In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant crafts an elegant solution to the free will problem that divorces rational will from the apparently deterministic framework of reality. By distinguishing between objective reality and its appearances, Kant proposes a dual membership status that shares rational beings between the realm of objects in themselves (i.e. the noumenal realm) and that of objects as they appear (i.e. the phenomenal realm.)

Part of his goal in this division is to find a way to free the will from any notion of extrinsic causation that would relegate it to the position of mere effect. It is vital for him to prove that the will contains its own principle of causation in order to salvage the individual agent’s responsibility for her actions, which he obviously views as a prerequisite for the existence of morality.

I will explain how Kant presents his case for the authority of moral law over human beings through his appeal that all rational beings have autonomous will. I will then show how this necessitates his noumenal–phenomenal distinction. Finally, I will argue why Kant’s proposal fails to solve the free will problem and put forward one possible human implication of his moral universe.

The Kantian Proposal

Kant holds that the will must be autonomous because it is the principle of causation for rational beings. If its actions were only the effects of the laws of nature, then it could not be considered free. A will requires autonomy to be free—it cannot be subject in any way to laws that exist outside of it.

That is not to say, however, that it must not be subject to any laws at all. Quite the opposite, in fact, as a will that is not subject to laws is therefore incapable of participating in causality, neither subject to it as an effect nor as the cause of any effects. This would be absurd, as the will itself is a cause and would be no will at all were it not able to bring about any effects. Instead, Kant claims, the will must be autonomous—it must contain its own causal principle, which it gives to itself. Since the moral law has already been shown through the categorical imperative to be an end in and of itself, Kant concludes that the free will is analytically connected to the moral law, going as far as to say, “a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same” (4:447).

Because Kant has shown that moral law governs the free will, then if we have free will, moral law must govern us. Kant adds that, insofar as we are rational, we act “under the idea of freedom” (4:448), so that when we perform rational acts, we say that we chose this act, or that we could have chosen that other if we had wanted to will it. Because our rational choices presuppose freedom, we see ourselves as being governed by the laws of freedom, and the laws of freedom are the moral laws. As rational beings, then, we should see our free choices as being governed by moral law.

The Veneer of Appearances

For Kant, the concept of morality necessarily follows from the idea of the free will, insofar as the will is free if and only if it operates under the moral laws that it gives to itself. This would be a circular argument, were it not for Kant’s shift to a discussion on his two-aspect conception of the world: the noumenal realm, which is the way we can think of the world as it is in itself, and the phenomenal realm, which is the way we can think of the world as it appears to us.

Through our senses, we participate in the phenomenal realm where we are passive recipients of the world’s appearances. But we are capable, through reason, of considering the world apart from its appearances, which allows us to think of it as noumenal. A very important point regarding this noumenal perspective, however: though such a perspective may give us for recognizing the existence of a noumenal realm, there is still no way for us to know anything about it, that is, we have no faculties through which we can things in themselves apart from their appearances—it is not a part of our knowable world.

One’s dual membership to both perspectives allows the rational being to regard himself from either so that he can “cognize laws for the use of his powers and consequently for all of his actions” (4:452). When we consider ourselves noumenally, we can think of ourselves operating under the autonomous laws of reason—in other words, we can understand ourselves as the free authors of our own choices, insofar as we are rational beings. When we view ourselves phenomenally, however, we see ourselves operating heteronomously, subject to the natural laws of cause and effect that govern the sensible realm—from this perspective, we are determined.

Understanding what it means for something to be a thing in itself as opposed to its appearances, Kant gives primacy to the noumenal realm, stating, “the world of understanding contains the ground of the world of sense and so too its laws” (4:453).

If there were no phenomenal realm and we were exclusively rational, then moral law would command our actions as a natural law, as the moral law governs our rational will. However, in the phenomenal realm, the moral law takes the form of an “ought” statement, obligating us to act from reason, but it is a practical impossibility to entirely avoid the irrational needs and that come into play in this realm.

This is Kant’s solution to the problem of free will: that when we act apart from the moral laws we’ve given to ourselves insofar as we are rational agents, we act heteronomously in accord with the principle of causality that governs the phenomenal realm. through the external causation of the sensible realm. But when we act in accordance with our moral laws, we act autonomously, through our own free will.

The Irrelevance of Kantian Freedom

Though it is a convincing argument for free will amid the existence of causation, it is a somewhat disturbing conclusion. If our only hope of freedom exists in the noumenal realm, and exists in our reason, which is itself governed by the so-called laws of freedom through which we universally command for ourselves the same laws, then our freedom only exists in what we ought to do, which itself is what we actually do in the noumenal realm.  So whenever we choose to perform some action other than that which we ought to perform, we are in fact not free but are imprisoned in the causality of the phenomenological realm, the realm of choices as they appear (i.e. not choices.) Either we do as the noumenal realm commands or we do what the phenomenal world orders, trapped in a prison with two cells and an open cell gate between them—and we are supposed to somehow feel comforted by the fact that one of the cells was a cell that we built for ourselves?

Kant claims that the moral law is what we will for ourselves, so that our autonomy is at the heart of our freedom. But he partitions the self into its determined and rational iterations, which leaves our noumenal reason void not merely of appearances, but of that which resembles the whole individual. He has given very good reasons for us to believe in free will, but at the cost of the individual—not merely the individual as a rational being, but as a human being.

Even if we accept Kant’s epistemic framework, we may still regard ourselves as co-mingled beings, beings that are whole only when considered both in terms of our appearances and our reason. We should be no less satisfied to have our noumena freed from our phenomena than if our heads were freed from our torsos. To say there is a faculty of the human mind that is free while the rest of her mind is determined is to make a proposition of no practical consequence to the individual as taken whole.

Furthermore, by introducing the two-point perspective, Kant has assigned freedom to our reason and determinism to our appearances, but he does not go into any satisfactory explanation of why exactly our motivation from reason sometimes or always fails to will moral law in the phenomenal realm. Without an adequate explanation, one is left with a gap between the noumenal and phenomenal perspectives of self, with one absolutely determined and the other absolutely free, but no sense of to what extent which principle is at play or where the choice resides as to whether to act from reason or else from inclination.

In the end, one must wonder what good Kant’s solution to the free will problem is when it steals from us our sense of empirical identity, dismissing such caused desires as mere appearances and then taking that which we can’t see and subjugating it to a rational prison of our own construction.

The Groundwork seems laced throughout with the faulty notion that once individuals understand every desire, inclination or need they have is determined; that they might somehow no longer find such attachments palatable in the face of free moral law. When the laws of freedom are only those laws that we would follow when we act from reason, and when more often than not we seem to understand ourselves as existing apart from such freedom, perhaps there is more to be said for what brings value to the human experience than what is merely free or rational.

“Wishful thinking is theoretically irrational, but it may be practically rational.”
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons

I’m questioning the extent to which truth has relevance for human beings.

Our cognitive framework is such that every object must first be distilled through our subjective faculties in order for us to recognize or understand it. With this in mind, it’s easy to see the fundamental nature of truth for human beings—that is, truth is only that fiction which we hold dearest. If truth is necessarily objective, and if there exists in the world some object of this kind, then it is immediately and by definition tainted and thus made false by our senses through which we can only subjectively perceive and make sense of it.

Hume already showed how the science we hold as truth itself is just another article of faith. We can’t prove causation from reason, only unscientific experience. The scientific method, and all science derived from it, then, rests on an assumption of a first principle of causality that we have never and could never prove. Hume’s conclusion? Our entire understanding of everything—science, reality, perception—is fundamentally one rooted in faith. Quantum mechanics has, as of late, to some extent affirmed his claims, and what scientists in that field have been finding completely undermines the history of science that atheists and freethinkers hold so dearly as undeniable truth.

Our personal and scientific considerations of objects alone as true are constantly being thrown out and revised. Depending on how strict a definition you affix to it, these objects either do not exist, or our approximations of them must be treated as false (if only because they are not “completely” true, and something that is true is necessarily completely true.) It should be trivially obvious how the foundational technique for acquiring scientific knowledge (i.e. the scientific method) is, by virtue of being an empirical technique, rooted in experiential observation. The scientific method, then, is only a hypothetical method, and not capable of touching truth. We must accept its resulting science only as a “strongly held theory,” which is exactly the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of faith.

Knowing “something close to the truth” is no less knowing a falsehood than knowing something further from it. Science exists on an assumption of proximal truth. The “closer” truths of the scientist, then, are not truths at all, but only more arrogant falsehoods than the man who accepts faith as the fundamental principle of his understanding, because–unlike the man of faith—-the scientist refuses to accept his so-called truths as articles of faith founded on the unproven precept that subjective perception is equivalent to objective reality.

I’m not suggesting people deny their most strongly held beliefs just because they aren’t outright provable. Instead, I’m arguing for the recognition that our epistemic framework seems to deny us true knowledge. In this light, we should accept all knowledge for what it really is: strongly held belief.

This liberates us from the often disturbing realities that would have us accept materialistic, deterministic likelihoods that would lead us down the path of fatalistic philosophies such as nihilism. By recognizing the truth is utterly out of reach, we are free to adapt for ourselves those conjectural false-truths which may not be true at all but seem to make us strive toward improvement in their practical delusions.

The true spectacle of Mozart’s Don Giovanni exists not in the anti-hero’s sexual transgressions, but in the audience’s delight and subsequent moralizing therein. Da Ponte’s libretto was billed as dramma giocoso—a genre of opera that mixes elements of comedy and drama; but Mozart catalogued it as opera buffa—possibly with the understanding that its moral lesson fails to teach. Instead, the opera strikes at the very core of what it means to be what Kierkegaard called an aesthete.

The aesthete is one who holds aesthetic considerations above all others in his moral decisions, and it is the only other choice available to human beings who think themselves unfulfilled by the ethical life. Don Giovanni, for Kierkegaard, is the idealized, exaggerated aesthete, an archetype whose life is directed not by God or moral consideration, but by what is interesting.

I laugh throughout the exhibition as the libertine Don Giovanni philanders and upsets the social order, so that by the point when the concluding ensemble delivers the operatic moral, “Such is the end of the evildoer: the death of a sinner always reflects his life,” I can only consider it as platitude. The Don, it turns out, seduces the audience, too, with each potential conquest. We become conquered bystanders in his parade of charms—one might imagine the countless innocents who turned to stone not from Medusa’s malice but by the very nature of what it means to witness such tantalizing treachery.

The wiles of the aesthete can be too much even for the hopelessly sublime ethicist. In his essay, “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic,” Kierkegaard describes the trance Don Giovanni has put him under, referring to himself a “young girl in love with Mozart,” lauding the composer:

“Immortal Mozart! You, to whom I owe everything, to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that overwhelmed my soul, the fear that gripped my inmost being; you, who are the reason I did not go through life without there being something that could make me tremble; you, whom I thank for the fact that I shall not have died without having loved, even though my love was unhappy.”

The newly debauched audience members are the actual manifests of the performance: we see ourselves in young Zerlina, not fully conscious of the transformation that is occurring within, wooed away from honesty and too embarrassed by moral defeat to admit what latent thing has been lured to the surface by the aesthete’s temptation. So we join her in castigating Don Giovanni, we put our sins in him, knowing that the aesthete (by nature of his disposition) is too brash to relieve himself of the credit of making us fools. But he did not make us anything—he serves only as the catalyst for our already in-dwelling foolishness.

If Don Giovanni is our Judas, he is equally our Christ: he saves us from sin by carrying the burden of our seduction. For there is no doubt that the Don is guilty of seducing, but we are each just as guilty for having been seduced. The reaction formation that occurs within the guilty mind is strong enough to chase him through the streets of Spain and will for itself a sense of moral superiority in the wake of his damnation.

I, as unwitting actor in the Don’s performance, refuse to accept his fate until he is literally dragged to Hell. Though what he inspires in others and in me makes me hate him, it ironically makes me love him, too. Even as his victims sing happily of their absolute vengeance, I look at their sad moralizing and lament for their world, which has just become so uninteresting the opera knows better than to continue. I am left empty and wanting for more of the unrefined aesthetic the Don brought us.

I become the actual manifest of Donna Elvira, ethically fulfilled by the Don’s death, but aesthetically emptied. I count myself among the moral actors of the play, because it is here that I should count myself. But the moral should denies me the excitement of that shameless, momentary pleasure embodied so perfectly in the Don, whom I’ve banished from my existence. I have doomed the pleasures of the aesthete, but I am now myself doomed to long for him, because I know it is the aesthete (and not the ethicist) who makes my life interesting, and so worth living.

When Donna Elvira’s betrothed Don Ottavio—that bastion of moral justice—asks her again for her commitment to him (and through him, the ethical life,) she is still unable to commit, even with the understanding that she has left herself no other choice. She sees in Ottavio what we see in ethics, no matter how much we are embarrassed to admit: it is, though morally fulfilling, still dull, still boring, still too judgmental for us to ever truly feel ourselves in it the way we felt in the insolent arms of aesthetic.

This desperate dichotomy—performed in Mozart’s opera, but still lived by its audience—is the tragic comedy of human existence. The final joke, then, is not on the Don, but on us his audience, those still stuck with the despair of the question of how we are to live long after the curtains are shuttered. In the dramma giocoso Kierkegaard calls the human condition, tragedy belongs to us, and our tragedy is the Don’s comedy, for though he had died, he is also the only one who ever chose to really live.

Good as a virtue has no intrinsic value, but it is given value in the context of groups.

Morality is derivative of collaboration and socialization. The potential for good (and evil) are concomitantly increased as civilization advances. That’s to say, when I’m alone, I can only help or harm myself; but when I’m with two people, three people… the more people I have access to, the greater potential there is for good and evil, and both rise in equivalent proportion.

One might that say we, being social creatures, are pre-disposed to find moral value and worth in things, but the value of those things is assigned to them by us, not necessarily contained in them. If this is the case, though, then the question becomes, what makes us want to do things that we or others might later value as good or evil? I’d say that comes down to empathy.

The way I define empathy is the ratio to which you are equivalent to a person — this is multi-factorial, and some of the factors I’ve explored (though I’m sure there are more) include physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual and cultural empathy. The whole existence of society is a multitude of frenetic circles of empathy, the solid center of each of these circles being a sole point, the individual, in whom empathy reaches its maximum potential.

When my body is at its physical closest to another person’s body, we are experiencing a heightened state of physical empathy. When I reach an epiphany through collaboration with a partner or group, we have maximized our intellectual empathy.

When I can understand that different cultures have different ways of respecting and admiring life, reaching past the superficiality of our rituals and practices and down to the fundamental likeness in our purposes for those practices, I have reached an enlightened state of cultural empathy. In each of these examples, I have widened a respective circle of empathy to include another, in my personal space (physical), in my thoughts (intellectual), or in my principles (cultural).

The opposite of empathy, of course, is apathy. And apathy, as it shrinks, comes to a point wherein one is not only unable to understand others, but by their very lack in exercising the understanding, soon become no longer able to empathize with themselves. And if empathy is as I said it was above, the ratio to which you are equivalent to a person, then a person void of empathy (i.e. an apathetic person) cannot understand even their own equivalence, and this leads to dissonance and confusion, feelings of disorientation and self-neglect.

If we wish to be more good, we need to learn how to have ever-expanding circles of empathy, maximizing the quality of our relations to others and simultaneously with that the quantity of relations we’re involved in. When we know another thing as singularly as we do ourselves, we act as much for its benefit as we would for our own.

At that point, there is no distinction left between self-interest and self-sacrifice. This is the goal of goodness.

There’s something about things walking into bars that’s usually cause for raucous hysterics. Whoever it is — a priest, a black guy, a blonde, etc. — the moment that mnemonic quip sounds, face muscles relax in ready anticipation for the punch line. But nobody laughs when a transvestite walks into a bar — not really, anyway. Tense patrons shift troubled in their stools, unsure of what to say or where to look. The punch line could never follow a transvestite; they violate the joke by wearing the punch line. The shock of the façade leaves little room for wit and we sit around the table in silence, smiling uncomfortably at one another under the pretense of tolerance.

British comedian and open transvestite Eddie Izzard calls this perpetual public unease “the baggage you have to deal with” as a transgendered individual. Indeed, when a cross-dressed comedian walks into a bar, mascara even makes for menace. Six men who couldn’t handle the ornament once assaulted Izzard during a comedy tour in England. Despite the public discomfort, Izzard asserts that transgenderism is here to stay: “It doesn’t go away” (Garfield).

It’s this very permanence of gender traversal that makes many so squeamish. It is the problem can’t be ignored and won’t go away. Gender is defined in modern parlance as the bipolarity of the male and female (often in terms of expression: masculinity versus femininity,) and it is usually contrasted with the biological distinctions of sex (i.e. man and woman.) Transgenderism weaves somewhere between and therefore threatens this trusted model of essential being. It “turns [gender] into a fancy-dress party, into a performance — into a spectacle” (204), as queer theorist Fabio Cleto asserts in his Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject.

But what if the punch line isn’t the transvestite walking into the bar? What if, instead, the punch line is the bar itself? If it turns out that gender actually is a fancy-dress party, then the squeamish ones become stiffs, too — uncomfortable ninnies embarrassed by the liberated ones who subvert rules that have no reality beyond the spit-in-hand social bargains that are sacred only because they say so. The solution to this sanctity is necessarily profane: we must fuck gender.

In her essay, “From Interiority to Gender Performatives”, Judith Butler puts forward the possibility that gender as a whole is a social construction and is therefore not tethered to one’s biology. She further posits that, if gender is not something that comes from within but is instead imposed on the body from without, then one’s acknowledgment of gender is more act than being, more stagecraft than reality. It is the “decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body [that] institutes the ‘integrity’ of the subject” (362).

More than this, though, it is the subject’s willingness to participate that determines the integrity of the entire institution of gender. Butler sees the stage of bodies as a panoptic prison in which individuals become gendered through the parts they’re told to play. This “prohibitive law” of gender distinction is what dictates the “fantasied and fantastic figuration of the body” (362). The tongue-in-cheek transgenderism of genderfuck “fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity” (363).

The feasibility of gender depends on the sexes’ cooperation with its distinctions. Men are supposed to be masculine, women are supposed to be feminine. There is an array of act, gesture and decoration involved in the assertion of these distinctions. Of course, some may contend that certain appropriations by one sex of minor artifacts from the other’s prescribed gender are celebrated, such as when real men wear pink, or every strong businesswoman has a power suit. Still, even these doctrines of seeming non-conformity, which allow some to feel like pioneers, were first agreed on by society only after they became habituated and absorbed into its rigid framework. Real men never wore pink until dandy men had worn it long enough that they could feel comfortable with it.

It is the transgendered individual alone who either fondles or outright fucks the established cultural norms. These are the balls of genderfuck that, as June L. Reich explains in her “Genderfuck: The Law of the Dildo” essay, structure the symbols of gender into performance as it “crosses through sex and gender and destabilizes the boundaries of our recognition” (255).

Izzard is a man who describes himself as alternately having “blokey” days and others when he wears “more makeup than anyone’s ever worn in the history of makeup.” He eschews the notion of picking sides, proclaiming, “if I don’t wear make-up for five years, then it’s my fucking life, and I have the freedom to do what I want” (Garfield).

It is this claim to gender permeability that distinguishes the Jill-today–John-tomorrow genderfuck of folks like Izzard from the very serious transsexuals who are just as guilty as anybody else of accepting as real the artifice of gender. Whereas Izzard comfortably sways from binary to binary and treads the bewildering middle, transsexuals experience a doubly dissonant cognition: first, that their gender doesn’t match their sex; second, and more importantly to this discussion, that it should. This idea of normative gender “works to stabilize the old sex/gender system by insisting the dominant correspondence between gendered desire and biological sex” (260), according to Reich.

Genderfuck can be seen as a sort of mimicry that fails to convince, and it does so spectacularly, or it can be seen as a mimicry that succeeds in revealing. Reich takes such mimicry to assert “both the presence and absence of a construction,” a performance that succeeds in its very failure and unmasks “the psychoanalytic constructions of feminine and masculine sexuality” (262).

Izzard on stage is either a beautiful man or a handsome woman but he’s also not quite either or else he’s something more. “I’m a straight transvestite or male lesbian,” he explains. “If I had to describe how I feel in my head, I’d say I’m a complete boy plus half a girl” (Rampton). Instead of seeing gender as it is classically constructed, a sort of mold into which human essence is poured to construct an individual, Izzard chooses to see himself as the mold itself; the whole mishmash of man and woman and masculine and feminine are ingredients that he can measure out for himself as he pleases depending on mood, on how handsome or sexy he wants to make himself. Izzard, unlike conservative transsexuals and transvestites, does not merely co-opt the Other for his use — he takes the Whole Damned Thing (i.e. gender itself) and spits out whatever he doesn’t want to use.

Culture tends to be gauche and uneasy in its own skin. Tight-lipped and tiptoeing on threat of tolerance, our wills are weak with concern; we’ve learned to fake rage for the sake of “what’s right,” each offended for the other at any mere mention of our differences. But this tolerance so-called condemns us to deny diversity for the greater good. It encourages homogeneity through the sacralization of distinctions that we should instead be celebrating with all the bacchanal profanity of an all-night kegger.

This, no doubt, is the sentiment expressed by Philip Core when he calls the breezy disavowal of gender through re-appropriation a “lie that tells the truth” (80) and the purveyors of this lie “heroes”:

Indefinable, unshakeable, it is the heroism of people not called upon to be heroes. It will find new ways to react both with and against public tastes, it will selfishly and selflessly shriek on, entertaining the self and the spectator in one mad gesture, oblivious of what it is required to do. (86)

Indeed, when Izzard came on stage during his Sexie tour, he was wearing a corset that accentuated a surprisingly ample bosom. Amid a throng of cheers and gasps, the comedian simply shrugged and said, “Well, I’d better explain the tits.”

Much of what Susan Sontag attributes to the concept of camp in her essay, “Notes on ‘Camp’”, could just as easily be attributed to Izzard’s unique genderfuck. Whereas Sontag describes camp as a simultaneously irreverent and respectful appreciation of “spectacular failures” in art and culture, Izzard in his own way supersedes failure by creating his own concept of success. He may be a failure in the eyes of some who can’t handle his penchant for dress or how good his legs look in a skirt, but what does this sort of failure matter when he doesn’t respect the opinions of those who’ve made the judgment? Sontag’s assertion on camp’s embrace of the radical applies no less to individuals like Izzard, who turn their backs “on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment” not to “reverse things” or “argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good, but “to offer for art (and life) a different — a supplementary — set of standards” (61).

This is what Simon Garfield intends when he mentions from his interview with Izzard that the comedian “is not a drag artist; he does not wear women’s clothes for stage effect or laughs; he likes to dispute that they are women’s clothes at all, just clothes that make him feel sexy or good.”

The tragedy of gender as arbitrary gives is an eternal well of comedy in itself, especially when we consider our prolonged dis-ease with ours and others’ relation to it. Just like the bar in the transvestite joke, the punch line supersedes the whole situation, and we realize that the entire ontology is a set-up. Butler suggests that the loss of a norm “can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when ‘the normal’, ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one … in this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived” (365).

Izzard discusses gender in his comedy routines with the light touch of a gentle mistress, as it is suggested by proponents of camp to ensure the joke is “funny, but not ludicrous; funny, but not ridiculous” (Cleto 206). The joke takes on a moral quality and laughter becomes its contract. In it, we reflect on the lie and truth of gender and the bar joke becomes one wherein we laugh at ourselves.

There is a well-known concept played out in a comedic double act called the “straight man”. The straight man is the character in the pair who plays the stooge or comic foil. He is not funny and is always shocked and surprised by the actions of his partner. The audience recognizes him as the brunt of the joke, partially because he really is the object of the joke, but even more because he is completely oblivious that he is the fool. In a world concomitantly containing the opposed notions of the interiority of gender and disavowal of gender, perhaps transgenderism makes us the straight men. The other half of the couple, the Eddie Izzards of the world — the “funny men” as they are coined in such paired comedy acts — are here to show us by making light of what we take seriously that we are the real punch line.

In this self-aware masquerade, the transvestite who walks into the bar is revealed amid a squirming and shifting crowd, ironically, to be the only one comfortable in his own skin.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. “From Interiority to Gender Performatives.” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 96-109. Print.

Cleto, Fabio. Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. P., 1999. Print.

Core, Philip. “Camp: The Lie That Tells The Truth.” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 80-87. Print.

Dress to Kill. By Eddie Izzard. Dir. Lawrence Jordan. Perf. Eddie Izzard. Vision Video, 1998. Videocassette.

Garfield, Simon. “Frock tactics.” The Observer. Guardian.co.uk, 27 May 2001. Web. 01 May 2011.

Rampton, James. “Eddie Izzard Is Tougher Than You Think.” London After Midnight. LAM Online, 16 June 2004. Web. 1 May 2011.

Reich, June L. “Genderfuck: The Law of the Dildo.” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 254-265. Print.

Sexie. By Eddie Izzard. Dir. Declan Lowney. Perf. Eddie Izzard. Universal Pictures, 2003. DVD.

Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 53-65. Print.

At age 37, Muslim philosopher and jurist Abu Hamid al-Ghazali fell into a heavy spiritual crisis, one that caused him to abruptly abandon his well-respected position as the head of the Nizamayah College in Baghdad and roam the regions of Syria and Palestine seeking revelation. After spending years in Jerusalem and Damascus, as well as making Hajj to Mecca, he returned to his hometown of Tus, where it was discovered that he had disposed his wealth, renounced philosophy, and now totally embraced the humble life of a poor Sufi mystic (Hozien).

Why the sudden change? After years of close analysis of the philosophical arguments of his day, Al-Ghazali was exhausted with the many refutations and few answers at which he’d arrived. He had realized, according to his autobiography, the inefficacy of reason as a method of attaining Truth. Though the Muslim thinker has since been hailed as one of the greatest philosophers in Islamic history, Al-Ghazali spent the years after his revelation arguing against philosophy and theology, asserting their vast inferiority to mystical experience. Indeed, many attribute the soon-following decline of Islamic philosophy to the logical precision of his devastating attacks on the philosophers of his time (Hozien).

Fascinating as the account of Al-Ghazali’s revelation and subsequent transformation may be, its storied struggle between faith and reason is not a novel friction, and nowhere does it play out so poetically (and paradoxically) as in Sufism. Part of what makes Sufism such a particularly compelling faith to study with respect to reason is its mystical core. Mysticism is a passive act, a contemplative submission to the divine and its correlated Truth through existential revelation, while philosophy is unabashedly active, seeking out and attempting to control Truth, often coming across ideas that seem to entirely disavow spirituality along the way (e.g. physicalism, materialism, etc.)

But are reason and revelation actually mutually exclusive? I propose instead that those actually driven by faith, like Al-Ghazali in the above anecdote, use the vehicle of reason to get only as far as they were ever willing to go. While some delight in reason for its own sake, others exhaust it as an agent in their pursuit of esoteric knowledge. The practice of reason, however, exists not in the answers sought but in the domain of questions. The only way to stop this frustrating flux of questions, of course, is to submit to an answer. Philosophers are builders of knowledge, not because they’re interested in the final product of their efforts, but because they enjoy building for its own sake. The disavowal of reason is predicated on the teleology of the denouncer: one cannot make that necessary “leap of faith” without first building a bridge from which to jump.

Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi certainly contended between reason and spirit in his life. While it is clear that he was acquainted with the Islamic discussions regarding Greek philosophy that were rife in his time (Lewis 400), the popular mystic made many efforts to ensure that his readers recognized the superiority of spirited revelation over philosophical reason. Still, it is safe to say that reason’s place in revelation was not that of the diametric opposition he often claimed in his poetry. Indeed, Rumi was well educated as a child. He knew several languages (including Greek) and was versed in Platonic philosophy either directly or indirectly through the Neoplatonist teachings of such prominent Sufi intellectuals as al-Farabi and Ibn Sina; whichever the cause, Plato resonates beautifully throughout Rumi’s poetry.

Rumi’s poetry lends meter and verse to Plato, supplanting his careful reason with the sensitivity and expression of revelation. Even when Rumi shows his ambivalence to the limits of reason, he does so with great nuance, as frequently hinted in his epic Masnavi. There, he recognizes the mystic’s use for reason in achieving the aforementioned jumping-off point into existential revelation, as when he exclaims, “Far-sighted reason — I have tested it. Henceforth I’ll make myself demented!”  (M2:2332, Lewis 400). One might see how this statement suggests Rumi’s acknowledgment of reason’s place in his own quest for divine purpose. Could he have gone mad without the questioning?

Though the extent of Greek philosophical works available to Muslims around Rumi’s lifetime was limited compared to what is available today, all serious philosophical work during that period was happening in Islam as it flourished during its Golden Age (Esposito 271). Scholars disagree on exactly which of Plato’s dialogues were popularly available throughout Arabia by Rumi’s lifetime, but it is generally accepted that the Timaeus, Sophist and Laws, as well as at least parts of the Symposium, Phaedo and Republic, were in relatively wide circulation (D’Ancona).

(There were also many Neoplatonist influences in the time period, which mixed Aristotelian, Protagorean and Platonic ideas into a religious framework, and they also probably brought other Platonic concepts into Islamic philosophy not largely discussed in the above listed dialogues. For the purposes of this essay, I am only going to be focusing on those of Plato’s writings that were directly translated.)

Sufism greatly benefited from the increasing acceptance of philosophy in Islam during its Golden Age. Just as al-Ghazali did much to improve Sufism’s legitimacy in the Islamic world by arguing philosophically and theologically for the origin of its concepts in the Qur’an (Hozien), so too did Rumi continue the elucidation of Sufi beliefs through his deeply intellectual poetry. The myriad ways in which Plato can be seen as having influenced and developed Sufi doctrine also show a Plato venerated through the transfiguration of reason into revelation. In the poetry of Rumi, we can see God as the deified model of Plato’s Form of the Good. In the pair’s respective writings, many similar constructions are explored: Truth as Being itself and as the object to which man should direct his efforts; the illusory and prison-like status of our sensory perceptions and our inability to ultimately apprehend Being through them; and finally the suggestion of death as liberation from this prison of perceptions. These are just a few of the comparisons through which the influence the Philosopher has on the Mystic become apparent.

Like Plato before him, Rumi often described the differences between the world of perceptible things — called Becoming — and the eternal, unchanging world of Being. Rumi makes Plato’s two-world doctrine more accessible by anthropomorphizing Being itself, as when he states, “The visible universe has many weathers and variations. But … the universe of the creation-word, the divine command to Be, that universe of qualities is beyond any pointing to.” But Rumi brings the often-elliptic metaphysics of Plato to its revelatory conclusion in the next line of the poem, noting that such a reality must be “more intelligent than intellect, and more spiritual than spirit.” (Barks 178-179) This subtle twist on the philosophical distinction gives Being ruh (Arabic for “spirit”) and audaciously animates it in a way the cautious philosopher could never consider.

Plato ponders in several of his dialogues the many distinctions between the false and the true that comprise reality. In the Timaeus, Plato describes the perceptible world in terms that render it — and knowledge of it — illusory, as when he asserts, “what being is to becoming so is truth to belief” (1235, 29c3-4). His precedent is amplified in Rumi’s condemnation, “Partial reason gives reason a bad name” (M5:463). Within Plato, as within Rumi, is the rejection of all understanding derived from perception (i.e. the world of becoming) as merely belief versus the true knowledge of Being. Plato gives us further reason to expect his and Rumi’s agreement regarding this analogical link between epistemology and ontology in the following excerpt:

What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes but never is? The former is grasped by understanding, which involves a reasoned account. It is unchanging. The latter is grasped by opinion, which involves unreasoning sense perception. It comes to be and passes away, but never really is. (Emphasis added, Timaeus 1234, 27d5–28a6)

From their shared proposal on the mendacity of change, both Plato and Rumi draw from this the overwhelming extent of our corporeal limitations. For Plato, the chance is put forward in his Phaedo that the body is “an obstacle when one associates with it in the search for knowledge,” whereas “the soul reasons best when none of these senses troubles it, neither hearing nor sight, nor pain nor pleasure, but when it is most by itself, taking leave of the body and as far as possible having no contact or association with it in its search for reality” (65c5-8, 57). One can re-imagine the body as a prison of the soul, our true Being chained up inside. Our eyes, ears, nostrils and mouth become the tiny windows through which we gain a keyhole perspective of reality.

At least, this is how Rumi envisages it. Using Platonic imagery as a jumping-off point, he condemns bodily knowledge, “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being” (emphasis added, Barks 30-31).

For Plato, the body as prison is a mainstay of his dialogues on Being, regarding this perceptible realm of the many as distractive from the real Truth, arguing that “as long as we have a body … we shall never adequately attain what we desire, which we affirm to be the truth. The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways [and] fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense.” In fact, Plato explains, “it is the body … to which we are enslaved” (Phaedo 65e6–66d1, 57). Likewise in the Phaedo’s climax, we find Socrates awaiting execution, consoling friends shocked by his peacefulness in the face of imminent death. But death, Socrates reassures his friends, is merely the “freedom and separation of the soul from the [bonds of the] body” (67d4-5, 58). Death as liberation is an important notion in Rumi’s Sufism, echoing the Socratic solace in a return to the Real:

My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there. This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile, I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary. The day is coming when I fly off, but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice? Who says words with my mouth? Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. (28-30)

While the body as a metaphor for sense-imprisonment is an important philosophical contribution to Sufi understandings of the fleeting nature of perceptible reality, an arguably more impacting parallel between Plato and Rumi can be found in the philosopher’s Theory of the Forms. In his Republic, for example, Plato uses the metaphor of the Sun to describe the highest of his eternal, changeless Forms — that of the Good — which “gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower.” Just as the Sun illuminates both the seeable and seeing itself, so too can the Good be considered the cause and object of knowledge and truth. For this same reason, he warns us not to confuse the many things that depend on the Good’s illumination for the Good itself and instructs us instead to concentrate on the Good (Republic VI, 1129, 508e1–509b).

It is worth noting that Rumi uses the same metaphor in the same respect when explaining, in Book 4 of the Masnavi, the falseness of language opposed to the many things’ true unity in Being: “I speak of plural souls in name alone — One soul becomes one hundred in their frames; just as God’s single sun in heaven shines on earth and lights a hundred walls.” Though the Sun individuates and is the causal source of everything, it is also where they will inevitably return: “all these beams of light return to one. If you remove the walls that block the sun, the walls of houses do not stand forever and believers, then, will be as but one soul” (M4:415-18) (Lewis 416).

Rumi reconciles Islam with Plato’s Forms by reconstructing disbelief: it exists not only in the subject, as the Disbeliever is conventionally described throughout the Qur’an (3:85, 4:65, 10:84, etc.), but also in the false objects of the perceptible realm. These are quite literally the “walls” that we accept as existing whom are also Disbelievers, who separate Believers from one another until they again achieve Unity in Being. If belief is opposed to truth and associated with the perceptible realm, then the objects of perception are more than merely beliefs; for Rumi, they are deceivers. Certainly, walls and words alike deceive the Believer. Rumi quotes a fellow Sufi poet, Sana’i, when he maintains, “The blind eye feels only the heat when struck by the enlightening rays of the sun” (M3:4229-31) (Lewis 419).

Such harsh enlightenment is the same as experienced by Plato’s prisoner in his meeting with Truth, in the Republic’s Cave allegory. The prisoner, recently forced into freedom, spent his life in chains with his vision fixed straight at the wall in front of him. Having previously accepted reality as the shadows cast by figured he couldn’t see walking behind him, he is dragged out of the cave and forced into the bright, true light of the Sun for the first time in his life, explaining, “if someone compelled him to look at the light itself, wouldn’t his eyes hurt … with the sun filling his eyes, wouldn’t he be unable to see a single one of the things now said to be true?” (Republic VII 515d9-516a2, 1133)

But whereas Plato uses the Sun in his metaphor to assert that initial discovery of Truth is temporarily blinding, Rumi’s depiction of the sense-prisoner experiencing Truth is one of terminal blindness. Plato considers reason to be the domain of the willing, while Rumi’s idea of will belongs to God alone. The eminence of God’s will in Islam chooses which of Plato’s prisoners are freed from the trompe l’oeil and which are damned to disbelief. Just as some are determined to never see and will be forever blind, there are others who can seek and shall find. Those who trust in reason for its own sake take it as progressive — difficult and painful at first, but more rewarding the longer one keeps at it. For the mystic, however, the metaphor can only go so far before it meets its end in surrender to faith. While philosophy tends not to make any bones about the ultimate incomprehensibility of truth, those who cannot settle on hypotheses and cautious theoretical evaluation are bound to find refuge in revelation. Plato’s Good could only go so far in the Sufic construction of Islam’s God.

Mystics like Rumi and al-Ghazali are educated people who become exhausted with reason in pursuit of answers it could never provide. Still, that’s not to say they aren’t better for having philosophized. Philosophical practice lifts one off the quotidian ground that has numbed him from wonder, but not all men are content to forever lose their grounding. The Sufi intellectual prefers to come back to earth for the chance to finally appreciate the now-novel feeling of their feet pressed down against the soil. They use reason not for its own sake, but to get to a place that they couldn’t otherwise go. Once that is revealed, they are content to stay there in existential stupefaction and awe. Perhaps this is what Rumi is admitting to when he exclaims near the end of his poem, “Finally I know the freedom of madness” (Barks 56).

Works Cited

Al-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation. Trans. Ahmed Ali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.

Barks, Coleman. The Essential Rumi. Trans. Coleman Barks. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Print.

D’Ancona, Cristina. “Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy.” The Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Web. 13 April 2011.
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/arabic-islamic-greek/>.

Esposito, John L. The Oxford History of Islam. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

Hozien, Muhammad. Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali. March 2011. Web. 13 April 2011.
<http://www.ghazali.org/>

Lewis, Franklin D. Rumi: Past and Present, East and West. Oxford: Oneworld Pub, 2008. Print.

Plato. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. Print.

The eristic problem in Plato’s Meno argues that the search for knowledge is precluded before it can even start; either because one does not know what they’re looking for, or because they already know that thing they would look for (80e.2-5). In other words, I cannot search for some knowledge I don’t already know, because I don’t know what that knowledge looks like and if I came across it, I would not understand that it is the thing I sought. Further, if I already had this knowledge then I would have no reason to even begin searching for it.

The Meno problem, as the eristic problem is popularly known, can be pictured as a wide chasm between two fields, knowledge and ignorance, over which no bridge can be built. We are faced with a disjunction with respect to anything knowable: either we know the thing and we reside on the side of knowledge with no need to get to where we already are, or we do not know the thing and we are on the side of ignorance, unable to see across the chasm and therefore unaware of even the existence of this knowledge. Knowledge and ignorance are isolated from each other with respect to each knowable thing.

But is that really how knowledge and ignorance work? There are things that we are aware we don’t know: we call these known unknowns, the knowledge of such ignorance arising from gaps and inconsistencies between the things we already know.

In order to better understand the Meno problem, I must first explain the kinds of knowledge to which it could apply. The problem can either be considered an argument against object knowledge, propositional knowledge, or both. Object knowledge is that which one would experience when encountering an object. It can be expressed with the sentence, “I know A,” and involves the direct knowledge of an entity. Propositional knowledge is knowledge that proposes something about an object. It is what is expressed when one says, “I know that p.”

In order to have any kind of right propositional knowledge, one must already know the thing about which they are proposing something else — that is, one must have right knowledge of the object before they can be propositionally knowledgeable about it. This doesn’t mean propositional statements cannot be made without object knowledge; only that such statements are unqualified until object knowledge has been attained. One can think of object knowledge as the apex of insight, worked toward with the gradual accumulation of propositional knowledge. If viewed this way, propositional knowledge is a kind of “coloring in,” allowing us to see the whole of the object by first amassing information about its parts. The end product, a painting, verifies the precision of the colors and their positions on the canvass, and vice versa (symbiotically interrelated).

It is my assertion that Meno isn’t questioning propositional statements (which he confuses for propositional knowledge) at all; actually, he seems to thrive on them, as when he asks Socrates for his “answer to my original question … on the assumption that virtue is something teachable, or is a natural gift, or in whatever way it comes to men” (86d.1-2), forcing Socrates to, “inquire into the qualities of something the nature of which we do not yet know” (86d.6–87a.1). Certainly, Meno would not be bothered if Socrates posed his question as, “What is virtue defined as in this community, at this epoch?” Meno could then repeat from his extensive memory what the socially accepted definition of virtue is, saying, “I know that virtue is defined as…” or “Gorgias told me that virtue is…” Unqualified propositional beliefs provide Meno with his comfort zone, as he agrees emphatically with every well-respected person, be he sophist (71d.1-2), philosopher (76c.7), or poet (76d.4).

Language itself is at the heart of the problem, for one man can consider language to arise naturally from real universals, whereas another can consider language to be the abstractions of human thoughts. Some may say that words exist only out of necessity for human communication and that they do not imply the existence of universals at all. They are merely placeholders for the things they were constructed to symbolize in language. To ask what things such as “virtue” are, by this right, might seem silly and meaningless. I believe the Meno problem originates in the student’s inability to understand why Socrates needs to “create” new technical terms from socially established words. In this light, the paradox can be refined as this: the definition for a word either exists because there is already an established habit of the word’s symbolic representation for something, and thus there is no reason to cull new meanings from the word; or we have not agreed on the need to define a word, and therefore no word needs to be defined. Meno is rendered blind to intuition by his devotion to the memories of his perceptions and is therefore incapable of understanding what is being sought after in object knowledge. He either refuses or is unable to look within himself for answers, always looking to others’ popular or eloquent notions for solutions to Socrates’ questions. He cannot see within, or it can be rephrased, he has no in-sight.

For Socrates, however, it is the universals from which our words receive their definition. In asking what virtue is, Socrates is not asking what people agree the word means (a propositional statement), but he is seeking to define what he intuits as that common thread that runs through all things that have the potential to contain it, as when he says “virtue of all is the same” (73c.5). He considers the implied disavowal of object knowledge in unqualified propositional statements — in other words, the kinds of unqualified propositional statements that the paradox implicitly defends — to be deeply disturbing and evidence of lazy thinking (“…for it would make us idle, whereas my argument makes them energetic and keen on the search.” [81d.6–81e.1]). It makes no sense to ask, “can virtue be taught” (70a.1), without first asking what virtue is, for as Socrates says, “If I do not know what something is, how could I know what qualities it possesses?” (71b.1-2)

What the Meno problem questions, really, is the legitimacy of the Socratic enterprise outright, for dismissing propositional statements for their own sake as a kind of epistemological jumping-the-gun that asks questions such as “is virtue that which can be taught?” without first even considering the object (in this case, virtue) of the question. Meno relies on it throughout his arguments in the dialogue when he quotes or summates the popular and highly regarded opinions of those he is impressed with and those he wishes to impress, as shown earlier. When Socrates asks Meno what “virtue” is and refuses the various popular definitions the student gives him, the word Socrates is trying to define becomes an empty homonym to Meno. This new Socratic term may sound like the word Meno has given many adequate definitions for but it is revealed as bearing no relation beyond pronunciation. Meno consistently reverts to the comfort of his memory of propositional knowledge, and Socrates continuously concedes, such as when he offers, “to answer after the manner of Gorgias, which you would most easily follow” (76c.4-5). One can imagine the sort of exasperated sentiment Meno is considering when he proposes his paradox: What room is there left for reason when a man communicates in what sounds like your native language but claims that the meanings of the words he uses are unrelated to the ones your people have already established? Socrates may as well be babbling. For Meno, it is not so much that he cannot comprehend the things Socrates is saying, but that the things Socrates says are incomprehensible.

At this point it is necessary to reiterate my contention that propositional knowledge is not useless to the Platonic search for truth. It is through the distillation of our propositional statements that we can achieve a qualified knowledge, first of the propositions and eventually of the object itself. But there is a difference in conviction — or courage, if you will — between the person who uses propositional statements as a comfortable crutch that allows them to avoid the search for knowledge, and the one who is encouraged by the purification from their false propositions and needs no crutch to continue. Socrates is not against propositional knowledge, as evidenced when he asks Meno if he can “relax” his rule of using “assumption” so that they can attempt to find the answer through the more investigative method of “hypothesis” (86d.1–87a.1), but he sees it as only a stepping-stone toward the deeper question of object knowledge. It is, in fact, our awareness of the earlier-mentioned gaps and inconsistencies in both our propositional knowledge ­and our object knowledge which instill us with a conviction, or desire, to “fill in” those gaps as we discover them and therein discover their knowledge’s lacking in us. This is the very thing Socrates admires in the slave boy’s puzzlement when the boy says, simply, “I do not know” (84a.2-3), that necessary point in his geometrical demonstration when the boy “answered confidently as if he did know, and he did not think himself at a loss, but now he does think himself at a loss, and as he does not know, neither does he think he knows” (84a.6, 84b.1-2). It is worth noting that while it is easy to argue that the boy’s confident, false answers were more given to him by Socrates’ wording than his own insight, that this is precisely the point: usually when we give such answers, we are like Meno — himself doomed throughout the dialogue by his sophistic “habit” (82a.4) and impatient requests to ask what is the right answer (75b.1, 76a.7, 86c.6-7, 98c.3-4) — always relying not on our own intuitions but on our memories of the pretty-sounding words (76e.2-3) we have heard from others. These are the false beliefs that Socratic self-knowledge attempts to rid us of, inducing the necessary state of aporia before we are said to be ready to continue in the pursuit of actual knowledge.

It’s necessary, in this pursuit, to be divorced from all of the potentially false, habituated “knowledge” we’ve accrued through the lesser senses before we can search within ourselves for the whole, intuitive truth. If truth is whole, then it is necessarily binary, and any amount of false understanding deprives it of being truth at all. Plato creates a spectacle through Socrates’ demonstration with the slave boy that intimates his desire for each of us, leading him at first through self-affirming questions that the boy is impelled to answer incorrectly. In this, he is mirroring, first, the kind of false propositions we are in danger of accruing, like Meno — either because we are anxious to not be caught without answers when we are asked questions, or because we wish to impress our interlocutors. Once we are walked into a dead end on our previous clinginess to second-hand knowledge, we learn then to trust only our own knowledge, at once discovering our lack of it and now desiring to search for it. This is where the search for truth really begins, for Socrates. Our habituated “knowledge” becomes like baggage that we must check at the door of insight before we can go on in an honest search for Truth.

The peritropê (“table-turning”) objection in Plato’s Theaetetus is a model in which the Protagorean theory of relativism, which holds that knowledge is equal to perception, is turned against itself. Plato puts forward the peritropê with the ostensible goal of exposing Protagoras’ model as contradicting itself and therefore being self-refuting. I contend that, though the peritropê objection is ineffective in proving any contradictions in this case, it does reveal the ultimate indefensibility of such a theory.

Protagoras’ measure doctrine holds that “Man is the measure of all things: of the things which are, that they are, and of the things which are not, that they are not” (152a3-4). Socrates reformulates the position as being one in which “that as each thing appears to me, so it is for me, and as it appears to you, so it is for you” (152a8-9). The assertion that appearances are equal to being provides the basis for an epistemological framework wherein one’s perceptions are actually true with respect to the individual perceiving them (152b12, 152c5-6). The formulation is this: what seems to a is true-for-a, and what seems to b is true-for-b.

In his peritropê argument, Socrates argues that if one believes, as Protagoras does, “All persons’ beliefs are true,” but also concedes that, “There is a belief that ‘Not all persons’ beliefs are true’,” then, in accepting all persons’ beliefs are true, the belief that “Not all persons’ beliefs are true” is also necessarily true. If this belief is true, then not all persons’ beliefs are true. The argument, Socrates alleges, is self-contradicting (171a-b).

But this example, which removes all relativizing qualifiers, might be seen as a reckless remodel of the measure doctrine. For Protagoras doesn’t mean to suggest that whatever seems to each person absolutely is, but that “things are for every man what they seem to him to be” (170a4-5) — namely, whatever seems to be for each person is for-that-person. It does not follow from the above premise that Protagoras must accept as true any statement other than, “Not all persons’ beliefs are true-for-others,” which does not contradict his theory, more correctly summed up as, “Each person’s beliefs are true-for-himself.”

Still, this distinction between absolute and qualified truth is exactly where the peritropê succeeds spectacularly. The impassable chasms between absolute and qualified statements, and moreover between all respective qualified statements, make the otherwise stable measure doctrine totally unjustifiable.

Consider the theory with respect to itself amid a plurality of perceptions. If two persons can have contradicting perceptions about something, and these perceptions are so-called truths only when qualified as for so-and-so, then it must be that truths are not inside the objects of perceptions but instead in the persons perceiving the objects. To say that something is true-for-me, hinging this statement on individuating perceptions, is the same as saying I have an opinion. Indeed, this is what one means when they say something “seems to be” some way or another for them.

Once a statement leaves the person for whom it was true and becomes susceptible to the other’s perceptions, it is not true in-itself and therefore it is not true at all. The speaking person, for whom it was and is still true, is unable to assert any sort of truth-value in the un-individuated world of human interaction.  When Protagoras claims to Socrates, “Man is the measure,” he really should be saying either, “It is true for me that man is the measure,” or, “It is my opinion that man is the measure.”

Indeed, while the peritropê is unfit to reveal any contradictions in the relativist argument, it does a terrific job of exposing the inherent fact that, in the context of relativism, there can be no arguments at all. If Socrates presumes that his objection forces Protagoras to admit “that the contrary opinion about his own opinion must be true,” then it may not be because he merely “agrees that all men judge what is,” (171a7-9) but in fact because he cannot speak at all. The measure doctrine leaves no room for argument.

What’s more, Protagoras knots perception, traditionally viewed as a capacity of opinion, to knowledge. Knowledge is always of something, and we tend to think of knowing something in terms of knowing something true, or real. The measure doctrine holds that knowledge is perception but perception can only apprehend qualified truths-for-whomever (or appearances, or things seeming to be, etc.) This would mean that the measure doctrine equates knowledge with opinion, and opinions with reality. The metaphysical relativity implied in this construction would mean there are as many realities as there are persons, and the truths in those respective realities are contained throughout those realities.

The Protagorean relativist, then, is left in a particularly loathsome self-contained reality. In his reality, everything he believes, he is utterly incapable of asserting, and the “vast army of persons who think the opposite” (170d8-9) are free to convince each other of the absolute truths contained in the reality belonging to him. Meanwhile, in their realities, absolute truth does exist because (from the relativist’s perspective) he concedes to their numerous respective ontologies for the sake of maintaining his own epistemology. Accepting that one can only ever admit personal opinions, amid a medley of superimposed realities where others are fine declaring knowledge, the relativist effectively opens up his cookie jar for everyone to take from while taking nothing from theirs on principle.

The peritropê objection can be seen as a logical, epistemological, or metaphysical refutation of the measure doctrine. While I think it is ineffective at the former, it is my assertion that it is a potent attack against the relativist in terms of the doctrine presuppositions about the nature of knowledge and of reality. The objection lays bear the clearest reality upon which the theory is founded — namely, that if man is the measure of truth, then some men are bound to help themselves to more of it than others. All the while, in the world of interactions (or metaphysically construed: the interacting worlds), the relativist is the only one who comes up empty-handed.

There is an old joke in politics that whoever promises both freedom and equality is either an idiot or a liar. Though both the ideas of liberty and equality appeal to political man, they are ever frustratingly opposed to each other. It is this rule of opposites that resonates in the words of French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville when he writes, “the taste which men have for liberty, and that which they feel for equality are in fact two different things.”

Liberty is the freedom from restrictions imposed on an individual. It is a natural state and is unlimited but for restrictions placed on it in the pursuit of order. Equality, then, is a type of order manufactured by men responding to perceived imbalances resulting from freedom. The targets of inequality are usually those who use their freedom in a way that impedes on the range of freedom of others. In this way, proponents of equality tend to argue against very specific freedoms, aimed at distinct groups of individuals who’ve grouped their freedoms together in a way that oppresses others. As Michael Walzer asserts in his article, Sharing the Dirty Work, “egalitarianism aims to eliminate not all differences but a particular set of differences, and a different set in different times and places.”

Because specific grievances against fixed targets are the nature of egalitarianism, its ideals too often become dated once they are achieved; such efforts soon spoil into a legislative sprawl that overreaches beyond their proponents’ initial grumblings. Legislation does not disappear the moment these differences are eliminated, but pervades and proliferates to restrict further liberties in the name of the already met cause.

Nowhere was the danger of the misappropriation of equality wrought more recklessly than in the philosophy of Karl Marx. Marx believed that history is progressive and that communism would be the natural consequence of disproportionate wealth distribution — a philosophy of ultimate equality. But he left questions unanswered, and these were necessarily concluded by practice in the Soviet Union. Reality withholds no effects from faulty or ill-considered causes. Marx anticipated these real effects, calling them “praxis,” or put simply, the ends justify the means.

The consequences of praxis were made clear by dictator Joseph Stalin as he sought to catch agrarian Russia up with Marx’s ideological mandate that communism could only take root in an industrialized nation. He achieved this by vastly expanding his predecessor Vladimir Lenin’s system of forced labor into what is now commonly referred to as the Gulag. Hyper-industrialization was Stalin’s primary goal. With the Gulag system in place, the Soviet Union used human labor to make up for its technological and financial shortcomings.

Political philosopher John Rawls contends in A Theory of Justice that the state defines “men’s rights and duties influence their life-prospects, what they can expect to be and how well they can hope to do.” By pitting men’s rights and obligations against their prospects, Rawls acknowledges that states actively limit individual freedoms. But he plays loose with his words, downplaying the state’s limitations of natural freedom while suggesting that it somehow has a role in creating freedom.  But how can states define the rights of persons in whom all rights are naturally inherent? In nature, individual liberty festers. The state is necessary not because we become free through it, but because, ideally, it re-defines our rights to encourage our better natures — in spite of freedom.

Why else would human beings, through the creation of democratic states, willingly limit their personal freedoms? Equality is a coercive tool that responds to individuals’ grievances over natural freedoms. When it works, it can improve the overall quality of life in a state. However, coercion can also be used to the benefit of the state opposed to these individuals, under a peculiar brand of equality wherein nobody but the state benefits. Human bodies became Soviet currency in a cruel cost-benefit analysis, wherein the greater good (i.e. state’s goals) was always worth more than the lives lost in its pursuit. This is the danger in valuing individuals against organized will, as Walzer succinctly states, “often enough money fails to represent value; the translations are made, but as with good poetry, something is lost in the process.”

Indeed, freedom is a natural state and is unlimited and timeless but for restrictions placed on it by the struggle for equality. It is man, then, that manufactures equality in response to grievances over the imbalance of freedoms in a specific epoch. But egalitarian pursuits too often become dated immediately after they are achieved; the vestiges of such efforts soon spoil into a legislative sprawl that overreaches beyond their initial grumbling.  As Walzer asserts, “egalitarianism aims to eliminate not all differences but a particular set of differences, and a different set in different times and places.” Legislation does not disappear the moment these differences are eliminated, but pervades and proliferates to restrict further liberties.

Once rapid development was declared a national cause, where else could its fuel be found but in forced labor? Michael Sandel claims there are three choices for a state in need of national service — “conscription, conscription with a provision for hiring substitutes, and the market system” — but he overlooks the ingenuity of desperate politicians. The expansion of the draft declared in the 1936 Soviet constitution (better known as the “Stalin” constitution) couldn’t provide enough able bodies for both the defense and industrial expansion of the Soviet Union, and a market system was not only ideologically ridiculous, but too expensive for the state to promote. Sharing the grueling work was never an option as much was already being sacrificed for the communist ideal of work-sharing throughout the Eastern Bloc — there was not enough wealth to distribute to adequately reimburse laborers for the vast toil required to meet Stalin’s impatient quotas and deadlines. Walzer provides Stalin’s practical answer to this dilemma:

When convicts do hard labor, we can at least argue that they deserve their punishment. But even they are not state slaves; their degradation is (most often) limited and temporary … Indeed, if hard labor is held suitable for convicts, then it becomes an insult to suggest that ordinary men and women should do it.

The rapid expansion of the Gulag under Stalin was not a result of some absurd, sudden increase in the nation’s production of criminals and delinquents, but a solution to the economic concern of how the Soviets could reach their goals without means to afford them. This is the cynical underbelly of Rawls’ claim that liberty should be “distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage. Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all.” When Stalin required more human matter in order to complete one of his many ambitious industrializing projects, the state found more free labor by tightening criminality to the fullest extent of its penumbra — individual motives for committing crimes became too costly to consider when measured against the needs of the common good.

It was enough to put peasant mother Maria Tchebotareva in the Gulag for ten years for “trying to feed her four hungry children during the massive 1932-1933 famine” after she was caught “stealing three pounds of rye from her former field.” In Soviet authorities’ eyes, she was merely a thief; in the state’s eyes, she was fodder for its hungry expansion. The capricious nature of convictions like Tchebotareva’s cannot be denied: though her sentence was originally meant to expire in 1943, “it was arbitrarily extended until the war ended in 1945.” Her punishment was equal not to her crime but to the needs of the state. The veneer of retributive justice allowed the Communist party to push its agenda of slave labor on scared citizens who tattled on each other for fear of looking unpatriotic in the eyes of an all-seeing commons. The system fed itself. Gulag prisoners were valuable — not as human beings, but as disposable labor. They lived in “stinking, poorly-heated barracks,” fighting over the scarcity of clothing and food. They often worked “up to 14 hours per day.” The cruel handling of prisoners in the Gulag was a natural result of what Sandel calls treating “all things as if they were commodities. It would be wrong, for example, to treat human beings as commodities, mere things to be bought and sold.” Sanctioned offenses against individuals are unforgivable even when they are performed in the name of a common good. Or as Sandel further explains, “human beings are persons worthy of respect, not objects to be used. Respect and use are two different modes of valuation.”

Playing into this problem is the added problem of man’s natural drive for his own freedom, even when his freedom causes inequality. Just as no truly free society exists due to men’s grieving for equality, no truly free society can exist due to their want for the unequal temptations of liberty. The question of who deserves equality goes against the notion of equality but is pragmatically confronted at some point in every philosophy that makes claim to it. Rawls, for example, argues that only those who have “a conception of their good” and “a sense of justice” are entitled to equality — what he calls “moral persons.” He implies justice exists always in inequalities so long as they are to the benefit of all. Stalin could profit from this notion of justice so long as he ostensibly labeled individuals as criminals according to his need for inhuman labor unbridled by the indemnity of equality. Their criminal records nullified their status as moral. As the casualties of his oppressive Gulags mounted, death further nullified their status even as persons.

The artifice of a “common good” is satisfied by a sociological cognitive dissonance that anthropomorphizes an organization so that it is capable of needing and feeling, and in turn subsidizing the organization’s deficiency in these capacities with the real needs and emotions of the individuals who comprise it. This is the shady logic led from the popular Marxist mantra, “workers of the world unite.” Marxism is the answer to the powerlessness of the individual laborer in pre-communist society. Apart from this new unity, however, the worker is still useless.

As de Tocqueville warned, when the state demands equality more loudly than it does liberty, it makes its citizens equal not in freedom but in servitude. Equality being a coercion, as I earlier mentioned, the state becomes a wholly coercive institution and the restriction of individual liberties, previously thought to be a common good, becomes the very thing that makes people powerless in the face of duress. The use of this formidable fear as equality undermines both equality and liberty while maintaining the façades of both. Those who before yearned for equality are given it in heaps until all they can do is seek refuge in its brutal mechanism. The common good becomes the only good, and the individual apart from the machine is made to feel inhuman. Working for nothing but itself, the machine is left with only one final, arbitrary function: to keep itself running.

Works Cited

Center for History and New Media. Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives. George Mason U, 2011. Web. 1 Apr 2011. <http://gulaghistory.org/nps/>

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard UP: 1999. Excerpt.

Sandel, Michael. “Hired Help / Markets and Morals.” Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2009. 75-102. Print.

Walzer, Michael. “Sharing the Dirty Work.” Harper’s Dec. 1982: 22-31. Print.

Works Referenced

Pontuso, James F. Assault on Ideology: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Political Thought. 2nd Ed. Lexington Books: 2004. Print.

de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Signet Classics: 2001. Print.

Law is a curious game. It outwardly proclaims to represent in theory the very thing it rejects in practice. In law, as it exists on paper, we are either following or breaking it; everything is either right or wrong, good or bad, black or white.

But we humans are the ones who apply it, and we are very gray creatures. There may be objective truths out there, but by natural law we can never know them; instead, we are forced to use our senses to interpret what we saw, heard, touched, smelled, tasted—and we know that our senses are inherently flawed.

Philosophy tends not to make any bones about the ultimate incomprehensibility of truth. It exists in the realm of suggestion, of arguments and possibilities. How could it work out any other way when its forefather in the Western tradition decreed that the only wisdom is in not knowing? There is never any final clarity or judgment in ethical philosophy, and thinkers must either settle or suffer unto death—the casualties continue to stack up neatly on either side.

I’ve come to recognize that law is, in many ways, the short-tempered, hypercritical cousin of philosophy. It demands practical results in the form of speedy trials, unconcerned with certain truth, settling on knowing “beyond a reasonable doubt.” I imagine it telling Hume, “Yeah, well, that all sounds nice, but we’re just going to assume reality exists and go from there, if you don’t mind.” It wants to know what everyone knows, through testimony and evidence, not so it can know the perfect answer, but at least the best possible answer, given the circumstances.

Of course it’s all contrived. The attorneys respectively represent two distinct sides of an issue, and the jury or judge decides on the premise of what they can sleep with. Right stands on the side of persuasion. Twelve people in a room, each with their own baggage and biases, are sanctified by position, becoming all worshiped arbiters on whose flawed logic and layman’s legal understanding rests the viability of democracy.

But, God, it’s charming. We’re out of the jungle on the heels of this great experiment, ill fitted in our fathers’ old suits and talking logic like bad teenage poetry, but somehow we’ve managed to eek out some semblance of practical sense, enough so that when I walk outside my house, I don’t have to fear my neighbor’s sharpened stick because I’m comforted by someone somewhere in a billowing black robe who’s got my back.

Pretty sophisticated for beasts.