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Now those of you who listen to last week's show
on the Austrian-born philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein
with Professor Hans Slouga,
will be pleased to know that Slouga is back with us
on entitled "Epinions This Week" as well.
For those of you who haven't heard last week's show yet,
I'll briefly mention once again,
that Professor Slouga teaches philosophy at UC Berkeley,
and that he has recently authored two remarkable books,
"One on Wittgenstein", came out in 2011
with Wiley Blackwell Press.
The other is on politics published by Cambridge University
Press in 2014 and goes by the titled "Politics and the Search
for the Common Good".
Last week, we discussed his Wittgenstein book.
This week, Professor Slouga joins me once again
in the studios of KZSU to discuss politics
and the search for the common good hands.
Welcome back to the show.
- Thanks for all but it's great to be back.
- So here are some sentences from your book
that I think might help us get today's show underway.
They come from the introduction, I quote,
"I begin with the thought that politics
"might usefully be conceived as a search for the common good.
"Even this characterization may prove to narrow
"for much of what we call politics is preoccupied
"with the more mundane, more practical,
"more down to earth matters,
"then consideration of the common good.
"What we call by the name of politics encompasses in fact,
"everything from the most trivial, the most local,
"and the most forgettable incidents of village life
"to the tragically grand events of world history.
"I conclude," continuing the quote,
"that the essence of politics cannot be captured
"in any short proposition,
"not even that of politics as a search for the common good.
"Our concept of politics is rather a family resemblance
"notion in Wittgenstein sense
"and resists being pinned down in any definitional formula."
End of quote.
So that last sentence,
signals to me that your most recent book,
"Politics and the Search for the Common Good,"
picks up where your book on Wittgenstein left off,
namely with the extension of certain Wittgensteinian
concepts into the political sphere.
The idea of family resemblance, for example,
is wonderfully productive in this new book.
Would you agree that there is this continuity
between the two?
- Yes, that's true.
In some ways, the Wittgenstein book was a kind of prologue,
a prologue, a garment until the politics book,
which I was writing at the same time.
But both books are really part of a much larger cycle.
I've been thinking for quite a long time
about the development of philosophy in our own period
and thinking that Western philosophy,
European philosophy, specifically German philosophy,
has gone through a period of immense creativity
since the middle of the 19th century.
As we can see in the work of a magician,
like God Look Frager and Nietzsche,
who are contemporary,
is think in very radically different ways.
The rise of phenomenology, of scientific positivism,
various movements that all come about
at roughly the same period in the late 19th century
and that have born rich fruit in the 20th century.
And then I begin to think that maybe this is a wider
Western phenomenon, that we have gone through a period
of rethinking philosophy,
and that all these movements have in common
a kind of challenge to the philosophical tradition
and the ambition to start in a completely new and different way.
And so this politics book now tries to spell this
out with respect to politics,
saying that there has been a long tradition
of what I call normative political thinking,
where philosophers start in great principles and ideals.
And that we are now in a new phase in which we philosophers
begin to look at the actual historical and political realities
and try to draw out political insights and conclusions
from that.
That's what I call diagodistically thinking.
- Right, which we'll get into,
but first could you inform our listeners
about the trajectory of your book.
So you've written on Frager,
- So you've written on.
- So I first wrote a book about Kontopraeger
and which tried to situate him in the historical context
of the late 19th century and tried to show how this new
form of logic, which was a radical break
was 2,000 years of logical tradition,
the Aristotelian tradition, how that originated.
Then I turned to thinking about Heidegger
and Wittgenstein to quite different thinkers,
nevertheless also radically question in the philosophical tradition
in different ways.
I saw Nietzsche, a contemporary of Frager,
as really one source of this process
and then looked at later figures like Foucault now
in this book, Hannah Arendt, Calchmitt and others
as continuing on this trajectory of trying to rethink
philosophical matters in various areas with respect
to what logic, language, history, politics,
in radically new ways.
- So would it be fair to say that you subscribe
to a certain kind of Heideggerian concept
that there is a history of metaphysics,
which comes to an end in the, let's say,
well, for Heidegger, it would be in Frederick Nietzsche's
thinking of the world of power
and that we are now philosophy has to find
its way beyond metaphysics
and that this is what your books, all these books
that you've referred to have been tracing
a little bit this movement.
- Yes, I would modify this story a little bit
by saying that I'm quite sympathetic
to one aspect of Davidus, Jacques de Rieder's thinking.
Namely, that Heidegger and the tradition
that we are now talking about,
this new radical challenge to the tradition
doesn't really fully escape from metaphysics,
that it creates its own metaphysical pressures
and stories again, and that this overcoming
of metaphysics is still something to be achieved.
- Right, so you think that there are more radical thinkers,
for all, so effectively speaking,
than Heidegger in this domain,
in the sense that there are at least more radical
in their pertinence to what you think this revolution
takes place in the end of the 19th century,
leads us to which is a turn of philosophy towards
the political.
- Yes, certainly more radical thing
because I wouldn't say more powerful thinkers,
so De Rieder for me is operates at the lower register
from Heidegger.
In my Wittgensteinberg, I say at the beginning
that maybe eventually there will be only two
20th century philosophers, we will remember.
Namely, Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
- Right, good.
Well, just a parenthetical question for you
out of my own curiosity.
Jean Paul Sash, the next existentialism,
plays no big role in your meditation
on this period.
Do you find it not part of this series of convulsions
in the history of philosophy?
- He is definitely part of that story.
I have not written about him,
but I have certainly thought about him.
He seems to be an important figure,
but I also see him as greatly indebted to Heidegger
in some ways modifying the Heideggerian program,
and that's why I focus more on Heidegger and etc.
- Well, thanks.
So let me, my first question for you regarding the new book
now has to do with a major challenge that you faced
in the book I'm assuming it's a major challenge you face
because on the one hand you seek to circumscribe
and delimit the domain of politics.
So that you don't wanna subscribe to everything
is political because if everything is political
then nothing is political.
On the other hand, you're determined to offer
an operative definition of politics
as a search for the common good.
That's broad enough to include a great many diverse
and heterogeneous things under the rubric of politics.
So question would be how and where do you set limits
on your conception of the political,
especially when, as you argue,
what did not belong to the political domain in one era
may enter the political domain in another era.
So would it be a misunderstanding on my part
if I were to ask whether there's a foundation
on which you base your conception of politics
as a search for the common good?
- So this gets me back to this idea
that there is a longstanding tradition
and political thinking which has now become questionable
to us.
I think that Plato and Aristotle,
really are the two who have given us
our classical understanding of what politics is.
They have said there's the institution of the policy,
the order of the policy and politics is really
the process by which we govern our rule
or organize, maintain this institution.
So politics is the rule of the policy.
And we have translated this in our modern lingo
as saying that politics is really government of the state.
So everything that has to do with government
and that has to do with state is for us political.
But I'm saying that now we are facing a situation
in which both government and state
have become problematic to us.
And that forces upon us,
has forced upon us a rethinking of what politics comes to
and a realization that politics is probably a broader category
than either Plato or Aristotle or the modern tradition
envisaged.
- That's right.
And our first show of the season was on Randolph-Borne,
the early 20th century American thinker.
And there we talked a little bit about his essay
called The State in which he makes distinctions a century ago
that are still resonant with what you just said
between the state, government and the country
and the people.
But anyway, we'll leave bone out of this.
Would it be fair to say that you are pro-taggery?
And why do I say pro-taggery?
And because you say that the definition of politics
as a search for the common good is something that
Plato attributes to pro-taggers in one of his dialogues
where pro-taggers says that we engage in politics
because the gods have forsaken us
and we are now forced to take care of ourselves.
And that in the pro-taggery and view,
democracy is the best form of this search for the common good
because it allows everyone to be a participant
in the deliberation of where the good lies.
And it doesn't give sanctity to either the philosopher's
greater wisdom or to the rulers, dictates
and that this seems to be quite sympathetic
with what you just told us.
- Yeah, so I suggested that Plato and Aristotle
are responsible ultimately for our classical conception
of politics as this, managing of the institution.
But I think pro-taggers precedes them and has a broader
and in some sense to us more relevant characterization
of politics as this care for community.
So his thinking is our social relations are not grounded
by themselves, they need to be kind of fostered
and taken care of in some fashion or other.
And politics is really not simply
an operating with institutions,
it's really an attempt to do that task, to perform that task.
And part of that can be done by creating institutions, of course,
but politics itself is something much broader.
- Sure, but I gather, if I understood you correctly,
this idea that politics is also about the caretaking
of the community, of the common good by all citizens
in one form or another.
- Yes, that's the pro-taggers in picture.
- That's right.
- But this caretaking can take many different forms, of course,
right, but this is the democratic form,
is one characteristic form it takes.
- So your book makes a fundamental distinction
between what you call the normative thinkers
and the diagnostic thinkers.
And you've been referring now to Plato and Aristotle
or Plato especially the more conservative
Plato being paradigmatic of a normative thinker,
the diagnostic thinking in general, as opposed to normative
thinking.
- So let me go back one step in some ways,
my book is forced to argue against the dominant figure
contemporary figure in contemporary American political
philosophy, and I think political philosophy
across the globe, in fact, and that's John Rawls,
who is for me the archetype of the normative thinker.
But the way he thinks ultimately corresponds to forms of thought
that we already find in Plato and Aristotle.
And what that involves is the attempt of the political philosopher
to step away from the political world itself
and defined from outside political standards
by which that world can be adjudicated.
Whereas for me, the diagnostic thinker engages
in the opposite exercise he wants to push he wants
to engage themselves in the world, look at the realities
that are out there and then draw from this
practical conclusions of what needs to be done.
- But can we do without norms, or if I call them norms,
I'm tempted to say yes, we can do without them ourselves,
but can we do without what you call the grand principles?
And in the case of Rawls for him, fair and justice,
that one of the major businesses of politics
is the administering of justice,
or certain other principles of citizenship.
And so we talked a little bit about this
in the Wittgenstein show about whether skepticism
has something to be skeptical about.
And I think diagnostic thinking has to have
certain kind of normative thinking to diagnose.
- Yes, that's true.
Let me say first a word about the word, the term norm,
which has become, which is de-fashioned term
in philosophy these days, everything is normative.
And I'm somewhat dubious about the way this term is applied,
it's used very broadly.
So I want to think about norms as a certain kind
of prescriptive principle that claims to be universal
to begin with, and that claims to have some kind of absolute,
maybe even a priori validity.
- Right.
- Then there are other ways in which we kind of regulate,
try to inform our actions.
We sometimes have rules.
We sometimes give instructions of a specific kind.
So I want to say there's a difference
between norms, principles, practical advice, commands,
and so on.
Practical reasoning has many different forms.
Yes, so we need practical reasoning.
The question is, from where do we get these principles
or concepts that we appeal to in this process?
Do we get them by some abstract ratio
of senation?
That's the thought of Plato and John Rawls, I think as well.
Or do we get it by looking at our realities
and saying, what is needed here?
What is this reality like?
What conclusions do we need to draw?
- Fair enough, here's a historical example,
the Declaration of Independence in the United States,
where we declare these truths to be self-evident.
There, it's a we, particular, it's located geographically,
and temporarily in a particular moment in history,
a trigger place, and this speech act.
We declare these truths to be self-evident,
which in the original pre-revised version,
we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,
that all men are created equal and endowed by their created
by certain inalienable rights among them.
That's, you know, that positing of an absolute truth
is something that creates history.
It's what Anna calls a moment of great Natality,
because it gives birth to a nation,
which after all the nation has the same root as Natality.
And I guess it's a new faith, which is not a new set of norms,
but that we declare these things to be our guiding principles,
is that something that diagnostic thinking can live with?
- Definitely, I don't see any problem here.
What we need to recognize, though,
that these kinds of declarations are themselves political,
rather than the expression of some absolute philosophical truth.
In fact, I think of Hannah Arran precisely
as a precursor of my distinction between the normative
and the diagnostic.
She is a very stark critic of these normative forms
of thinking that she thinks come from Plato.
And instead she wants us to think in terms of principles,
broad principles like justice or equality and so on.
So on the question of how you delimit the notion of the political,
and we're talking here, we're jumping a little bit,
but Hannah Arran has already entered the discussion.
Do you, as you know, Hannah Arran was determined
to delimit the political, what is political narrowly
and to shield it from contamination by the social
and the private and the economic and so forth,
whereas you see much more comfortable in allowing the political
to spill generously or promiscuously
into all these other domains.
So in that sense, I think there's a way that you're much more
liberal in the limits that you set on the political
than someone like Hannah Arran.
- Yes, so when I discuss these issues with my students,
we talk about tribal societies
and very simple primitive tribal societies.
We read Claude Levi-Strauss, Trist to speak together.
And I try to show my students that here is a society
in which there are no institutions,
there are no established offices,
there are their achieves, but they have a very tenuous
kind of position in their society,
but there is obviously politics going on, right?
We can understand that.
And there we begin to see that what we already understand
to be politics is not tied to these institutions
with which we have familiar.
- And so the role of institutions so is important.
You stress it later, that some of your diagnostic thinkers
did not give enough importance to how institutions are formed,
no? - Yes.
- And institutions are tools,
to the care of the common we owe itself,
to say, there are specific instruments
that emerge under specific conditions.
- Which is very fucology,
and for me also my vehicle,
John Batista, Vico had been a precursor of that kind of thinking.
So when it comes to the diagnostic thinkers,
Carl Schmidt, Hannah Arran, and Misha Fucco,
they had some precursors.
I would just like to spend a few minutes
talking about those precursors whom you see
in Aristotle a little bit, Machiavelli,
and Benjamin Koston.
So Aristotle referred to him,
let's talk just briefly about Machiavelli,
you know one of my heroes.
You say that there's a diagnostic element in his thinking
because he understood that politics
has to be closely connected to experience
and to reality and to get at the effectual truth of things,
not the ideal truth of things, right?
- And in addition, he understands
that this experience is an experience
of something historical and unique, right?
So in order to convince his fellow Florentines,
how they must conduct themselves politically,
he writes a history of Florence.
- Right, right.
- Right, and then in the Prince, of course,
he has a notion that the sphere of the political
is radically pervaded by contingency, circumstance,
for locks, his word for theirs, for tuna,
and all that is unpredictable and uncertain.
Later in our show, we'll speak about how much you insist
on uncertainty as the very element
in which the political drifts.
So this insight, diagnostic insight of Machiavelli,
that politics is always caught in the flux
of circumstance and time and history,
is one that you credit him for,
but at the same time you find that he doesn't go far enough
in that domain because he believed
that there are certain stable, if not immutable laws
or precepts in the political sphere.
Do I get that correct?
- Yes, so one of the characteristics
of classical political thinking starting with Plato and Aristotle,
again, is this belief that we can spell out once
and for all the possible forms of government
and can rank them in a linear fashion.
And that presupposes that we have sort of an overarching
comprehensive view of the political possibilities,
a very unhistorical picture of what politics comes to.
Machiavelli with all his historical acuteness
falls back into this, I want to say,
because he still thinks there is only a limited number
of possible forms of government.
And then he in the end says,
"The best one is the combination of the three major
"and the democratic, the aristocratic, and the monarchical."
And that's where I think he is thinking unhistorically.
And that gets me exactly to Constantinople, of course,
because Constantinople says,
"No, there is no way in which we can foresee
"the forms of government and we can't go back
"to these ancient models.
"We have to see that our form of government
"is something new and historically unique."
- Yes, which I think is a tremendous insight
for Constantinople in this time.
Now we're talking about an early 19th century thinker, correct?
- Yes, indeed, yeah.
- First decade of the 19th century.
- So if Machiavelli's limits, the limits
of his political thinking were that he didn't think
beyond the traditional forms of government,
constant on the other hand, you also think has limits
in his theory of liberalism.
What are the limitations of Benjamin Kostom?
- Well, he thinks that the old forms of democracy
certainly are not viable anymore,
and he thinks what we now need
and what we have is a new form of democracy,
and a new representation of democracy,
in which we as individuals only partake
to a small extent in actual politics,
but we designate representatives to speak for us,
and I'm saying he has a very idealized picture
of this process of representation,
which we have now come to see is not really fully realistic.
He thinks we as voters, as citizens,
and insight into what needs to be done,
we are in a position to freely choose our representatives,
and we have the means to control them,
and I'm suggesting that none of these three things,
three things is true.
- Anymore.
- Anymore, yes, certainly.
- But at the same time, Kostom was intensely conscious
of the role that population, for example,
plays in bringing about a whole new set
of political conditions, so that what Aristotle played on Aristotle
were saying about politics may have applied
to a certain extent of a police that had six to 10,000 citizens,
but that with a huge population of the nations
that the politics have to change quite dramatically,
and at the end of your book,
you also come back to this issue of population
as a fundamental shift, seismic shift,
in recent political history that we have to take account of.
So at least Kostom had a precursor role in that,
a vision of the connection between politics and population.
- Absolutely, in fact, that's where I say Aristotle
has already the glimmerings of a diagnostic viewpoint,
because he already has an understanding
that population bears on the forms of politics
that are available to us.
- Exactly.
So I know this is meandering a little bit,
but there's a logic, on this question of Aristotle
understanding that the police function,
the way the Athenian had had a certain limited population,
does that put into question in a severe way,
perhaps Hannah Arendt's thinking of what is the political,
where Hannah Arendt wants to isolate the political
as something that's separate from the private sphere
and from the social sphere,
and it's this stage of appearance where the citizens
can appear, can be seen and heard by fellow citizens
in this public sphere of radiance.
And perhaps that is possible only when there's a certain
limit to the size of the police or the community,
is Hannah Arendt's insistence that we need to hold on
to this more narrow concept of the political viable
in late 20th century, early 21st century society.
- Well, that's a very good question.
She never addresses that issue, of course.
That's maybe one limit of what she can offer us.
But she does, of course, think as politics
as involving communication.
And so the question is, what is the reach
of our capacity to communicate with each other as citizens?
Maybe digital means the machinery we have now available
allows us communication on a broader scale
and at a greater distance than in the Greek policy.
But presumably there are also limitations
to actual communication given how many we are
and how many voices there are
and how many people we can listen to, right?
- Exactly, exactly.
- But she doesn't address those issues.
- So, Constal is a precursor, but your main diagnostic thinkers
we can go through them, maybe say a few words
about Carl Schmidt and his importance in your book.
- Okay, I call him a diagnostic thinker
because he seeks to understand that the classical
modern state is really no longer present.
We have states and of course we have governments
we have bureaucracies, we have administration,
we have the whole machinery,
but their function has changed
because the state has merged he thinks with society
and the boundaries between the political and the social
and the economic have all kind of softened up
and we are now in a new kind of reality
and we have to rethink what politics is all about.
That's what makes him a diagnostic thinker.
- Yeah, then things of course, what does this come to?
He wants to rethink politics in terms of what he famously
and provocatively calls the friend and a mischema.
All politics has to do with friend and make constellations.
They can take many different forms.
The modern state has only been one
and we have now to ask ourselves,
where is it moving to and what he speaks of in his late writings
and he calls the normas of the earth
and you kind of global order that is emerging
whose outlines however are by no means clear.
- Do you buy into his notion that a great deal of politics
is reducible to the friend enemy relations?
- Yes indeed, that seems to me utterly too.
I resist however the belief that this is defines
the essence of politics is certainly defines one important central feature of politics.
- Why is Karl Schmitt so much in Vogue these days
in the last 10 or 20 years, even more than he ever was before?
What is it in his thinking that people are responding to?
I mean, I'm talking about leftist intellectuals and others
and there's great fascination with Karl Schmitt.
- Because we live in a world in which conflict is so predominant
in which international relations are so conflictual now again,
I'm always struck by the fact how much my students take to Karl Schmitt.
I'm worried by this even, but I understand it at the same time.
He seems to capture elements of our reality
that are very close to us.
- And his thinking about sovereignty,
do you think that still has the same purchase now that it would have had
had in the last 10 or 20 years?
- Well, his doctrine of sovereignty I think is still important.
He wants to take away the idea that sovereignty isn't a feature of an institutional order.
That's the old Hobbesian conception of sovereignty.
Instead, he wants to say sovereignty becomes manifest at the moment
where the institutional order fails and someone somehow has to make a decision.
And so, sovereignty is he who decides on the exceptional situation
and in the exceptional situation, who then makes a decision at that point.
- Yeah, and we want to hold on to that idea, right?
- Yes.
- Because it's hugely important for sure.
And we could spend the whole show on Karl Schmitt or any of them,
one of your diatonsis thinkers, but let's move on a little bit.
We've talked about Hannah Addent, but can you say a little bit more about why she is
rather a paradigmatic diagnostic thinker more than what you've said so far?
- Yes, so when we read the human condition, she begins by saying that we must look at our latest experiences now
and see what they come to and she's writing in the 1950s, 1958 her book appeared.
So she talks about Sputnik, she talks about new technologies, she talks about the possibility to change the human genome.
So she talks about these new things that are appearing that are transforming us and our world.
And that's what we need to think about.
Her book itself goes, of course, much further back.
It goes all the way back to the Greeks and tries to show how our understanding and practice of loss-face change,
how the modern period has particularly superimposed economics on politics in a way that is destroying the independence
and the power of the political institution and political order, the political world as you call it, the world.
- Do you believe that her distinction between the political and the social is still viable,
where for her, the problem with our modern world, which was alienating us as citizens
and also alienating us from the earth to a certain extent,
was that the social sphere, which is a weird intermediary sphere between the public and the private,
has become the blog, the blog that is just spreading like a kind of cancer and corroding the very essence of the political.
- She has an idealistic and over-idealistic picture of politics.
It's a very grand picture of politics, namely, this process by which we learn to communicate with each other freely,
and thereby become the persons we are.
It's a process of mutual recognition and self-presentation.
And she wants to separate that from everything else, from all other features of our social existence.
I think that is an artificial separation, and it doesn't really work with the way we want to,
and need to think about politics, for instance, for us economic need is connected with political questions.
And she wants to separate these two as strictly as we can.
And I think there is an artificiality here to that kind of line of thinking.
And how do you explain that, Hans, such an intelligent, lucid, insightful political thinker, and I kind of add,
why she was not naive enough not to be aware of how problematic such a distinction was, and yet she stubbornly insisted on it.
Why would that be?
- Well, to some extent, it's a conceptual distinction rather than a real one she's trying to make.
There are features of our existence as political beings in the broad sense, which we ought to isolate and bring out,
because they will show us why politics is not just a necessity, but is a genuine human achievement that we should value as such.
- Politics is a sphere of freedom. - Yes.
And it's not separate from the sphere of necessity, and therefore the economic.
And as it's immense that politics in her age, late 20th century, had degenerated, if that's the correct word, into administration.
And that now we think of the political apparatus as basically problem-solving agencies.
And in a certain sense, it's undeniable that we look to our politicians or the governments and the states to administer our social welfare and education and other kinds of relations that we maintain with one another.
And for her, this was a horror to this conflation of the political into the administrative.
And yet, one could ask from the argument you make, especially towards the end of the book, that problem-solving has to be one of the key missions of politics and the search for the common good,
is there something in your conception of the political that will preserve a role for politics beyond this administration and problem-solving for the world's populations in general?
Well, I certainly think this is inevitable, but I can understand her concern about the reduction of politics to administration, because she comes, of course, from a study of modern 20th century totalitarianism, and she sees this connection that exists between totalitarianism and the functioning of bureaucracy.
So the larger and more prominent bureaucracy becomes in our lives, she worries that the less we are capable of freedom and the greater the danger of totalitarianism.
Well, is there something that we should take note of in that caution of hers?
In our own day now.
Yes, absolutely.
She says we shouldn't think that at the end of the second world, but totalitarianism has disappeared. Now, it remains a possibility in our existence that we should worry about.
Maybe not under the name of the old regimes, but in some new form, it can still manifest itself.
Good. We move on now to Michel Foucault, who is, like the third diagnostic thinker.
What does he add to the equation?
So I see Schmidt and Aaron in certain ways as complementary. Schmidt emphasizes the conflictual element in politics, which I think is certainly there, whereas Aaron is concerned with cooperation and communication.
So in that sense, they still see two different sides of the political.
I think what Foucault adds to this is to say that all these relations are not relations between equals, but a conflictual or communicative, that there is always a power differential at work, and that the really the more general and more encompassing notion we should be concerned with in politics is the notion of power of power relations.
And one wants to say that he is absolutely right about that.
That power relations have to be broadly conceived, not as traditional political relations, but relations that are in many cases the effects of certain institutional structures and frameworks that we are hardly aware of.
So for example, the architectural space of the cities we live in, or the panopticon, or the factories and other forms of power relations that are more discreet and hiding a little bit in the background of our lived experience.
Yes, one of the things that Foucault certainly has alerted us to is this fact that the way we have constructed and are constructing the spaces in which we move have a political character to it and they have political effects on us.
So the existence of an open space in which we can gather together has certain open up certain political possibilities. The absence of the obliteration of such a space has also certain political effects.
And he has explored this in many ways. He has talked about Bensom's panopticon, this famous construction of a surveillance system, prison system, but he has also talked about the hospital, the prison and other kinds of spaces at the plague written city.
So various ways in which we organize space that give structure and form to our political interactions.
I was told when I first arrived at Stanford by some elderly professor that in the 60s with all the upheavals of the 60s on the Stanford campus, that the Stanford campus was kind of rest structured architecturally, but what was taken away were large places of congregation.
So there is not one coffee house or one, it is all dispersed in these multiple things where you cannot have big groups gathering together in order exactly to forestall the kind of congregations that made those upheavals possible.
As well as we are talking architectural history, Paris and the way house-man after the revolution creating a completely different kind of architectural openness to the imposition of central control. It is a very interesting thing, but it takes us a little bit away from our...
I was going to say to get back closer to home, so UC Berkeley, which has been one of these hot houses of political activism, has of course, proud plaza, this space where everybody passes through at some time of the day.
So it is this natural forum for political debate and political demonstrations. It was that I think in the 60s when I was in there, but it still is today.
And I am always amazed to cross there and see all this energy kind of unloading itself in this place.
I am amazed it hasn't been dismantled.
Yes.
So the limitations of these diagnostic thinkers is something you end up wanting to insist on because you think that we are now living in a regime where our concept of the political has to get beyond what their concepts were.
Could you say more about how you, on the one hand, you inherit the legacies of Schmidt-Aret Foucault, but also the precursors that you inherit them on the one hand and yet project them into a different sphere and you define the political differently than they did.
This is very interesting last two chapters of your book.
Yes. So I am suggesting that despite their radicalism and their attempt to rethink politics in this radically new way, apart from the institutional order as the tradition had done, nevertheless there remains one element of the traditional understanding of politics with these three thinkers.
The politics has to do with the regulation of the interactions between us here together in this space, united citizens.
And what escapes from this concept is the realization that our relation to the natural world can also and does also have a genuinely political character to it.
So I see environmental problems not only as incidental small-scale problems, but as problems which force us to rethink what politics is about.
Politics is also the struggle with the natural world and that is really in some sense not included in Schmidt's arena for coz-wisinking of politics.
Even though the human condition begins with the audience's evocation of what is taking place in the realm of technology and what is doing to uproot ourselves from the earth.
So I remember those lines about this, on the one hand there's a nuclear weapons on the other hand that this intervention into the actual genetic processes of reproduction and this idea that whatever is happening is alienating us from the earth as such.
So I'm saying that these three thinkers still don't think hard enough about environmental problems. They also don't think hard enough about population and not hard enough about technology, but they all have some thoughts on this topic.
So it's not that they are completely blind but they don't see enough on it. And they don't think radically enough I want to say. That's still up to us.
In fact you say that what you call the TPE syndrome which is a technology population and environment.
And I'd like you to go through one at a time those things but that you can summarize my argument over Schmidt's audience and Foucault's diagnostic work by saying that all three were blind to the syndrome of the TPE syndrome.
So starting with technology, what is it because of the new developments in technology that occurred since their deaths that they were blind to it?
Well that is true to some extent certainly but I think the problem is much deeper than me that we need to think we need to have something like a philosophy of technology. We need to really reflect on technology in a profound fashion on what it does to us socially politically, in other words.
And all of them, all those these three and others in the 20th century like how you think about technology of course, but I think we need to push that further.
And one way in which I think we need to push that further is that I'm arguing in the book anyway.
That technology allows us to extend human power and that it does so in two very different ways. They may allow us to concentrate power to bring about concerted power in which we act together in more intense fashion and link with each other in more intensive ways.
But it also allows dispersion. It gives to each one of us more power individually.
So one of my examples is to say for instance if you think of the handgun with which a criminal threatens.
And the one hand that handgun is the product of a very complex industry. So that is concerted power at work.
But the product, namely the individual handgun, is used gives this criminal a new kind of power over his victim as well. So there is both concentration and dispersion going on at the same time.
And that kind of balance or imbalance between these two kind of tendencies of power to produce both these effects is something that these three think or seven sort about.
And let me quote you, you say that the picture of ourselves as being in full control of technology is delusive.
In helping ourselves to technological means we have subjected ourselves to its imperative and with that to the power of nature as well.
For entire technological tool chess, the whole elaborate machinery demands readiness for us to obey the laws of nature.
And you go on to say that technology far from making us free subjects us to the natural world.
And when we imagine ourselves as consumers of technology but in reality we are consumed by it.
I sympathize a great deal with these sentences. And I also find a certain high-to-garian echo.
Definitely definitely.
So you are not very optimistic about the power of technology to solve our problems.
Well it can solve some problems but it creates a new one sort of way. That is the situation which we find ourselves constantly.
And in fact on this idea that it creates new problems you also in the concluding chapters you speak about the insidious and intractable problems that every time you solve a problem you have created a set of conditions for bigger problems.
What do you call that?
The wicked problems I call them they end up in the end.
So we face various problems. Some of them turn out to be easily solvable. Some of them take more effort.
And in the end there is only that group of problems left that we can't solve.
So I am saying that is where the human race may find itself eventually.
Or that we find ourselves at any given moment in a kind of story where we are always dealing with problems.
And eventually we find ways to solve the most pressing ones. But every time we do that, either new ones arrive or those wicked ones, we are their heads.
And we are obliged now to turn our attention to another set of problems.
And therefore if I get you correctly politics must resign itself to this bad infinity of problems that will keep succeeding one after the other after the other.
And that rather than believing or making false promises as highly ideological political doctrines might promise that we are going to not only solve, but we are going to resolve and get an absolute transcendence of whatever problems afflict us that we need in our new kind of political thinking to live with the first thing, the uncertainty of the human race.
And the way in which politics has only partial and local power to adjust itself to ever shifting circumstance.
Yes, so it is the fallibility of politics like the fallibility of everything human that we need to recognize.
Let me use a metaphor, a show upon our, at some point, says that what we need to understand is that our walking is really always a falling forwards which we temporarily uphold by putting a foot ahead of us.
So we are constantly falling and we are constantly trying to put a foot ahead to prevent us from doing so, but there's this constant play between these two things.
So that would mean in the question of technology as one of the three elements of the syndrome that in the question of technology then it wouldn't be a kind of high-degenerian call to actually do with a lot less technology.
So we have to use technology to solve the problems that technology is creating.
I resist, it certainly says I resist that because then it always serves the purposes of technology.
If you're always using technological means to solve the problems that technology creates because I believe that there is a kind of blind will in technology that's beyond our control as you say we are subjected to it, but that it's driven to maximize the means,
technological means. And its end is the kind of unending empowerment of technological means and that this increasingly militates against our humanity, especially in the political side of our humanity.
So I would like to leave open the possibility that there is a way of responding to the essence of technology that would not involve the enlisting of technology to that end.
I'm only kind of skeptical about the degree to which liberating ourselves for technological thinking in the way that high-degeneration is enough.
Yes, it's small, it is required, so we also need to control this technology itself. It's not just our attitude towards it that requires attention.
Well, we can say a lot more about that. There's a way in which the technology be witches and it's easy enough to turn off your cell phone or your computer, but there's this element of desire which gets in the way.
And there is this fixation, mesmerization. When I continue drawing attention to as a kind of techno narcissism that is hard to pull your eyes away from that kind of reflection that has transfixed you.
But we talked about population earlier, so we're getting near to the end of our show.
The last element in the syndrome is E, which is environment. Can you say a few words about that?
Well, I talk about both the use of the environmental resources, natural resources of the natural environment, but also the social environment.
I think that with the growth of populations there's the more demand on natural resources, but this very kind of fast increase in the human population also destroys established traditional forms of social interactions.
It's also a threat to our social environment. And as we know, even today there is an expectation that the world's population may grow by another 30 or 50% within the next generation, right? And I see this as a tremendous pressure on our natural resource, but our social abilities to keep the human community together.
Now, I understand Hans, you're not a normative thinker, you're not pushing a normative agenda, but do you give in all these problems of technology, population, and environment? Do you have any kind of prescription or recommendation for what would be the kinds of institutions that would best address these problems?
What kind of forms of government would best be suited for the problems? Or any other things that would fall under the notion of prescription?
Well, I certainly diagnosis, yeah, we know what the diagnosis, but I'm certainly skeptical about the possibility of world government, or the United Nations, taken on a major risk of the human population.
But there has to be some kind of global order, so the question would be what would this look like?
An order of large kind of assemblies of states, maybe, something like the European Union, China, the US give us some example of this, maybe the African Union in the long run.
So, on the one hand, I think larger kind of institutional orders, but also maybe a devolution of power downwards to smaller kind of associations, so more power once again being given to local communities. I think that's another part that we should be looking for.
So, is there any chance that we can look forward to a book from you in the future that would maybe venture into this very difficult domain of recommendation?
Or do you have other plans in mind?
Well, I certainly, that's what I'm working on, but I also want to say that I don't see the philosopher as somebody who can stand apart from the political reality and dictate solutions.
So, we are part of the political community, so we are speaking as citizens, I want to say, should see ourselves as citizens when we speak.
So, I want to open a dialogue rather than give hard and fast prescriptions.
Right. But if I were to open a dialogue and say, I think the problem is the nation state, and that we should try to dissolve the nation state.
You can say, well, yes, but at a certain point, one has to commit to some sort of vision of what kind of political organization is necessary to best address the new political realities that we live with.
Well, yes, but I still want to say we need to take much more seriously the question, what are the realities to which these kinds of rules or these norms or these suggestions, these prescriptions are to be applied.
And that's where I sort of blamed the normative political thinkers that they don't pay enough attention to this.
And I say somewhat derisively, you can't make rules for a game if you don't know what game is being played.
And these normative thinkers don't pay enough attention to the game that actually takes place.
And that's what's so great about your book. It's that you persuade the reader that we need a lot more diagnosis.
And a lot more serious diagnosis before we can even raise the question of how do we respond to it.
And the political philosopher can't stand on his own right, he has to interact with historians, with sociologists, with all kinds of other people in order to form a coherent and plausible picture of what's going on and suggest what we need to do next.
There you go. We've been speaking with Professor Hans Slouga from the University of Berkeley, where he teaches philosophy.
And the book in question is called politics and the search for the common good came out less than a year ago with Cambridge University Press.
So look for that and thank you again Hans for being on entitled opinions.
Thank you, Robert. Take care.
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