amnesty, Socrates could not be prosecuted for anything he had done or said during or prior to the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. But he could be prosecuted for things he had done and said for the 4 years preceding his trial in 399 BC. It appears that there was some sort of attempted putsch, by 'Socratified youth', in 401 BC which led to a complete loss of patience with the old fool. 

About 14 years after Socrates was executed, Plato wrote in the Meno gives us this rather poignant, or ironic, dialogue between them- 

Soc. Please, Anytus, to help me and your friend Meno in answering our question, Who are the teachers?

Teachers are guys who get paid to teach even if they are as ignorant as shit. It is a different matter that a person may receive training from the master of a particular craft of skill or that there might be a system of apprenticeship or mentorship.  

Consider the matter thus: If we wanted Meno to be a good physician, to whom should we send him? Should we not send him to the physicians?

Our answer would be that Meno should first do well in School- more specifically in Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics. After that he should attend lectures on various aspects of Medicine. Only then might he serve as an 'intern' or 'apprentice' to practicing physicians or surgeons or what have you.  

Any. Certainly.

Soc. Or if we wanted him to be a good cobbler, should we not send him to the cobblers?

Any. Yes.

Soc. And so forth?

Any. Yes.

Soc. Let me trouble you with one more question. When we say that we should be right in sending him to the physicians if we wanted him to be a physician, do we mean that we should be right in sending him to those who profess the art, rather than to those who do not, and to those who demand payment for teaching the art, and profess to teach it to any one who will come and learn? And if these were our reasons, should we not be right in sending him?

No. If I send my son to my G.P and say to him 'teach him medicine', he will politely but firmly decline. The theory of comparative advantage applies. The GP's time is costly. He ought not be teaching my son the basics of Chemistry or Biology. School teachers may do a worse job of this but their time is worth less.  

Even in Socrates's time, busy statesmen let their kids be educated in the normal manner and only sought a mentor for them, or themselves took them as an apprentice, after they had received the best available education. 

Any. Yes.

Would Anytus actually have given this reply? No. He thought his own son should receive a good education and then come into the family business before entering public life. This is the course he himself had taken. Unlike Socrates, he and his family had risen greatly. True, if 'Socratified Youth' had taken over Athens, then, perhaps, Socrates would have had great influence. The problem is that his head was full of shit.  

Soc. And might not the same be said of flute-playing, and of the other arts? Would a man who wanted to make another a flute-player refuse to send him to those who profess to teach the art for money,

He might do if they are shit. The fact is some kids have musical talent. They pick up a flute and master it on their own.  

and be plaguing other persons to give him instruction,

or plaguing other people in the belief that you can give them instruction 

who are not professed teachers and who never had a single disciple in that branch of knowledge which he wishes him to acquire-would not such conduct be the height of folly?

Any. Yes, by Zeus, and of ignorance too.

Who taught Socrates his foolish type of Elenchus or forensic cross-examination? It was either a prostitute or a shrew, not a lawyer or a statesman.  

Soc. Very good. And now you are in a position to advise with me about my friend Meno. He has been telling me, Anytus, that he desires to attain that kind of wisdom and-virtue by which men order the state or the house,

i.e. 'economia'. This has nothing to do with seeking for definitions and axioms and deducing theorems. Indeed, such 'akreibia' (seeking for a precision greater than the subject-matter affords) is antithetical to economia. 

and honour their parents, and know when to receive and when to send away citizens and strangers, as a good man should. Now, to whom should he go in order that he may learn this virtue?

Not Socrates, who was poor and wasted his time gadding about instead of raising up in status his own sons. Anytus- who ran a profitable business and was a successful statesman- was the 'bonus paterfamilias' whom you might ask to act as the mentor or guardian of your sons.  

Does not the previous argument imply clearly that we should send him to those who profess and avouch that they are the common teachers of all Hellas, and are ready to impart instruction to any one who likes, at a fixed price?

No. You send your kids to school with other kids but also ensure they have proper mentors or that they undertake an apprenticeship with recognized masters of the craft or profession in which they seek to rise.  

Any. Whom do you mean, Socrates?

Soc. You surely know, do you not, Anytus, that these are the people whom mankind call Sophists?

The word for teacher was didaskalos. The Sophists were not teachers but rhetoricians whom we might term 'idealogues'.  

Any. By Heracles, Socrates, forbear! I only hope that no friend or kinsman or acquaintance of mine, whether citizen or stranger, will ever be so mad as to allow himself to be corrupted by them; for they are a manifest pest and corrupting influences to those who have to do with them.

They may have made some money for themselves but they neither enriched the State nor increased its military power. Still, it was possible that they increased 'soft power'. But so did famous courtesans or jesters or acrobats.  

Soc. What, Anytus? Of all the people who profess that they know how to do men good,

e.g. wizards, witches, swindlers and those who show how you can save money by eating only your own shit.  

do you mean to say that these are the only ones who not only do them no good, but positively corrupt those who are entrusted to them, and in return for this disservice have the face to demand money?

It is better to be paid to transmit a STD than to do so just for the pleasure of the thing. After all, the money a prostitute earns may feed her family.  

Indeed, I cannot believe you; for I know of a single man, Protagoras, who made more out of his craft

which wasn't teaching 

than the illustrious Pheidias,

who wasn't a teacher of sculpting or architecture.

who created such noble works, or any ten other statuaries. How could it be that a mender of old shoes, or patcher up of clothes, who made the shoes or clothes worse than he received them, could not have remained thirty days undetected, and would very soon have starved; whereas during more than forty years, Protagoras was corrupting all Hellas, and sending his disciples from him worse than he received them, and he was never found out.

Unlike Socrates, the careers of whose most famous pupils- Critias & Alcibiades- were calamitous, Protagoras was associated with Pericles in Athens' golden age. For Plato, I suppose, Socrates was important in linking he himself to Protagoras and Heraclitus and Parmenides etc. What is certain is that Plato's Academy was a success. 

For, if I am not mistaken,-he was about seventy years old at his death, forty of which were spent in the practice of his profession; and during all that time he had a good reputation, which to this day he retains: and not only Protagoras, but many others are well spoken of; some who lived before him, and others who are still living. Now, when you say that they deceived and corrupted the youth, are they to be supposed to have corrupted them consciously or unconsciously? Can those who were deemed by many to be the wisest men of Hellas have been out of their minds?

If Periclean Athens had become the regional hegemon- sure. But it didn't. Athens lost to Sparta which, in their different ways, Alcibiades and Critias ended up serving.  

Any. Out of their minds! No, Socrates; the young men who gave their money to them, were out of their minds, and their relations and guardians who entrusted their youth to the care of these men were still more out of their minds, and most of all, the cities who allowed them to come in, and did not drive them out, citizen and stranger alike.

 You spend good money educating your son and getting him to move in the right social circles and he turn around and says he despises you and the manner in which the family makes its money. Still, expressing fury at this outcome is a backhanded way of saying 'my son is a real Nob. He will have nothing to do with 'trade'. I suppose I will have to spend a lot of money maintaining that idler in the style he has become accustomed to.' 

Soc. Has any of the Sophists wronged you, Anytus? What makes you so angry with them?

Any. No, indeed, neither I nor any of my belongings has ever had, nor would I suffer them to have, anything to do with them.

I suppose, it was at a later point that Anytus's son came under Socrates's influence.  

Soc. Then you are entirely unacquainted with them?

Any. And I have no wish to be acquainted.

Soc. Then, my dear friend, how can you know whether a thing is good or bad of which you are wholly ignorant?

Ignorance is not the same thing as lack of acquaintanceship. Socrates wasn't ignorant of Homer though he wasn't acquainted with him.  

Any. Quite well; I am sure that I know what manner of men these are, whether I am acquainted with them or not.

Anytus was better acquainted with himself than Socrates which is why the latter, not the former, says-

Soc. You must be a diviner, Anytus 

just as Socrates must be a cat because I say so.  

for I really cannot make out, judging from your own words, how, if you are not acquainted with them, you know about them.

Socrates did not know that you can acquire knowledge from third parties. Anytus was in the leather business. He employed and did business with people of good repute even if he had no prior acquaintance with them.  

But I am not enquiring of you who are the teachers who will corrupt Meno (let them be, if you please, the Sophists); I only ask you to tell him who there is in this great city who will teach him how to become eminent in the virtues

e.g. the virtue of levitation or the yet greater virtue of flying around the place shitting on the heads of your friends 

which I was just, now describing. He is the friend of your family, and you will oblige him.

By not fucking him in the ass

Any. Why do you not tell him yourself?

Soc. I have told him whom I supposed to be the teachers of these things; but I learn from you that I am utterly at fault, and I dare say that you are right. And now I wish that you, on your part, would tell me to whom among the Athenians he should go. Whom would you name?

Modesty forbids... 

Any. Why single out individuals? Any Athenian gentleman, taken at random, if he will mind him, will do far more, good to him than the Sophists.

more particularly those of the pederastic persuasion 

Soc. And did those gentlemen grow of themselves;

No! They were taught to grow in the same way that seeds go to school and are taught how to turn into trees or bushes or plants of various tupes.  

and without having been taught by any one, were they nevertheless able to teach others that which they had never learned themselves?

People can teach themselves things and then teach those things to other things. But, equally, a teacher may be little more than a glorified child minder even if his 'students' are doing PhDs in stupid shite.  

Any. I imagine that they learned of the previous generation of gentlemen. Have there not been many good men in this city?

Soc. Yes, certainly, Anytus; and many good statesmen also there always have been and there are still, in the city of Athens. But the question is whether they were also good teachers of their own virtue;-not whether there are, or have been, good men in this part of the world, but whether virtue can be taught, is the question which we have been discussing.

It is certainly possible to teach ethics or morality of various types. In some cases, this is protocol bound and 'buck stopped'- e.g. Medical ethics or professional etiquette.  

Now, do we mean to say that the good men our own and of other times knew how to impart to others that virtue which they had themselves; or is virtue a thing incapable of being communicated or imparted by one man to another?

Neither. It is also not the case that we mean to say that Virtue is the sock of the imaginary cat which is also a top hat every other Tuesday.  

That is the question which I and Meno have been arguing. Look at the matter in your own way: Would you not admit that Themistocles was a good man?

Any. Certainly; no man better.

Soc. And must not he then have been a good teacher, if any man ever was a good teacher, of his own virtue?

Any. Yes certainly,-if he wanted to be so.

Soc. But would he not have wanted? He would, at any rate, have desired to make his own son a good man and a gentleman; he could not have been jealous of him, or have intentionally abstained from imparting to him his own virtue. Did you never hear that he made his son Cleophantus a famous horseman; and had him taught to stand upright on horseback and hurl a javelin, and to do many other marvellous things; and in anything which could be learned from a master he was well trained? Have you not heard from our elders of him?

Any. I have.

Soc. Then no one could say that his son showed any want of capacity?

Any. Very likely not.

Soc. But did any one, old or young, ever say in your hearing that Cleophantus, son of Themistocles, was a wise or good man, as his father was?

Any. I have certainly never heard any one say so.

Soc. And if virtue could have been taught, would his father Themistocles have sought to train him in these minor accomplishments, and allowed him who, as you must remember, was his own son, to be no better than his neighbours in those qualities in which he himself excelled?

Did any one say Cleophantus's overmastering ambition in life was to be considered wiser or better than his father? No. On the other hand, he may have wished to excel as a horseman.  

Any. Indeed, indeed, I think not.

Soc. Here was a teacher of virtue whom you admit to be among the best men of the past. Let us take another,-Aristides, the son of Lysimachus: would you not acknowledge that he was a good man?

Any. To be sure I should.

Soc. And did not he train his son Lysimachus better than any other Athenian in all that could be done for him by the help of masters? But what has been the result? Is he a bit better than any other mortal? He is an acquaintance of yours, and you see what he is like.

Some are more teachable than others and some who are teachable may not want to be taught.  

There is Pericles, again, magnificent in his wisdom; and he, as you are aware, had two sons, Paralus and Xanthippus.

Any. I know.

Soc. And you know, also, that he taught them to be unrivalled horsemen, and had them trained in music and gymnastics and all sorts of arts-in these respects they were on a level with the best-and had he no wish to make good men of them? Nay, he must have wished it.

 So what? A smart man may have stupid sons. 

But virtue, as I suspect, could not be taught.

There are rules of conduct which can be taught and those who live by them will be considered virtuous. But some may be too stupid, too lazy, or too lacking in motivation to learn much or retain what they had learnt.  

And that you may not suppose the incompetent teachers to be only the meaner sort of Athenians and few in number, remember again that Thucydides had two sons, Melesias and Stephanus, whom, besides giving them a good education in other things, he trained in wrestling, and they were the best wrestlers in Athens:

Clearly, Thucydides, the leader of the Conservative faction, considered wrestling to be superior than talking nonsense in the manner of Socrates.  

one of them he committed to the care of Xanthias, and the other of Eudorus, who had the reputation of being the most celebrated wrestlers of that day. Do you remember them?

Any. I have heard of them.

Soc. Now, can there be a doubt that Thucydides, whose children were taught things for which he had to spend money, would have taught them to be good men, which would have cost him nothing, if virtue could have been taught?

What did Socrates teach his sons? Why does Aristotle say this progeny were fools and dullards? I suppose this had become apparent by the time Plato wrote this.  

Will you reply that he was a mean man, and had not many friends among the Athenians and allies? Nay, but he was of a great family, and a man of influence at Athens and in all Hellas, and, if virtue could have been taught, he would have found out some Athenian or foreigner who would have made good men of his sons, if he could not himself spare the time from cares of state. Once more, I suspect, friend Anytus, that virtue is not a thing which can be taught?

Which is why he didn't give a fart for his own sons and went roaming about the place hoping to influence the sons of the richer or better born.  

Any. Socrates, I think that you are too ready to speak evil of men: and, if you will take my advice, I would recommend you to be careful. Perhaps there is no city in which it is not easier to do men harm than to do them good, and this is certainly the case at Athens, as I believe that you know.

Sadly, the blathershite didn't know shit. 

Soc. O Meno, think that Anytus is in a rage. And he may well be in a rage, for he thinks, in the first place, that I am defaming these gentlemen; and in the second place, he is of opinion that he is one of them himself. But some day he will know what is the meaning of defamation, and if he ever does, he will forgive me.

Anytus did not forgive Socrates. He knew the meaning of defamation well enough to get the municipality to apply a swatter to a gadfly who, it has been suggested, turned his son against him. 

I suppose, Plato's point is that though metaphysical strife is as pointless as political stasis, nevertheless, it is a 'Form' which it is less lethal to 'participate' in. Also, instead of seeking to bugger the brains out of the jeunesse dorée , maybe one should just make a little money ensuring they learnt the elements of Mathematics. That way angry fathers won't try to get you executed or exiled or just beaten to a pulp by brawny family retainers. 

That Maimaktes turn Meilichios

That every Maimaktes turns Meilichios by the Solonic irrigation of a but municipal Aristides

Or that Oedipus killing Dad, fucking Mum, yet turns Savage Erinyes into Civic Eumenides

Boots what? if the serf's subsistence consumes five sixths of the harvest

Democracy, is thy scepter more secure now thou starvest?

Envoi

Prince! That, for Delphi, thy Adelphi can seize power only during a festival of the High God

Every Seisachtheia of handicaps is the tautochrone Olympiad of but Sly Fraud

The a priori is an intensional fallacy

If by 'a priori knowledge' we mean 'background knowledge' or 'conventional wisdom', no great harm is done. We may equate the thing with Bayesian priors and move on. Kant, however, defines it thus- By the term “knowledge a priori,” therefore, we shall in the sequel understand, not such as is independent of this or that kind of experience, but such as is absolutely so of all experience.

It is fine to say this of Revealed Scripture which being wholly imperative has no alethic component of which we could have experience- e.g. harrowing Hell or chatting to God. Indeed, the major religions consider their Holy Book to be 'uncreated'. What Kant is suggesting is that there is some experience we all have which is independent of any contingent circumstance of our own existence. But what experiment can we do which assures us this is the case? Some say that if you die and are brought back to life you will have a particular type of experience which is proof of the afterlife. Others say that if you take drugs and suck their cock you will lose your 'false consciousness' and 'materialistic delusions' and overcome the hegemony of Patriarchy & Neo-Liberalism such that you will give all your money to your pimp rather than meanly keeping back some for yourself in order to buy a burger. 

We may say 'a priori knowledge' is an 'intension'. But its 'extension' is empty or only knowable at the end of mathematical time. Consider the 'black cabbie' in London who has done 'the Knowledge'- i.e. was tested on his ability to get from any street address to any other by the shortest route. He did not have posteriori knowledge but a 'skeletal' knowledge base which he found it useful to update from time to time. 

 Opposed to this is empirical knowledge, or that which is possible only a posteriori, that is, through experience.

Fuck off! We gain empirical knowledge by updating an epistemic map or model in a routine or protocol bound, manner. As for what we experience, we forget it if it isn't 'mission critical' or confirm it if it is. 

 Knowledge a priori is either pure or impure.

If one thing exists a priori, then the existential predicate entails the necessary existence of at least one thing. But this means there is an ontological proof of at least one thing- even if it isn't the God of St. Anselm. If that thing necessarily exists then either it is everything or there is some sufficiency condition by which all things are within its web of predication.

That's why claiming 'a priori Knowledge' exists (unless you are a mystic or a Theist) is pure horse-shit.

 Pure knowledge a priori is that with which no empirical element is mixed up. For example, the proposition, “Every change has a cause,” is a proposition a priori, but impure, because change is a conception which can only be derived from experience.

If so, the same thing could be said about 'cause' and 'every' and 'has'. Indeed, since Knowledge is not a priori, nothing in it can be so.

'Kant's dove', famously, thinks it can fly better if there were no air. But doves and fishes aren't stupid. They know that if the tide or the breeze are in their favour, they get to their objective faster. It is only when they turn against them that they might wish to transcend the element in which they must have their life.

Kant believed that

III. Philosophy stands in need of a Science which shall Determine the Possibility, Principles, and Extent of Human Knowledge “a priori”

Sadly, nobody stood in need of Philosophy. If you want to get rid of Kings and Bishops, just chop their fucking heads off and repent your sins at leisure. Philosophy can slay no dragons. It can merely foul its own nest.  

Mathematical science affords us a brilliant example, how far, independently of all experience,

The cunt didn't get that geometry or analysis weren't independent of all experience. They arose because they were useful in improving empirical outcomes 

we may carry our a priori knowledge.

Gauss and Grassmann and Galois, not to mention Hamilton and Lobachevsky etc. carried it yet further by rejecting the dogmatic straitjacket of 'synthetic a priori' truths. They prevailed because their work was useful. The shibboleth of 'necessary truth' wasn't. Sadly some remained in thrall to it and wasted everybody's time.

It is true that the mathematician occupies himself with objects and cognitions only in so far as they can be represented by means of intuition.

Thankfully, that had never been the case. 

But this circumstance is easily overlooked, because the said intuition can itself be given a priori, and therefore is hardly to be distinguished from a mere pure conception.

The Brits tended to be 'conceptualists' and thus fell behind the Continent. Anal-tickle philosophy inherits that Misology.  

Deceived by such a proof of the power of reason, we can perceive no limits to the extension of our knowledge.

There are none. It isn't the case that just coz a dude is bleck, we can't learn a lot from him. Sadly, we can't learn much from Kant however racist he might have been.  

The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels,

Why would it feel resistance if the wind is at its back?  

might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space.

No. Its wings would be useless in a vacuum. This silly cunt didn't get that Galileo, Newton etc. were able to get to better equations of motion by abstracting from air-resistance and wind velocity etc.  

just in the same way did Plato, abandoning the world of sense because of the narrow limits it sets to the understanding, venture upon the wings of ideas beyond it, into the void space of pure intellect.

Fuck off! He ventured, upon the wings of words, into the space of Musaeus from whom his patrician ancestors would have been partially descended on the distaff side. 

He did not reflect that he made no real progress by all his efforts; for he met with no resistance which might serve him for a support,

Socrates met with resistance. Plato was careful to keep clear of 'resistance' which is why he lived long and died of natural causes.  

as it were, whereon to rest, and on which he might apply his powers, in order to let the intellect acquire momentum for its progress.

Plato's big idea was that Math was important. Since there still are Mathematical Platonists, he succeeded. Kant failed. There was no 'bridge' between his Metaphysics and actual Physics which is why in his last fascicles he thinks perhaps his system reduces to 'galvanism' or 'Zoraster'. In other words there must be some being, or energizing principle, which incarnates Transcendence. The trouble here is that Christ is good enough for this purpose and there's a pretty decent Church within walking distance for the vast majority of Europeans. 

It is, indeed, the common fate of human reason

there was little of that commodity in Kant's neck of the woods.  

in speculation, to finish the imposing edifice of thought

pile of shite more like 

as rapidly as possible, and then for the first time to begin to examine whether the foundation is a solid one or no.

It is shit. What you are actually doing, when you establish a 'necessary' truth, is shitting not just your pants but also the Professorial chair which you occupy. 

Why Agnes Callard is always angry

In a paper titled 'The reason to be angry forever' Agnes Callard writes-  

We get angry for reasons—or, at any rate, for what we take to be reasons.

There may be a reason why we can be angry for no reason- e.g. we are drunk or have a brain tumour or something of that sort.  

If asked “why are you angry?” you will

head-butt the person asking you, at least you would if you lived on the Council Estate down the road.  

cite something (that you think) someone did or failed to do. That action or omission is what you are angry about. Getting angry is easy to understand:

for some people at some times but not for some others. Why get angry when what you really need to do is to get even? 

I wrong you, by, for example, betraying your trust; you find out and that makes you angry,

or you predicted I would do so and have a sanction already in place 

and now you are angry, at me, for having betrayed you. What is harder to understand is why you might cease to be angry.

Emotions are 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind'. They exist because they have survival value. By their nature, they are transitory though, no doubt, a particular person may be dysfunctional in this respect and thus be perpetually sad or perpetually angry or perpetually suspicious.  

Consider what I will call “the eternal anger argument”: P1: My betrayal of you at t1 is your reason for being angry with me at t2. P2: If it is true at t2 that I betrayed you at t1, then it will also be true at t3, t4, t5, and so on that I betrayed you at t1. Conclusion: If you have a reason to be angry with me, you will have a reason to be angry with me forever.

Consider the following- P1 My slapping you at t1 is your reason for feeling pain at t2. P2 If it is true at t2 that I slapped you at t1 and you felt pain at t2 then it will also be true that you will feel that pain at t3, t4 and even thirty years later.  Emotions are like physical sensations of pain or pleasure. You feel the pain of a slap for an hour or two. You feel the pleasant feeling of satiation for an hour or two after a meal. You don't feel them forever. 

What is wrong with P2? The answer is that the efficient cause of pain, or the feeling of pain, is internal to the body of the person in question. Callard is confusing the cause of a thing with a 'reason' people may give for what triggered that particular cause. I may say, x slapping you is the reason you to feel pain. Someone else might say the reason you feel pain is because you don't stand up for yourself. That is why your students keep slapping and punching you. A court of law, on the other hand, may come to the conclusion that the reason you suffered pain was because you pinched the bottom of a student who has a black belt in karate. You have only yourself to blame. 

The argument says that if I have generated a reason for you to be angry with me, then there is nothing I can now do to address that reason.

It is a stupid argument. You may apply a balm, real or metaphorical, to rid the other person of their anger or pain.  

For suppose that I offer compensation, apologize profusely, promise never to do it again, radically and convincingly transform my character. None of that seems to touch the thing you are angry about, which is that, at t1, I wronged you.

And at time t2 that wrong was righted. Consider what happens when a penis has a reason to become erect because entry into a nice vagina has become available to it. Will it remain perpetually erect because that reason continues to operate? In my case, sadly not. Similarly, if you say something I have reason to find funny and thus cause me to laugh aloud, it is not the case that I will keep laughing for all time even if my reason to find your remark funny continues to operate. 

It is still true that I did that, and it is still true that I shouldn’t have. Your reason for anger is eternal because I can’t change what you are angry about.

The reason may be eternal but the cause is ephemeral. Moreover, different people, or the same person at different times, may give a different reason for a physical or mental or emotional element. You slap me and say the reason is because I pinched your bum. I say the reason is coz you are a fucking Lesbian tramp. You remind me that you are the Headmaster of the school where I teach and, being of the male gender, could not possibly be Lesbian. I remind you that you supplied the drugs we have both been taking. We then agree that the true reason I got slapped was because of Neo-Liberalism.  

On one popular account of anger, the eternal anger argument is unsound because P1 is false.

It is false. Anger is an emotion which, by its nature, is ephemeral. What Callard is talking about is a grievance. One may be angry and yet have no grievance and vice versa. We may say that a grievance is unextinguished save by some act of forgiveness or equitable reparation.  

I will call this account the “problem-solving account.” The problem-solving account maintains that your reason for being angry with me is not simply the betrayal. Rather, your reason is constituted by some continuing problem generated by the betrayal, a problem your anger motivates you to resolve.

Callard is no longer talking about anger- which is an emotion. She is talking about 'being angry with'- which is an attitude- a hostile one- towards a particular person. That hostility may arise out of something the other person did or a problem they created which continues to vex you. But, for purely strategic reasons, one may choose to act in a hostile manner, or feign great anger towards, a class of people you have never interacted with. Equally, a schoolmaster who affects an irascible disposition and who perpetually appears about to blow this top may terrify his pupils into desisting from seeking to amend his ignorance concerning Pythagoras's theorem or other such shite.

On the problem-solving account, anger is desirelike:

Anger is more like sexual arousal. A sense of grievance is like the sense of desire. True, your grievance may end for the same reason that your desire may end- viz. that which provoked it is dying horribly of a disfiguring disease.  

It responds to reasons to make (what the agent perceives as) a positive change in the world.

What responds to such reasons is the desire to make positive changes in the world. Anger or grievance has nothing to do with it. 

If the reasons to be angry are reasons to, for example, take measures that prevent future violations of the relevant kind, then they will not be eternal.

No. They will still be reasons to be angry. It's just that there will be no further occasion for those reasons to come into operation. Thus if you find other people make you angry and you take steps to kill everybody, then the reason for your anger won't be other people. It may be something else- e.g. birds. Fuck you birds! Fuck you very much! 

Martha Nussbaum presents this as the correct account not of anger as such but of a species of anger she calls “transition anger.”

All emotions are transitory. A brief flare up of anger may leave one with a permanent sense of grievance and a persistent attitude of hostility. But anger is not the same thing as grievance or hostility. Both can arise without any experience of anger.  

Others have argued that anger is an attempt to protest a threatening message, to the effect that the victim is deserving of bad treatment; reverse the ongoing misbehavior of a wrongdoer who, in failing to apologize, acts as though the wrong were acceptable; get the wrongdoer to understand what he or she has done; be restored to the status from which the wrongdoing demoted one; and secure the wrongdoer’s commitment to the norm he or she violated.

Anger may certainly have these instrumental effects but so may shitting into your palms and flinging your faeces about. The problem with stupid shitheads seeking to philosophize anger is that anything proposition they advance can, salva veritate, also be applied to farting in a derisive and contemptuous manner or masturbating wistfully while gazing at a bowl of pomergranates. 

No doubt, Callard & Nussbaum's students are even now writing and publishing peer-reviewed papers on 'the reason to be forever farting noisily' or 'the reason to keep shitting into your palms and flinging your feces about'. 

On closer examination, Callard doesn't really has an argument. She is commenting on the fact that something which happened which didn't much matter and which doesn't much matter, nevertheless is something which happened. Thus, if a reason for something was given at time t and it was stupid and had no consequences whatsoever, then even fourteen thousand years later, it would still be the case that reason had been given. 

But, this really isn't a very interesting observation.

The argument doesn’t purport to establish that anger is eternal or even that it would be rational to be angry forever. Long-term anger is unpleasant, unattractive, and exhausting; one has many reasons for bringing it about that one’s anger cease. What the argument does try to show is that these reasons must leave the original reason to be angry in place.

Just as it must leave the fact that a chipmunk in Canada farted in 1922 or, if that is not the case, then I made a claim to that effect. Moreover, if you think the reason I did so was because I am Jennifer Aniston then that reason would also be 'left in place' by the entire destruction of the multiverse which I have a very foolish reason to believe occurred in 2013. Even if that isn't true, my foolish reason is left in place.  

If the argument works, it follows that a person gives up his or her anger

which is like giving up on peeing because there is nothing left in your bladder  

not because the issue has been resolved or even addressed in any way but merely because,

anger is ephemeral though a grievance may not be 

for example, he or she sees that he or she will be better off in a nonangry condition. Pragmatic reasons for ceasing to be angry have positive counterparts:

reasons aren't causes. You may have a very good reason for go to work but you may end up taking taking drugs and watching TV because you are a lazy sod.  

pragmatic reasons to get angry. (For example, I work myself into an angry state before entering the car dealership, in the belief that a menacing appearance will put me in an improved negotiating position.)

The cause of your doing this is the fact that you are as stupid as shit. No doubt stupid reasons to not shit yourself at the car dealership- e.g. thinking your Bank Manager will feel offended because you did not favour him in this way- have equally stupid positive counterparts- e.g. shitting yourself in the hope that the salesman mistakes you for Joe Biden and gives you a car for free. 

If the eternal anger argument is correct,

then, a reason, however stupid, is a cause. Thus if you can give the Andromeda Galaxy a reason- e.g. better feng shui- to move a few thousand light years to the right- this would cause it to do precisely that.  

The fact is we don't know the cause of anything or the reason for anything. We merely have reliable correlations and hypothesis which as yet have not been refuted. Callard is making a category mistake. She is confusing something epistemic- viz. reasons- with things which subsist in the material world- viz. causes. 

proper (i.e., nonpragmatic) reasons for anger—reasons akin to those cited in P1—have no negative counterparts.

Sure they do. One can just as easily say 'x was angry because y betrayed her' or 'x was sad because y betrayed her. That's why she showed no anger.' 

Callard invokes Aristotle- 

Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one’s friends. . . .

Aristotle is wrong. Anger is an emotion, not an impulse. There is a separate impulse towards revenge but it may involve hilarity or boredom. True, the connotations of the word he used for anger “orgy” (ὀργή) were different and related to thymos as a specific type of orexis (ὄρεξις) which is the type of desire we regard as motivating action.

It must always be attended by a certain pleasure—that which arises from the expectation of revenge.

Aristotle had shit for brains. But, in his line of work, that was an advantage.  Still, I suppose his most famous pupil had a very bad temper. Perhaps this was because he was young and drank way too much. 

For since nobody aims at what he thinks he cannot attain, the angry man is aiming at what he can attain, and the belief that you will attain your aim is pleasant. Hence it has been well said about wrath, Sweeter it is by far than the honeycomb dripping with sweetness, And spreads through the hearts of men.

The Indians considered anger 'a small pleasure'. Still, as we get older we derive this small pleasure from reading the sort of shite Professors of useless subjects produce so as to bring further disgrace upon their disciplines.  

Anger, like other emotions, serve a signalling function. Mum has to pretend to be very angry you failed your Math exam when, secretly, she is pleased you didn't shit yourself the way you did in Remedial English. 

Angry people are, of course, motivated to seek revenge or apology or restitution, and they are sometimes moved to prevent future infractions.

I think anger is a signal that the course of action taken towards a specific person is not to be to be seen as a routine modus operandi. The gangster takes pains to differentiate between murders he commits because he has been dis-respected from those which are 'only business'.  

But anger does not, in the first instance, seem to be a response to the fact that some wrong action hasn’t yet been avenged, apologized for, or disavowed, or that it may recur in the future. Rather, it seems to be a way of concerning oneself with the (unchangeable) fact that some wrong was done.

That would be the case if anger persisted after revenge had been taken. Alexander killed Cleitus in a fit of anger. He then felt remorse. He did not continue to brood on the things Cleitus had said which offended him. His anger had abated and so had his sense of injury or grievance. What took its place was grief and regret. 

Simulated anger or indignation can serve a signalling function of the sort Callard mentions. Thus a person who had relatives who perished in the Shoah might say to his son, 'never stop being angry about what happened. Be ever vigilant to ensure it does not happen again. You may forgive. You must never forget.' 

However, in this case, we are no longer speaking of an emotion. We are speaking of having a reason to cultivate an emotion in a specific context.  The problem is that it is strategic. If you cultivate a grievance, others may cultivate an equal and opposite grievance. The thing is like a 'threat point' and there can be an arms-race between threat points. But, this is 'wasteful competition'. One can outsource anger or grievance. Some other sap may be accorded the onerous duty of anger, grievance and hostility. If wrongs exist and are immutable, they concern only those who fall below the threshold of recompense. I suppose this is Callard's argument for eternal anger. Since those who teach philosophy are thralls to the most sub-human of the Humanities, let them perpetually seethe in their own impotent fury. 

Punkass Mishra on Teutonic philosemitism vs Socialist Corpophagy

 After the Second World War, Germany was shorn of much territory and was partitioned and occupied. The East was under Soviet control. Since Stalin was initially supportive of Israel, East Germany was initially positive in its attitude to Israel but became hostile from about 1956 onward because of the Suez crisis when Israel allied with Britain and France to attack Nasser's Egypt. Since West Germany was under American control, it was anxious to appease the Israelis though the latter country only agreed to exchange Ambassadors in 1965. The East never had diplomatic relations with Israel. 

Nazi Germany was not the only country which persecuted Jews. However, countries like Romania, whose War-time regime was even more unhinged than that of Germany, were quick to establish diplomatic relations with the newly created Israel. The Czechs were particularly important in supplying weapons during its first war in 1948. However, like Poland and other Warsaw pact countries it severed relations with Israel in 1967. Romania was the exception because Ceaucescu wanted to be seen as taking an independent line.

Pankaj Mishra has an article, taken from his latest book, in the Guardian on

Israel and the delusions of Germany’s ‘memory culture’

Since there is no such thing as a 'memory culture', the article is deluded. West Germany had to do what its occupiers wanted it to do while East Germany had to do what the Soviets told it to do. The only memory that counted was the memory of being defeated twice. What reinforced this memory was the presence of occupying Armies on German soil. 

Germany embraced Israel to atone for its wartime guilt. But was this in part a way to avoid truly confronting its past?

West Germany sucked up to the Israelis because that's what the Allied occupying armies wanted. Indeed France was a bigger supplier of arms (and probably cooperated with Israel to gain nuclear weapons) to Israel than America till the mid Sixties. Still, I suppose it is true to say that it was Israel's victory in 1967 which put an end to old fashioned anti-Semitism. Clearly the Jews were a martial people. However, attitudes to Israel were a function of Cold War politics. Nobody gives a fuck about 'atoning' for or 'confronting' the past. 

After the second world war, Germany’s

West Germany's 

contrition and radical self-cleansing, under allied supervision, as the chief tormentor of European Jews ought to have been straightforward.

It was.  The Americans had plenty of money of their own and thus let the West Germans off lightly when it came to reparations. Germany made a one-off payment to Israel which, with hindsight, was cheap at the price. Thanks to the Cold War, 'de-Nazification' was halted or reversed. Still, the intelligentsia in the West were fearful of the supposed attractions of the Communist ideology. After the Russians gave up on Nasser, East Germany stepped in as the biggest supporter of the Palestinian terrorists and this spilled over into their recruitment of nutters like the Baader Meinhoff gang. Thankfully, the young lost interest in that type of stupidity. There was sympathy for the Israelis athletes killed in Munich. More importantly, Israel's policy of reprisals was admired. Nevertheless, most West Germans were not greatly concerned with the Shoah till the Holocaust TV series (starring Meryl Streep) was broadcast there in 1979. Since Germans had become 'materialistic' rather than 'martial', they felt themselves to be the new Jews. Nothing wrong with that. After all, Christ was a Jew- rejected by the Jews- and thus appropriable by Aryans. 

No country, however, matches its convoluted journey from ground zero in 1945 to Gaza today.

Nonsense! West Germany followed a consistent line. East Germany, like other Warsaw Pact countries, did not. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, everybody was on the same page. America, from time to time, was bound to bomb the fuck out of A-rabs. The same goes for Israel. If we are on America's side, we are on Israel's side.  

In recent decades, solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the very foundation of its collective identity.

Fuck off! Germans are proud- or were proud- of their cars and capital goods.  The foundation of Germany's collective identity has to do with economics, not talking bollocks. 

Particularly since German reunification, a Shoah-centred memory has been comprehensively institutionalised.

So as to civilize those knuckle-draggers in the East. The West Germans eagerly bought into AJP Taylor's theory that the good German was the Rhinelander. It was the Junkers from agricultural East Prussia who had started both wars and been responsible for any beastliness. 

School curriculums and calendars emphasise anniversaries such as 27 January (the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz)

Auschwitz is in the East. German Schools had to teach the Holocaust from 1992 onward. Why? Reunification.  

and 8 May (the final surrender of the Nazis). Monuments, memorials and museums across the country commemorate the victims of German crimes. A resonant symbol of this memory culture is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate in the capital, Berlin, probably the only major national monument to commemorate the victims of a nation rather than the nation itself.

It must be said, it was a great stroke of Germanic wit to give a big contract, in this connection, to the firm which produced Zyklon-B. Still, in a certain sense, the Memorial was timely. Its concrete soon started to crack. The message was clear. German infrastructure was failing. Thankfully, the politicians were able to ignore this completely. 

In 2008, the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel, claimed before the Knesset that ensuring Israel’s security was part of Germany’s Staatsräson, or raison d’état.

She was a deeply silly person.  Still, she was from the East and so people were grateful she didn't try to kill and eat the American ambassador. 

The phrase was repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders after 7 October 2023. Less than two months before the Hamas offensive, Israel had secured, with American blessing, its largest ever arms deal with Germany. German arms sales to Israel surged tenfold in 2023; the vast majority of sales were approved after 7 October, and fast-tracked by German officials who insisted that permits for arms exports to Israel would receive special consideration.

Biden, it must be said, had been very quick off the mark air-lifting weapons to Israel. Mishra is puzzled as to why a NATO country would follow suit. Perhaps it is because of something Robert Musil said to Hannah's Aunt.  

As Israel began to bomb homes, refugee camps, schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in Gaza, and Israeli cabinet ministers promoted their schemes for ethnic cleansing,

NO! Israel is roasting and eating Palestinian babies! Did you know that 80 percent of all falafels sold in Tel Aviv are actually LGBTQ Palestinian dissidents who are screaming loudly even as heartless Islamophobes dip them in ketchup and munch upon them?  

the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, reiterated the national orthodoxy: “Israel is a country that is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.”

Compared to Hamas, the IDF truly are angels. Still, maybe angels aren't the need of the hour.  

As Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction

not to mention the indiscriminate sale of LGBTQ disabled Palestinian dissidents to hungry people who eat them, despite their vociferous protests, under the impression that they are falafel.  

intensified, Ingo Gerhartz, the head of the German air force, or Luftwaffe, arrived in Tel Aviv hailing the “accuracy” of Israeli pilots; he also had himself photographed, in uniform, donating blood for Israeli soldiers.

I suppose he bombed plenty of Muslims in Afghanistan and thus looks upon the Israelis with a fond eye.  

The German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, approvingly retweeted a video in which an English far-right agitator claims that the Nazis were more decent than Hamas. Die Welt claimed that “Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler” and Die Zeit alerted German readers to the apparently outrageous fact that “Greta Thunberg openly sympathises with the Palestinians”.

Nothing wrong in any of that. Mishra's own people are strong supporters of Israel. Genocidal Islamists aren't greatly liked by kaffirs.  

Visiting Germany after the war, the philosopher Hannah Arendt

who was as stupid as shit 

confessed to being “oppressed by a kind of pervasive public stupidity

it was called being German and having studied stupid shite at Uni 

which cannot be trusted to judge correctly the most elementary events ... A great number of Germans,” she wrote, “especially among the more educated, apparently are no longer capable of telling the truth even if they want to.”

She was incapable of telling the truth- which was that she liked dollars and would publish any old shite to get more of them.  

Witnessing the German public sphere in recent months,

Mishra is a public urinal in Berlin and thus has been witnessing a lot 

it was hard to resist a similarly damning conclusion:

Those who come to such conclusions are damned indeed.  

that self-righteous hypocrisy had been normalised enough to turn into a mode of governance and thought.

When has this not been the case? Mishra himself is self-righteous. He does not say 'I escaped from India- which Socialism had turned into a shithole- so as to thrive in Thatcher's England. 

As hypocrisy lapsed into self-deception,

The Germans have woken up to their parlous economic position and have reversed course on migration 

and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) led a dramatic reshaping of the country’s politics and culture,

the country has no alternative but to change course. 

it was also hard not to think about Germany’s past and to fear for the political future of Europe’s most important country.

Mishra is incapable of thought.  

“In less than six years,” Arendt marvelled, “Germany laid waste the moral structure of western society, committing crimes that nobody would have believed possible.”

Arendt liked the 'moral structure' of Jim Crow America. This is because America was rich. 

With the intimacy and bluntness of a former insider,

she ran away when Hitler came to power. She may have been stupid but she had a great survival instinct. 

she recorded that a “general lack of emotion, at any rate this apparent heartlessness, sometimes covered over with cheap sentimentality, is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened”.

What really happened was that Germany tried to conquer a lot of territory so as to get rich. It failed. Boo fucking hoo.  

Such mentalities were partly manifest in German treatment of the Jewish displaced persons. They were still languishing in West Germany in 1952, when the Bavarian customs police launched a raid on a displaced persons camp.

This was the Fohrenwald camp which had recently come under the control of the FRG. Most of the Jews there were from Russia or East Europe. They feared being sent back behind the Iron Curtain- where they would swiftly be killed. Also, they had heard things weren't really very comfortable in Israel. Still, there was little sympathy for them. The feeling was that the Allies had taken their pick of those capable of manual work and only the dregs remained.  

The assault had, according to the Manchester Guardian, “all the trademarks of Nazi descents on the ghettos of Berlin and Frankfurt in the past”.

The Brits knew their own soldiers had used anti-Semitic language when beating the shit out of Jewish rioters in Palestine. Soldiers will be soldiers. As for the police- don't get me started.  

As the newspaper reported, quoting the camp committee, “policemen yelled such slogans as: ‘The crematoria are still there’, ‘The gas chambers are waiting for you’, and: ‘This time you really will get it in the neck, you damned Jews.’” In communist-run East Germany, antisemitism was more subtle,

Fuck off! Erich Nelhans, the leader of the East German Jews, was sentenced to 25 years hard labour for allegedly helping Jewish Red Army soldiers to escape to the West. Still, one might say that there was a brief period- ending with the Slansky trial in Prague in 1952- when it appeared that East German Jews might be coopted by the Communist regime. After Stalin's death, official anti-semitism was moderated but, by then, Jews in the East had no illusions as to their fate if they tried to gain a political voice. However, there were some Communist intellectuals and artists who did well in the GDR. 

if not less lethal, closely mimicking Stalin’s campaign against “cosmopolitans”, which assumed that most Jews were potential spies.

 Some were spies- for the Soviets- e.g. Jurgen Kuczysnski who, while serving in the US military, recruited Karl Fuchs.

At the same time, as an American military officer told the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, many Germans were acting “as though the Nazis were a strange race of Eskimos who came down from the north pole and somehow invaded Germany”.

Whereas Americans acted as though the indigenous people were some strange race illegally occupying territory God had destined for the WASP.  

Bourke-White herself remarked: “I have yet to find a German who will admit to being a Nazi.”

Because De-Nazification was a real thing back then.  

As late as 1949, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote to Thomas Mann that aside from a “couple of total and touching puppet-like villains”, he hadn’t met a Nazi yet, “not simply in the ironic sense that people will not admit to having been Nazis, but in the far more disturbing sense that they believe they never were Nazis”.

They only joined the Party because they were drunk and lost a bet.  

In his 2002 book Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, Norbert Frei painstakingly measures the depth and the breadth in the early postwar years of popular German sentiment against prosecuting criminals of the Nazi era or ejecting tainted elites out of positions of power.

Send Uncle Willi to jail? No! He used to bring us chocolates.  

In West Germany, according to the British historian Mary Fulbrook, of the nearly 1 million people who “were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians” (the number of enablers was much higher), “only 6,656 were convicted of Nazi crimes” – “fewer even than the number of people who had been employed at Auschwitz alone”. By the end of the 20th century, only 164 individuals had been sentenced for the crime of murder – of 6 million Jews.

So what? There was a collective punishment. Germany lost territory.  

In a March 2024 article for Dissent, the historian Hans Kundnani wrote: “By the mid-1950s, the elite in the civil service, judiciary, and academia had largely reverted to that of the Third Reich.

The same thing happened in Japan. Why? The answer is- the Cold War.  

Many young people growing up in west Germany felt they were ‘surrounded by Nazis’, as one person I interviewed put it.

Also the neighbour's cat was keeping them under surveillance. Did it report to Mossad or was it the CIA?  

By the mid-1960s, they had begun to see not just personal continuities but structural ones: the federal republic was a fascist, or at least ‘pre-fascist’, state. The student movement emerged as a protest against these real and imagined continuities.”

It truly was shit. Fuck off to the GDR if you hate Fascism so much. I suppose Brandt's 'Ostpolitik' and the suspicion that Barzel's bid to bring him down was defeated thanks to bribes paid by the Stasi, defused Student radicalism. No root and branch reform was possible. Indeed, it might not be desirable.  

When in March 1960, the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York, he had not only been presiding over a systematic reversal of the denazification process decreed by the country’s western occupiers in 1945,

those Western occupiers changed tack as the Iron curtain came down. 

he had also been aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust.

Nobody gave a fuck about it. What India's partition showed the world was that genocide was more cheaply done with agricultural implements.  

The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had “joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could”.

Also, most Germans under Nazi rule spoke Chinese as their mother tongue. 

In September 1952, Adenauer had agreed to a deal that would compensate the state of Israel to the extent of some 3.5bn Deutschmarks. The deal was not popular: in 1951, only 5% of Germans had admitted to guilt over the fate of the Jews, and 21% thought that “the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich”. More embarrassingly, some in Adenauer’s own party voted against the deal.

It was pushed through only because the SDs were unanimous in supporting it. The truth is, it was a good deal for both sides. Still, it was America which decided the issue.  

Nevertheless, Adenauer’s language at his meeting with Ben-Gurion was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a “fortress of the west”, adding: “I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.”

Jews wanted to be left alone. Still, I suppose a German Chancellor can't help sounding sinister even if he is trying to be friendly.  

The German chancellor possessed the typical worldview of a western colonialist:

as opposed to Eastern colonialists who believe you should hand over cash and territory to anybody who wants it. 

as vice president of the German Colonial Society

which was big in Cologne because Catholic Missionaries from there kept going off to Africa. Sadly, few were eaten by the natives. In dietary matters, Africans can be a little too fastidious. By contrast, Israelis eagerly devour LGBTQ Palestinian dissidents claiming them to be falafel. Mishra Sahib is remiss in not pointing this out. It is ILLEGAL to eat Lesbian Muslims! Kindly desist from this loathsome practice! As Robert Musil said to Hannah's Aunt 'Stop chowing down on the Begum of Bhopal! Kant would so not have approved.'  

he had urged the German reich to possess colonies in order to create more living space for the German people. But, as the cold war intensified, he was also convinced that Germany’s “long road west” – the title of historian Heinrich Winkler’s bestselling book about German history – lay through Israel. “The power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated,” he said after his retirement. West Germany moved quickly along that road west after 1960, becoming a major supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation.

The Arab League threatened to boycott the Germans. They they realized they would be cutting off their own nose to spite their face.  

The postwar German-Israeli symbiosis was at the centre of the “unprincipled political gamesmanship”, in Primo Levi’s bitter words, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known.

Fuck off! The FRG, like Japan, was rehabilitated by the Cold War. So was Franco's Spain. 

By the mid-1960s, when the Jewish Austrian writer Jean Améry travelled through Germany, the country was savouring its so-called economic miracle,

West Germany had been quicker off the mark in getting back to a market economy.  

partly due to the American loans that were also sparking a broader European recovery.

Marshall plan assistance ended in 1953. Adenauer's reparation payment to Israel meant the Americans were willing to take a bigger haircut on those loans.

In “the industrial paradise of the New Europe”, Améry found himself unexpectedly discussing the latest European and American novels with Germany’s “refined” intellectuals.

As opposed to illiterate hobos.  

Yet the survivor of Auschwitz could not expunge from his memory the “stony faces” of Germans before a pile of corpses at a railway platform or of the Flemish SS man who beat him on the head with a shovel handle whenever he didn’t work fast enough.

Sadly, Mishra has no such memories.  

And he would discover that in this “thriving land”, he bore a new “grudge” against Germans and their exalted place in the “majestic halls of the west”.

The Soviets had decided that they were losing money on their bit of Austria and thus permitted its reunification. It too did well materially and, thankfully, remained as xenophobic as ever.  

The flip side of west Germany’s accommodation of Nazis was what Améry called an “obtrusive philosemitism”.

Unlike good old-fashioned Jew baiting in Vienna. 

Why did anti-Semitism in Europe get replaced by admiration for Jews? The answer is obvious. Jews were smart and talented. The more education you get, the more likely it is that your intellectual or artistic heroes will disproportionately feature Jews. We might say 'philosemitism is highly income elastic as is education.' Mishra won't accept this obvious point. 

As the historian Frank Stern unsparingly diagnosed in 1992 in The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge, German philosemitism is primarily a “political instrument”, used not only to “justify options in foreign policy”, but also “to evoke and project a moral stance in times when domestic tranquillity is threatened by antisemitic, anti-democratic and rightwing extremist phenomena”.

This is nonsense. Support for Jews and Homosexuals and women who want to go to school rather than sit at home behind a 'purdah' has to do with

1) raising productivity rather than doing stupid shit

2) opposing Islamic nutters who might want to chop our heads off.  

Thus, German Israelphilia and philosemitism is peaking just as there is again a recrudescence in Germany of far-right furies.

By 'far-right' Mishra means people like Rishi Sunak who supported Brexit. 

This perverse dialectic helps explain why, while commemorating the Shoah and proclaiming its undying support for Israel, Germany ignores the atrocities Germans inflicted on Asians and Africans during the brief rampages of German colonialism.

It also ignores Mishra. Surely, that is the biggest atrocity here? 

The political and moral deformations and intellectual helplessness of

Mishra. He is as stupid as shit. 

Germany today are more dangerous than at any other time since 1945.

Germany wasn't dangerous in 1945. It was as weak as a kitten. 

The AfD is no aberration;

Priti Patel is worse. 

it benefits from a broadening lurch to the extreme right among mainstream politicians and journalists.

Rishi Sunak was so 'extreme right' he practiced 'Hinduism'. Did you know that it is an 'Aryan' religion? Swastika is a Sanskrit word.  

The likely next German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats, has recently broken the German mainstream’s “firewall” against the AfD, promising to work with politicians overfond of Nazi slogans and salutes.

So what? Kiesinger was a member of the Nazi Party. He served as Chancellor from '66 to '69. There has never been any fucking 'firewall'. What happened, after reunification, was that there was a fear the East Germans, unused as they were to Democracy, would go astray. That's one reason Merkel was made Chancellor. Then, she fucked up. There has been a political back-lash against refugees because of the horrific actions of a small number of them. Still, Europe has to seal its borders one way or the other. All we can hope is that it is done in a legal and responsible manner and there is no more virtue signalling on what- for desperate people- really is a matter of life or death. 

Meanwhile, German courts are trying a far-right group for plotting the violent overthrow of the government.

Some Germans be kray kray. Who knew? 

The country that laid waste the moral structure of western society looks feeble again

to Mishra's feeble intellect 

before the economic crises and social breakdowns of capitalism that first produced fascism.

There we have it. First we must bring down Capitalism and then build up Socialism by eating only our own shit.  

Worse: Germany’s long road west now leads straight to Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

No. America's road led to them.  

Germany’s pre-eminent philosopher

which is like saying 'The Taliban's foremost Feminist'  

Jürgen Habermas

who had shit for brains 

once hailed the “unconditional opening of the federal republic to the political culture of the west” as the most important achievement of postwar Germany.

Actually, reunification was an achievement as was going into the Euro under-valued.  

According to this argument, Germans had strayed too far off the road to the west and ended up committing monstrous crimes.

Crimes don't matter. Losing wars does.  

Thus Habermas lauded an exemplary “western civilisation” from which Germans had unwisely dissociated themselves.

Nonsense! Even under the Nazis, they were part of 'Western Civilization'. Israelis felt a bit foolish for banning Karajan & the Berlin Philharmonic.  

Germans could become part of a superior west again by putting the Shoah and undying commitment to Israel at the centre of their collective identity and by renouncing ethnonationalism.

Also they should eat only their own shit. Only thus can true Socialism be achieved.  

But this entire framework for understanding the world, and Germany’s place in it,

is as stupid as shit. Economics matters. Military and Diplomatic strategy matters. Saying everybody should feel deep remorse for stuff that happened long ago is mere virtue signalling of a type we have grown tired of.  

has been tottering in recent years. Habermas and others have convinced themselves their country safely converted to liberalism on its high road to the west through Israel; they don’t, however, seem to ponder the fact that the old idea of the west has never seemed more incoherent and unconvincing.

Says a guy who lost little time in getting the fuck out of Socialist India and settling in the West.  

Refined during the cold war, this conception of the west had a large, self-flattering Anglo-American component, signifying electoral democracy, free markets and individual freedoms, in contrast to totalitarian regimes. But the US has lurched in the last decade from calamitously failed wars to far-right demagoguery, and Britain, deceived by blustery rogues into Brexit, is unlikely to recover soon from an extreme act of self-harm. The “political culture of the west” does not inspire great admiration even within the west today.

Which is why Mishra is packing his bags to return to a UP ruled by Yogiji.  

 As Günter Grass wrote in his 2002 novel Crabwalk: “History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.”

This is why German peeps should kindly listen to Mishraji. He is telling you to abandon Capitalism and establish TRUE Socialism by eating only your own shit. That way, you won't need toilets. Guess who keeps building toilets? Narendra Modi! That proves toilets are totes Fascist.  

Agnes Callard & the Mexican Donkey.

If there is no further frontier for Metaphysical 'Realism' (which means the opposite of what a lay-person would think. Ideas are real. Reality isn't.) than Plato, then, equally, there is no further frontier to 'critical' philosophy of a Nominalist type than Kant. But Kant in his last days (this is the Opus Postumum) was trying to 'transition from metaphysics to physics'. It is in these 'fascicles' where we find, by a series of redefinitions the notion that, in the final analysis, Transcendental Philosophy is "galvanism" (AA XXI, 133, 135) and its principle is "Zoroaster".

 Interestingly, the first volume of Nietzsche's 'Thus spake ' appeared about a year after the first publication of the fascicles. 

Previously, even if a canonical text was posthumous or fragmentary, it had a school, or schools of a factional type, of interpretation and transmission. This, the Opus Postumum lacked. To carry forward Kant's project would involve seeking 'galvanism' or a 'daimon' or 'tutelary genius' of one's own- except it could not be, as the daimon of Socrates was, parochial or confined to one self-destined to be a qurban, pharmakos, scape-goat sacrifice carrying off the sins of a particular Polis to which the author was natal. It had to be something vaguer, perhaps, more mischievous. 

Christ, of course, is also a pharmakos but his Ascension is the bridge between Metaphysics and Physics and, moreover, the imitation of Christ requires no further scapegoat because it is in essence non-rival. Salva veritate, we may say that Girardian mimetic, only applies to Athens not Jerusalem. As Nietzsche remarked- it was purely Hellenic to say, as did the Ephesians at the banning of Hermodor-  ‘Amongst us, nobody should be the best; but if somebody is, let him be somewhere else, with other people.’ Here, the merely mathematical economics of Tardean emulation demands a homo sacer who, Rene Girard tells us, must be killed again and again so as to prevent the Metropole, like Canetti's anthill, burning itself down in the universal conflagration of its own constitutive mimetic desire. 

For working class people in Europe, including illiterate Hindutva nutjobs like me, Socrates is redeemed by Christ as indeed was Greece and many other great Nations. There is a great chain of Being linking the daimon of Desdemona and the qareen of Suqrat and Kant's Zoroaster and Nietzsche's Syphilis and even my own hooligan Socioproctology. 

I'm lying. The truth is, it is the bride of Christ- the Church- which does, or did till it got 'woke', the heavy lifting. 

I suppose one may say hierogamy- e.g. the ever fractal or else mise en abyme marriage between Cupid & Psyche- is epistemic and 'aspirational'. Sadly, that knowledge is unavailing and those aspirations a but primrose path to pompous vacuity.

As a case in point, consider this New Statesman interview with Agnes Callard, who, having married her student, considers conjugal life in reality to, by some magic, or arbitrary assertion, become univocal with the 'conjugacy class' of some particularly bulimic or coprophagous stripe of Psilosophy. 

In the acknowledgements at the end of her new book, Open Socrates, the philosopher Agnes Callard writes: “Socrates compares writing down one’s ideas to planting seeds in barren soil from which nothing can grow: pointless.”

The context is that writing things down is not enough. You must ensure there is a chain of interpretation, exposition or criticism such that the thing remains intelligible and is used for its proper purpose. Plato has an obvious interest in making this argument because he had set up an Academy. More generally, along with a revealed or otherwise canonical text- e.g. Euclid- there is a class of people eligible to expound or explain it.  

“Socrates says in a couple of places in late dialogues: thinking is like having a conversation with yourself,”

Even Socrates wasn't foolish enough to say this to himself. He said it to somebody else. Why? He was explaining that he wasn't just chatting with his interlocutor as a way to pass the time. He was speaking aloud about some internal cogitation of his own which was not connected to the fact that he was talking to an attractive boy rather than some elderly bore with a long beard.  

Callard told me when we met at her hotel in London’s Marylebone. “Fundamentally there’s conversation, and then thinking is an imitation of that.

No. Socratic dialogues aren't conversations. They are more like soliloquies or lectures on an abstract topic. The form of that thinking might be dialogic or dialectical- i.e. featuring thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis- and there was an open question as to whether geometry and jurisprudence were what we would call 'natural' deductive systems.  What isn't the case is that people think in the manner that they chat with people. Chatting often involves suppressing or dissimulating thinking or the appearance of thinking. 

And we can get some way through that imitation.” Writing, too, is an (ultimately inadequate) imitation of conversation.

No. There was a style of writing which was conversational or thrown into the mould of a dialogue. But there were other styles- e.g. the lyric, the epic, the oracular, the mystic, the satirical, the fantastic and the wholly nonsensical. 

When it comes to a dogma, it is important that there is both a text and a class of expositors or elucidators of that text. The fear was that 'infidels' or the 'uninitiated' might use the text we hold to be sacred or canonical for their own, very different, purposes. Furthermore, there was often an esoteric doctrine- or the claim that such a thing existed- alongside the exoteric aspect of the text. Thus, it was believed in medieval times that Plato and Socrates had super-natural powers.  

It is idiosyncratic to acknowledge, at the very end of a book, that you believe it to be such a limited medium.

No. Agnes is saying that if you spend a lot of money taking her courses at Uni, you will gain something which the mere Amazon customer will not. Agnes is lying.  

But Callard is an idiosyncratic thinker.

She is an imbecile.  

She began her answer to my first question – about why she chose to be a public philosopher

as opposed to one who could make technical advances and thus gain the esteem of her colleagues.  

– with the caveat that “whenever you explain yourself, you’re just giving a theory among many theories”.

No. When you explain why you did something, you are giving a 'privileged' account which can rely on your own knowledge of your internal states and motivations. True, your 'privileged' account may be inconsistent or stretch our credulity. In a Court of Law, a Judge may substitute a more reasonable theory for the one offered by the defendant so as to establish motive.  

She described history as her “Achilles’ heel” because it “is not in the right order, it’s just in the order that things happened” –

This isn't a big problem. You can have a notion of the underlying configuration space and specific 'frictions' or 'singularities' with it so as to explain why things did not proceed in their logical order- e.g.  abolition of slavery in Indian territory came after its end in the Confederacy even though the Indian Tribes were militarily much weaker. 

perhaps the logical order to most. Yet she is frustrated that “it’s not in the order of importance or in the logical order of ideas”.

It seems illogical that Ceylon gave women the vote 14 years before the French did or that Ottoman Turkey was more progressive in its attitude to Homosexuality than 'Liberal' Britain or the USA. However, if we have a grasp of the political configuration space, we can easily understand why such seeming anomalies arose. 

Open Socrates is Callard’s second book, but she is perhaps better known

as the tenured Professor with lots of babies who is as stupid as shit. Maybe she is neurologically diverse or was molested as a child. 

for her popular essays on topics such as parenting, infidelity and why travel is a very poor means of self-discovery, and for being the subject of a 2023 New Yorker profile. In it, the philosopher allowed a considerable level of access to her private life, detailing how she fell in love with, married and had a baby with one of her students, divorcing her first husband and the father of her two eldest children in the process. Eventually, they all moved in together, and Callard and her second husband opened up their marriage.

That's perfectly sensible. People should have lots of babies and Dads should stay close to their kids. That way we won't keep having to import people from faraway countries who look down on us because we are lazy, stupid, and have the morals of an alley cat. Vivek Ramaswamy, this means you. Fuck off back to Palghat instead of lecturing us on our terrible work ethic.  

When I asked why she had agreed to do the profile,

publicity. That means selling more books. Money comes in handy when you have lots of kids. We admire Callard for having babies and keeping the Dads around while bringing more and more money into the household. True, she is a cretin but since she teaches a worthless subject, there is no 'opportunity cost' here.  

Callard posed a secondary question: “Why didn’t I, when [the journalist, Rachel Aviv] came to questions about my personal life, say: ‘I won’t answer those things?’

The answer is obvious. If you don't talk to journalists they will talk to people who know you. Mums, in particular, tend to dwell on your problems with toilet training even though, nowadays, it is perfectly acceptable to skip that soi disant 'pediatric development goal' and just wear adult diapers all your life. Also, there's no law saying you have to learn how tie your own shoe-laces. I sometimes wonder why I am not a tenured professor of Philosophy. Is it coz iz bleck? 

One part of the answer is the questions were interesting, so I was interested to hear what I was going to say. I think that I am probably less inclined to shield my personal life from my interlocutors:

This suggests Agnes doesn't have a lot of skeletons in her cupboard. Even if this isn't the case, she did the right thing. The fact is, she has had babies. We like babies. She has ensured the Daddies are in the picture- indeed, they are in the house. That's great. Kids need parents who get on well with each other. Nobody cares who is fucking who provided the kids get to skool with nutritious packed lunches.  

if that’s what they want to talk about then there’s probably something interesting there, something worth investigating.”

That is perfectly sensible. I recall being interviewed by a lady doing a thesis on the impact of 'Art Therapy' on people who had been diagnosed with Depression. It turned out that she wasn't interested in how often I had suicidal ideation and whether this causes me to masturbate while weeping and watching documentaries about large aquatic mammals. Instead, she asked me a very interesting question 'Was I depressed?'. I discovered I wasn't. It's just that I find people cheer up when I tell them I am planning to top myself soon. The general attitude seems to be that it can't be soon enough. As for the stuff about large aquatic mammals, I threw that in just to add a touch of verisimilitude. 

This approach to inquiry is at the heart of the Socratic method.

No it isn't. Socrates sets the agenda and manipulates things so as to get to where he wants the dialogue to go. True, smart peeps, like Parmenides, get the better of him but that suited Plato's purpose.  

We tend to consider thought a private, insular activity, but, Callard writes, Socrates found that “the key to getting unstuck” is to relocate thought “from its usual home inside one person’s head into the shared space of the conversation that passes between two people”.

No. For Socrates, what was crucial was the 'palinode'. You start of going in one direction, but then find, thanks to the prompting of your daimonion or peculiar genius, that you must reverse course. One can think of this as rowing in one direction because there is no wind, but then, when the wind springs up, you unfurl your sail and though your direction is now different, you are upon an arc which gets to where you want to go faster and with less effort. Socrates says rowing is like categorical thinking. It is sub-optimal but it may be your best option when there is no wind to belly out your sails.  

Together, we can answer questions that we could never examine on our own.

No. We can examine things on our own and, if we have one piece of a possible solution and a guy working in some other field appears to have the other part of it, maybe we can answer the question together. Socrates never says that his own 'synoida' is something he gained in conversation. This is similar to but different from Stoic synedeisis and later Christian notions of synderesis or the still small voice of the conscience. It is something inborn or Divinely implanted, or has to do with a particular daemon or tutelary genius, though the realization of it may be catalysed by the right type of cross-examination (elenchus).  

To Socrates, there was no shame in being wrong, because being wrong leads to the discovery of what is right.

It is true that discovering you are wrong may involve gaining new information. This does not necessarily mean you know what is right. On the other hand, there is shame in being wrong about a thing on which you claim special knowledge or expertise. Socrates said his own expertise lay in the field of 'love'. Since he was as ugly as shit, this was very funny. 

“What kind of person am I?” he asks in Plato’s Gorgias.

This is a rhetorical question. He supplies the answer himself. This shows that he has thought about the matter before he engaged in any conversation.  

“One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue.”

But, he also says that Philosophical questions are ones where as good an argument for a proposition as against it can be made. The problem is that conjectures are many, refutations are few and themselves prone to refutation. 

“One part of my willingness to answer Rachel’s questions [for the New Yorker],” Callard told me, “is that if you think as I think, that you really can’t think by yourself, then

you are against Socrates. You may be a Social Constructivist who believes 'language thinks us' or some such shite. But, in that case, you have to gas on about Witlesstein.  

whenever anyone asks you a question, that’s an opportunity…

for me to quickly mention weeping while masturbating to documentaries about manatees. For some reason, I thought this would enable me to come across as as 'deep'. But people think I'm not just an insufferable bore, I am also weird in a repulsive manner. The truth is, I don't watch documentaries and my sexual tastes are vanilla. The problem with boring people is that they become even more boring and repulsive when they try to make themselves interesting. 

Socrates gets that: he gets that we can’t really think by ourselves, and that we’re thrown on other people of intellectual necessity.”

No. Socrates claims knowledge of only thing- love. But this is what in Christianity we term agape, not eros. Solitude may be an 'intellectual necessity'. But Love of a Socratic type can't flourish in isolation. The vital question was, did such Love involve asebia (impiety)? Did it imperil the Polis? Perhaps. Periclean Athens was doomed and maybe Socrates was part of the problem. The fact is 'philia' or affiliation is all very well, but what really matters is fiscal policy. 

Agnes Callard was born in 1976 in Budapest, Hungary, where she lived until the age of five,

Hungarian 'Martians' enjoyed a certain intellectual pre-eminence back in the Fifties. Callard is right to play up this aspect of her heritage.  

after which the family moved to Rome and then New York. Her mother was a haematologist; her father studied law in Hungary but in America worked as a carpet salesman. Callard considers her love for school “an early manifestation of my love for philosophy”;

which would have been killed off had she studied in France where Philosophy is taught at High School.  

she once had a German teacher who called her frage frau, “question lady”, because she asked so many.

Frauen frage, means 'the woman question'- i.e. Feminism. I suppose Callard must have studied German as an adult.  

Callard was diagnosed with autism in her thirties, but has not yet fully discerned what contribution the condition might have made to her philosophy:

Kant & Parfit may have been on the spectrum. But Kant was smart.  

“When you’re at the beginning of thinking about something,

do some research. Separate out what are 'open' questions and in what manner previously open questions were closed by other, more empirical, disciplines.  

all you can produce for other people is clichés,

don't produce for other people. Do it for yourself. Alternatively, just tell them about your period or how your addiction to manatee porn wrecked your marriage.  

and so I feel like when I try to talk about it… I’m not contributing much.”

If you are teaching nonsense to imbeciles, that is going to be the case even if you are able to prove that only manatee porn can subvert Neo-Liberalism.  

She completed her PhD in philosophy at Berkeley, California, and is now an associate professor at the University of Chicago, where she leads the undergraduate programme.

There are young people stupider than Callard. That's a very depressing thought. Maybe Vivek Ramaswamy has a point.  

It was this, she theorises, that began her interest in public philosophy, as it led her to consider how the department could appeal to students for whom it was not their major.

The answer is spread the word it is an 'Easy A'. Also, you can get credit for watching manatee porn.  

Callard refuted my suggestion that public philosophy is inherently controversial because

it is inherently boring and stupid 

it requires the philosopher to openly pose contentious questions,

like- why Neo-Liberalism so adamantly opposes compulsory gender reassignment surgery for heterosexual males?  

on the grounds that “almost all speech right now is inherently controversial,

because dicks haven't been banned. Its totes triggering to me that people keep talking while dicks are prowling around raping the environment.  

and so it might not be that peculiar to philosophy”.

In Open Socrates, Callard identifies the “political fictions” of our age as being the “liberalism triad” of freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice.

Free speech is part of Classical Liberalism. Some people pretended Rawls had smuggled the other two things onto the Liberal Agenda, but he hadn't really. Economic non-convexities means 'Justice as Fairness' is 'anything goes'.  

It is not that these are not genuine ideals to be aimed for,

They aren't. There are prudential reasons for paying attention to them. But, there are also prudential reasons for ensuring that attention is entirely hypocritical.  

but that the systems we have designed to achieve them are insufficient.

We have designed shit to achieve them. There is a Hohfeldian immunity for 'free speech' but it is defeasible. Due process or 'equal dignity' is purely formal or procedural and has no substantive content. Social Justice is an oxymoron.  

Callard considers free speech to be that which is truly inquisitive,

e.g. guys who want to know your Bank account number and password and so forth.  

and none of the structures by which we distribute and enshrine it – such as the First Amendment – truly render it free.

We don't distribute or enshrine it. We tolerate it though we may also bring an action in law for libel or defamation.  

Free speech is “an intellectual ideal, and we’ve misconceived it as being a political ideal,

No. Relevant speech may be an intellectual ideal. A Math Professor may respond positively to a hostile speech by one of his students who accuses him of having made a mistake in presenting a particular proof. He will not respond to inquisitive questions about which particular photo of a curvaceous manatee he would most consider masturbating to. 

There can be a 'political ideal' of 'parrhesia' and laws can be enacted to protect whistle-blowers or those who have been forced to sign unconscionable non-disclosure agreements etc. But Callard is too stupid to discuss such things.

about like restrictions we place on one another”.

I suppose Callard is getting at her University cracking down on cancel culture. 

Our work towards equality is flawed because

Callard is doing no such work.  

“we’ve failed to reconcile our love of equality with our love of status”.

Which is like saying 'we've failed to reconcile our love of Putin with our love of Ukrainians his troops are killing'. The fact is, either you love equality or you love status and hierarchy. It is a different matter that you may have to pretend to love equality so as to keep your status. But that is hypocrisy merely.  

The fight against injustice is more enlightened than it once was: today, we understand that killing a person – a Russian soldier, for instance – does not kill the idea (such as Ukraine isn’t a sovereign country) we are really taking aim at.

If we are killing Russian soldiers in the present war, we are helping kill the idea that Ukraine isn't sovereign. Why? A country which defeats and repels invaders is de facto sovereign.

Even supplying Ukrainians with guns, because we are too lazy or cowardly to fight Russians ourselves, is part of an attempt to kill the idea that the place can be conquered and thus lose its sovereignty. 

“That’s a big human achievement, because through a lot of human history, people were, like: fighting wars is how you, like, fight for ideas.”

What this silly woman means is that when the US and the UK guaranteed the sovereignty of Ukraine, the hope was that we wouldn't have to put our own, treasure, if not blood, on the line. We were wrong. The Ukrainians were fools to give up their nukes. They lost territory in 2014 and, it may be, they will have to concede yet more territory if the Donald pulls the financial plug.  

But Callard believes that when, “instead of killing someone, what you’re doing is humiliating your political opponent or denying them a platform, that’s the same thing.

The Rabbis condemn the inflicting of 'social death' on others. But 'social death' isn't the same thing as actually dying.  

It’s just a little bit of a gentler stab,

as is shitting yourself whenever you hear mention of that person. True, this may be self-defeating. People may give you a wide berth and flock to the person you despise.  

but you haven’t achieved anything idea-wise in lowering the status of your opponents.”

Not if you focus entirely on shitting yourself. On the other hand, if by the use of forensic accounting, you show your opponent is a fucking swindler and this gets him arrested and sent to jail, then you have lowered the fuck out of the status of your opponent. 

Protest, too, can fail in its attempt to correct injustice.

More particularly if it involves shitting yourself.  

Callard thinks about protest as “a kind of complaint”, and “agree[s] with Simone Weil that the fundamental form of thought inside of a complaint is, ‘Why am I being hurt?’

Nonsense! If I protest against Police inaction in cases of rape, no one thinks I am myself being raped. This is because I am a fat, elderly, black man. Still, everybody understands that my life will be better if rapists are locked up. This is because though I am not in danger of rape, people I depend on or whom I care about are at such risk.  

But you could pose that in a couple of different ways. One way you could do it is… ‘I’ve decided ahead of time that there’s no good reason, and you’re my enemy. And what we’re going do is say this as loud as possible to cause you certain kinds of pain, so that we then get certain kinds of benefits.’ What you’ve done, if you see it that way, is you’ve sapped the protest of its potential philosophical import,

Nonsense! There are philosophers, or potential philosophers, who will seize upon the thing in order to write stupid shite. On the other hand, it is true that if you keep shitting yourself, even if is under the rubric of 'dirty protest', philosophers will not scoop your shit out of your pants with their own delicate hands. But this is because philosophers are of no fucking use to man or beast.  

because the only way to really ask why you’re being hurt is [to be] open to an answer.”

Nonsense! When Mummy wails 'why are you hurting me by failing your Accountancy exams? Do you really want to drive me to suicide? Will nothing less make you happy?' she is not 'open to an answer' because the reason you failed your Accountancy exam is because you thought 'double entry' meant something pornographic. If you mention this, she will slap the black off you. All in all it is better to put up with a Mum who screeches at you because you don't bring her naches, rather than get beaten to a pulp and have parental controls put on your laptop. 

In failing to see protest as a dialogue, rather than a one-sided attempt to air grievances, Callard believes, the possibility of progress is lost.

Negotiation is a dialogue. Protest isn't unless it leads to negotiation. The possibility of progress is predicated on positive sum games which raise productivity.  

In Open Socrates Callard defines politicised speech as when a disagreement becomes not an attempt between two people to discover together what is right,

it may have that quality. Reading Hansard shows how 'politicized speech' can yield a consensus on what is right. Consider the Parliamentary debate on Brigadier Dyer- the infamous 'Butcher of Amritsar'. Churchill was on a sticky wicket because he needed the support of Ulster MPs who were pro-Dyer. He diffused their animosity and then asked a practical question- was there any British General willing to give Dyer an appointment? The answer was no. The fact is the Military Johnnies were angry about 'Geddes axe' and were pretending that Dyer had been treated unfairly by the 'frocks' (civilians in frock-coats). But they themselves knew that if Dyer came onto their staff, some crazy Lieutenant would take it as a signal to start shooting striking miners or what have you. As the Chief of the Imperial General Staff had said, Britain did not have the troops to hold England in the event of a Bolshevik uprising. Once Churchill had made this point- which he did subtly and without spelling things out- he could then display his oratorial fireworks condemning Dyer without appearing to do so. The House was then able to put the matter behind it. It was clear that Churchill had done his homework. He had talked to the Generals. He had talked to the Ulstermen. He was even ready to talk to Michael Collins. He had the situation under control. There had been some popular feeling that Montague and, maybe, Isaacs (both of whom were Jewish) had stabbed an Anglo-Irish soldier in the back. But, once it was clear that Montague was getting the chop while Isaacs, who was a brilliant lawyer, had gotten the better of Gandhi, Westminster could turn the page on the issue.  

but “a zero-sum context where if one party wins, the other loses”:

Nothing wrong with that. Churchill was making it clear that there was no alternative to Geddes axe. But that also meant 'Butchers of Amritsar' were unemployable. Why? If Dyer was re-employed, there would be 'Butchers of Aberdeen' or 'Butchers of Alberta'. Consider the son of a mill-owner who is a Captain in the Territorials. His father's mill hands are on strike. He turns up with a squad of machine gunner and mows them down. He thinks he has personally defeated Bolshevism and Sinn Fein and the machinations of the fucking Elders of Zion. If he is handsome and spends money freely, there may be those in his regiment who idolize him. But what would be the consequence? A labour problem might snowball into an outright insurrection. The King Emperor might go the way of the Kaiser- if not the Tzar. 

Some games are 'zero-sum'. It is important that the loser accept the verdict of the umpire. 'Politicized speech' is the speech used by politicians, some of whom have great expertise in making that verdict compelling and binding on all players. In this case, Churchill had appeased the Military Johnnies and the crazy Ulstermen. He had poured oil on troubled waters. True, he did end with a rhetorical fireworks display which, when quoted in India, won back the loyalty of many who had wavered after Jallianwallah Bagh. But, those sitting in the House, felt that this was 'mere puffery'. Churchill didn't really like beastly niggers. He was merely praising Britain for having the bestest Empire ever. 

an observer who is not invested in the argument

is not an observer. He is a guy who is thinking about other things 

might conclude that “the debaters are not really talking about what they claim they are talking about”.

Whereas, if you are 'invested', you can ask around and soon find out what is really happening. Thus, I am invested in Jallianwallah Bagh and can properly decipher the relevant debate in Hansard by asking around and looking things up. 

Does she think discourse can survive the culture wars?

If cockroaches can survive a nuclear winter- sure, why not?  

The problem, Callard believes, is that often we’re having conversations in the wrong medium.

This is not the case with important conversations.  

She has been reading about sociolinguistics and “what happens mechanically in a conversation”. For instance, she points out that I respond to her in 0.2 seconds; “if you wait longer… that’s an awkward pause”.

Or a pause for effect in an important conversation.  Awkward pauses are one's where the 'common knowledge' expected response- e.g. 'You're not ugly! Anyone who thinks so must be...BLIND!'- is long in coming and is accompanied by a furtive averting of the eyes. 

But this is less time than it takes for my brain to process the signal that comes at the end of a sentence, which means I am predicting when Callard will stop speaking.

Whereas I am thinking about manatees.  I suppose women really do have a different type of brain from men.

Humans are “incredibly sophisticated in how we manage conversational signals and how we navigate tensions inside of a conversation – like, you were having to navigate the tension: do I ask her about autism?”

Do I have to listen to her reply? This is what inhibits our natural inquisitiveness.  

But when we move conversations into writing, all that vital information is stripped away.

Unless you are good at writing- which Plato was, at least in places.  

“I think it’s a deep, deep problem about Twitter.

No. That's what makes it useful. Trump could take down rivals with a mean tweet. Biden just kept talking and talking.  

If you want to know my current theory [about] why things go wrong, [it] is just we don’t understand each other; we’re literally not following what other people are saying. Because human beings are not that good at communicating using written text.

Sadly, the kids are right to prefer texting to talking. It's faster and less ambiguous. Also, you can use poop emojis.  

We are, in every way, trained to communicate using spoken language…

This is an American thing. In England, we were trained to keep our mouths firmly shit in the class-room. I recall, during my first week at the LSE, being amazed by the marvellous flow of words that every American exchange student seemed capable of. Then I realized they were as thick as shit. Within a week or two these American students were told, politely but firmly, by other American students of longer standing, not to ask questions or seek to make any sort of contribution. Why? They were making their parent Institution back in the States look bad. On the other hand, the Brits were sometimes wrong about loquacious Americans. I recall an elderly Professor telling me about Baumol, a City College grad, who, at his first appearance in the LSE struck everybody as a cretin. He was denied entry to the Doctoral program. But his performance at Seminars was so stellar that the Brits had to admit their mistake. The man was a genius who made fundamental contributions in almost every subject area. But this was because he wrote even more clearly than he spoke. There were plenty of British academics who were a delight to listen to but who scarcely produced anything worth reading. In the case of Econ or Philosophy, we know why. They were stupid. They just didn't sound stupid because they had been to the right schools and Colleges.  

In written text… people immediately jump to bad motives and hostility.”

Not if the written text is up to snuff.  

Still, Callard believes the culture wars can be positive in that they “manifest the fact that stuff matters to us and we want to engage with other people on topics that we care about.”

But if all that matters is 'affiliation'- being part of a mob- then the stuff we talk about does not matter to us.  

Crucially, she thinks we need to “unearth the question that’s at the heart of a dispute and address it”.

In Academia, that question is tenure and who gets Einstein's office and other such petty stuff. This is Sayre's Law- Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. 

The penultimate chapter of Open Socrates is about love. An earlier draft did not touch on the subject, but Callard was prompted by the response to the New Yorker profile to consider it more deeply. In the book, she portrays romantic love as an aspirational, intellectual pursuit: meeting a partner is not the end goal, but the beginning of a collaboration through which you prompt and encourage each other towards further discovery.

That's not romantic love. It is the attempt to endow with a glow of romance something which is merely mundane and utilitarian. Still, it may be there was a time when Hilary and Bill were 'in love'. They certainly had aspirations and encouraged each other to rise as high up the greasy pole as they were able. But this really isn't a love-story for the ages. 

The extent to which each couple pushes this aspiration is, Callard told me, so personal that it is impossible to say what exactly we should be aiming for.

The Clintons knew what they were aiming for. That's why they are still together.  

“The interesting thing about romance is: how big is the project?

Getting to the White House is a big project. Eight years for Hilary as first lady and eight years for Bill as first horn-dog was what they aimed at.  

What kind of or how much perfection are you aspiring to with your partner? I think that is going to be particular to [each] relationship.”

It is also the reason more and more people are giving up on marriage. It's not the sex they object to. It's the couple's counselling.  

That question – “How big is the size of the project?” – sometimes causes conflict within Callard’s marriage. She is Socratic; her second husband is Aristotelian.

She has tenure. He doesn't. Gassing on about Kant & Aristotle is a safe enough way to stay employed. Sadly, the lad is venturing into Hegel who, while Napoleon was still cock of the walk wrote a short piece titled 'He who thinks abstractly' which praises egalitarian France and condemns the stupidity and brutality of the German speaking peoples who were groaning under the lash of a vast aristo-bureaucratic class of parasites. This causes the proles to class a murderer as simply a murderer without regard to any other qualities he might have had. (Napoleon was certainly the kidnapper and murderer of the Duke of Enghien). Hegel allows that 'polite society' does not 'abstract' away every detail except the salient one in pronouncing judgment. But the common people do. Why? Because they have been brutalized. The problem is that the 'beautiful world' runs away from metaphysics as much as it does from abstraction. Hegel's predicament is that he is like the German prole but moves in better circles. He ends by recommending the example of the French gentleman who listens to and seeks to persuade his servant rather than the German master who will beat the shit out of his servant because the fellow belongs to the beatable class. 

 Callard's young spouse says of this essay ' it’s not the philosophers who think abstractly, it’s everyday people who think abstractly'. That is not what Hegel said. He too, when worst comes to the worst, thinks abstractly. Napoleon is a murderer but there are things we must learn from France. It isn't that the abstract thesis or its anti-thesis (viz. Napoleon is a reformer and killed the Duke for a political reason) are wrong. It's just that there is a 'concrete universal' which is a synthesis of a superior type. What that is, the 'beautiful world' is not interested in. It prefers fine sentiments and striking poses. Sadly, there were and are no 'concrete universals' or 'World Historical Personalities' who incarnate the Weltgeist or any such nonsense. That's why the abstraction associated with murder is actually a ramified type theory which distinguishes between unlawful killing, justified homicide, manslaughter, premeditated murder, diminished capacity, etc., etc. The proles knew this well enough as did the 'beautiful world'. Even philosophers grasped this. But, at that time, Hegel was part and parcel of a particular political movement or tendency and, to his brutish, Teutonic, brain, Napoleon might still have been a 'concrete universal'. It is best not to inquire too much into the workings of the German mind because its apotheosis, or Himmelfart, is nothing but that fart which, Martin Luther assures us, drives the devil away. Indeed, German political philosophers worked hard to render Satan otiose. 

The difference is that “Socrates thinks: aspire forever, out to infinity – not really infinity, until knowledge, but it’s going to be more than one lifetime.

We don't know that. The guy wasn't Pythagorean. I think he did see himself as a pharmakos- at least that is Plato's account.  

Aristotle thinks: aspire until you’re around 35 or something, and then enough is enough; now it’s time to take the character that you have and… exercise it.”

Had Alexander, Aristotle's pupil, drank less and lived longer, he might have permanently changed Iranian history in the manner that Hellenization permanently changed Judaism.  

Callard often finds herself thinking “we need to be doing more aspiring; we shouldn’t be happy where we are. My husband’s more, like, the point of life is… to be happy, to exercise the knowledge and wisdom that you have, and to enjoy [it].”

Quit nagging me till I've at least got tenure. 

Though other, non-philosopher couples might not put it in such terms – Socratic vs Aristotelian –

Platonic vs Aristotelian. It may be that Socrates understood the third man argument in Parmenides. On the other hand, the simplest explanation is best. He was part of the Periclean circle and his care was for his native City.  

she believes the divide between wanting more and being content with what we have is common in relationships.

Nagging your husband may be common in relationships but let the boy get tenure first.  

In Open Socrates, she mounts an argument that “Socratic love is radically non-exclusive”.

There is nothing 'radical' about such love- unless you think tom-cats are subverting Patriarchy and Neo-Liberalism.  

Socrates does not differentiate between eros – romantic love – and philia – friendship love.

Yes he does. That's why he uses different words for the two things.  

“In that respect, Socrates isn’t so different from us. In this day and age, most people would say that they are friends with their spouse.”

Socrates doesn't say he was a friend of his shrewish wife.  

Socratic polyamory, she writes, “doesn’t distinguish between having many lovers, and having many friends.”

But he wasn't incessantly bumming everybody that he met. Also there was no fucking polyamory back then. Alcibiades had a lot of affairs but the consent of previous or subsequent partners was neither sought nor received. 

The “proper activity” for lovers is not sex but philosophy.

Philosophers who fuck their students are engaged in an improper activity. On the other hand, lovers above a certain age might settle for tea and sympathy and give both sex and philosophy a wide berth.  

This seems a rather sexless idea of polyamory?

“In the Phaedrus, [Socrates] describes the best relationship as just philosophical, but [in] the second best one, there’s sex,” Callard said. He allows for “some amount of deference to the savage commands of our body”, but he believes that “sometimes the desire for sex is a manifestation of wanting something more, something that sex couldn’t possibly give you… I think that Socrates wants us to reflect on the oddity of our sexual practices and the kind of hopes we pin on sex, and the way it seems like larger than the activity itself.” But this “isn’t the same thing as saying you should never have sex”.

In the Parmenides, Zeno- a handsome middle aged man- has a relationship with the elderly sage which, hopefully, has transcended sodomy. In any case, pederasts tend to prefer beardless youths. Once they are stronger and smellier than you, their charm has worn off. You try to keep them from buggering you senseless by talking metaphysics.  

The study of Socrates is well-suited to

philologists.  

public philosophy because

the public knows ancient Greek 

it makes clear the stakes of philosophical thinking to the average life:

They are zero. The thing is a waste of time.  

“If I think about the problems I have in my own life, they don’t look like trolley problems,”

Because 'trolley problems' are silly. If you kill a guy to save some other bunch of guys you will still go to jail unless you were legally obligated to make that decision.  

she said, referring to the thought experiments that explore the ethical dilemma of whether to sacrifice one life to save many others. Instead, the “practical upshots” of Socrates are: “How do you conduct your romance?

By doing romantic things not by talking pederastic bollocks.  

How do you think about your own death?

The slightly less ancient Greeks decided that Christianity was the way to go.  

How do you be political?

By imitating the most successful politicians.  

These are real problems that show up for me all the time that I need help thinking through in a concrete way.”

The answer is always 'do what smart peeps are doing even if you aren't smart and are stuck teaching stupid shite.' 

What, for those who are not willing to open their relationship in the pursuit of a higher intellectual plane, is the practical application of Socrates’ beliefs about love?

They can lead you to Christianity. Sadly, the Church isn't that keen on 'open relationships'. This is perfectly sensible. There will be tears before bedtime for Callard and the youth she has seduced.  

The answer brings us back to the quality of our conversations. “Most of what you’re going to do with your partner over the course of your life is talk to them,” said Agnes Callard.

Which is why nobody wants to get married any more. Melania has the right idea. If your husband is in Washington, don't stray from New York.  

“And so, yes, pick someone you can have good sex with, but pick someone you can talk to…

Mexican donkeys are poor interlocutors. Also, they insist on wearing a sombrero in bed.  

I think when we think things are going well, it’s because we’re talking well.”

Fair point. It is when you are stabbing each other well that you need to think about calling a Divorce attorney.