Ep. 251: Simone Weil’s Ideal Society

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 251 is what is freedom? And we read Simone Weil's theoretical picture of a free Society from 1934. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer freely putting this idea for a podcast into action.

0:28 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, not avoiding the necessity of necessity. In Austin, Texas, this is Wes all

0:36 Wes: one not defined by a relationship between desire and its satisfaction. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey

0:44 Dylan: struggling against necessity in my quest for liberty in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:48 Mark: All right, we had a long episode already, but this is going to be a short one, relatively. That's the goal anyway.

0:56 Wes: It's always Mark's dream. Long readings, short episodes.

1:02 Mark: We want to do this justice. We hinted at some of its broad themes last time. I was throwing out a few elements, but this is not going to be a typical description of a utopia.

1:12 Wes: It is kind of a utopian. What do you mean by that? It's not typical or just because it

1:16 Mark: starts so much with what does freedom feel like to an individual? And going on this long tangent into what is it like to do mathematics and things before it finally gets around to what would this actually mean for our relationship to society? I just picture a utopia. You immediately walk out and there's a narrative like in Herland of look, look at all the people working together in small groups. And then you kind of feel out the philosophy from there, as opposed to starting with the philosophy and edging toward.

1:47 Wes: I love that. Look at the hunter gatherers. Wouldn't that be great? Instead we have to do math. Yeah. I mean, she starts with this idea, which. It's not foreign to us. For students of philosophy, it's not new, but that perfect liberty does not mean the disappearance of necessity, which means all those external obstacles that we face.

2:12 Dylan: Perfect liberty doesn't mean that we're gods.

2:15 Wes: It doesn't mean just getting everything we want. So she'll say, true liberty is not a relationship between desire and satisfaction, but between thought and action. In the context of our discussions of free will, for instance, this cashes out as the idea that free will does not just mean, which is not the same thing as liberty, but it's a parallel. Free will does not mean that we can just make arbitrary decisions independent of all the external constraints, including our own biology, all the things that sort of determine us, our character, external conditions, what it does mean, though, is that there is the possibility of being reason responsive because we are subjects, because we can be aware of the world, because we can collect evidence, because we can reason.

We're not just automatons or we can do things that are not simply the products of those external constraints. And that's why she will focus on. I think it's part of why she's going to focus on arithmetic and geometry because they represent an ideal picture of what it would be like to. She's going to set up an ideal of what it means to have this perfect relationship between thought and action. And that starts with the model of mathematics.

3:27 Seth: Right? So this is not liberty conceived of like a libertarian. It's not a question of as few constraints as possible on your will to do whatever it is that you want. It's not even really a question of constraints so much as it is the ability for you to freely exercise reason and then use that free exercise of reason to take action in the world. So the determination or the necessity is partially a function of the geographical and physical and sociological constraints that are put upon you, but it's also a necessity that puts you in a state where you act without thinking.

4:12 Wes: Part of it is we're not necessarily going to get what we want. I think, Seth, this is just what you're saying. It's not liberty in the sense that our actions are always going to attain our ends. The way she puts it on page 81, a man would be free if every action proceeds from preliminary judgment concerning the end which he set himself and the sequence of means suitable for attaining this end. So there's freedom in figuring out what you want. That's the non hypothetical reasoning. And then you figure out, okay, what are the means to those ends. You engage in hypothetical practical reasons, reasoning about how to get there. And that's where freedom lies. It's not that your plans are going to succeed, it's just that you can make those plans. There's freedom in the ability to make the plans.

4:58 Seth: I had that section called out here in my notes too. Wes and I put in parentheses. I was just thinking like the inner versus the outer freedom consists in a certain kind of relationship between your inner self, which is this what she thinks of and we talked about in the last episode as this ability to think and this complete, radical total freedom to. And using that inner self in that way to establish a certain kind of relationship. And not just theoretical relationship, but practical relationship with the outer world. So there's a sense in which the outer world represents that necessity and your body too, you know, and a variety of other things that we wouldn't necessarily consider outer or the world.

So there's certain borders or limits to necessity in the outer that you're not going to be able to overcome. But having an understanding of what those limits are, having an understanding of what you want to accomplish against above and beyond those limits, and then using your ability to think, to plan out a path to accomplish those goals is kind of how she conceives of what a free person would do.

6:02 Wes: Yeah, that's great. The irony there, or the seeming paradox is that so she'll say he can choose between either blindly submitting to the spur with which necessity pricks him on from outside, or else adapting himself to the inner representation of it that he forms in his own mind. And it is in this that the contrast between servitude and liberty lies. So this is one of the things we've seen before. When we think about things in a way, we are submitting to a kind of internal or inner necessity. Right? The reasons become the things that constrain us once we recognize them. And so it's in the inner necessity that liberty lies, as opposed to external necessity, where we are doing things because we're being puppeted by the external world.

6:48 Mark: I'm trying to think of how the way she puts that relates to the traditional Laplace demon way. We would talk about a causal network that is unchangeable. It's an absolutely inflexible necessity. It sounds like she's saying the same thing there. But clearly choosing actually does choose two different things. So you could counterfactually say you could let yourself be pushed on by the spur of necessity pricking you from the outside. Or you could hesitate, deliberate, use your reason and get a model and move more intelligently. So that's strange that she's saying it's not just that something feels like more free if you're bringing in conscious planning into it, but that you actually will make a different choice if you do.

7:30 Seth: So I think another way to characterize what you're saying. Mark and Wes, I apologize. I wasn't sure where you were reading from. But here at the top of page 82, she says, as for complete liberty, one can find an abstract model of it in a properly solved problem in arithmetic or geometry. For in a problem, all the elements of the solution are given. Man can look for assistance only to his own judgment alone, capable of establishing between these elements the relationship which by itself constitutes the solution sought. A completely free life would be One wherein all real difficulties presented themselves as kinds of problems, wherein all successes were as solutions carried into action.

So the difference between liberty and servitude, I'm going to avoid saying freedom. I say liberty and servitude is, in a sense, how do you treat the burden or the boundaries or the obstacles that necessity places in your way? Do you bemoan your fate? Do they put you into inaction? Or do you see them as problems to be solved? And if you treat things in the world as problems to be solved and you think, okay, what are the limits of my power? What are the options available to me? And you put a plan in place and then you go do it, that's as much liberty as you can hope to get out of life.

And this idea of treating your life as a series of problems to be solved made me think immediately of Descartes.

8:49 Wes: Oh, yeah, what are rules for the

8:50 Seth: direction of the mind or whatever the last thing we read was.

8:53 Wes: Yeah, this is also straight out of his geometry, though.

8:55 Seth: Yeah, she's got many references because on the next page she kind of gets into de Beauvoir. But she even talks about when she goes in that tangent that you talked about, Mark, about geometry and mathematics, essentially recapitulating the Cartesian method of breaking things down into component parts, which is tied into what she's trying to do in this essay. The broader essay is she's saying, look, it's not enough. We don't want to be fantasists. We don't want to dream of utopia. We want to create an ideal, measure the gap between the ideal and where we are now, and put a plan in place to improve and get closer to the ideal. She's very, very much like a woman of action, like a pragmat thinker in that respect.

9:33 Dylan: I want to figure out the distinction between the way we're describing this, which sounds a lot like stoicism, where you would just have an attitude with regard to constraint and actual liberty. It would be illustrative to understand what would be a constraint that would mark it being a situation where I don't have liberty. Because if all it is is just the way I happen to think about it, then that's going to be stoicism. That's not going to be liberty, because I'm going to be able to have any amount of constraint, in fact, that I would normally recognize as being decidedly against my liberty in any kind of conventional way.

But I would understand my process of choosing between all of these things that act as necessities and my pragmatic path forward and all that kind of thing. I could be a slave and understand what my liberty looks like. That doesn't seem like that can possibly be what she means. And so there has to be, I think it is, has to be something about the relationship of what kinds of necessities qualify as actual necessities in the way mathematics does, and which kinds of things amount to not real necessities that are constraining my liberty and what wasn't clear to me.

I want to sort of understand what it would mean to have cases where my liberty is constrained.

10:50 Mark: I think that liberty is always constrained. It's just that we're saying the absolutely free individual. You would have this complete transparency in coming up with a plan, understanding as you're actually putting it into action, every single step. Exactly like Descartes describes the sequence of things when you're solving a complicated problem.

11:08 Wes: It's an equation. Basically you set up an equation in

11:11 Mark: Descartes, in describing that actually says you can't keep all that stuff in your head at a time. You want to make it so that you can stop at any given point and zoom in on any given link in the chain and say, okay, this makes sense, this makes sense, but the link is going to be too long by necessity, just through the complexity of the problem or the complexity of the world if you're talking about practical action. So you're going to have to do things sort of, okay, I thought of the plan, I examined the means, now I have to just do it. And I can stop at any point and think about what I'm doing, but like I'm not going to be super self conscious at every moment.

It's like a practical limit. Like, imagine that you could actually keep all this stuff in your mind. And I think like you're saying there are definitely societies which would make it impossible for you to understand those various links because you, you wake up and your parents tell you go to school and they don't tell you why and you're just obey, obey, obey, and now get a job, obey, marry this person. Like that would be the kind of thing where obviously liberty can't be available in the way she wants. You have to be able to have institutions that are rational in order for you to be able to understand them rationally.

12:13 Dylan: That's getting closer to what I wanted. But is it just that any rational institution would still afford me liberty in the way she's describing?

12:23 Wes: I mean, I think the reason why I was tending towards the word freedom is because this doesn't really map on to, as far as I can tell, traditional distinctions between free will and liberty, for instance, where liberty has something to do with the absence of external constraints, you know, the absence of government oppression, for instance, having something like free speech or rights. And I mean, there's a reason why she's doing this is because she's trying to do a thought experiment. She's trying to ground, as Mark pointed out at the very beginning, she's going to try to ground around social liberty by way of this utopian thought experiment about what it would be like if someone were truly completely free.

And the model that she gives us, what she's trying to explain to us, is that if there is freedom, the freedom is in this ability to problem solve, as Mark put it. So what she's doing here is straight out of Descartes geometry, where to talk about treating the solution is given is to say that you create an equation. And so even though there are unknowns in that equation, the equation itself is, in a way, the solution is already there in front of you. You just have to work it out. So if we had true liberty, we would be able to set everything up as an equation and then problem solve, and then that would flow directly into action.

Or the way she puts it is we'd have an existence where the work of our minds immediately affected our muscles, to paraphrase her. And there's this very tight relation between problem solving and action. But in reality, of course, that doesn't happen. There are too many constraints for our plans to be executed perfectly. It's just that we're setting up an ideal here.

13:58 Seth: Okay, I didn't hear a response to Dylan's question in either Mark or Wes's response. So, Dylan, I think there's a sense in which, if this simply recognizes the necessity of sort of a set of conventional restraints or the. The intractitude of a set of conventional necessities maybe is a better way of saying it, and all we can do is accept and work within those things, Then it's no different than stoicism. And so it's really a question of circumscribing the sphere of what's considered a necessary constraint and saying, okay, physically, human beings can't fly.

We're not birds, we don't fly. But saying, well, you can't climb that mountain because you're a woman, like, there's really no physical necessity there. It's just some kind of conventional necessity and that there needs to be some way to cash out necessity a little bit more and have her have an account for how we're allowed to think through and act against everything except physical necessity or something like that in order for this to be truly differentiated from like, just a plain old stoic response.

15:00 Wes: I don't see it as stoicism. Maybe you can help me understand why it would be that. But for stoicism, it's about you alleviate your distress by modifying your attitude towards the world. And the way you do that is to realize that what's on the outside cannot be truly good or bad in itself. The only thing that can be truly good or bad is your state of mind, or more specifically, whether or not you are virtuous. To be virtuous would be the only good thing, and to be vicious would be the only real bad thing. And what's on the outside, yes, we might prefer one thing over the other, but it can never be truly good or bad, and so we can't be hurt by that.

This seems different to me in that it's a focus on the fact that there's a certain kind of freedom and the ability to set our ends, to set our goals, and then to problem solve. So it sounds more existentialist to me. Right. This is the ethics of ambiguity, where on the one hand there's essence and on the other hand there's existence. And despite the essence, despite the external constraints, we emphasize the freedom, the existence part, the subjectivity.

15:58 Mark: Pretty much every time anybody criticizes stoicism, oh, it's the philosophy of a slave, and it makes you not want to actually work towards social change. They're talking about a very passive version of stoicism. But when we had Ryan Holiday on, he has a very active version of stoicism that may in fact be stoicism plus pragmatism or something, where it's kind of going back to that understanding the distinction between what I can change and what I can't change. Coming to terms with what you can't change is the passive part, but making the most of what you can change is the active part.

16:27 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, maybe that's one of the ways in which I was thinking of stoicism. Yeah.

16:32 Seth: Grant me the wisdom to know the difference.

16:34 Wes: But what she's going to do next is relevant to just getting into Dylan's concerns. She's going to basically list a bunch of obstacles to liberty. That's the bulk of this essay, in fact.

16:45 Mark: So this is like bottom page 89 around where we were talking about the.

16:49 Wes: No, this is earlier where she's talking about basically the complexity of Scale. So this is page 83 in the middle. The difficulties of real life do not constitute problems made to our scale. So I think, Mark, you kind of hit on this a little bit. She'll talk about how the mind can only exercise itself upon unreal combinations of signs. The results of our actions depend on external accidents. When we represent causal chains, we're doing this a great deal of abstracting. Once we get into this realm of problem solving. We're simplifying and abstracting from the concrete world. And we have to do that just to handle the scale of things and the complexity of things.

17:26 Mark: And also just the idea of a causal chain. It's always sort of mysterious why one thing causes another. You know, for the very reasons Hume pointed out. We could see in front of us one billiard ball hitting another. And we can maybe cite a physical law why that should be the case. But, like, well, why does the physical law happen? Like, there's always going to be a lower level you could bounce down to, okay, well, the macro objects are interacting like that. Because the molecules are interacting in, you know, ways that we can understand. But since there's always going to be some element of unknowability.

And especially as she makes this really explicit when we were talking about our own bodies that are involved in these things, that's really mysterious to us. Why, when we think, I want to move my hand, and then your hand moves. So there's always going to be an element of sort of magic and mystery that we can't understand. That makes it this picture of perfect connection between idea and its realization in the world just impossible. But there are situations we can more or less understand.

18:19 Seth: There's a nice little bit here on page 83 where it says we can easily accept the fact that the results of our actions are dependent on accidents outside of our control. What we must at all costs preserve from chance are our actions themselves. And that in such a way as to place them under the control of the mind. To achieve this, all that is necessary is that man should be able to conceive a chain of intermediaries. Linking the movements he is capable of to the results he wishes to obtain. And he can often do this thanks to the relative stability that persists athwart the blind cross currents of the universe on the scale of human organism, blah, blah, blah.

She's trying to overcome an objection here, which is if she defines absolutely free liberty as your ability to assess every situation completely and totally with preliminary judgment, understand all of the constraints and the causal chain, and then implement an Action that will result in the outcomes that you are trying to achieve. Right. A criticism that would be, look, this is like, you know, the criticism I make of consequentialism, like there's no way to understand what the outcome of your actions are going to be or what the net good is going to be, because you can't predict the future and you can't foresee all the unforeseen consequences of what your actions are.

And she's trying to say, okay, yes, obviously you can't draw a line and connect the dots between all of these things. And that's exemplified in the fact that you can't even explain how you can lift your arm, something as simple as that. You can't even do that. And in fact, you can't even consciously make that happen in a weird way. But she's trying to say, look, it's not necessary that you actually be able to conceptualize and control every link in the chain. All that's necessary is that you should conceive that it's possible to achieve this outcome through some series of actions.

You don't necessarily need to know the mechanisms by which all of these things are going to be effectuated at every microscopic level. I don't know if I buy it, but I think that's what she's trying to address there.

20:12 Wes: Yeah, I think as she articulates these problems, she will give you kind of a way out, but only to move on to the next problem. So she's basically saying, look, obstacle one, complexity, scale. How do we deal with that? We abstract, we use science, we make progress in science and technology, except with respect to this relationship that Mark mentioned between mind and body. So as she's getting into page 84, we get a new wrinkle, and that's the way this essay will progress. We just keep getting these new obstacles and these new wrinkles as we think we've come to deal with them.

20:46 Seth: Can I interject one thing before we jump there tail end of 82 to 83. It is not possible to conceive of a nobler destiny for man than that which brings him directly to grips with naked necessity without his being able to expect anything except through his own exertions. And that's such that his life is a continual creation of himself by himself. That's just a naked echo of de Beauvoir, whether Beauvoir is echoing her or vice versa. But that's your existential creed right there.

21:12 Wes: So what she gets into on page 84 is that our science and abstraction, they don't eliminate chance. And what she's just said before is really, we can engage in hypothetical reasoning and planning. Because on the macro level, there are these causal regularities. Although a deeper level, we expect chance to play a role. Something like Lucretian swerve or subatomic physics, where things aren't as orderly as they are on the macro level. But even worse, we get into what is essentially the mind body problem. And, you know, it's the understandable reason why primitive human beings see their relationship to the world as not a matter of work, but a matter of magic.

And this is one form of slavery. This is one form of absence of liberty. According to her, this view of the world as being this kind of magical relation and we're at the mercy of various superstitions. Oh, what do we do to appease the gods?

22:09 Mark: Yeah, that reminded me of Beauvoir as well, that she says that women in particular tend to have that magical take because they have so little experience of agency. So I think that right there points us to the connection between how we should be structuring society so that people actually have these liberties and these comments about human nature here.

22:27 Seth: I didn't focus on that aspect of this section. There's a really, really nice section on the top page. 86. The docility of the body in such a case is a kind of miracle, but a miracle which the mind may ignore. The body, rendered, as it were, fluid through habit, to use Hegel's beautiful expression, simply causes the movements conceived in the mind to pass into the instruments. The attention is directed exclusively to the combinations formed by the movements of the inert matter. And the idea of necessity appears in its purity without any admixture of magic.

So she's talking about this idea that coming up against constraints that you don't understand and then confronting a necessity that you don't necessarily understand outside of yourself creates this situation where you have this notion of interpreting the world as magical. But in a sense, when you have more mastery over your body in the form of habitual action, that it then almost disappears as a barrier, as something which confutes your interpretation of the world. And you're able to come up against the external necessity itself in a way that gives you some more clarity.

I thought that was interesting. And I like this reference to habit as a way of eliminating chance, but also eliminating the complexity that is required by thought. When you have a practice in your body that eliminates having to think about things, it frees up the capacity to think about other things, which includes taking Stock of what's happening in the world and, you know, the external necessities.

23:55 Wes: Yeah, we get this transition because she's talking about how do we get away from this sense of a magical relationship between the body and the world and these sorts of superstitions. And she'll say, we lose those things to the degree that instruments become more important to us. And so that when we're doing things, it's not just because we have a certain passion or a certain desire, but because, you know, our motions, our activities become more tightly related to our objectives. And that's what Seth, as you mentioned, she's describing with this idea of a body rendered fluid through habit, where it seems as if the instrument, your mind, has kind of passed into the instruments.

So she makes this contrast, contrast between unconscious instinctual movement on land versus steering a ship at sea. So she'll say on page 86, for example, on dry land, and borne along by the desires and fears that move his legs for him, man often finds that he has passed from one place to another without being aware of it. On the sea, on the other hand, as desires and fears have no hold over the boat, one has continually to use craft and strategy, set sails and rudder, transmute the thrust of the wind by means of a series of devices which can only be the work of a clear intelligence.

You cannot entirely reduce the human body to this docile intermediary role between mind and instrument, but you can reduce it more and more to that role. This is what every technical advance helps to bring about.

25:24 Mark: I had the same question when we were doing Dewey that he seemed to be saying that sedimented habits are bad. We want to bring intelligence into action as much as possible. And Weil says almost exactly the same thing in terms of what makes a meaningful life. What makes this feel like your choice, what makes this feel like the free action is to have intelligence involved. And I brought up in that Dewey question, well, is he really saying everything has to be made conscious, like real deliberation? Because we already just said, even according to Descartes picture, you use consciousness, you use intelligence to fix the pieces together, but once they're fixed together, you can't hold them all in your head at the same time.

If you're talking about a long geometry proof or a long plan that you're going to put into action. And so there has to be some sort of internalization of the intelligence. And so this is what I'm seeing here is that maybe she actually has the insight that we saw in Merleau-Ponty and that Maybe I should have even been attributing to Dewey, despite the way he was putting it. In terms of making everything explicit, making everything conscious. Is that part of the way to tighten the perceived connection between plan and action is to just internalize, is to practice.

Makes perfect to feel good doing what you're doing. That feeling of freedom when you're playing a sport really well. Or you're playing an instrument really well or something. It's not because you've made everything conscious. That would make it too hard to actually do. It's that your intelligence has been written into your fingers to a great extent. So it's an interesting balance between planning. In other words, this is a chosen goal. I'm choosing to play my instrument on this day. I'm choosing to play this song. And then automating parts of the process.

26:56 Seth: Exactly. And the critical piece of that is not just that it changes your relationship to the world. To eliminate the notion of mysticism or magic or whatever. It also frees you up to exercise your thought to new and different projects and solve new problems. The point is, is that habituation not only eliminates magic. And along with technical advances, gives you more mastery over your body and takes chance out of the world. It also creates the opportunity for taking on new challenges, new opportunities, new thoughts that as if you had to put the same thought into the same action that you did 500 times every day. You would never be able to move on or think about anything else. And so the body has this wonderful mechanism of creating habit.

27:41 Dylan: I just have a few questions about the way we're going. So on the one hand, I completely get what we're talking about. Like the freedom that comes with the accord of mind with action. The musical instrument case, the sports case, the doing mathematics case. Where, you know, the very activity of your mind is ingrained with your physical action. With action, let's just say action. Because it could be an action of the mind as well as an action of the body. You're just doing that activity. And that is the sign of liberty.

28:09 Wes: She's really articulating a series of obstacles to liberty. And this actually will turn out to be one of them. So in the next section, she's going to say there's this real distinction between speculation and action. And, you know, as things become routine and as they become habits. And as we develop a kind of procedural knowledge that's in our body. There's a disjunction between idea and movement. It's as if we transfer our mind, for instance, into the matter or our mind into various signs and we lose sight of the relations between signs and the things signified. So I guess the way to sum it up is that as things become more routine, we become less thoughtful. Our ability to reflect and problem solve at a high level is actually compromised.

28:58 Dylan: Yeah. In fact we have to develop habits associated with that kind of discipline of method and other mechanisms of mind to maintain our liberty in that respect. And I want to talk about that modification some more. But before we do that, what's not clear to me is why any of the things that we're were pointing at as being contrary to liberty are saved from this. Why do we avoid superstition with this? How does that happen? Right. Because people think in superstition in certain kinds of consistent ways unless it's completely anarchistic in their thinking. There's always a kind of consistency or even a deep consistency where there's just a gap where there's evidence that you bring to bear that just says, well your superstition is wrong because of this, something completely outside of it. So I don't see how this saves you from that. You just would be a different kind of superstition.

29:53 Wes: Well, she says that at first we seem to be saved from superstition, but this way in which the mind seems to have passed into matter or into signs, when we do math, for instance, adding, we're not thinking reflectively about what it means, we're just manipulating symbols. Right. Thoughtlessly. So that might as well be superstitious that reintroduces that magical element. She says that herself. Really, the utopian ideal that we're working towards is this strange combination where we can do this habituated, we can be in the flow. Right. Doing our work and yet be engaged in methodological thought at the same time.

I'm not even sure if it's really possible and I think she probably might agree. She doesn't know if this is possible, but she's going to spell out this ideal for liberty. The way she'll put it, the only mode of production absolutely free would be that in which methodological thought was in operation throughout the course of work. So we can see where this is going. This is getting us into the social and Marxian element of all this and the concern about what it is to do rewarding work and non alienated work versus what it is to do work in a factory, let's say, or on an assembly line when you might as well be a robo.

31:10 Seth: I want to address Dylan's question about how this resolves superstition to Some extent. So there's two components to it. The first is, let's call it the habituation of pieces of the causal chain. The more we advance technology, the more we advance education. The more we create circumstances where what is distant, far away, misunderstood, far away from us in the causal chain becomes closer by virtue of habituation, of understanding of how those things work. It's no longer Gods of Thunder and whatever. It just becomes weather. Why does it become weather?

Because you've developed science of some sort to measure and track it. And you understand that wherever you are in the world, there's certain consistencies. As you demystify the world through technology and through advancement of knowledge. You habituate chunks of the causal chain that keep things distant from you and bring them nearer. But that's just theoretical. It's also effectuated in the creation of work associated with that. So when we not only turn that into a science, but we start to do work associated with that. People doing research and measuring.

And we start figuring out, like barometric pressure and these sorts of things. Then that essentially is how you eliminate or remove superstition. It's because you're essentially turning more and more of the world into a sphere where work can take place. Work as conceived of this way.

32:33 Wes: I think she actually agrees with Dylan on this. So on page 87, she's talking about the solution to theoretical problems. Where you solve a theoretical problem and you come up with a method to solve it. And then after that you can put it into action. But she'll say, you cannot say in such a case that the action is, strictly speaking, methodical. It is in accordance with method, which is a very significant thing. The difference is capital. For he who applies method has no need to conceive it in his mind at the moment he is applying it. Indeed, if it is a question of something complicated, he is unable to even should he have elaborated it himself.

For the attention always forced to concentrate itself on the actual moment of execution. Cannot embrace at the same time the series of relationships on which execution as a whole depends. Hence, what is carried out is not a conception. But an abstract diagram indicating a sequence of movements. And as little penetrable by the mind at the moment of execution. As is some formula resulting from mere routine or some magic rite. So I think in reading this, we have to keep in mind that every time we think we've escaped the constraints on liberty. These new wrinkles come up.

It seemed like our problem solving got us somewhere. But then it turns out that there's this sedimentation. And it just becomes routine and formulaic, and we're no longer thinking about what we're doing. And so we got to move forward. We got to figure out what the next step is.

33:57 Seth: Yeah, absolutely. And it becomes harder and harder to move forward.

34:00 Mark: And I guess I'm also thinking of her critique of. I think in the last episode we talked about her critique of Aristotle's doctrine of the golden mean. That I was just putting it as we need some kind of balance between what is made conscious and explicit and what is routine. And I think that is going to be. Of course, we need some kind of balance like that. It's just a matter of defining what kinds of making things routine, making things habitual, are beneficial to us, and which kinds are the bad kind of sedimentation. But she had said that the doctrine of the golden mean is just going back and forth between opposites. It's like satisfying no one. That she was just in principle against that kind of, well, just average out competing demands. And I don't know what to make of that, really.

34:41 Dylan: She joins us up with the notion of work at the bottom of 87, where up at the top, the quote that Wes had read was the way in which something is methodical in accordance with method. But that does not necessarily mean that you are doing the kind of thinking that's even really associated with liberty. So it goes without saying that those who go on applying indefinitely such and such a method of work have often never given themselves the trouble of understanding it. Furthermore, it frequently happens that each of them is only charged with a part of the job of execution, always the same, while his companions do the rest.

Hence one is brought face to face with a paradoxical situation. That there is method in the motions of work, but none in the mind of the worker. It would seem as though the method had transferred its abode from the mind into the matter. Automatic machines present the most striking image of this. From the moment when the mind which has worked out a method of action has no need to take part in the job of execution. This can be handed over to pieces of metal just as well as and better than the two living members. And one is thus presented with a strange spectacle of machines in which the method had become so perfectly crystallized in metal that it seems as though it is they which do the work, the thinking.

It is the men who serve them that are reduced to the condition of automata. I guess he's really focusing on where the thinking has happened and when it gets mechanized or methodized. That the churning of the method doesn't involve Liberty in the same way, the mere churning of the method.

36:15 Mark: Sure, especially as you get division of labor. Somebody got to be creative and think up this method. You know, how the assembly line is set up, but then all the people that are stuck and made into machines within it, no fun there. I guess the question that we're considering is what if you did that yourself? What if you sort of made up the method yourself, it's going to be a one person job and then you set yourself into motion. Would that be fulfilling? Well, I think it kind of depends how you do it.

36:38 Seth: No, no, no, no.

36:39 Wes: She explicitly says no. She entertains that idea.

36:42 Seth: Yeah.

36:43 Wes: So she'll say even if you come up with the method, that doesn't mean once you're employing it, that there's methodical thought involved in the employment.

36:50 Mark: I think if you do it once, then it would be fun. If you, if you do it again and again and again to make more of the widget yourself, then yes, you're dehumanizing yourself through your own method that you came up with.

37:00 Seth: Remember that the title of this thing is Theoretical Picture of a Free Society. So the problem statement is how can we maximize the amount of liberty that each individual has? How can we create a society that maximizes the liberty? And her answer here is, well, we have to maximize the ability for people to engage in this novel, thoughtful, non methodological thinking. Okay, but there's a problem. We have all these external constraints. We have the bodily constraints, as she says later at the bottom of page 90. We have the constraints of other people and we have the constraint of the fact that the mechanism is.

As soon as you come up with something novel like this, then it becomes method. Then when you start to apply it, well, now you got to go find something new. Because that application is itself, doesn't involve the same kind of thinking. And in fact methodological application without think is oppressive. It can be oppressive. Her problem statement is how would you have a society where everybody had the ability to pursue these kinds of problem solving, taking into account every possible avenue of solution and all these sorts of things? How could we do this?

Give everybody a canvas where they could have this freedom of problem solving?

38:11 Wes: I had mentioned doing the arithmetic. This is on page 89. This is a good example. There's something which has a theoretical basis, but in practice we don't really know what we're doing doing, except for manipulating signs according to formulas. So she'll say the process of calculation places the signs in relation to one another on the sheet of paper without the Object so signified being in relation in the mind. So we do that with numerals when we're doing arithmetic, with the result that the actual question of the significance of signs ends by no longer possessing any meaning.

One thus finds oneself in the position of having solved a problem by a species of magic without the mind having connected the data with a solution. This is why I did so poorly in math in high school. If only they had given me the St. John's version, just count it on your fingers. So yeah, and she gives this quote, scientists who say, my pencil knows more than I do. And then she'll say, look, even in higher mathematics you get this mixture of blind operations. So when someone is doing something really theoretical and creative As a mathematics PhD, some of it is blind operation.

And then you get these flashes of understanding. But the mind can't embrace everything. And the more complex this all gets, the more complicated science gets and the more complicated math gets. One mind isn't even enough to comprehend all that stuff. So you just become kind of a worker bee and the theoretical hive. So this high level intellectual work is not in itself a solution. And even, she says, as you move into page 90, even the elaboration of a method itself becomes formulaic and routine. The problem of routinization infects each layer successively, even as we go up the chain to what we think are higher level forms of work or thinking.

In this case, we encounter the same problem each time.

40:01 Mark: I feel like this essay could almost be called the Vanity of Reason. Even though clearly she wants people to have their reason involved rather than everybody telling them what to do. But that once you sort of get clever and you're like, oh, I don't like to do that routine stuff. I like to do the higher level, the planning. Well, you sort of keep wanting to go to a higher and higher level of planning, a more meta level. I want to just delegate more and more stuff to the other people that can do the grunt work. It's just, it's a vain struggle for a higher and higher level, more intellectualized

40:32 Dylan: picture until you're doing nothing.

40:34 Wes: Exactly. Unless you're engaged in philosophical contemplation. And even that, that's the only way out. It has to be completely impractical.

40:42 Mark: No, once you do 250 episodes, then it becomes so routine.

40:48 Seth: So when I was reading on page 90 like this, the first thing that came to my mind was, okay, so artistic and creative endeavors like, we have to somehow alleviate the amount of oppression that comes from grinding work. If you're Just doing the same thing for eight hours a day. And then you. You don't have the energy, right? It saps the life out of you to think and to read and to comprehend, but also to create. So I thought creativity, art, that sort of thing might be one solution. But there's the segue into the next section about human beings as obstacles too.

And there is a way in which, even though human beings may present themselves as limiting factors, as necessities in the same way as the outside world, even applying method in the realm of human interaction presents itself as an endlessly complex and ever changing canvas in which you can exercise your thought that just getting people to work together to an individual trying to address their own problems, the method maybe says, okay, here's how we do cognitive behavioral therapy, or here's what psychoanalysis looks like, or whatever. But the actual practice of doing that kind of activity with somebody, I think requires a certain kind of original thought, or can maybe at some point it becomes routine, but.

But it can do that too. So there is a way in which application of method in that messy human realm, I think creates the space for a more thoughtful practice.

42:16 Wes: That's really interesting. Before we get more into that, I want to lay out the ideal that she's setting at the bottom of page 90. This is one of the places where she sort of explicitly says what she's working towards. And she'll say, it goes without saying, that the degree of complexity of the difficulties to be solved must never be too great. On pain of bringing about a split between thought and action. Naturally, such an ideal can never be realized. One cannot avoid in the practical affairs of life, carrying out actions which it is impossible to understand at the moment when they are being carried out, because one has to rely either on ready made rules or else on instinct, trial and error, routine.

But one can at any rate widen bit by bit the sphere of conscious work. I think that phrase is key, conscious work, and perhaps indefinitely. So to achieve this end, it would be enough if man were no longer to aim at extending his knowledge and power, and definitely, but rather at establishing, both in his research and in his work, a certain balance between the mind and the object to which it is being applied. So that's where we're going. But then, Seth, you were getting into this section where she says, okay, here's another obstacle. I mean, Seth, you were suggesting that this is kind of a domain, though, where we might start to get more possibilities for truly conscious work and dealing with people.

Which is interesting because this is the section that I Have summarized in my notes as describing the ways in which people get in the way of our liberty. So the existence of other human beings is true.

43:43 Seth: I wasn't saying that.

43:44 Wes: Yeah, yeah, I know. You're not.

43:45 Seth: To be clear, it's not her position, it's my position.

43:48 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I don't think they're incompatible ultimately, but there's an interesting dialectic between them because I think ultimately you're onto something. You're right about that. But here the idea is that you could literally be a slave. That's one way. But even if we're not literally slaves to other people, we're worried about being humiliated. There's kind of. We get into the thematic element here where our relationship to the consciousness of other human beings can create a kind of dependence and servitude.

44:17 Mark: She says there are no bounds to the satisfactions and sufferings that a man can receive at the hands of other men. In context, it sounds like the previous section was, you know, she's almost Thoreau, where I was picturing the Ron Swanson on parks and Rec. His woodworking. Like, you know, keep things small, stay in a cabin by yourself, and you can be creative. You could keep making different kinds of chairs, whatever you want to do. And then it sounds like the next part is like, but other people around. It's really hard to do that. But by saying there's no limits to not only what they can impose on you, but the satisfactions you can get out of them.

It's an enslavement that is in our nature. We are social beings that even though it might sound like you want to try this Thoreau thing, of course you need periods of solitude. That's definitely something she's in favor of, but not as a way of life.

45:04 Wes: And then she's going to move on as we get into page 92, into. It's not just a matter of impossible servitude to other specific individuals, but we are dependent on the collective life as. On collective life as a whole. And a lot of that has to do with hierarchy and the arbitrariness of power, which can be capricious and mysterious. So we are embedded in this social context which our relationship to it is itself an impediment to. To liberty.

45:34 Mark: And luckily, we already gave great detail about this in the last episode and why we need hierarchy and we need obedience and we need other people to obey us and all this stuff. So just impose that all on this section. At least that's what I'm doing.

45:47 Wes: So we can Skip that. I think what happens now is so we move beyond these obstacles and then we get what I call criteria for utopia. We get a series of criteria. The first one is really about our relation to the collective. So how do we get some autonomy in the relationship to the collective? And she says, well, it requires understanding it first of all and then being able to have some influence over it. So ultimately it's going to mean that as a worker, my actions are not just a matter of external rules imposed by the collective, but a product of my own clear intelligence. So there has to be this connection between my mind and my action. It can't just be me carrying out or manifesting a rule that is some formula that is external to me and defined by the collective.

46:42 Mark: She's going to want these collectives to be small. Last time I kept bringing up from this essay the idea of teams of workers. Manual laborers would come to mind. People working together on something objective, building a house or something. I think cooperative artistic projects, I think intellectual, I think any kind of creativity you could impose on this. But now that we've talked about the different degrees of consciousness that action can have now it makes me wonder more about how much they have no exit, right? Like when you get three people together, is it not inevitable that you're gonna have to figure out how much to talk about things?

Right. If you have a common goal? Like are we as a podcast gonna have a frickin business meeting every week because we have to bicker over every little things, or do we have more or less assigned roles that just makes it go smoothly and automatic? I'm really unclear, given her just contrarian attitude, how well she would do in a small group performing cooperative action. I don't know. One genius put them with two or three other geniuses. Does that make something better than the sum of its parts can?

47:50 Dylan: Society is basically a kind of evil that we put up with. And at the bottom of 97, she says to sum up, the least evil society is that in which the general run of men are most often obliged to think while acting, have the most opportunities for exercising control over collective life as a whole, and enjoy the greatest amount of independence. It's not that you will always be able as the individual to control everything in the collective life, but that those things will be as large as they can and you'll have the least evil society. It'll still be evil, but it'll be the least evil one.

48:23 Mark: Because it's our food, we need these groups. But I guess if you're participating in multiple groups and having different roles in them. And then you don't feel dominated. Your life won't be crushed by I am just my job and my job defines me, or I am just my tribe.

48:38 Dylan: Mark, you just said that this is part of the food of our souls. And to me, maybe I'm cherry picking a particular phrase out of here, but it's the kind of thing that feels in a bit of tension with the previous thing that we read where here I don't have the sense that society is feeding my soul. When I call it the least evil society. I'm taking something that is negative and trying to make it less bad rather than having it be contributing positively to the needs of my soul.

49:08 Mark: Yeah, this is nine years earlier than the other one. So. So we should not be surprised. I guess I was a little too quick to try to shove everything we learned last episode into here.

49:17 Wes: The critical factor in describing this, what I think is clearly a utopia and clearly probably is an ideal limit that can't be fully accomplished in practice. But the key thing is about work. So she'll say it's really about the amount of autonomy that it provides you more than welfare or leisure or security. So she talks about fishermen. Despite the pains and the danger, they're better off than the assembly line worker because they have some degree of autonomy in what they do. So even if the assembly line worker is more comfortable and safer and so on, they're not better off than the deep sea fisherman doing a really dangerous job.

I mean, ultimately you want collective cooperative action. Instead of just obedience to your foreman or whoever your boss is, you want a society society in which the fellowship of cooperative work is kind of a basis for the way you feel about other people, for brotherly love, for friendship. This value of work becomes an overarching principle that guides the way that you organize your society.

50:25 Seth: Let me read a quote from 98. The purely negative idea of a lessening of social oppression cannot by itself provide an objective for people of goodwill. If the foregoing analyses are correct, the most fully human civilization would be that which in manual labor constituted the supreme value. It is not a question of anything comparable to the religion of production which reigned in America during the period of prosperity and has reigned in Russia since the Five Year Plan. For the true object of that religion is the product of work and not the worker material objects and not man.

It is not in relation to what it produces that manual labor must become the highest value, but in relation to the man who performs it. It must not be made the object of honors and rewards, but must constitute for each human being what he is most essentially in need of if his life is to take on of itself a meaning and a value in his own eyes. So she says in another place, something about thinking about production not in terms of output, but in the relationship of thought to action. So it's clear that, as Wes said, the notion of work is critical, but it's looking at what we produce, the effects of production on the people who produce, and not on the output of that production, which is clearly anti capitalist, but also it's unclear, at least to me, whether it's anti Marxist in some respect too.

51:43 Wes: Yeah, somehow it modifies it.

51:45 Seth: Yeah.

51:46 Wes: It's not just class relationships that are at issue with oppression for her. It's who owns the means of production and all that stuff. It's about conscious work and the opportunity to do that.

51:59 Mark: So much of this sounds like the New York discussion that we had before in terms of, yes, we should design a society that pays more attention to the psychological effect on individuals. Right. Dewey was saying the same thing, like we should have a society that actually keeps human nature and the growth of humans in mind rather than just what our GDP is going to be. But she has such idiosyncrasies, you know, that she ends up coming down on the side of physical labor. I think. I think as a reaction to this, what I was calling the futility of reason, of trying to get more and more abstract that.

No, actually she said labor like death. This is actually, since I knew the Roots book, that a lot of it was about labor. Later on, I kind of did a search on just that word and what she had to say about it later. And it was things like death and labor are inevitable. And so instead of trying to fight them all the time, we should just submit. But it's not, of course, submitting to the factory system or whatever. It's the fact that there's always going to be some necessity on us. We established this very firmly in our last year's episode on Weil, where you might think that there's physical necessity.

And then as soon as you get society involved, then they could somehow lessen that. But no, actually, the necessity of the physical world ends up exerting itself through other people so that other people become just as oppressive to us and in fact, even more so than the world itself. There's always going to be this need for work. So it's a matter of just how we interpret that and try to submit to that. Just as she gives this exact parallel, it's like you got to serve somebody. So instead of just straining and fighting under the yoke of necessity, you should consciously submit yourself to God's will and the fact that we're all going to die.

And so work is a third part of that, that.

53:43 Wes: Well, she uses this phrase on page 101. True labor is a conscious submission to necessity.

53:49 Mark: Yep.

53:50 Wes: This is really disappointing ending to me. Any utopia that involves manual labor, I thought that's what we were going to escape. I'm just going to be lounging by the pool and getting martinis delivered to me. I don't know what the hell's going on here. But yeah, so manual labor, not just conscious work. But. But first she'll say it's the idea of labor considered as a human value that we're embracing. But then she'll say a life spent freely among a free people and entirely taken up by hard and dangerous physical labor, which would, however, be carried out in the midst of brotherly cooperation.

And she's contrasting this with living a life of contemplation and abstraction. She talks about Goethe's Faust and the idea of becoming disgusted with the abstract search for truth and wanting this more concrete relation to the actual physical world. The kind of thing that you get with manual labor and the kind of thing that I have been trying to avoid all my life. I don't know. Do people read that the same way? The negative seeming like the rejection of.

54:54 Mark: I think she just has this Christian fatalism to her that is a little disappointing. Just like you might agree with a lot of what Thoreau says, but his own idiosyncrasies make it. Well, okay, this is not maybe the ideal that I would choose. I think she has a similar kind of self, you know, the kind of person who fasts a lot and stuff.

55:12 Wes: Well, Thoreau didn't choose them either. He was living on Emerson's couch, essentially.

55:17 Dylan: Well, there's this kind of tension between how she describes freedom as being thought in action. And then she'll have like at the end. Another example is we cannot command nature except by obeying her. This is a quote. This simple pronouncement ought to form by itself the Bible of our times. It suffices to find true labor, the kind of which forms free men. And that to the very extent to which is an act of conscious submission to necessity. So I come away feeling that there is a kind of unresolved tension about the way in which we deal with the boundaries and necessities, that there's this free action. But when she Goes this direction. Well, I guess this is why I was thinking about stoicism earlier. That the activity involves a submission to necessity, which to me just has lots of ringings of stoicism.

56:09 Wes: She'll say the most fully human civilization would be that which had manual labor as its pivot. That in which manual labor constituted the supreme value. And then she goes on to tell you directly how that would work for things like science and art and sport and then social relations. So for science, it means this focus on applicability, direct or indirect, and concreteness. And most importantly, on not just acquiring power over nature, not just going the Baconian route, but improvement of consciousness and method. So this is a really different conception of science.

And what you're trying to do is not to get the power that you might get by routinizing, making things routine, but creating methods that allow one to stay conscious in the actual work. And then she'll go on to say, art should express a happy balance between mind and body, and sport should be focused on giving the body a fluidity which will allow it to enter directly into contact with material objects. And then social relations are also to be modeled on labor. So you work in collectivities. There's a really clear connection between rules and the public interest.

And there's a kind of brotherly, like I mentioned before, feeling that's based on being a coworker. It's not the feeling I have had traditionally towards my coworkers, but that is the model for social relations in general. So that means for friendships. Right. So it's not like she's saying we should be friends with our coworkers. She's saying we should be coworkers as a model for friendship. The spirit of cowork should be a model for friendship.

57:47 Seth: I don't have anything more to add. I completely agree with what Dylan and Wes said for their closings. Still very worth reading.

57:55 Wes: Great. Really great.

57:56 Mark: I think one of my favorite quotes here, actually, I'm not sure if this is an exact quote. The sight of the unfinished task attracts the freedman as powerfully as the overseer's whip stimulates the slave. We do need other people. That's part of a context in which she's saying that we would get stimulus out of a desire to win our fellow's esteem. Again, we are social creatures, but she wants us to have maximum independence from each other. So I think even that having a ambivalence about the existence of other people is probably a pretty natural thing here.

That if we didn't have other people Our lives would be completely meaningless. We need to define what constitutes an accomplishment through a social enterprise. And not just in general with society, but with individuals that like having that winning the esteem of other people. That is one of the things that gets us moving. But ultimately we should be. It's our own mind, it's not somebody else's standards. It's only insofar as they can explain the standard to us and we internalize it. What counts as an unfinished task for us? What ultimately is going to make something meaningful?

Yes, we get it from a social environment. We rely on a social environment for constant interaction. But it has to be something that is internalized, that is your own, and that's what makes it free.

59:06 Wes: It's the sight of the underwear on the floor that makes you pick it up, not your spouse berating you for leaving it on the floor. That's the unfinished task that calls out to you in an ideal society. It just happens.

59:21 Mark: Well, thanks guys for finishing this up with us. I'm much more satisfied. Do we feel like we have a. I still feel like it's an entirely positive picture. I still would have liked if she had an appendix to this, where it was more like. She describes somebody in a narrative way, looking from. Oh, there's a group of workers working together. And here's a. I would have liked to actually have the picture described. Maybe that's somebody else's task.

59:45 Wes: You want a manual so that you can operationalize all of this without having to think about it.

59:51 Mark: I just want to put myself on autopilot once I internalize.

59:54 Wes: Exactly.

59:56 Mark: I just think it'd be fun to have to have the visual representation and how this would actually work, because I just think people would be bickering a lot. I think that, you know. But maybe that's okay.

1:00:06 Seth: Yeah, this feels like. Maybe there's like a kibbutz or a commune kind of thing lurking behind this. Which small collectivities where there's a constant sharing of tasks and things like that. And it's like anti scalability.

1:00:19 Wes: And nothing ever goes wrong.

1:00:21 Seth: No, nothing ever goes wrong. There's never any kind of obstacle that they have to overcome. No necessity or chance that borders and hinders them in.

1:00:31 Wes: It's just all drum circles and drum

1:00:35 Seth: circles and fish fries.

1:00:38 Mark: Next episode is by an essay by Jurgen Habermas called Speech Acts Linguistically Mediated Interactions and the Life World from 1998, which sums up his whole project of communicative ethics. And for you supporters, just so you know, this will be cut into two pieces, as will probably all of the episodes going forward, but they will still be ad free. They will still be released at the same time. This is just to make things easier for people who are newly signing up and only want to hear Part two to so you don't have to figure out where in the middle of the file to go.

Today's closing song is Libreville from Bill Bruford's Earthworks. I interviewed Bill for Nakedly Examined Music episode 25, so you can hear that@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com and just to comment about the closing songs, this may be the last of them starting next episode. Our plan is to make the Part two episode restricted to Partially Examined Life supporters. And since the point of these closing songs is to publicize the Nakedly Examined Music episode and many less people will be hearing Part two of the Partially Examined Life episode, the practice no longer makes a great deal of sense.

Good night everybody.

1:01:41 Seth: Thanks.

1:01:59 Mark: Sam.

1:02:24 Wes: Ram. Sa. It.