Tabula Rasa: Issue I

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Cover art by Ian Baime Cover design by Emily Jiang

Letter from the Editor Before philosophy was a formal academic discipline, it was the everyday conversations among those intrigued by life’s most enigmatic questions. The enshrined Socratic method, indeed, relies on roundtable questioning and answering to stimulate nuanced critical thinking—a cyclical practice of expression, reception, and evolution of ideas. This core communal, dialogic essence of philosophy is what we hope to evoke with Tabula Rasa.

Open to students of all disciplines and to submissions in all mediums, Tabula Rasa aims to push philosophy out of the confines of the classroom and into the hands of anyone interested in the fundamental questions of knowledge, truth, existence, and ethics. We hope to provide a journal that will engage those previously unacquainted with formal philosophical concepts just as much as philosophy majors well-versed in the canon. Philosophy is, after all, something in which we all partake, whether we realize it or not.

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported and promoted the beginnings of Tabula Rasa: to Michael Green for being our very first faculty advisor; to Julie Tannenbaum and Ellie Anderson for joining him in judging our Writing Prize; to all of the 5C philosophy faculty and department liaisons for helping to garner interest; to Katya and Lilly for pursuing this ambition with me from day one and for your unwavering zeal in bringing this publication to press; to Hutch and Victor for also committing yourselves and your creativity to this project from the start; to Elena for being our jack-of-all-trades and surpassing every expectation; and, of course, to all of my fellow board and staff members for all of your hard work, dedication, and counsel throughout this Pygmalion endeavor. We are grateful for all of the wonderful submissions we received as well as for the overwhelming excitement, interest, and encouragement from the 5C community as a whole. Tabula Rasa would not be half of what it is without the immense support from all those mentioned here.

It is with excitement and appreciation that I leave the future of Tabula Rasa to the next board and the ones following. I am eager to see how this project evolves going forward, and I encourage future members to continue to try the limits of what a philosophy journal can and should be. What is a blank slate if not possibility embodied?

With that, this inaugural issue will be, we hope, the first of many strokes on this tabula rasa. We hope you enjoy.

Emily Jiang, Pomona ‘21 Editor-in-Chief

Tabula Rasa is the undergraduate philosophy journal of the Claremont Colleges, founded in December 2020. Tabula Rasa is published biannually and includes both written pieces and artwork within the realm of philosophy. In creating and publishing Tabula Rasa, we hope to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and creative work among undergraduate students interested in philosophy.

Etymology: Tabula rasa [tab-yuh-luh-rah-suh] is the Latin term for “blank slate.” In philosophy, the term is associated with John Locke’s theory that individuals are born without innate mental content, and so knowledge is gained exclusively through sensory experience and perception.

MASTHEAD Editor-in-Chief Emily Jiang (Pomona ‘21) Managing Editors Katya Pollock (Pomona ‘21) Lilly Weidhaas (Pomona ‘21) Senior Editors Eric Fossum (Pitzer ‘20) Cooper Pryde (Claremont McKenna ‘21) Victor Solorzano-Gringeri (Pomona ‘21) Sean Menton (Pomona ‘22) Patrick Liu (Pomona ‘22) Laura Mora (Claremont McKenna ‘22) Anna Soloman (Pitzer ‘23) Jenna Lange (Pomona ‘23) Senior Art Editors Jenny Park (Pomona ‘22) SeoJin Ahn (Pomona ‘23) Layout Editor and Web Designer Elena Mujal (Pomona ‘22) Prize Manager Hutchinson Fann (Pomona ‘21) Logo Design Eric Blair (Pomona ‘22)

Staff Writers Elena Breda (Pitzer ‘21) Eva Augst (Claremont McKenna ‘23) Sanjana Bhatnagar (Pitzer ‘23) Derek Li (Harvey Mudd ‘23) Justin Peng (Harvey Mudd ‘24) Sam Hernandez (Pomona ‘24) Phillip Kong (Pomona ‘24) Hannah Frasure (Pomona ‘24) Amiri Rivers-David (Pomona ‘24) Resident Artists Tarini Gandhi (Pomona ‘21) Ugen Yonten (Pomona ‘21) Jackson Kinder (Pomona ‘21) Ruth Mueller (Harvey Mudd ‘23) Tristan Latham (Pomona ‘23) Joshua Suh (Pomona ‘23) Ian Baime (Claremont McKenna ‘24)

Table of Contents WRITING On Universities and Heterotopias, Sanjana Bhatnagar, Pitzer ‘23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Love and Infinity Within the Other, Hannah Frasure, Pomona ‘24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 The Moral Justification for the Practice of Tanking in the NBA, Phillip Kong, Pomona ‘24 . . . . . . 16 Camus: the Forest, the Mountain, the Panther, Amiri Rivers-David, Pomona ‘24 . . . . . . . . . 23 Embracing the Love Ethic, Elena Breda, Pitzer ‘21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 The Ethics of Tourism, Eva Augst, Claremont McKenna ‘23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 A Definition of Philosophy, Derek Li, Harvey Mudd ‘23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Another Brick in the Wall, Sam Hernandez, Pomona ‘24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 In Defense of “Death,” Gloria Choi, Scripps ‘21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Trauma, Conflict, and Contradiction, Glen Skahill, Pomona ‘22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Counting at the Time of Death, Eric Fossum, Pitzer ‘20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 American Discipline, Justin Peng, Harvey Mudd ‘24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 ART Blueprint, Tarini Gandhi, Pomona ‘21 . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sensibility, SeoJin Ahn, Pomona ‘23 Boulder, Ugen Yonten, Pomona ‘21

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Bearer of Light, Jackson Kinder, Pomona ‘21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Suffocated by Capitalism, Ruth Mueller, Harvey Mudd ‘23 Rest Stop, Jenny Park, Pomona ‘22

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Untitled No. 19, Ian Baime, Claremont McKenna ‘24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Untitled, Tristan Latham, Pomona ‘23

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Antiphon the Sophist, Joshua Suh, Pomona ‘23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 MORAL DILEMMA Response 01, Andy Hahn, Pomona ‘23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Response 02, Joshua Suh, Pomona ‘23

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“Blueprint” Tarini Gandhi, Pomona ‘21 Medium: Cyanotype Winner of Art Prize This piece deals with heterotopias through an architectural lens by focusing on the buildings of Pomona College. I explore Foucault’s definition of a heterotopia as a single space where several otherwise incompatible spaces are juxtaposed, by illustrating the coexistence of Pomona’s varied architecture that ranges from Spanish Colonial Revival to Brutalism. The medium of the piece, cyanotype, which is also associated with architectural blueprints, further lays emphasis on the role architecture plays in casting the College as a heterotopia.

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On Universities and Heterotopias

in the forms of “series, trees, or grids.”1 In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault examines the potential of a unique type of site: defined by difference (hetero), and conceived of as enacted utopias, Foucault names these sites heterotopias. They are distinct, because the heterotopia’s relations of proximity are between the points or elements of every other site in society. If a normal site is a set of relations, then the heterotopia, whose set of relations is between sites themselves, is almost like a meta-site.

Not only does a heterotopia relate to all other sites, but it also does so in a manner that inverts the sets of relations contained within those sites.

Heterotopias both produce an image of all spaces within a society and contest that image. They are like a blueprint site, creating an understanding of all other sites through depiction, but reconstituting the image of those sites through their potential to meet the urgency of the present era’s problems. In capacity, they could almost be utopias, except that heterotopias exist in the world of reality.

To clarify the way in which a space can both represent and contest, Foucault calls upon the image of the space within mirrors. The subject seen in a mirror is unreal, as it exists in an imaginary, “placeless place” beyond the mirror, but it is also real because the mirror itself is real and provides an inverted image of the very real subject before it. As with the subject in the mirror, who is able to see an image of themself and their relation to space in their inverted reflection, the heterotopia provides a means through which society can conceive of itself and its relation to space through an image that contests itself and its relations.

by Sanjana Bhatnagar, Pitzer ‘23 Winner of Writing Prize Introduction

Staring into a screen for hours on end during the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve begun to dissociate. Some days, it feels as though everyone is just a square on the screen, thoughts on a forum post, or an empathetic expression in a group chat. Flattened by this two-dimensional existence, I ache for the consistent sense of expansiveness that rushed through me when I was at college. For most students, this past year has been immensely emotionally taxing, and the “college experience” has become a secondary concern. With our upcoming return to campus this fall, I cannot help but reflect on how the college experience has manifested during the pandemic. On the surface, a lot feels similar on Zoom to how the university functioned on-campus. However, comparing the virtual experience to the physical experience of college using Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia reveals that there is one fundamental thing universities have failed to provide in their shift onto Zoom.

Although universities have reconstructed almost every principle of the heterotopia remotely, they have failed to translate the effects of the one principle which ties all of the other principles together: the liminal spaces—hallways, sidewalks, and gardens—that unify the disparate elements of the university. With the configuration of the university as a virtual institution, relationality has been lost to the seperation of sites. Everything is disconnected, and so it is no surprise that we, too, disassociate.

The University as a Heterotopia

There are many moments in modern and contemporary history when universities have served as heterotopic sites that have effectively represented and inverted society at large. One such instance is the protests of May 1968 in France, which were heavily influenced by the works of Foucault himself.2 What started as visions of reform by students at the Paris Nanterre University and the Sor-

What is a Heterotopia?

In his 1967 talk “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault contends that our present era will be determined by how we arrange our spaces. The arrangement of spaces occurs in sites, which are defined by “relations of proximity between points or elements,”as 3

bonne quickly disrupted all of France and turned into a movement that included not just students, but workers across society. Since so many of the workers who were protesting were integral to the daily functioning of France, the French economy was literally brought to a standstill.3 The goals of May 68 expanded from overturning university structures to reforming a wide array of French social and cultural systems. As universities have often been sites that spur political action, calling into question the norms of the societies they exist within, it seems fitting to look to the concept of the heterotopia as a means of understanding how the space of the university functions. It is precisely the constant interrogation of society as it was and is arranged, in the mission of imagining society as it could be, that makes the university such an enriching site to participate in.

To get at the heart of the university—the critical something that makes the institution a heterotopia—I reviewed the six principles Foucault uses to coordinate the heterotopia:

on the institutional level, they still uphold society in its most absurd of power structures. Rather, my argument is that they hold the potential to provide a framework for students to recognize and shift existing social norms. Ultimately, this means that universities are heterotopic only to the extent to which students manifest this potential.

The Claremont Colleges are flawed, but heterotopias can exist within such circumstances. This is in fact something that is considered in the sixth principle: the space of the heterotopia must relate to all other spaces in society. Foucault proposes two modes through which spaces can achieve the sixth principle. One way is through the creation of “a heterotopia of illusion” which relates to all other spaces in society by exposing them. This mode speaks to how a heterotopia can exist, even through the negative norms of society, by creating “a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory.”4 The Claremont Colleges function as a heterotopia of illusion in the moments when they sustain and reproduce the norms of the rest of society, to such an extreme extent that the illusion of those norms are made apparent. For instance, one needs to look no further than the use of the various 5C endowments to see that the institutions do not invert, but rather uphold some of the worst norms of society. From endowment investments in fossil fuels to the lack of support for workers during the pandemic, it is hard not to question the very foundation of our colleges. However, the aforementioned uses of endowments (or lack thereof) were met with considerable advocacy which sought to reveal not only the problems with how the 5Cs use their money, but also a more general concern about the ends towards which money is used in society.

The second way spaces can achieve the sixth principle is through the creation of “a heterotopia of compensation,” which relates to all other spaces in society by opposing them. They compensate for the flaws of societal relations through creating “another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.”5 The most important feature of the university is the classroom, as the function of college is to pro-

1) They exist for those who are either in a state of crisis or deviance.

2) They are created to serve a specific function and that function evolves with time.

3) They bring together several, contradicting spaces.

4) They are associated with slices in time.

5) They are only penetrable to those who perform certain rituals to enter.

6) They expose or oppose all other spaces in society.

Considering each of these principles as they apply to the university structure of the Claremont Colleges, I found that all but the third principle have held true on Zoom.

Before further investigating these principles, it is important to note that the Claremont Colleges as they exist now are not ideal heterotopias. In multiple systemic ways, they are deeply flawed. As such, I want to emphasize that my argument is not that the institutions of universities or the institutions of the Claremont Colleges themselves are an inversion of social norms, because 4

fourth principle of the heterotopia is that “heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time.”9 College is a slice of time because it often delineates the interim time between childhood and adulthood.

This transitory nature of college makes it a time of radical exploration in which one is able to investigate the features of adult life with the low-stake consequences of childhood. The nature of this time can be further contextualized by the first principle, which is that heterotopias exist for those in a state of crisis or deviance. The university is a crisis heterotopia, defined by Foucault as “privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis.”10 For many, college is the first instance of leaving home and learning how to be in the world.

It is culturally deemed a place of finding oneself and one’s path, and so the space of the university could certainly be seen as reserved for individuals figuring out the crisis of individual identity.

The community is not only one of individuals experiencing a shared period in time, but it is also artificially organized by the admissions process. Although college admissions are problematic in countless ways, this process is a feature that facilitates the fifth principle of the heterotopia, which is that heterotopias require a “system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable... To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures”.11 One of the considerations in admitting students into the space is evaluating how they will relate to the community at large. Both the shared sense of time and the community of college are critical in rendering it a heterotopic site.

While all of these principles still apply in translation to Zoom, Foucault’s third principle of the heterotopia—the heterotopia’s ability to connect its various, incompatible sites—is not found on the Zoom rendition of the Claremont Colleges.

Although Foucault does not address the potential for heterotopias, or spaces more generally, to exist through non-physical sites, he does consider the existence of non-physical sites in realms such

vide education, and, for the most part, classrooms facilitate this construction of a well-arranged world. As students learn ideals and interpretations of society and the world from professors, who are acquainted with all of the various aspects of relationality within their fields, students can conceive of how to manifest a society on campus that pushes for the ideals taught in the classroom. The intensity and depth of the classroom experience has the potential to trickle into how campus life arranges itself, as students use it to shape the world around them. This could be in a way that is explicit, such as a sociology lesson leading students to an innovative approach to discussing how identity configures itself on campus. Or, it could be less explicit, such as a math class in fractals inspiring a student to take their friends on hikes to find fractals in trees and appreciate the wonders of the natural world.

The second principle of the heterotopia is that each heterotopia has a “precise and determined” function that adapts in relation to the time in which it exists.6 Higher education has evolved over time to serve different functions, and the Claremont Colleges are a prime example of this in that each college was founded around a core mission suited to the needs of the time. For example, Claremont McKenna was founded in 1946, only a year after World War II had ended, with the intent of preparing students (many of whom were GIs) to be “future leaders of private and public enterprise” through an emphasis on practical action.7 Harvey Mudd was founded in 1955, the same year that the space race began, and it first opened for classes in 1957, just a month before Sputnik I was launched, and so the mission of the school echoed the needs of the times and set out to offer “a rigorous scientific and technological education.”8 Pitzer defined its mission and core values in accordance with its founding decade of the 1960s which saw the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, and the start of the modern environmental movement. Each of the 5Cs have renewed and redefined their missions to find new relevance and function in all subsequent eras.

Another key aspect of the experience of the university is living in community with peers. The 5

as technical work. Since the potential exists for sites to exist virtually, there is the potential that the university could function as a heterotopic site when moved away from its physical space and configured into a non-physical site. However, the one principle that the heterotopia on Zoom lacks is not only an aspect that is currently solely achievable in a physical site, but it is also the principle that is necessary in making every other principle truly heterotopic. A site is not a heterotopia if it does not contain liminal spaces that connect its contradicting, multiplicitious points and elements.

McKenna, around the lush gardens of Scripps, to the native-plant desert ecosystem of Pitzer, up and around the open lawns surrounding the brutalism of Harvey Mudd. What ties all of these dissonant features together and creates a singular site out of multiplicity is nothing more than the pathways and public spaces that connect them. On our computers, there are no pathways to connect the various components of the university. After a class, no one lingers. As Zoom fatigue takes over, students simply move on to the next thing. Ideas end on the page of the essay, the problem set, the lab, or the red “leave meeting” button. The home, as a space, is distinct from the classroom, which is on a particular Zoom link, which is distinct from other classrooms, on other Zoom links, which are distinct from social settings on various sites of social media or private spaces of communal interaction. Zoom fails in providing the string that weaves it all together into a field of relationality—into a heterotopia.

It is not enough for thoughts to be invoked in the classroom; they must be discussed, integrated, and pondered with peers of different studies and beliefs. They must bleed into our everyday lives.

They must not remain isolated in the classroom, but rather diffuse into the spaces of society at large. This is achieved in the undesignated time of commute, as the ideas are able to fester in a student’s mind, either through conversation with the classmates they walk out with or in their own mind as they move between destinations. The commute allows for thoughts to move with the student while they relate with the material world. In moving through different spaces, students may consider the theory they were grappling with in class as it relates to the world that they are moving through. Recall the examples of how theories presented in sociology or math classrooms might find their way into campus life. If a student leaves the sociology classroom and commutes to the place where their affinity group meets, or perhaps they even just pass the place where their group meets, then the odds that the theories of the sociology classroom move with the student into that space of the affinity group is increased. Or after the math class, if a student looks at the nature they pass in their commute as more than just a feature of

The Third Principle

The university on Zoom has failed to achieve the heterotopic potential of universities in person because it does not unify the sites that achieve the various principles of the heterotopia. The third principle of the heterotopia is that “the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.”12 Insofar as heterotopias are defined by their capacity to simultaneously represent and contest every other site of the culture they exist within, it is in fact impossible that they can exist without creating a unified site out of multiple dissonant and incompatible sites. Universities, especially liberal arts colleges, contain a web of interconnected but juxtaposed features. There is an array of classes in various fields that sometimes contradict each other in outlook, but all come together on one campus.

Beyond just classrooms, the university contains the heterogenous sites where students eat, learn, sleep, organize, hook up, cry, dance and engage in other features of everyday life. On the college campus, all of the incompatible sites of our lives come together into one space. Further, the Claremont Colleges demonstrate a unique combination of incompatible sites, as the consortium is formed by five very different schools. The values and student bodies of each of the schools are different, even somewhat disparate at times, but the very composition of the spaces sufficiently demonstrates the union of contradictory sites—one needs to look no further than the walk amongst campuses, from the old world glamour of Pomona, through the corporate Claremont 6

their environment, but with fractals in mind, then the materiality or even the spirit of the theory is confronted, and its importance outside of the classroom escalates. In these liminal spaces, thought moves from the abstract spaces of classrooms and sublimates into the spaces where students manifest.

Moving college to Zoom does not change the slice of time that the majority of college students exist within, as they are still of the interim age between childhood and adulthood. But after shifting off campus, many students moved back home with their families, returning to a similar environment as their childhoods. Others moved into their own apartments, mimicking a self-sufficient adult environment. Neither group of students has fully created the situations of childhood and adulthood, as they are still defined by the experience of being within the interim of the university. For students living with friends, the community aspect of the university still remains to an extent, but most of these students still feel the tangible lack of diversity and novelty presented by the whole college community, as students are limited to those they already know. The shared slice of time and state of crisis, with the uniquely composed community, becomes limited to a very small set. It is uniquely in the liminal space of the commute that defined social sets are abolished, as these spaces are defined by movement, such that no individual or group can permanently occupy them. Conversations after class create new connections, as those who might share nothing in common can move into a social space together while continuing those conversations. Or while commuting and passing by students gathering, perhaps for a club, one might be called to join them when they otherwise would not have been. Leaving a gathering late at night, one might spot someone they’re familiar with and decide to walk back to the dorms with them. Strangers, who would never have crossed paths, slowly turn into friends through the commute, and at some point, what started as a mere smile while passing by shifts into something else completely. The potential that is unlocked by this seems menial, but in considering the disconnected communities of the outside world, the social potential of college is radical.

People from completely different circumstances, values, and majors come together and learn from perspectives that challenge their own, gaining the potential to innovate in a way that those in the outside world, who limit themselves to interacting with those inside their fields of work, their geographical location, or some other commonality, cannot. The commute opens up the potential of social networks expanding the relations that society has limited itself to, and inverting the spaces of the outside world.

The crisis of identity is confronted with the possibility of a multiplicitous, non-static subjectivity.

The commute is a space in which people have the tendency to use their phones, attempting to make use of a time that is otherwise considered wasted. Although technology might provide an “efficient” alternative to an undesignated commute, it limits the potential that students can unlock from the university as a holistic entity with a complex set of relations. In considering how fundamental the third principle is in creating a heterotopia, it becomes remarkable to think that non-physical sites have not yet found an equivalent to physical liminal spaces. Every site on the computer or the phone is self-referential, which deprives them of a connectivity that could only come from undesignated, undirected movements between sites. As non-physical sites gain more and more prevalance in determining how society arranges itself, it seems important to consider what might be lost from moving everything into the virtual world and expanding our definition of space to include the flattened virtual worlds of our screens. Or perhaps this could even provide a model for an addition to the virtual site that would allow it to mimic the more complex connections amongst networks that exists in physical sites.

Conclusion

A heterotopia is defined by difference and is conceived of as an enacted utopia. It is a placeless place. It feels almost intuitive that the defining aspect of the university is the placeless place of the connectors, the hallways, the sidewalks, the gardens: the commute. For the university, the subject in the unreal place of the mirror is the ideals and 7

theory of the classroom. It is the classroom that reflects the reality of society through the opposed image of society’s ideals. The dorms, the social spaces, and the dining halls are all spaces that relate to this subject in the mirror. The capacity to reflect onto society the image of this inverted subject of ideals and its relation to spaces lies in using what literally connects the subject and the spaces around it to form an image of their whole as a relational entity. In connection is where relations are made evident, and the image in the mirror can bounce back into the real world. The blueprint emerges from this connectivity as relations are made evident through the various heterotopic principles, converging and reassociating in the commute to form innovative and new possibilities of relations.

Embracing the potential of the journey to, from, and between places could perhaps unflatten our persistent screen fatigue and invigorate the potential that ideas have to be manifested into the world. On Zoom, the university is a hollow shell of what it used to be. Without the intricate network of connections and relations that physicality provides, the university is not a heterotopia, and ultimately that is why there are no stand-ins for the experience. Staring into a screen just isn’t enough.

no. 2 (2014): 31. https://doi.org/10.3384/rela.20007426.201452.

4. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 27 5. Ibid.

6. Ibid, 25.

7. “History of the College.” cmc.edu. Accessed April 24, 2021. https://www.cmc.edu/about/history-of-the-college.

8. “History of Harvey Mudd College.” hmc.edu.

Accessed April 24, 2021. https://www.hmc.edu/ about-hmc/history.

9. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 26 10. Ibid, 24.

11. Ibid, 26.

12. Ibid, 25.

Endnotes 1. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 23 2. Lopes, António. “The University as Power or Counter-Power? May 1968 and the Emergence of a New Learning Subject .” European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults 5, no. 2 (2014): 31. https://doi.org/10.3384/rela.20007426.201452.

3. Beardsley, Eleanor. “In France, The Protests Of May 1968 Reverberate Today - And Still Divide The French.” NPR. NPR, May 29, 2018. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/05/29/613671633/in-france-the-protestsof-may-1968-reverberate-today-and-still-dividethe-french.

7. “History of the College.” cmc.edu. Accessed 8

“Sensibility” SeoJin Ahn, Pomona ‘23 Medium: Digital Imaging In reading about qualia—or phenomenal experiences—I grew interested in our sense perceptions and what they could mean for our ability to understand and interact with our environment. This piece is focused on the sense of touch and how it individualizes our experiences.

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Love and Infinity Within the Other

sees mice chewing the vine, and beside him, a drop of honey on a leaf. He wonders whether he should lick the honey, since he will fall sooner or later.

by Hannah Frasure, Pomona ‘24

When someone is aware of their fatality, death can become like a wild animal, visibly in pursuit or hiding in unknown places. Everything to rejoice for in life, like honey, has lost its sweetness.

Nothing has lasting meaning because of the fate that awaits. Thus, everyone must solve the conundrum of living with the knowledge that they will eventually cease to exist. In The Courage to Be, Tillich explains that “reality has the basic structure of self-world correlation and that with the disappearance of the one side the world, the other side, the self, also disappears.”2 Because it is impossible to perceive death immediately, the notion is derived from observing the similarities among its effects on others. When a being dies, it loses the part of its essence that allowed it to exist, so existence must be inseparable from the essence of anything that lives.

As a result, when death causes a being to lose its life, death instantiates nonexistence. Therefore, if the existence of a thing is contingent upon its perceivable quality, if the being no longer has the capability to perceive the thing, the thing may no longer exist.

Humans in the 21st century face what seems to be an insurmountable, growing number of existential threats. Climate change may leave the world uninhabitable; weapons of mass destruction may render it obsolete. Regardless of what is done to prolong human-made annihilation events, the Sun—billions of years from now—will engulf the Earth before ceasing to burn. As a result, there are constant reminders of imminent extinction. If that is our destiny, is courage even possible? What meaning may life have in the face of imminent doom?

Throughout history, philosophers have addressed these questions, and they remain as important as ever. The answer I propose is synthesized from the phenomenological and existential arguments of Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and G.W.F. Hegel.1 I first endeavor to discover the connection between death and meaninglessness. Then I explore how the self relates to and knows of the existence of other-selves—with those selves referred to as the Other—to understand the origin of the idea of death. Lastly, I come to an understanding that our relation to the Other is also the basis of meaning, and that unconditional love of the Other makes not only meaning possible, but also transcendent, infinite, and eternal existence itself possible—what I refer to as Being and what Buber refers to as God.

Moreover, as perception has taught that everything living dies, the self too will die, which means that it is fated to nonexistence. As a result, since the self will become nonexistent, everything is independent of the self, because the self-world correlation will vanish. Thus, the reality is that nothing will exist.

Tillich goes further by identifying the problem this poses. He explains, “it is not causal necessity that makes fate a matter of anxiety but the lack of ultimate necessity, the irrationality, the impenetrable darkness of fate.”3 To return to the fable, the man clinging to the vine believes the jaws of the dragon make it impossible to take pleasure from licking the honey. If man’s fate prevents him from enjoying honey, then man exists only to be eaten! If this notion is true, then Albert Camus was wrong to liken the human condition to Sisyphus. Instead, it is more like that of Prometheus, anxiously awaiting the eagle’s talons, fated to suffer

The first step is to undertake an inquiry asking how the idea of nonexistence is concluded from death and why it causes life to lose its meaning. Leo Tolstoy once rewrote a Buddhist fable that illustrates the connection. Walking down a path in the woods, a man becomes aware that a wild animal has begun to chase him. Ahead, he sees a plant with a vine hanging inside a well. The man decides to escape by climbing down the vine and waiting for the animal to leave. After he begins the descent, he looks down and sees a dragon at the bottom. Meanwhile, the wild animal has reached the top of the well and paces around it, waiting for him to ascend. Looking up, he 10

because his chains are not only to the rock but to his experience of consciousness. It is the absence of an efficient cause for the finiteness of existence, along with the absence of a final cause for why beings have the capability to perceive their existence at all, which is the source of the Prometheus-like agony that Tillich terms ontic anxiety. From everything inferred so far, life has no meaning, so self-awareness necessarily entails suffering.

However, the inquiry thus far is incomplete. The self-world correlation also implies that the existence of the self is contingent upon the existence of other objects. These objects, it will be shown, are other living beings: the Other. G.W.F. Hegel demonstrates that a being may only have an awareness of itself if there is something else that is not itself.4 So, for a being to have the capability to conclude its own existence, those others must necessarily exist, and the mind must have the ability to perceive their existence. The self and the Other have an interdependent relationship, what Hegel and Buber individually call reciprocity.5

Suppose the existence of the self depends upon the actuality of the Other. In that case, the self must conceive of nonexistence because it has the capability to perceive the Other as inactual. To be inactual is to lack the property that instantiates existence. Buber’s basic premise is that there are two ways the self relates to the world, (a) the I-It and (b) the I-You. The former relation causes ontic anxiety.

For Buber, the essence of the “It” is finiteness. He writes, the “It is only by virtue of bordering on others.”6 Under objecthood, the Other does not have an actual existence within the present but is contextualized as a point within the casual chain of spacetime. In short, the “It” is an object, whereas the “I” is a subject. When the “I” encounters the consciousness of the Other as an “It,” the Other is no longer a subject, another “I,” but an object, and a result, nonexistent. Thus, at this point, it is known that the finiteness of the body, learned from the sensed lack of actuality of the Other in the I-It relation, causes a being to think of itself as finite—or fated to die.

itself as having the same kind of selfhood as the Other, if the Other is an object, the subjectivity of the individual becomes confined to the same status of that of the Other. That is, of objecthood.

As such, the relation becomes one of mutual objectivity. Although the “I” still recognizes its own existence, its existence is that of an object, which has the essence of finiteness. Therefore, in the I-It relation, the “I” gains an awareness of its imminent death because all objects are empirically known to be merely transient. So, a being cannot conceive itself as actually existing when it relates to the world as an “It.” Instead, because it perceives itself as an object that will eventually no longer exist, the self does not perceive its existence as anything more than transient. As a result, if a being always engages in I-It relations, it will be doomed to a constant state of ontic anxiety. “I” may never act meaningfully in the world insofar as “I” regard the Other as an “It.” The “I” is doomed to the extent that it continues to encounter the Other as an “It,” only sensing the Other and the self as powerless objects, which threatens the actuality of their being.

If “I” relate to the Other as an object, then “I” do not perceive its existence as actual, because the essence of an object is that it is finite. Its existence is merely transitory. As a result, it is impossible for the “I” to conceive the existence of objects that continue after the death of the self. Although an object is present in the I-It relation, the internal cognitive experience of relating to the Other as an object does not let the “I” know of this existence. When I choose to perceive the world as an “It,” the previous I-It relations cause the “I” to anticipate the loss of self-world correlation. The I continually relates to the Other as an “It” because the “I” fears its loss, which subsequently induces the knowledge of the death of the self. However, when the “I” relates to the Other as an object, attempting to avoid their fear of the actuality of nonexistence, the “I” ultimately fails because they will never recognize the actuality of existence.

So, is there a type of internal cognitive experience by which the self may grasp actuality?

Buber believes that this experience may be had in

In the I-It relation, because the “I” sees 11

nonbeing. Nonetheless, a closer examination of the “I-You” relation reveals one possible attitude that one may take to overcome this fate. To encounter the world as a “You,” a being must be prepared to love it.

relating to the Other as a “You.” He writes, “I do not find the human being to whom I say You in any Sometimes and Somewhere... As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempest of causality cowers at my heels. The whirl of doom congeals.”7 To encounter a “You” is to be aware that one has definite knowledge of the presence of an external object. That is, one has the pure awareness of the presence of the Other. Buber writes, “we speak to the [You] only when all speech has ceased within.”8 From an awareness of this definite knowledge, the “I” can infer the world continues to exist after the loss of the self-world correlation, something the “I” cannot infer insofar as the world is an “It.” To encounter an “It” is only to be aware that there is an object whose existence is finite. The “I” relates to the Other as “You” through an internal action of the cognition whereby the self, as opposed to perceiving the relation to the Other as a means to an end, is perceived as an end in and of itself. The Other does not have the essence of an object, but the same essence of the self, as a subject. Thus, mutual objectivity transforms into mutual subjectivity, or intersubjectivity, in the I-You. Even as the encounter ends, the relationship itself is still the experience of a being perceiving Being within the Other (as opposed to the nonbeing that is manifest within the “It” of the “I-It” relation). If all actual things share this property, they do not essentially differ, given that their actuality depends upon it. Thus, what one perceives to be the self is merely Being that inheres within a temporal body.

The evidence of infinity and eternity is inherent within beings as they necessarily have the property of existence. Ultimately, in the I-You relation, a being no longer perceives itself as finite since it gains the knowledge of the essence of existence in sensing the immediate presence of the Other.

Love is the mutual recognition of the Being within a being. To return to Hegel, “in love, life is present as a duplicate of itself and as a single and unified self.” He continues, “love destroys objectivity and thereby annuls and transcends reflection…and discovers life itself without any further defect. In love, the separate does remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate; life senses life.”9 Through love, two beings exist simultaneously, separate and whole. In love, objecthood, or the “I-It” relation, vanishes, and the “You” is seen within the Other, despite physical differences. To love the Other is to sense a property, existence, that is necessarily caused by something independent of both entities.10

However, since love is an action, and the purpose of an action is to produce an effect, love must occur as an actual event. Since it is only possible to affect something if it is changed following the action, causality may only affect things with the property of existing in spacetime. By inhering within bodies, the relation can become an event, and Being may be actualized. Similarly, Buber states it is through love that a being “[n]o longer [feels] the one, limited by the other; you felt both without bounds, both at once.”11 Both beings are present and actual.

Moreover, to love a being despite the intuitive notion that such an act is meaningless is to affirm the being’s meaning. To love the Other believing that one day both beings will become nonexistent is to triumph over the seeming absurdity of existence which threatens to destroy any meaning.

Ultimately, love is the relation which Buber states each being is responsible for having with the Other.

While “I-You” relations have a duration, the “You” that is innate in the world does not. It is through this knowledge that ontic anxiety can be relieved. Buber explains, “The eternal You is You by its very nature; only our nature forces us to draw it

However, since experience teaches that such encounters seem transitory, self-knowledge is reduced to what it is under the “I-It” relation. Due to inevitable cessation, self-awareness is still seen as a relation between objects, not subjects. Subsequently, the meaning that was made possible in having an “I-You” encounter can no longer be had.

So, it seems the self is still resigned to the fate of 12

into the It-world and It-speech.”12 There is always potential to encounter infinity, as the opposite of a finite presence; the “I-You” relation is always possible. This infinity is the eternal “You,” what Buber refers to as “Thou,” or God. However, beings will not always encounter this presence because to exist, “I-It” relations are necessary. When the “I-It” relation is seen as the only possible way to relate to the world, the self loses touch with their essence. That is, “whoever goes forth to his You with his whole being and carries to it all the being of the world, finds him whom one cannot seek.”13 That is, even in approaching the world from an “I-You” perspective, one is destined to encounter “I-it” relations.

Insofar as a being has unconditional love for whatever they encounter, such a being will always find presence. If a being loves conditionally, they have the attitude that not every Other can be encountered as a “You.” This is the critical mistake that induces ontic anxiety. True love recognizes the Being inherent within anything. Through this type of love, one gains the awareness that Being is always present. As a result, they know Being, which transcends death. “God […] the eternal presence, cannot be had. Woe unto the possessed who fancy that they possess God!”14 God cannot be had precisely because it is Being which always exists; Being which is eternal. The earlier intuition, which concluded that the loss of self entails the loss of the world, is incorrect. A world can exist independently of the self, and given the self ’s ability to consistently recognize Being within itself and the Other through unconditional love, knowing it is merely a form of Being inherent within the world. Thus, nonexistence is something inactual because the essential property of a being, existence, is not lost upon death. Being— God—is something independent of beings, although it depends upon the possibility of them.

So, beings necessarily exist as finite within spacetime to love each other, and Being may occur.15

what is lost upon death. Although a part of the self remains—the existence inherent in the self— has another part become nonexistent? The possibility of nonexistence becoming actual would require nonexistence to instantiate its existence to become actual, which is incoherent. For example, at the most basic level, vacuums still inhere within something in order to be a possibility. Even as particles seemingly disappear within quantum vacuums, there is still energy in the vacuum to produce the matter.16 The vacuum must still be inherent within something to be an actuality at all.

As a result, the essence of everything, including even of finite selves, is always present. That is, totality is contained within the infinity of existence.

Everything that has ever been or will be possible is inherent within Being. Even if nothing had ever been actual, despite the incoherence of such a notion, the totality of everything existent necessarily would have been contained within it in order for anything to have existed, or in other words, nothingness would have the essence of Being.

This last conclusion, alongside what I inferred about existence, should cause even the most potent ontic anxiety to dissipate. Separate, finite self-aware bodies exist so that, by sensing the presence of other similarly self-aware bodies—referred to as the Other—they may derive knowledge of an actual efficient cause for their separate existences.

It is this knowledge that actualizes Being. Since the actuality of Being is contingent upon beings sensing the presence of the Other, there are a multiplicity of beings. Additionally, since beings only encounter the presence of the Other through unconditional love, the actuality of Being is also contingent upon the possibility of love. As love is an action, its possibility depends upon the capability of a being to act, which, in turn, depends upon the possibility of a definite effect being produced. Since the occurrence of an effect depends on a change within space and time, beings must be capable of perceiving those dimensions. As a result, since that perception is only possible if a being has a mind aware of the finiteness of their body, and since the actuality of Being is only possible if beings have the freedom to love, Being is fated to inhere with-

However, to come by knowledge about death in such a way is incoherent. Nevertheless, its inevitability still stands, and so intuitively, there is still some part of the self that is lost. Even if one has affirmed the possibility of the world to exist independently of the self, one has yet to address 13

n separate bodies that exist for a finite duration.

The anxiety caused by death is an accidental result.

willing the internal cognitive act of unconditional love for every object that is perceived, regardless of whether they foresee the return of that love, they shall find that no longer must meaning be sought in the face of death. Instead, meaning is found everywhere one turns. It is the act of love that affirms the omnipresence of transcendent existence.

To return to this paper’s origins, Tolstoy’s story shows the illusory trap of the “I-It” relation. Neither the wild animal nor the dragon is there in actuality. Instead, what is present always is the essence of Being—a necessarily transcendent being and contains the totality of all beings’ essences within its infinity. In every encounter with an existent thing, it is possible to encounter existence itself. It is an error to believe that one must search for existence when at any moment, existence can be found. Even with the knowledge of impending doom, meaning may be rescued if one is willing to stay open to the encounter of immediate presence and love that which they find. As Buber asks, “That you need God more than anything, you know at all times in your heart. But don’t you also know that God needs you—in the fullness of his eternity, you?”17 Through “I-You” relations, ontic anxiety is dissipated. To illustrate this, I consider a separate story from Tolstoy.

Endnotes 1. The original version of this paper equally incorporated metaphysical arguments from The Ethics

by Baruch Spinoza due to the similarity between his pantheism and the panentheism of Buber, however, due to brevity, the segments had to be cut. So, I urge readers familiar with Spinoza to especially compare his ideas of (a) bodily finiteness as the basis of the mind’s ability to conceive spacetime (5p21, 5p29) as well as eternity (5p30) and (b) the infinite love of God occurring through its expression by finite beings (5p34c) with what is discussed on Buber.

They will find a number of similarities. For further reading that is an account of Buber’s own thoughts on the similarities of his theology to that of Spinoza’s, see: Buber, Martin. The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, translated by Maurice Friedman.

New York: Humanities Press International [1960].

2. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1952] 2014), 42 3. Tillich, The Courage to Be, 42 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (New York City: Oxford University Press, [1807] 1979), 111 5. Hegel, G. W. F, “Love” in Early Theological Writings, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975 [1798]), 305, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fh9kb.6 & Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York City: Charles Scribner’s Sons, [1923] 1970), 58. For further comparative literature on Buber and Hegel, see: Hudson, Stephen. “Intersubjectivity of Mutual Recognition and the I-Thou: a Comparative Analysis of Hegel and Buber.” Minerva - an Internet Journal of Philosophy 14 (2010): 140-155 6. Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York City: Charles Scribner’s Sons, [1923] 1970) 7. Buber, I and Thou, 59 8. Buber, I and Thou, 153 9. G.W.F. Hegel, “Love”, 305

A King is seeking answers to three questions: (1) who is the most important one, (2) when is the most important time, and (3) what is the most important thing to do? Since the wisest person in his kingdom is an old hermit, the King endeavors to meet him. Upon encountering the hermit in his garden and seeing the hermit struggle, the King takes over the task for the hermit. As soon as the King finishes gardening, a man stumbles in front of the King and is bleeding to death.

The King bandages his wounds. When the King can finally ask the hermit his questions, the hermit tells the King that he already knows the answer. The most important one is the person right in front of you, the most important time is the present, and the most important thing to do is love the person how they need to be loved. Notice the similarity between this conclusion and the plea of Buber: “Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms—and our hands encounter the hands that hold it.”18 Insofar as one strives to encounter the subject within every Other, 14

10. While this paper does not have the space to address the concerns raised by Hume over the possibility of establishing causality, I believe it will suffice to note that the first part of the Treatise explains that to have an idea of an object is to have an idea of its existence, the very same premise I use. Subsequently, my purpose is to show that what we sense in other beings, their existence, is a universal effect, which makes possible the knowledge of a universal cause. In the fifth section of the Enquiry, such a knowledge is deemed impossible because the “secret nature” of that which we perceive is unknowable, but I believe Hume seemed to have neglected his own observation that anything perceived by has the uniform property of existence. For further reading on this subject, see: Smithurst, Michael. “Hume on Existence and Possibility.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 81 (1980): 17-37. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/4544963. Thus, what I propose is that given the thing-in-itself exhibits the property of existence, we can infer that it is caused by existence itself (a point which relied on Spinoza). However, I concede that this is a rebuttal which needs further argumentation.

11. Buber, I and Thou, 130 12. Buber, I and Thou, 48 13. Buber, I and Thou, 127 14. Buber, I and Thou, 155 15. Although there is insufficient space to discuss another philosopher, British Idealist J. M. E. McTaggart, known for his argument that time is illusory, wrote an interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy in a book called The Further Determination of the Absolute where he presented a similar conclusion: the Absolute Spirit is actualized through the love between a multiplicity of finite beings.

16. For an argument on the impossibility of a vacuum, see: Bennett, Jonathan. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1984.

17. Buber, I and Thou, 130 18. Buber, I and Thou, 143

15

The Moral Justification for the Practice of Tanking in the NBA

draft picks in upcoming entry drafts, the main process by which college or international players enter the NBA, and/or young prospects. For example, the Oklahoma City Thunder traded away All-Star player Paul George and received five first-round draft picks as well as 20-year-old prospect Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in return.6 Teams have the unique ability to secure players cheaply for a long period of time through the entry draft. They have the exclusive rights to sign the player they pick to a rookie-scale contract that lasts for up to four years.7 Additionally, even after a first-round drafted player’s rookie-scale contract expires, the original team can match any offer the player receives from other teams and keep the player in a process called “Restricted Free Agency.”8 Another important aspect of tanking is that teams will intentionally field less competitive lineups to lose more games. This is because the worst performers from the previous season receive the best odds of earning higher draft picks.

by Phillip Kong, Pomona ‘24 Introduction

“Tanking” in the National Basketball Association (NBA) is a highly debated topic. Certain journalists call the practice an “epidemic” while others argue that the growing acceptance of tanking is indicative of fans becoming more invested in their favorite teams.1 2 Tanking is the practice of purposefully losing in the short-term to increase a team’s chances of winning in the long-term. This is achieved by trading away older players for younger prospects and draft picks in future entry drafts. A current example of tanking is the Houston Rockets who traded away former Most Valuable Player James Harden for four first round draft picks, a prospect, and one other relatively young player.

Although it is uncommon, some teams have even publicly stated that they are tanking. During the 2017-18 season the owner of the Dallas Mavericks stated that the team was purposely trying to lose games towards the end of the season because they were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.3 4 While there has been research analyzing the longterm effectiveness of tanking, it is unclear whether tanking is a morally justifiable practice within the confines of the NBA.5 Using a Kantian framework, this paper finds that tanking is a morally justifiable practice in the NBA because it is an action out of duty that adheres to the a priori principles of the association. A common objection to tanking is that it reduces the enjoyment of the fans of the tanking team because those teams lose the vast majority of their games. However, looking at the practice through a Millsian utilitarian lens shows that this objection does not hold any moral weight.

The reason teams tank is to achieve success on basketball’s biggest stage, the NBA playoffs. Under normal circumstances, teams play an 82-game regular season and are ranked in their conference (East or West) by their win-loss record. The top-six teams of each conference attain automatic qualification into the playoffs and their seeding is determined by their regular season position. The seventh to tenth place teams compete in a play-in tournament to decide the seventh and eighth seeds.9 Once all eight seeds in both conferences are set, teams play a knockout five-game series in the first round and seven-game series in all subsequent rounds until only one team remains, the NBA champion.

Kantian Justification

The term “sporting integrity” is typically used when making a normative evaluation of certain actions in sports. That is whether and to what degree the course of action exhibits sporting integrity. For this essay, it is necessary to define sporting integrity with regards to morals. Philosopher Abe Zakhem argues that the most important aspect of sporting integrity is the adherence to the “spirit” or “ethos” of the game.10 Namely, sporting integrity

Background

Teams “tank” primarily by trading away their older, higher-caliber players in exchange for 16

is not simply a matter of coherence, that is, coherence regarding the restraints athletes or teams face when competing.11 Instead, Zakhem argues that sporting integrity is defined by genuinely holding values which embody the “spirit” of the sport and to act in a way that is true to those values. To act “coherently” in sport does not equate to acting with integrity. For instance, even if Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) were not illegal in the Tour de France, hence Lance Armstrong and his team would have acted coherently, the sporting integrity of cycling still would have been compromised as the values associated with cycling would have been violated. Therefore, acting with sporting integrity requires one to act out of genuine respect for the values of the game. Zakhem’s definition of sporting integrity has Kantian implications in that people involved in sport, as moral agents, ought to act out of respect for certain values inherent to the sport that effectively function as moral maxims.

can evaluate the practice of tanking in the NBA.

The NBA is an association of individual members, the professional basketball teams that compete in the league, who are governed by rules and regulations created by the league.18 There are two significant moral implications of this structure. First, each team is an autonomous agent capable of operating according to their own volition.

This means that each member has the capacity to act rationally. The ability of reason is fundamental to Kant’s ethical framework. If one were not rational, it would be impossible to act according to duty. Second, each team is expected to adhere to the “principles” and “values” that the Association aims to promote. The principles and values of the NBA are found in its mission statement, the most relevant of which to tanking is “compet[ing] with intensity.”19 This principle suggests that it is the duty of the members of the Association to “compete with intensity.” Written in the form of a maxim using the Kantian formula, we have the maxim of competition: “I, as a member of the NBA, will act in such a way as to compete with intensity.” In a Kantian ethical framework, for a member of the Association to act according to duty, one ought to act in reverence of this moral law.

Kant’s moral framework is founded upon three propositions of duty, the concept of acting according to the unconditioned good will.12 The first proposition is that actions are only morally good if they are done for the sake of duty and not because of inclinations such as physical desires.13 The second proposition is that the moral value of an action done from duty lies in its accordance to a maxim, an a priori principle of how one ought to act, and not from the results it attains or seeks to attain.14 For example, a person’s decision not to steal would only have moral worth if they did so because of the maxim that one ought not to steal, not because of the possibility of being arrested. Additionally, Kantian maxims are universal. They are unconditioned and hold true regardless of circumstance. Combining these two propositions, we get the third proposition of duty, that to act according to duty, one must necessarily act out of respect for moral law.

15 Moral law is the “authoritative standard” that is the “source of moral requirements.”16 One can reduce these three propositions into a formula for a maxim, that “I will A in C in order to realize or produce E,” where A is some action, C is some circumstance, and E is some end to be realized by A in C.17 We will use this formula to create a maxim that

The practice of tanking is the most effective method for small-market teams to be competitive in the NBA. A team’s market size is determined by many factors, including the value of the broadcasting rights, sponsorship opportunities, ticket and merchandise revenue, tourism, and the local tax rate. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are examples of big NBA markets.20 Big-market teams have an advantage over small-market teams because they are more attractive markets to high-caliber players in free agency. Free agency is a period in the off-season when players whose contracts expired are free to sign with whichever team they want.21 These high-caliber players are necessary to be competitive in the NBA. Almost every single team that wins a playoff round has at least one All-Star player. As a result, small-market teams often have to resort to tanking if they do not foresee being competitive in the immediate future.

17

Acquiring draft picks and young prospects under contract is the most effective method for them to acquire high-caliber players for the long term (see Background). The practice of tanking in the NBA, therefore, is morally good in the Kantian framework because it is a practice by which small-market teams like the San Antonio Spurs act according to the maxim of competition. San Antonio had the 23rd biggest TV market in the NBA when they drafted Tim Duncan first overall in the 1997 Entry Draft, after having the third-worst record in the league the season prior. Tim Duncan became the cornerstone of the franchise and was integral to the Spurs’ first NBA championship in 1999, as well as three more championships between 2003-2007.22 If the Spurs had not received such a high draft pick, it is likely that they would have languished in mediocrity and not been competitive or seriously challenged for a championship in the Aughts.

its volition.”24 Therefore, the lack of competitiveness of a team while tanking does not detract from the moral value of the practice as the intention of tanking is in accordance with the maxim of competition, namely being able to compete intensely in the future. It follows that it does not matter how long a team tanks, or to what degree of success they achieve. This includes whether a tanking team wins a championship in the future or not, because the moral value of the action is only dependent on its intention’s alignment with the maxim of competition.

Millsian Objection

Tanking is often criticized for decreasing the enjoyment that fans can derive from watching their favorite team’s games.25 Naturally, when a team trades away high-caliber players to acquire unproven young players and draft picks, the team loses more games and causes a decrease in the enjoyment of fans. This objection is based on the Millsian framework of utilitarianism, which features three main premises. First, the only desirable ends of actions are pleasure, or the absence of pain.26 For NBA fans, more pleasure is derived from watching their favorite team win and less pleasure is derived from watching their favorite team lose. Over the course of an entire season, fans derive more pleasure overall from a winning record and making the playoffs as opposed to a losing record and missing the playoffs. Second, certain pleasures are greater than others if “of two pleasures, there is one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference.”27 Third, following the previous two premises, moral judgements are made based on rules that promote general utility.28 Thus, if the practice of tanking decreases fans’ utility, the decision to tank by that team would be a morally reprehensible action.

The sharp reduction of competitiveness of a tanking team in the short term does not make the practice of tanking a morally reprehensible action in the Kantian framework because the consequences and impacts of an action do not affect its moral value if the action is done out of duty to fulfil a maxim. While most tanking teams would be more competitive without trading away their high-caliber players in return for draft picks and young prospects, they likely would still not be able to reach the level of “competing with intensity” because they would not be able to acquire any of the best players in the league. From 2010-2020, one-hundred teams made the playoffs as a fourth seed or lower.

Of those teams, only three made it to the NBA finals and only six made it to the round before that, the conference finals.23 Simply making the playoffs does not qualify a team as being intensely competitive, as they are usually not legitimate challengers for the championship. To be considered truly competitive, a team must be a top three team in their conference. A team maintaining mediocre performance is not fulfilling the maxim of competition any more than a tanking team who does not make the playoffs at all. Moreover, in the Kantian ethical framework, “a good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, […] but only because of

Rejoinder to Millsian Objection

Generally, tanking’s potential to increase the amount of pleasure fans can derive from watching a competitive team in the future outweighs the marginal loss of pleasure fans experience while a team is tanking. First, the decision to tank is typ18

that tanking, as a general practice, aims to increase the overall utility of fans, there exists a social rule that a team ought to tank when it is unlikely that they will be competitive in the foreseeable future.

pically made when a team does not foresee being competitive in the near future. This is generally the case when teams have aging players with expiring contracts or are on the fringe of making the playoffs without any developing talent on the roster. Thus, while the team may perform worse by tanking, the chances of them being able to compete for the title does not decrease substantially. In the best-case scenario, if a team who is likely going to be uncompetitive decides not to tank, they can potentially make the playoffs as one of the lower seeds. However, achieving a higher degree of competitiveness through tanking, which enables teams to contend for a championship, creates exponentially more pleasure for fans. There is a higher level of play and significantly greater stakes in playoff games. 29 This means that fans derive substantially more pleasure from each playoff victory than they do from each regular season victory. Furthermore, unlike NFL fans, NBA fans tend to be less attached to a specific team. The brands of individual players like Lebron James are larger than some teams.30 In short, the NBA is a league that is focused on players, not teams.

Thus, when a team tanks by trading away their best, and often most popular players, the decrease in pleasure derived by fans is mitigated by the fact that they can still find some sort of pleasure in watching other teams who field high-caliber players. Overall, the potential for tanking to make a team more competitive, and therefore drastically increase the pleasure fans can derive from watching the team, outweighs the marginal decrease in pleasure due to tanking, generating a net increase in utility.

Conclusion

The practice of tanking in the NBA is morally justified according to a Kantian ethical framework because it fulfils the maxim of competition for small-market teams. Moreover, the utilitarian objection that tanking reduces fans’ utility is defeated when looking at the long-term utility consequence of tanking. While each particular instance of tanking is different, the practice generalized as sacrificing a team’s competitiveness in the shortterm by acquiring draft capital and young players to become more competitive in the future is a morally justifiable practice. It is expected that each team’s tanking campaign will unfold differently with varying results, but such particularities do not affect the moral value of tanking as a managerial practice.

Endnotes 1. Tyler Lauletta, “The NBA Is on the Verge of a TANKING Epidemic as Teams Jockey for Position at the Bottom,” February 20, 2018, https://www. businessinsider.com/nba-tank-2018-draft-2018-2.

2. Hunter Felt, “The Growing Acceptance of Tanking Is Good for the NBA,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, April 6, 2017), https:// www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/apr/06/ tanking-nba-los-angeles-lakers-brooklyn-nets.

3. Adrian Wojnarowski, “With Focus on Developing Young Players, Oklahoma City Thunder Shut down Al Horford for Remainder of Season,” ESPN (ESPN Internet Ventures, March 27, 2021), https://www.espn.com/nba/ story/_/id/31148420/sources-oklahoma-citythunder-shut-al-horford-seek-offseason-trade 4. Lott, Thomas. “Mavericks Fined $600K for Mark Cuban’s Tanking Comments.” Mavs fined $600K for Cuban’s comments on tanking. Sporting News, February 21, 2018. https:// w w w. s p o r t i n g n e w s . c o m / u s / n b a / n e w s / nba-mavericks-mark-cuban-fined-600k-tank-

It is important to note that, under a Millsian ethical framework, the duration and success of a particular tanking campaign does not necessarily affect its moral evaluation. That is, even if the particular circumstances surrounding a team’s decision to tank results in a net decrease in utility for fans, the practice cannot be deemed morally reprehensible. Actions can only be deemed objectively “right” or “wrong” based on the utility it creates, not morally “right” or “wrong.”31 Rather, acting in accordance with the social rules that promote utility is the most important factor in judging the moral value of an action.32 Since we have already established 19

king-comments/1e1pynn663fro1lr9bjueu74zu.

5. Penrice, Stephen G. “Applying Elementary Probability Theory to the NBA Draft Lottery.” SIAM Review 37, no. 4 (1995): 598–602. https://doi.org/10.1137/1037129.

6. Tim Daniels, “Report: Paul George Traded to Clippers for Danilo Gallinari, 5 1st-Round Picks,” July 6, 2019, https://bleacherreport.com/ articles/2844398-report-paul-george-traded-toclippers-for-danilo-gallinari-5-1st-round-picks.

7. Cody Taylor, “2020-21 NBA Rookie Scale Contract Figures for First-Round Picks,” USA Today (Gannett Satellite Information Network, November 23, 2020), https://therookiewire.usatoday.com/2020/11/22/2020-21nba-rookie-scale-contract-first-round-picks/.

8. “Free Agency Explained,” NBA.com (National Basketball Association, March 16, 2021), https://www. nba.com/news/free-agency-explained#restricted.

9.

“NBA Announces Structure and Format for 2020-21 Season,” NBA.com (National Basketball Association, November 18, 2020), https://w w w.nba.com/news/nba-announces-structure-and-format-for-2020-21-season.

10. Abe Zakhem and Michael Mascio, “Sporting Integrity, Coherence, and Being True to the Spirit of a Game,” Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2018): pp. 227-236, https:// d oi. org / 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 1 7 5 1 1 3 2 1 . 2 0 1 8 . 1 4 7 5 4 1 9 .

11.

Alfred Archer, “On Sporting Integrity,” Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 10, no.

2 (February 2016): pp. 117-131, https:// d oi. org / 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 1 7 5 1 1 3 2 1 . 2 0 1 6 . 1 1 4 0 2 2 3 .

12. Immanuel Kant and Christine M Korsgaard, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10.

13. Ibid, 11.

14. Ibid, 13.

15. Ibid, 13.

16. Robert Johnson and Adam Cureton, “Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, July 7, 2016), https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#CatHypImp. 17. Ibid.

18. “National Basketball Association Constitution 20

and By-Laws,” NBA.com (National Basketball Association, September 2019), https:// ak-static.cms.nba.com/wp-content/upl o a d s / s it e s / 4 / 2 0 1 9 / 0 9 / N BA- C on s t it u tion-By-Laws-September-2019-1.pdf.

19. “Our Calling and Values,” NBA Careers (National Basketball Association, February 26, 2019), https://careers.nba.com/our-calling-and-values/#:~:text=At%20the%20NBA%20we%20compete,key%20elements%20of%20our%20game.

Sports Media Watch (MMXXI Sports Media, January 3, 2021), https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/ nba-market-size-nfl-mlb-nhl-nielsen-ratings/.

21. Joel Maxcy and Michael Mondello, “The Impact of Free Agency on Competitive Balance in North American Professional Team Sports Leagues,” Journal of Sport Management 20, no. 3 (2006): pp. 345-365, https://doi.org/10.1123/jsm.20.3.345.

22. Benyam Kidane, “#NBATogetherLive: Tim Duncan Named Finals MVP after Leading Spurs Past Knicks for 1999 NBA Championship,” NBA. com (National Basketball Association, April 8, 2020), https://ca.nba.com/news/nba-together-live-tim-duncan-named-finals-mvp-san-antonio-spurs-past-new-york-knicks-1999-nbachampionship/t4ky9fsf8n0014fa3tuc6iv vt.

23. “NBA & ABA Playoffs Series History,” Basketball Reference, accessed April 3, 2021, https://www. basketball-reference.com/playoffs/series.html.

24. Immanuel Kant and Christine M Korsgaard, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8.

25. Post Sports Desk, “How Fans Feel about Tanking in Sports,” New York Post (New York Post, February 7, 2019), https://nypost.com/2019/02/07/ how-fans-feel-about-tanking-in-sports/.

26. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Duke Classics, 2012), 20.

27. Ibid, 22.

28. Ibid, 20.

29. Ryan O’Hanlon, “What Does ‘Playoff Basketball’ Really Mean?” The Ringer (The Ringer, April 14, 2017), https://www.theringer. com/2017/4/14/16040442/2017-nba-playoffs-coaches-analysts-explain-playoff-clichesec1074245a89.

30. John Branch, “Why the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. Are So Far Apart on Social Justice Stances,” The New York Times (The New York Times, June 22, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/sports/ nfl-nba-social-justice-protests.html.31. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Duke Classics, 2012), 19.

32. “John Stuart Mill: Ethics,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed April 3, 2021, https://iep.utm.edu/mill-eth/#H1.

21

“Boulder” Ugen Yonten, Pomona ‘21 Medium: Newspaper prints and magazine cutouts This piece features an inverted design and was created from magazine cutouts and local newspaper prints. I attempted to reinterpret some of the wellknown book cover designs from Albert Camus’ novels that feature contrasting shapes and repeated patterns. The piece is part weaving and part collage.

22

Camus: the Forest, the Mountain, the Panther

themselves to something nice. They have been too busy and have not had time to appreciate the goodness of life, it is said, and so slowing down is prescribed as a remedy for their predicament. But this answer is unsatisfying. It fails to ascribe a fundamental quality to their suffering, choosing instead to attribute it to external forces like “hustle culture” or “rigid socio-economic structure.” While these outside factors have an effect, to speak only of influences outside the individual and nothing of the human condition is to paint only half of the picture.

by Amiri Rivers-David, Pomona ‘24

As difficult as it might be to map the terrain of existential crisis, such an endeavor is owed to every victim of the ailment—for in our investigations we may find not an immediate cure but a prescription, grounded in some restful method or praxis through which they may find respite. This landscape may be divided into three areas: la selva oscura, il colle, and la lonza, each representing some stage of progression or ideal within the existentially-lost journey.

Though novelist and philosopher Albert Camus has attempted to map these lands, his prescription fails at being restful; though with help from others, namely John Dewey and Dante Alighieri, a much clearer and more agreeable portrait of existential crisis and its reasonable prescriptions forms.

No philosopher, living or dead, has addressed this second, more inherent aspect as Camus has. He infuses his structured approach with beautiful poetic quality in The Myth of Sisyphus, as in his own words, “Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understanding.”2 It would be inappropriate, he argues, to discuss suicide and its causes in a strictly analytical manner, for it is a deeply emotional subject. Here he is absolutely correct, and as such I have chosen to preserve some of that style.

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say What was this forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews fear.1

To dissolve the very big phenomenon of suicide into a streamlined form, Camus introduces the notion of the absurd and builds from it an explanation of how la selva oscura comes to present itself. He writes, “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.

His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”3 The absurd, for Camus, represents fundamental disillusionment. The realization that true disillusionment is the feeling that sets in motion the dark chain of events in question is shocking to many, and only becomes more shocking when one acknowledges that this disillusionment is an inescapable facet of the human condition. We are so deeply separated from everything that the morbid epipha-

For some inexplicable reason, sometimes spontaneously, other times gradually, a deprived few among us find ourselves in la selva oscura, the dark forest. For them the sun shines no more, as the thick carpet of canopy overhead smothers its rays. The path that had once offered some guidance, some solace, is now lost, and without it a deep fear takes root within them. And some, too, decide the only way out of la selva oscura is through death itself. So they plunge their hands through their own chest, freeing themselves from the world.

Countless thinkers have conjectured about what precipitates these peoples’ descent into la selva oscura, and about what they should do to escape. In our time, the answer is frequently concerned with self-care; someone in a dark place ought to take some time outside of their lives to relax, or to treat 23

ny could, in fact, be lying in wait inside each of us.

While the most obvious candidate is organized religion, nearly everyone—including self-proclaimed atheists—subscribes to one doctrine or another.

Any narrative that asks its followers to believe the unproven is a stone on il colle. Each of us cling to it, as these promises of success and happiness are the only things that prevent our fall into la selva oscura.

We simply cannot rely on rationally explained processes for an understanding of our world. Camus writes of how “the mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity… the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought.”4 As such, we find it immensely difficult to stick to such an incomplete description of our surroundings. This “nostalgia for clarity,” as he calls it, goads us into the beyond-rational, or the theological. The conclusion that we have no idea what matter is fundamentally made of is painful—what are quarks made of, and what is that made of?—as it means we cannot understand the nature of things. The phenomenologist notion that things’ essence can be known truly, or that God created all with His hands and vision, however, are not painful. They promise us that a true understanding of the nature of things is possible, and as such they assuage the absurd feeling of disillusionment with the universe.

Camus calls this act of turning away from reason and towards the theological “the act of leaping.” He goes from philosopher to philosopher, from Heidegger to Chestov to Kierkegaard, showing how each of them have leapt, creating from some notion their illuminating God that explains all and reveals all. He criticizes them for not “sticking to their guns,” if you will, and for escaping to answers that are comfortable rather than embracing the lack of an answer itself. While such analysis is useful for professionals, the vast majority of people have no idea what Heidegger or Chestov or Kierkegaard even argue, so many would fail to draw any sort of connection between the act of leaping and their own lives. What is far more important is the exploration of the kinds of leaps ordinary people take, and while they may not be as philosophically rigorous as Kierkegaard, they certainly are more relatable.

But after I had reached a mountain’s foot, At that point where the valley terminated, Which had with consternation pierced my heart,

Our society is built from the stones of il colle that each encourage us to leap, to abandon our commitment to the factually true in exchange for hope and a promise. There are economic reasons why these narratives could be useful; for instance, convincing the masses that money will serve as a path to happiness increases productivity. So too are there socio-political reasons; persuading members of a church that opposing pro-LGBTQ+ legislation is key to salvation increases the political influence of the clergy. The idea here is not to cast away il colle, but rather to embrace the parts of it that allow one to live peacefully and to coexist with others doing the same. One ought to reject the hateful facets, like those that condone racism or sexism with the belief that those unequal doctrines lead in the right direction; but there is little wrong with embracing other parts of il colle, for example, the doctrine that helping people recover from traumatic surgery will provide happiness. In Camus’ view, all of the afore-

Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders, Vested already with that planet’s rays Which leadeth others right by every road.

Then was the fear a little quieted That in my heart’s lake had endured throughout The night, which I had passed so piteously.5 These theological beliefs often serve as an escape for those stuck in la selva oscura. They are the mountain, il colle, that penetrates through the oppressive leaves and branches of its dusky trees. Il colle provides a new pathway to replace that which the deprived have lost, a path that once again can guide them to a place drenched in sunlight and warmth. It is not rational, but rather stems from cultural narratives that tempt with completeness.

24

mentioned scenarios are leaps, because they do not concern strictly provable fact. There is no way to verify with certainty that dedicating one’s life to helping recovering patients will make that life complete and fulfilled. Still, though, every individual needs some light at the end of their tunnel, and using acts of helping people in need as motivating factors only makes the world a better place for everyone.

After my weary body I had rested, The way resumed I on the desert slope, So that the firm foot ever was the lower.

as their application would require impenetrable mental fortitude. We need meaning and value to continue to work our jobs and care for our loved ones and to live enjoyable lives. Camus’ view could only exist in an abstract philosophical space, and as such, his position crumbles when thrust into the noise and demands of the real world. How, for example, would a single mother care for her kids if she was suddenly submerged in never-ending existential turmoil without hope of ever leaving?

This critical mistake Camus makes is illuminating, as it makes very clear that philosophy should be subjected to the realities of life and not the other way around. To put it simply, we have shit to do, and we cannot do it without having some level of perceived clarity about our world. We need to believe that our goals and successes have value, among other things, and any philosophy that impedes those processes needs to be revoked and reconsidered. Therefore we must challenge the ground on which Camus stands.

And lo! almost where the ascend began, A panther light and swift exceedingly, Which with a spotted skin was covered o’er!

And never moved she from before my face, Nay, rather did impede so much my way, That many times I to return had turned.6 Camus’ response, however, is far more extreme.

Rather than qualifying the kinds of leaps as I have above, he strikes them all down in one fell swoop.

He argues that, rather than settling in any doctrine without rational foundation, one’s life “will be lived all the better if it has no meaning... The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual experience. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”7 This anti-doctrine challenges our instinct to know the nature of things by denying each and every answer, doing so without hope that an answer is even possible. To accept such an anti-doctrine is to thrust oneself into an epistemological inferno, where one has nothing but the scorched skin on their back. This is the panther, la lonza, that Camus advocates for. She blocks the path up il colle and repeatedly drives the person trying to escape la selva oscura back into its harrowing grip.

Philosopher John Dewey does this job excellently. Dewey talks about how philosophy as a field of study inherited the role of religion in academia, especially during the Enlightenment when religion as a source of knowledge production was becoming outmoded. As a result of its history, philosophy sees itself as transcending the sciences, and being something of great importance in its own right. Dewey notes this self-importance in the metaphysics of his contemporaries, an almost-arrogance which manifests in their attempt to see things with certainty.

Dewey argues that metaphysics “naturally adopted the notion, which has ruled philosophy ever since the time of the Greeks, that the office of knowledge is to uncover the antecedently real.”8 Due to its lineage, the philosophical tradition treats the conclusions of philosophical processes almost as if they were divine commandment—things that ought to be obeyed, period. The statement, “So what if it’s correct; it makes life impossibly difficult!” is scarcely uttered, and this is an oversight to say the least.

Herein lies the great problem with Camus’ thought process. He treats philosophy as though it were an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. These radical conclusions are downright impossible to implement for the average person,

Things needn’t be this way, though. It ought to be okay to find our way to some part of il colle that allows us to live comfortably and do our due 25

due diligence. Dewey writes, “Should we overcome all these dualisms, then philosophy might be ‘instead of impossible attempts to transcend experience… the significant record of the efforts of men to formulate the things of experience to which they are most deeply and passionately attached.’” Philosophy should strengthen our connection and deepen our passion of life; it should help us live beautifully, not tragically. If we find an acceptable doctrine to live by, there should be no great undermining of it on sweeping and unrealistic philosophical grounds. Life is hard enough without la lonza swiping our legs out from underneath us.

Endnotes 1. Dante, Inferno (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 2008), 1-6.

2. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 2.

3. Ibid.

4. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 6.

5. Dante, Inferno, 13-21.

6. Dante, Inferno, 28-34.

7. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 18-19.

8. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 43. NBA,

Camus is right about a lot of things, and his conclusions follow well from his premises. The error he makes is not a logical one. He is correct that the world around us is fundamentally unknowable through strict rationalism, and that we flee to find our God in theological answers as a result. What he fails to do is to express why this process of fleeing is necessarily a bad one. Of course leaning on bigotry as a response to that inherent anxiety is a bad thing; but Camus simply assumes that, because he is logically consistent in his arguments, his conclusion is compelling. Outside of academia, for people on the streets or working nine-to-five jobs, this is not the case, and philosophy’s conclusions should strengthen everyone’s experience.

Everyone deserves a suitable spot on il colle, safe from the prickly undergrowth of la selva oscura and the fangs of la lonza; only there will our passions be intensified and our love for life set ablaze.

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Bearer of Light

by Jackson Kinder, Pomona ‘21 This piece was inspired by bell hooks’ seminal work All About Love. I sought to explore the question: what might a Love Ethic sound like? What sonic components can offer insight into hooks’ groundbreaking ideas?

To listen, go to https://tabularasaclaremont.com/Bearer-of-Light-Jackson-Kinder.

Lyrics: i close the door to your words when i fall down the road through the cracks under your back i trace the part where i froze i want it to melt i want it to heat, up i leave the lamp on and beneath it, i’m still dreamin’, i’m beneath it now.... i bring the heat in now... tired of these wings they use to prop me up they don’t hold me up you could be the bearer of light but you’re addicted to fear this darkness inside/outside/keeps us under the tide “love” could be a world that we build instead of a word that we say almost all of the time... i don’t believe u ur in disarray

27

Embracing the Love Ethic: A Roadmap for Abolition

W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term abolition democracy in Black Reconstruction in America (1935) to argue that abolishing slavery required citizenship, suffrage, and equal rights for Black Americans.5 Today, the concept retains these roots while also requiring the abolition of the prison industrial complex (PIC). Critical Resistance, a national abolitionist organization, defines the PIC as “a term [abolitionists] use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.”6 Describing prisons and police as a prison industrial complex exposes the actors involved in criminalization and incarceration. These actors— both private and public—reap financial and political rewards from this system. Finally, the term broadens the scope of criticism available to abolitionists, acknowledging how prisons, police, and other institutions of social control work together to dominate and oppress marginalized communities.7

by Elena Breda, Pitzer ‘21

Like most Americans, I knew little about the police abolition movement until the summer of 2020. As a student, I was invested in philosophical discourses on ethics and justice, but I supported movements to abolish prisons and police only symbolically. This changed when, along with the rest of the world, I watched in horror as police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for more than 9 minutes, taking his life without hesitation.

This moment catalyzed a global conversation on police brutality and the inadequacy of past reforms, compelling myself and many others to recognize abolitionists’ message: police reform is not, and will never be, enough. Abolitionists see prisons and police as irredeemable institutions of state-sanctioned violence.1 They advocate not only for a world without the prison industrial complex, but for a world where these institutions are unnecessary.2 This vision of the future—one without the prison industrial complex or the ideologies that support it—is what abolitionists refer to as abolition democracy.

A society without prisons and police is challenging to imagine. Abolitionist and law professor Allegra McLeod clarifies one vision for abolition democracy, describing a movement that “calls for a constellation of democratic institutions and practices to displace policing and imprisonment while working to realize more equitable and fair conditions of collective life.”8 Importantly, abolition democracy requires not just a radical restructuring of democratic structures and institutions, but an ideological restructuring away from carcerality.

It is a fateful coincidence that I read feminist cultural theorist bell hooks’ All About Love (1999) amidst this summer’s call to defund police departments. In this book, hooks connects a collective fear of love to an obsession with safety, citing both as symptoms of a culture of domination.3 She insists that overcoming this reality requires rejecting domination, choosing love and care instead.

In her words, hooks advocates for a collective embrace of the love ethic—a set of principles guided by love.4 In this paper, I explore the relationship between abolition democracy and the love ethic. Abolitionist theory contends that the prison industrial complex depends on carceral ideologies. Its proponents urge for a world without prisons and police.

The love ethic, on the other hand, renders carceral ideologies obsolete. Thus, I argue that a collective embrace of the love ethic leads to abolition democracy by uprooting the ideologies that the prison industrial complex relies on for its existence.

Hooks provides further insight. Relying on her theory of the love ethic, I argue that collectively embracing practices of love and care leads the United States towards abolition democracy. Hooks builds the love ethic on M. Scott Peck’s definition of love as the “will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”9 Hooks adds that love requires a combination of various “ingredients,” namely “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”10 Importantly, hooks defines love as “an action:” the “will” to base one’s behavior on these ingre28

dients.11 In sum, love is a continuous process of nurturing spiritual growth in ourselves and others.

Abolitionists similarly critique ideologies of domination and violence, referring to them as “carceral ideologies.”16 Abolition is not simply defunding the police or closing prisons. Rather, abolishing carceral institutions is incomplete without dismantling the ideological frameworks that allow these structures to exist. Thus, abolition democracy requires the abolition not just of prisons, policing, and surveillance, but also of the corresponding ideologies on which the former structures depend. Abolition democracy and the love ethic share a goal: abolishing ideologies of fear and domination. The love ethic, however, offers an aspirational framework to move towards.

When synthesized, abolition democracy benefits together with the love ethic because the latter provides a positive alternative to carceral ideologies.

Hooks bases the love ethic on this specific conception of love. If acting lovingly includes collective care, respect, and honesty, living by a love ethic means loving not only oneself or one’s friends and family, but all human beings. A society guided by the love ethic “presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well” and that “in large and small ways, we make choices based on a belief that honesty, openness, and personal integrity need to be expressed in public and private decisions.”12 Embracing the love ethic nurtures everyone’s spiritual growth and well-being. To live by the love ethic is to base one’s actions in love.

So far, I have examined abolition democracy and the love ethic as separate concepts. In the following pages, I bring these concepts together, exploring where they intersect. I argue that these concepts are deeply intertwined, down to their discursive frameworks and ideological underpinnings. Finally, I conclude that abolition democracy and the love ethic are not simply interconnected—rather, a collective embrace of the love ethic leads to abolition democracy.

Just as abolition democracy opposes carceral ideologies, it also opposes fear and alienation— two notions that undergird traditional conceptions of safety and security.17 Abolitionists question the assumption that police and prisons keep us safe.

Examining whom these institutions incarcerate and surveille, abolitionists also interrogate racialized constructions of threat. Abolitionists expose the history of police departments, created in the 17th and 18th centuries to control newly freed slaves in the South and keep the industrial working class from organizing in the North.18 The police were designed, abolitionists argue, to keep wealthy white Americans safe from poor people of color. Today, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, and countless more unarmed Black people demonstrate the enduring legacy of policing’s racist initiative. Abolition democracy redefines safety not as protection from poor Black people—and certainly not as a privilege held only by upper class white communities—but rather as the protection of collective well-being.

Abolition democracy and the love ethic are connected by what they oppose: ideologies of violence and domination. Hooks wrote All About Love to address Americans’ fear of love, reflected in a cultural obsession with safety.13 She writes, “Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience… Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination.”14 The love ethic is a framework for overcoming fear and challenging structures of domination. According to hooks, “when we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation.”15 Hooks connects structures of domination— including prisons and police—with fear, manifested as ideologies of violence and domination. This fear creates alienation and separation between individuals, allowing structures of domination to uphold the status quo. The love ethic rejects the PIC by targeting the ideologies that perpetuate it.

Bringing abolition democracy in conversation with the love ethic clarifies the meaning of collective well-being. Hooks explains that the love ethic is an “ethic of communalism and the sharing of resources.”19 Abolition democracy adopts a similar commitment to communalism in its ad29

cacy for increased public welfare, investment in marginalized communities, and a universal living wage.20 Both the love ethic and abolition democracy define safety as protection from hunger, poverty, housing insecurity, and interpersonal and state-sanctioned violence, rather than protection from stereotypical “bad guys.” Reframing safety in these terms embraces the love ethic. Because abolition democracy and the love ethic converge on this framework of safety as well-being, adopting the love ethic leads to abolition democracy.

If the love ethic were to govern society, the PIC would become obsolete. We would understand safety as having a roof over your head, enough food for your family, freedom from interpersonal and state violence, and so on. Prisons and police—institutions that intimidate, divide, and harm people of color—do not fit with this redefined conception of safety. The love ethic dismantles structures of domination and state-sanctioned violence, encouraging investment in institutions that foster well-being such as social services and welfare programs. Guided by the love ethic, we would settle for nothing less than abolition democracy.

In the previous pages, I have shown that abolition democracy and the love ethic are connected: both oppose ideologies of violence and domination, reframe notions of safety and security, and prioritize collective well-being. Based on these connections, I argue that abolition democracy emerges following a societal embrace of the love ethic. Abolition democracy cannot exist until carceral ideologies and the PIC are abolished and replaced. The love ethic uproots carceral structures and ideologies, replacing the PIC with systems of justice and accountability that prioritize collective well-being.

In this paper, I have explored the relationship between abolition democracy and the love ethic. Both oppose carceral ideologies and structures of violence and domination. Both fundamentally reframe the notion of safety to mean the protection of every citizen’s well-being. To create an abolition democracy, we can’t just abolish prisons and police. We must abandon the carceral ideologies that uphold structures of domination. Embracing the love ethic does exactly that: it renders carceral ideologies obsolete. A collective embrace of the love ethic leads us to abolition democracy.

Hooks writes, “Domination cannot exist in any social situation where a love ethic prevails.”21 Carceral ideologies are ideologies of domination.

The prison industrial complex relies on carceral ideologies to legitimize its role in society and uphold the status quo. Living by the love ethic means rejecting ideologies of domination that are incompatible with loving action and decision-making. Embracing the love ethic renders carceral ideologies obsolete. Without carceral ideologies, the PIC no longer appears legitimate or natural.

Endnotes 1. Rachel Herzing explains: “The prison industrial complex is not a broken system, right? Reformers believe that this system is broken, and that if we can just fix the right cog in it, that it actually is going to work fine for all of us. Abolitionists know that the system works precisely as it should. It cages, it controls, it kills precisely who it should, and some other people probably in addition to precisely who it should, right? And I think if you believe that this thing can be fixed, then you’re looking for the thing to fix it.” In the same panel, Marbre Stahly-Butts elaborates: “These are not broken systems, they don’t need tweaking, it’s not like, oh, ups, if we just maybe fix this one law — these systems are rotten systems, they were created to do what they’re doing. […] And so our job is not to tweak them, it’s to dismantle them.” Critical Resistance, “Abolition is Liberation: Marbre Stahly-Butts & Rachel

Indeed, living by the love ethic leaves no other choice than to abolish these institutions. The love ethic requires that concern for collective well-being drives action. The PIC, on the other hand, operates on fear, social control, and domination. Most importantly, the PIC is built on systemic racism that disproportionately targets marginalized communities.22 Any institution that protects one group at the expense of others is incompatible with the love ethic.

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Herzing in Conversation with Cory Lira,” filmed November 23, 2019 at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR, video, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=dpYc-WnmMBs&t=3889s. 2. Abolitionist and law professor Allega McLeod quotes the following in her article on abolition democracy: “What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses, 22 SOC. TEXT 101, 114 (2004).

3. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000), 91-93.

4. hooks, All About Love, “Values: Living by a Love Ethic,” 85-102.

5. W.E.B. Du Bois and H.J. Mack, Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Rutledge, 2012), 165.

6. “What is the PIC? What is Abolition?,” Critical Resistance, accessed April 29, 2021, http://criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language/.

7. See Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 12 & 84-104.

8.

Allegra McLeod, “Envisioning Abolition Democracy,” Harvard Law Review 132, no. 1 (April 2019): 1613-1649.

9. As quoted in hooks, All About Love, 5.

10. hooks, All About Love, 5.

11. Ibid.

12. hooks, All About Love, 87-88.

13. hooks, All About Love, 91-93.

14. hooks, All About Love, 93.

15. Ibid.

16. See Brett Story, “Dis-placing the Prison: Carceral Space, Disposable Life, and Urban Struggle in Neoliberal America” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2015), 28-29 & 158-202. Abolitionist author and lawyer Andrea Ritchie asks: “What are the metrics of safety? What are the things you will need in order to feel safe? Often when I ask that question, I almost have — I’ve never heard police. When I’ve talked to Black people about that. I’ve only heard I need a roof over my head. I need a job that is not

criminalized […] We need to divest, as I said, from the notion that policing and punishment — that we can police and punish our way to safety. We can only police and punish ourselves to more violence.” Pitzer College, “Racial Justice in Our Time: A Conversation with Activist Scholars,” recorded September 10, 2020, held virtually on Zoom, video, https://www. pitzer.edu/racial-justice-initiative/racial-justice-inour-time-a-conversation-with-activist-scholars/.

18. See Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (New York: Verso Books, 2017); Orisanmi Burton, “To Protect and Serve Whiteness,” North American Dialogue 18, no. 2 (October 2015): 38-50.

19. hooks, All About Love, 99.

20. See “Invest in Care, Not Cops,” #8toAbolition, accessed April 29, 2021, https://www.8toabolition.com/invest-in-care-not-cops; “Divest/Invest: Criminalization,” Funders for Justice, accessed April 29, 2021, https://divest-ffj.org/#what-is.

21. hooks, All About Love, 98.

22. See “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” NAACP, accessed April 29, 2021, https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/; “Corrupting Justice,” Prison Policy Initiative, accessed April 29, 2021, https:// www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/corrupting-justice. pdf; Holly Barrow, “Systemic Racism and the Prison-Industrial Complex in the ‘Land of the Free’,” Hampton Institute, July 26, 2020, https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/systemic-racism-and-the-prison-industrial-complex-in-the-land-of-the-free.

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“Suffocated by Capitalism” Ruth Mueller, Harvey Mudd ‘23 Medium: Digital Imaging The piece offers examples of some locations which have been affected by imperialist tourism—specifically Cuba, Puerto Rico, Grand Cayman, and Jamaica—accompanied by a turtle being restricted by pollutants, on a sea of tourist memorabilia and with infestations of resort and commercial infrastructure encroaching on their shores. This represents how tourism destinations are often seen as ‘remote’ or ‘exotic’ which forces the economy to be dependent on tourism. The shirts on the back have few references to the locations shown in the foreground, dissociating a tourist’s experience from the location of travel. The dollar and euro hover over the piece, representing the financial control tourism holds over local governments, and the rebuilt conquistador ships show how tourism is an adaptation of historical imperialism rather than an independently emerging form.

The Ethics of Tourism: An Exploration

voluntary on the part of the less powerful nation.

Tourism constitutes imperialism in the sense that it involves a clear expansion of developed nations’ interests and facilitates power imbalances regardless of visited nations’ willingness to host tourists.

With Nash’s thesis as an informative lens, this article explores the ethics behind the tourism industry.

by Eva Augst, Claremont McKenna ‘23

Before 2020, the international tourism industry was booming. Tens of millions of Americans traveled internationally every year, new resorts were always under construction, and travel corporations’ investments were thriving. The industry took a hit due to the pandemic, but it is expected to return with renewed vigor as Western countries work to vaccinate their populations. As participating in tourism once again becomes a possibility, the time has come to begin to examine the question: is the tourism industry ethical?

Dennison Nash’s anthropological thesis explores the industry of tourism as an institution of modern imperialism. He argues that imperialism, in its most general form, strives to expand a country’s influence abroad, economically, politically, militarily, or otherwise, and is facilitated through societal interactions. As Nash describes it, imperialism need not be an unwanted imposition of outside interest on another society. Instead, it is characterized by the imbalanced interactions and transactions between nations—even if these are

From both an ecological and a cultural perspective, it is necessary to interrogate the ethics of tourism on individual and structural levels. From an individual standpoint, tourism is often pursued with pleasure-motivated, even hedonistic, intentions that are centered on individual consumption. Consumerist, instant-gratification-based tendencies are encouraged in this context. Whether based on rest and relaxation, personal exploration, or area-specific forms of leisure, tourism is often undertaken by visitors seeking individual fulfillment. Whether this fulfillment comes at the expense of detrimental cultural or ecological effects to the visited nation is not often considered by tourists, and even in the cases when tourists do reflect about these effects, they must weigh their individual fulfillment against broader social responsibility, which is a daunting task.

Traveling tourists seeking leisure are generally 32

self-focused, looking primarily for rest or mental enrichment, and unlikely to spend much energy attempting to assimilate to the cultures of the visited nations. The burden of accommodation and adaptation, thus, falls on the hosts, who work for the comfort of the visitor and, at times, neglect the maintenance of their own cultural identities in order to sustain the flow of cash.

tions, they also necessitate the creation of metropolitan, often Western-centric infrastructure and marketing. Local businesses and markets are eliminated in favor of larger, often Western, corporate enterprises. Local populations are frequently displaced from their homes and workplaces, particularly in the agricultural sector, to make way for the construction of resorts and golf courses. Though these infrastructural enterprises may stimulate brief job creation or GDP boosts, they come at the cost of a clear interest expansion and power imbalance, favoring the visiting nation. Due to the phenomenon of economic leakage, the presumed economic benefits of the industry also turn out to be greatly exaggerated: 60-70% of the revenue from tourist enterprises will leave the economy of the host country and return to that of the visiting nation.2

More structural approaches to the marketing of tourist industries may involve the commercialization, sometimes referred to as “Disneyfication,” of culture. This process is comprised of cultural oversimplifications that aim to create palatable, surface-level, bite-sized versions of native cultures for tourists to enjoy. Governments are typically more concerned with their country’s marketability on the global stage and its tourism revenue than with the needs of local communities. The privileging of financial outcomes and the neglect of local cultures are, thus, inherent to the tourism industry. Peoples, cultures, and practices are treated as monetizable commodities or attractions in order to bolster a country’s position within this industry. As a consequence, human values and livelihoods are overlooked.

In addition to the demoralizing commercialization of culture, tourism often involves the proliferation of service-based economies. As Nash writes, “In the tourist area the consequences of tourism derive from the introduction from outside of a new sociocultural reality. This reality, to which the native people and their social system must adapt, amounts to a transiently populated, externally based leisure class and its accompanying goals or expectations.”1 As the host nation works to accommodate the “externally based leisure class,” priority is placed on the visitors’ wellbeing and comfort.

The development of infrastructures such as metropolitan industries and a service-based economy is inherently outwardly oriented, with the primary goal of providing for and accommodating tourists’ needs—once again creating an expansion of the visiting nations’ interests, as described by Nash.

Although the development of tourist areas can indeed offer economic boons to the host na-

Tourism constitutes expansion in the physical sense because it entails the construction of infrastructure and leisure areas in the host country, and it constitutes economic expansion because it fosters the profit-driven interest of the visiting nation. The infrastructural developments are often justified through the rationale of improving the land that was theoretically being insufficiently used by the less-developed countries. This attempt to justify the practices of the tourism industry fails for two reasons. First, those who were already living on and cultivating the land often assert that it was already being used in a productive manner. Land that was previously used for agriculture could adequately support local families in terms of revenue, food, and housing, and the construction of leisure infrastructure in these areas resulted in the displacement of those families and in the destabilization of their forms of subsistence. Additionally, the jobs created by the tourism industry are problematic in their own way, given that the revenues generated by locals’ labor efforts primarily benefit the visiting nation due to economic leakage, and locals are forced into service jobs as employees, in contrast to their previous condition of being self-employed, which allowed them more economic mobility and independence.

From an ecological standpoint, infrastructural expansion often has detrimental impacts on the host nation. Golf courses, for example, are of33

ten constructed on previously productive agricultural land, generating a significant loss of biodiversity. Resorts in general are notorious for siphoning disproportionate amounts of natural resources from the areas in which they are built, particularly water. Mega-resorts often take up thousands of gallons of water for tourist use, grounds upkeep, sanitation, and more—water that could have instead been used by thousands of local residents.

When engaging in these more ethical forms of tourism, it is key to consider their possible ramifications and motivations. Mission trips, for example, are often criticized as paternalistic, culturally insensitive, or incorrectly motivated, and sometimes are found not to be in the best interest of the host nations. Additionally, it is important to remember the structural harms of tourism and to be aware that ethical tourism largely addresses the outcomes, rather than the root causes, of tourism as a generally detrimental industry. Deferring the burden of ethical responsibility to individuals rather than institutions also has its flaws in the long run. However, for the average individual looking to travel, addressing these structural issues is an unfeasible task. It is important to note, nonetheless, that individuals can still take steps to avoid contributing to the structural problems. For example, by supporting local businesses, hotels, and restaurants rather than staying in large resorts, and being conscious of local cultural values rather than imposing Western viewpoints. Participating in alternative forms of tourism, where available, may also be a more ethical option. In taking small steps toward ethical tourism as individuals, we can, at the very least, work to alleviate the detrimental cultural and ecological effects of tourism as an industry.

Tourism additionally constitutes clear unequal expansion and imbalance in the cultural sense that it involves the imposition of Western ideologies and interests. It creates a power dynamic in which the host country must assimilate the values of the visiting nation, to the benefit of the latter. Western culture, markets, and ideals are prioritized, whereas the culture of the host nation is neglected or commodified to best fit the visitors’ conceptions and standards.

So, what can be a possible takeaway or remedy for these cultural and economic harms? Clearly, some of the existing problems with tourism as an industry are structural. The governmental relations and financial motivations that propel the industry are largely outside of individuals’ control. Although it is imperative that these structural issues be addressed, that seems like a far-fetched task for the average tourist looking to enjoy time abroad in an ethical manner. Recently, new avenues for pursuing ethical tourism on an individual scale have been developed. The alternatives include ecotourism, propoor tourism, social tourism, and political activism tourism. This recent trend demonstrates that the tourism industry can be developed through a more sensitive approach, which is generically referred to as “alternative tourism.” The endeavors of alternative tourism enterprises involve legitimate efforts to accommodate locals’ needs; they aim to not overwhelm communities with infrastructure construction and they promote cultural authenticity rather than commodification. Further, alternative tourism promotes economic diversity to avoid dependence on service economies. It generates a vast array of jobs and works to ensure that the developed infrastructure will be beneficial to locals on a broad level.

Endnotes 1. Nash, Dennison, Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, 2. ed., [Nachdr.], Philadelphia, Pa: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 47.

2. UN Environment Program, as cited in “Leap Local - Where Does the Money Go from Tourism?” http:// www.leaplocal.org/goinglocal/responsible-tourism/where-does-the-money-go-from-tourism/.

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“Rest Stop” Jenny Park, Pomona ‘22 Medium: Paint Marker Rest Stop is a rendering of one of Chris Herwig’s photographs of Soviet bus stops. It is also an attempt to portray the reliance upon structures, ideas, and ghosts of the past as respite from the strenuous demands of the present. In the space, the figure is resting temporarily rather than waiting for a bus that never comes.

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“Untitled No. 19” Ian Baime, Claremont McKenna ‘24 Medium: Acrylic This painting centers around the separation of layers of paint in a two-dimensional work. I set out to create a piece that can be interacted with in a more three-dimensional way. Thick white paint is placed on top of black base layers and then torn away, which allows the viewer to see the black paint on a separate physical plane from the top layer.

The painting invites the viewer to look at it as a work that exists in multiple fields of physical space and not as one two-dimensional object. It pushes the boundaries of what is possible with paint.

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A Definition of Philosophy

An interesting inquiry of philosophy’s nature, in a sense the earliest, is our identification of the origin of Greek philosophy with the thinkers before Socrates, the Presocratics. To issue an identification of the beginning of philosophy, we contemplate what we mean by philosophy and what it was historically—this is search for a definition. Philosophy was not the earliest of intellectual endeavors, not even the earliest system.

In Greece, the literary tradition of Homer and Hesiod was well established prior to the emergence of the legendary first philosopher Thales in 6 BCE, and the poetic tradition likely remained the dominant system of thought during the time of the philosophers.2 Rather, it appears that only after a tradition of ideas and culture had fermented, was philosophy to be engendered. Hence our notion of philosophy as a first explanation of the world is at least historically inaccurate, which is more germanely ascribed to mythology (muthos), meaning simply story, such as one finds in Hesiod’s Theogony, genesis of the Gods:

Article by Derek Li, Harvey Mudd ‘23

φιλοσοφια λογω εμοι, λογος εμου φιλοσοφια. 吾哲思，吾思哲 My thought, my philosophy—my philosophy, my thought.

Is it not, for the student, the first and final question—what is philosophy? To some, it is a name for all prodigious attainments of human thought. It approaches us, an ancient recollection—of what is, of what is not, of principles and elements, of nature, of virtue, of goodness, of the soul, of existence’s intelligibility, of knowledge, of logic, of metaphysics, of the limit of understanding, of unity. To thoroughly study each part of Being, we designated the disciplines of natural philosophy, moral (human) philosophy, and critical (thinking) philosophy. Yet to us students of modernity, heirs of twenty-three centuries of this enterprise’s history, hopeless it seems to maintain one body of knowledge through one method of thought. For some of us, philosophy is a moribund enterprise having exhausted its efficacy. Its proper purview for the present and futurity is the specialized disciplines of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. This is our efficient disciplinarization—is it a truer conception of philosophy?

First of all Chaos came into being. Next came Broad-breasted Gaia [Earth], the secure dwelling place forever of all…3

Such is a story—an account—of the constitution of the cosmos. When first reading the passage, I wondered what is meant by “first came into being” —does an object coming to be imply the existence of the process by which it came to be? Is declaring ‘chaos’ as the first being a confession of original incomprehensibility? These, however, are not questions of direct interest to the poet. As my professor of ancient philosophy Richard McKirahan puts it, “Hesiod explains neither how the sum total of existence came into being nor how it came to be divided.”4 What then distinguishes philosophy from the earlier literary tradition? The standard, though historically inaccurate,5 conception is that the Presocratic philosophers introduced argumentation, justification of beliefs with reasons, to their theories. Anaximander, the second of the Presocratic philosophers after Thales, posited for the element of the cosmos, that is, its principal constituent, an entirely indefinite substance

In this essay, I begin with the first recognized Western philosophers known as the Presocratics, philosophers before Socrates, and proceed to concepts of philosophy developed by Plato and Aristotle. I suggest a view of the history of philosophy as a maturation of a method of reasoning that can be generally called deduction.1 And deduction, I think, constitutes a philosophical criterion for all sciences and understanding, on which we may seek a definition of philosophy. I understand that my sources and the central ideas that form my subject are solely from Western philosophy, and the applicability of my remarks should, strictly, be to these. Yet, as a young student, if ever I hope for understanding’s unity, it is in the name philosophy.

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he called apeiron.6 One reason for the postulate of apeiron is that given the existence of opposite properties as moisture and dryness, hot and cold, if the element, the fundamental substance, has such a definite property, it cannot constitute something holding the opposite: if water is the element, then fire cannot be satisfactorily explained. An alternative reason is that, as in Hesiod’s Theogony, for any definite object, we are prompted to ask how it was generated, and the question proceeds ad infinitum. To terminate the infinite regress, therefore, the elementary being should be indefinite and ungenerated to which the question of generation does not apply.

regarded as critical for the relative novelty of their ideas not by an absolute standard that demarcates them from earlier thinkers. As posterity, nonetheless, we may incorporate the readiness to engage, deconstruct, and evaluate fundamental beliefs as a quality to our philosophical attitude.

Criticality is a careful attitude of taking apart our wonted ideas, yet it is not a precise method of analysis or a positive way of devising a theory. What would be the criterion for a more complete model of reasoning? Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, voices his discontent with Anaxagoras, a Presocratic philosopher: “the man mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other strange things… but he would neglect to mention the true causes of things.”8 In the dialogue Gorgias, distinguishing philosophical disciplines from other, what he considers, specious intellectual subjects, Socrates identifies philosophy as having “investigated both the nature of the object it serves and the cause of the things, and is able to give an account of each of these.”9 Herein I think is a definition of philosophy—a knowledge of causality. Socrates is disenchanted with the theories of earlier natural philosophers because the principal causes they posited, e.g. water, air, fire, earth, do not satisfactorily explain existence. The variety and complexity of phenomena cannot be derived from these simple causes. With his theory of Forms, Plato attempted to account for this plurality, though we, in light of our modern system of physics, may perhaps be as disenchanted with it as a cosmological theory, as he was with the Presocratics. Nonetheless, the object is for us, as for Plato, one—a system that encapsulates the causes of things, and through causal relations with which all can be derived and understood. A theory of everything may appear, to our view, more of a project for the physicist. Yet the nature of such a system of knowledge—what are explained, the method of explanation, the limits in our understanding—is of the utmost interest to a philosopher if not to any scholar. Furthermore, the idea of causality itself, the essential criterion of any such theory, is central to philosophy.

These are not sufficient reasons to justify a belief in apeiron, and so may be for most of the Presocratic arguments on various subjects.

Nevertheless, the Presocratics initiated critiques of common beliefs and introduced new theories that, in turn, invited sustained questioning.7 Their influence can be found in the later sophists and in the theories of Plato and Aristotle. Thus, by this, they initiated reason, whatever it may be, as the standard of a theory’s acceptance, which the rest of history is to develop. They also boldly stated conceptual models of reality, e.g. the atom, idealizing and abstracting phenomena to a set of principles that can be analyzed precisely. The Presocratics demonstrated criticality in examining the premises of ancient beliefs. Criticism toward a system of thought can be defined as an investigation of its fundamental beliefs. A person who has reflected carefully on the working of his or her genius appreciates how conventional thinking is, and how scarce and alienated is a critical thought that induces insight! There is yet no universal method of critique, for critique itself is an introduction of ideas. An idea, to be appraised or criticized, requires another, as assumption. That assumption defines the nature of the critique.

So long as our thought has not comprehended all Thought, we cannot claim, for any system of ideas, that we have eliminated the possibility of criticism. In this sense criticality is relative—it is not an unambiguous basis for a definition of philosophy, and the Presocratic philosophers are 38

What is causality? By it, I do not mean the temporal ordering of events, for instance, that I am caused by the Big Bang. Knowing merely that it preceded my existence affords me little understanding of myself. Rather, I understand atoms and atomic interactions as causes of molecules, people and collaboration as causes of society, the substances and physical laws issued by the Big Bang as the cause of my and the universe’s being. These I call epistemic or theoretical causes, which are the end of any philosophical or scientific enterprise. They are the set of underlying principles from which other things of import can be derived. Γ is the cause of A if A can be logically deduced from Γ. In this sense, causality is a relation of ideas. It is, in simplicity, deduction.

ed that the principles are empirically verified. In this essay, I consider the question of ideas or concepts primarily, which I call understanding, leaving aside the question of validation, which maps concept to reality, commonly denoted knowledge.

The importance of deduction to philosophy is intuitive. Students of analytic philosophy may consider it a tautology. After all, why is Plato so philosophical for us?11 It is probably the plurality of his ideas. Yet is it not essential of Plato that he presented them as systems of deductive arguments, as theories? Perhaps a defining contribution of Socrates is that he first sought clear definitions of things that encapsulate their nature, which made deduction and clear arguments on these defined concepts possible. Thus, in one sense, a legacy of philosophy is to have applied and developed a model of abstract deduction typical in mathematics to objects of our common experience, such that we can rigorously reason and thereby understand. Plato produced arguments in ethics and introduced questions in epistemology, politics, and metaphysics. Aristotle, his successor, formulated the sciences as deductive disciplines. In the opening of Physics, he proposes:

Now, for those who have studied the idea of ‘causation,’ significant confusion might ensue over my definition of causality. David Hume famously analyzed our concept of causation, demonstrating the difficulty of validating what we conceive as causes, our theoretical causes, physically.10 The problem here with the terminology, as I perceive it, is that we apply the word ‘cause’ in discussions of reality, whereas ‘deduction’ pertains to concepts and ideas, where the word ‘priority’ might be the analogue of ‘causality.’ Between idea and reality is the great mapping problem of philosophy, which I do not attempt to broach here. What I consider useful for our present discussion is the observation that any true physical cause we can understand is necessarily represented as ideas and theories. When we reason about anything, it is implied that ‘that thing’ can be represented by our ideas and so is amenable to reasoning. Furthermore, we cannot validate, without presupposing the validity of some ideas, that any idea corresponds to reality. This is the priority of theory: make no assumption—and we cannot think.

Hence, our conception of reality, and of causality which organizes reality, must assume the form of ideas available to our mind and specifically, through deduction. We consider something sufficiently explained, say the lower density of ice compared to water, when we can deduce it from foundational principles, here energetics, provid-

In all disciplines in which there is systematic knowledge of things with principles, causes, or elements, it arises from a grasp of those: we think we have knowledge of a thing when we have found its primary causes and principles, and followed it back to its elements.12 The essence of principles is that they can sufficiently derive other things. As such, they are putative causes of other phenomena. Explaining phenomena by tracing to first principles is still the standard mode of scientific explanation. In the contemporary philosophy of science, for example, the Deductive Nomological Model defines an explanation as a deduction from verified first principles, so-called laws of physics.13 (For Aristotle this deductive quality is essential not only to natural science but to all disciplines that produce understanding, which he called the sciences.) Yet beyond technical explanations as found 39

in science, there is, I suspect, a significant relation between deduction and what we call understanding. To under-stand, in a precise sense, is to be able to explain. An explanation is a constructive and conscious activity. By this qualification, I exclude the freighted word ‘intuition,’ for if we cannot reason about it—such as I cannot as easily mentally create a feeling of touch as I can conceive an image—we cannot study its meaning.

tively, then this tautology of understanding and deduction might be a significant one. How else can I understand an idea other than by knowing what it is, which is knowing the definitions that constitute it? A triangle is a planar figure enclosed by three intersecting lines. But ‘definitions’ need not be formal or technical. A person is an organism with a head, a torso, and four limbs. I need not have definite notions of all of the parts that constitute a person, but precise notion of any part, say one head per person, allows me to count the number of visitors I have—deductively. I wonder if it cannot be maintained that any meaningful idea implies a set of definitions that constitute it deductively. Deductivity is the necessary relation of ideas. (And if we need a term to distinguish this general concept from pq, we may call it universal deduction.)

Deduction, then, appears to be the maturation of any reasoning; the end of any science is a deductive system; and a view of the history of western philosophy is the maturation of this method of knowledge’s organization, that is, as deduction.

In what contexts do we say we understand something without deduction? We often use the term ‘inductive reasoning.’ Yet do we really understand that the sun shall rise tomorrow? Perhaps we may understand it by the law of gravitation, which’d be a deductive law. Fundamentally, though, induction is an association of similarities—myself from yesterday and today, this atom and that atom—that cannot rationally be justified.

This is Hume’s analysis of induction, which is a basic faculty of our mind that associates similar or so-called ‘identical’ objects. This association, though, is an assumption, and we cannot construe it in any deeper sense.14 If induction will not qualify as understanding, perhaps we will consider a statement such as “humans are good and evil” as an example of so-called approximate or abductive reasoning. What do we really understand in this statement? Is it not that an individual has interests, and interests of individuals can conflict and unite, sometimes tending to things we regard bad and sometimes to good? This then is a rather precise notion that can be made deductive. The reason we do not consider our concept of the statement “humanity is good and evil” as deductive is that we have no precise mathematical definition of humanity as well as of good and evil, to show the latter follows from the former. Yet the essential constituents of the sentence that may qualify as understanding are such deductive segments.

I must emphasize, though without the liberty to entertain the point, that human thinking is certainly more than deduction. Through inductions and other means, we form the ideas that render deduction possible. Deduction is a model of reasoning—it is a criterion by which we assess the validity of our ideas. Success in formulating a deductive system imparts the maturity of our understanding. Yet deduction itself is not how we generated the system. Mathematics, philosophy, the sciences are not closed enterprises that proceed deductively from an initial set of premises, but they are revolutions that constantly develop the consequences of certain ideas while introducing new ones. What I mean to say is that deduction is the universal standard and method of reasoning—what I may call a philosophical criterion, necessary to understanding and to all disciplines.

The reader will object that the question— is there understanding apart from deduction?—is specious, as I seem to only recognize deduction as understanding, hence presuming the answer to the question. This is true, yet my contention is that if there is no other common mode of think-

If the reader has been able to somewhat indulge the concept of deduction I suggested, then my intent for giving a definition of philosophy as deduction is plainly rendered with the quote of Moritz Schlick, “philosophy is not a separate 40

science to be placed alongside of or above the individual disciplines. Rather, the philosophical element is present in all of the sciences; it is their true soul.”15 That we call it philosophy is not my contention. Indeed, let us call it Biology, call it Mathematics, call it Chemistry, Physics, and Sociology, for the plurality of ideas they engage, as deduction certainly depends on the fundamental ideas that constitute its definitions—they create the meaning of the deductive system. Only when we reflect on all the knowledge we have generated and seek our method of thought, if we will, we shall call the common core philosophy.

And to philosophize, ultimately, is to reflect on our thought and understanding. We students of philosophy are as that youth of Shakespeare: But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes Feedst thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel...16 Endnotes 1. This view, given its simplicity and crude historicity, has probably been proposed and treated by historians but, by the lack of my reading, eluded me. I present it here not as a historical argument on the discipline of philosophy but only as a perspective from which a notion of philosophy can be fashioned.

2. “Hesiod and the Beginnings of Greek Philosophy”, Chapter 2, Philosophy Before Socrates.

Richard D. McKirahan.

3. Ibid, pg. 9.

4. Ibid, pg. 10.

5. My brief discussion of Presocratic philosophers here is couched in the general treatment given in the book Philosophy Before Socrates by Professor McKirahan. The chapter references given in my notes and references regarding the Presocratic philosophers are all to this book. Prof.

McKirahan has cautioned me about the historical infidelity of identifying the Presocratics as the introducers of rigorous argumentation, (an identification drive perhaps by an impulse of analytic philosophers) the point of which I acknowledge here and also later in considering argumentation as a relative and not truly precise measure. This inaccurate characterization is, I think, nonetheless useful and interesting to discuss, not the least for later viewing Plato and Aristotle as articulating more rigorous methods of reasoning.

6.

“Anaximander of Miletus”, Chapter 5, Philosophy Before Socrates.

7. See Xenophanes and Parmenides, Chapters 7, 11, Philosophy Before Socrates. The theories of the natural philosophers and later the atomists are also novel and critical ways of explaining the world that initiated new discourses and argumentation and so effectively critical toward traditional ways of thinking.

I would like to close with a view of logic. If we mean to define philosophy with deduction, it is required to be a precise idea. What is deduction? It is the relation of ideas. What are ideas? Have they ever been defined? If I may consult a philosopher of mathematics, I’d like to ask: has the number 1 ever been defined? Or is it isomorphic ideas conceived in the minds of you and I? We want to say that the idea of 1 makes it the minimum number together with the ideas of other natural numbers, not that the notation 1 is nominally the first number, which’d be impossible to comprehend. Yet if we cannot define an idea, is deduction, the necessary relation of ideas, a precise concept? We cannot claim that all meaning is deductive without having access to all meaning. I am capable of reasoning about numbers, for my mind can grasp and analyze distinct notions of them and formalize them as notations. As much as we would assign to our mathematical world, the a priori, an independent existence from our natural being, is it not due for an empiricist to affirm that what we call deduction—the reasoning that proceeds through a proof—is a phenomenon of our mind?

That the meaning of those mathematical ideas are the active thoughts conceived in our ideation?

Thus, mathematics and our models of logic cannot define deduction but are the most admirable artifacts of that deductive capacity of the mind.

To fully understand deduction then is to understand this deductive capacity. Can we understand our understanding? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Yet only through thinking can we understand our thought.

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8. Phaedo, 98c-e. Plato.

9. Gorgias, 501a. Plato.

10. “Sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding”, Section 4. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. David Hume.

11. Plato is the putative inventor of the word philo-sophia, love of wisdom, in his dialogue Gorgias.

Intuitively meaningful, to use the etymology— love of wisdom—as a definition of philosophy begs the question of what wisdom is, which is a freighted and unelucidated term for Plato.

12. Physics, 184a, Aristotle.

13. “The DN Model”, Section 2, Scientific Explanation. Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

14. “Sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding”, Section 4, Part 2, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. David Hume.

15. Preface, General Theory of Knowledge. Moritz Schlick.

16. Sonnet 1. Shakespeare.

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Untitled Tristan Latham, Pomona ‘23 Medium: Digital Imaging Commentary regarding the inability of humans to see ourselves as one. The world we’ve built upon the one we were born to has been raised to such a high level that we barely recognize our own best interests. To me, Betsy Devos represents humanity’s habit of killing ourselves to save the structures we’ve made, even as they are crumbling around us. We are preoccupied with bullshit like Betsy Devos’ not-so-coded educational plans, while continuing to leave our fellow humans in the dust of industry.

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Another Brick in the Wall: Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses and the Reproduction of Labor in the University

social group.”2 Ideology is all-encompassing and thus includes every single one of the individual’s thoughts and beliefs. Crucially, the definition also proves the impossibility of not having an ideology; even if an individual does not subscribe to a particular political system, they still have an ideology and are necessarily subject to the societal processes of ideological subordination. Moreover, every particular ideology is subject to existence within the broader frameworks of society and so necessarily has a positionality within those structures. As a result, every particular ideology has and expresses a “class position” and a position within frameworks of race, gender, sexuality, and other power structures within the given society.3

by Sam Hernandez, Pomona ‘24

In this essay, I explore the foundations of the University as a facet of the broader educational state apparatus described by Louis Althusser in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”1 Althusser outlines how every state maintains, and when necessary deploys, a variety of repressive methods to maintain its grasp on control. Institutions such as the police, the courts, the Army, the political system, and the prisons are generally conceived of as the extent of the state apparatus in Marxist thought. Furthermore, Althusser develops a theory of the more subtle—and potentially more important—aspect of the state: Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). ISAs can be distinguished from the aforementioned arms of the Marxist State Apparatus—which will hereafter be referred to as Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs)—by the means through which they extend the state’s influence.

ISAs work mostly through peaceful indoctrination, whereas RSAs usually employ force, or at the very least, display the capacity for use of force in order to achieve their goals. By analyzing Althusser’s work on Ideological State Apparatuses, I aim to discern the role of many of our societal institutions—most significantly that of the University—in reproducing the labor necessary for the capitalist mode of production. I then examine the possibilities that ISAs present for the continuation of class, race, gender, and other liberatory struggles. I will first look to ideology to convey the function and impact of ISAs in the reproduction of labor-power.

In examining ISAs as they function under capitalism, it is helpful to look at how ISAs have developed from previous modes of production to their current forms. For instance, under the feudal mode of production, the most influential ISA was the Church,4 which came to dominate the social consciousness of pre-capitalist society. The Church took on a multitude of roles that allowed them to have an immense ideological influence on the minds of individuals in feudal society, reinforcing the power structures of the status quo. It subsumed the educational role within society and that of social functions or culture, which is a crucial facet of the material expression of ideology. Because the ideological power of the Church was so great, nearly “all ideological struggle, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, starting with the first shocks of the Reformation, was concentrated in an anti-clerical and anti-religious struggle.”5 The Church presented the most significant hurdle to revolutionary change in the ideological transition from feudalism to capitalism. It is no coincidence that the rise in anti-clerical sentiment was accompanied by considerable changes in the economic organization of production and the ensuing social relations as the capitalist class grew in strength and the power of the aristocracy waned. The advancement of technology that allowed individualized production to become more viable gave rise to an increasing number of small-time capitalists. In turn, this develop-

Ideology goes beyond a mere set of political, religious, and cultural beliefs. It extends more broadly as the “system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a 44

ment created a new ideological current, which fed back into the growth of the burgeoning capitalist class, forming a cyclical relationship. The ideological warfare against the Church made the revolutionary change in the mode of production more viable. The shift in the mode of production reinforced the need for ideological change. The advent of Enlightenment ideals—especially that of private property—recognized and encouraged the development of early capitalism, which in turn further propelled the shift in social consciousness towards an emphasis on human reason over religion.6

With the triumph of capitalism over feudalism, the Church lost much of its hegemony as the dominant ISA, and the educational State apparatus rose in its place. Instead of sitting in the Church for several hours every Sunday to disseminate the ruling class’s ideology, we now sit in school Monday through Friday. Rather than hearing religious parables that justify existing social hierarchies, we have history class (which, make no mistake, is a very specific version of history conducive to white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism) to teach us why our society has to be the way it is. Not only must every mode of production be capable of producing the items society consumes, but it also must reproduce itself to perpetuate its existence.

This requisite may seem evident at first, but it also raises questions when more thoroughly examined, especially regarding how it can maintain the willing existence of an exploited class. The Church was able to reproduce the serf class such that they accepted their subordination, even in the face of evident domination. Who dares to question the disciples of God? Through the sermons and rhetoric of the clergy class, the existing social order that kept the serfs exploited from birth to death was reinforced. That is, because the Church was legitimized through the state’s authority (and thus, allegedly, the authority of God), the serf class had little ground on which to advocate for social change.

However, my goal is to examine capitalism in the 21st century, which reproduces the relations of production, especially the relationship that 45

employs the working class merely as their commodified labor-power. In the immediate sense, this reproduction is carried out “by wages,” in that wages allow the working class to reproduce with some degree of autonomy.7 As the working class is composed of human beings, they will buy food and clothes and shelter if they have access to it, which incentivizes the capitalist class to pay them a subsistence wage. Their wages are just enough to ensure that they remain relatively healthy and economically viable to do their part in the production, but not enough to have the ‘luxury’ of quitting their job or taking time off. With enough wages to avoid starvation, people also tend to want a family and possibly children, which are crucial for capitalism’s generational survival. Wages alone, though, do not make those children into commodifiable labor-power.

Instead, they just make sure that those who are already members of the working class remain members of the working class. Wage labor limits the ability of the existing working class to fight capitalism because they rely on the wages it generates for their survival, which makes the notion of alternatives to the existing mode of production and social order seem unrealistic. To properly explore the reproduction of the working class as labor-power, I must now look beyond the effect of wages.

Though wages allow workers to reproduce themselves as labor-power and give rise to the next generation’s possibility, more is needed to convert each new cog in the machine from potential to actual commodified labor-power. As the final step in the educational state apparatus, the University plays a significant role in the creation of each new crop of workers in several ways. First is the inundation of students with skills under the assumption that the students are preparing entirely for the commodification and sale of their labor-power. The entire educational process is not designed to render the students capable of maximizing their unique potentials within their communities; it is designed to produce generation after generation of employable cogs for the labor machine. Consider how universities brand themselves to prospective students, publishing the destinations of their graduates, to lure high school-

ers with their alumni being well-paid cogs. Once the student arrives on campus, the sheer quantity of job fairs and corporate-sponsored events in the various academic departments clarifies how little interest there is in the students as individuals. The University serves merely as a battle royale amongst students for lucrative positions, regardless of how much the University veils itself in the “co-operation over competition” rhetoric. The ideological subordination is especially effective because it is so rarely mentioned. There is an inherent assumption that students’ destiny is found in wage labor, which makes any alternative seem, again, unrealistic.

The third way in which the University carries out its ideological domination is the cost that it imposes on its students. Because getting a degree in higher education has become the expectation in the United States, universities, especially private institutions, can charge ridiculous prices, encouraging students to take out loans to cover the costs.

It is more socially acceptable to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt at eighteen than not to have a degree. As a result, the ideological freedom of the student is constrained from before they even step foot on campus, as the anxiety and material reality of debt innately taints their options concerning their choice of major(s), classes, and aspirations post-graduation. Many students are forced to forsake their passions and even their talents because their particular strength is not conducive to commodification. Instead, they are forced to go into a field they have no interest in because it provides the only viable alternative to lifelong debt or bankruptcy. Part of the reason this structure is so insidious is that universities paint themselves as places where intellectual freedom thrives and where students can pursue their unique interests. However, the University’s allegiance to capital, from their funding to their direct relationships with corporations and the capitalist financial system, guarantees their continuation of the capitalist paradigm inherent to their role as an ISA.

After the inundation of students, the second stage comes in the form of four specific roles that Althusser outlines for how the educational State apparatus prepares individuals for society.

Each can be found within every graduating class of the University. The roles are (1) the “exploited,” which consists of most people who engage in wage-labor under capitalism; (2) the “agent of exploitation,” who is taught to manage workers and extract surplus value from them (this is primarily made up of the capitalist class); (3) the “agent of repression,” describing those who enforce the will of capital both overtly—as police, for example—and behind a façade of neutrality, as judges or politicians; (4) the “professional ideologist,” who carries out the task of pondering, discussing, and disseminating ideology under the guise of religion, science, or philosophy, but nearly always does so in a way that upholds the dominance of capitalism.8

Furthermore, the state is often the provider of student loans, demonstrating the extent to which the University is complicit in the structural state-inflicted violence on marginalized groups.

Debt is dangerous. Having high debt often gives the lender the right to seize the borrower’s necessities of existence—their living quarters, transportation, and even their rights, through a loss of access to education, or even through imprisonment, the ultimate loss of personal autonomy. Debt also lowers credit scores, which gatekeep access to many of the tools for social mobility (including escaping poverty), such as owning a home, unless the individual taking the loan is willing to accept exorbitant interest rates. Poverty, by nature, is often cyclical and intergenerational, and this is in large part due to

The majority of those engaged in the University—as well as most of those who are ejected from the educational system after finishing primary school—are the exploited, selling their labor-power to a capitalist in exchange for a wage in the process of production or in the service economy, as is more common in Western liberal democracies. However, the agents of exploitation, repression, and ideology filter through the University as well, but are more difficult to convince to defect, since the roles they are funneling into benefit directly from the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production.

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debt. Interest accrues, and payments are due, but having that debt in the first place is an obstacle to accumulating the money to pay off the debt. Individuals are then forced to pay late fees and higher rates, and the share of their already slim income going to debt and interest payments increases and ensures the cycle of poverty. The proliferation of debt throughout the modern economy, facilitated by the University and the state itself, perpetually forces people into the capitalist mode of production. Nevertheless, their choices to do so are the only way to give their lives any semblance of stability in providing for themselves and potentially their families. What’s more, the University does not merely produce the working class but also takes on the capitalists’ ideological reproduction role.

working class. Class consciousness and organization are made infinitely more difficult when subsistence conditions are made more uncertain, as material needs for food, water, and shelter obstruct workers’ ability to engage in the sorts of political action that threaten the hegemony of the capitalist class.

Understanding the crucial role the educational ISA plays in shaping our collective thought process and conception of society guides us to look at how this ideological domination can be overcome. Overarchingly, the beginnings of an answer can be found in Althusser’s analysis of the broader operation of ISAs, where he argues that “no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and within the State Ideological Apparatuses.”9 A critical first step to weakening the capitalist class position is to wage emancipatory war for all marginalized groups within the sphere of the educational apparatus.

Even though overcoming the immense power of the state appears to be a daunting goal, it remains possible for several key reasons. The first is that many educational state apparatus members do not fulfill their indoctrinatory role knowingly or intentionally. Due to the total weight of the University apparatus, which is “bigger than they are and crushes them,”10 it has the dual effect of making them susceptible to taking up common cause with students, or at the very least refraining from antagonism.

Universities boast of their entrepreneurial education and their ability to prepare the business leaders of the next generation while concomitantly sending most of its students into the mundanity of wage labor. To ensure this function, some majors and departments are designed to teach students to be good stewards of capital and shepherds of labor—especially those focused on business management and finance. The sect of the university student population devoted to managerial studies receives a qualitatively different education, although its methods, classes and seminars are like those of any other student, concealing the altogether different sort of preparation these majors provide. Instead of making these students appealing as labor-power, business administration and managerial programs create capitalists-without-capital, ready and able to manage workers effectively—or, more clearly, in a way that maximizes their surplus value—and prepares them for an entirely different relationship to the means of production. In short, they fill the opposite role in the capitalist-worker social relation.

Students of finance are not taught how to be good labor-power for their bosses; instead, they are educated on capital accumulation and strategic investment. Their studies on how best to maximize profits have the secondary—or, in actuality, primary— function of maximizing the power of the capitalist class to maintain the fragility and instability of the

Secondly, control in the ISAs is much more tenuous than control born of repression, especially given the propensity of oppressed groups to fight for self-expression and liberation. Because the state and the capitalist class must maintain the façade of scholastic neutrality, the University has a much more difficult time stifling the full range of anti-capitalist struggle, whether it manifests in art, writing, or student organizations. Through these mediums, marginalized students can use the supposed objectiveness of the educational apparatus to their advantage, leveraging it in defense of their own forms of resistance and expression. However, it is also important to note that ISAs are undergirded by the threat of force as well, often in col47

laboration with the RSAs. For example, if a student misses too much school and becomes truant, they now have technically committed a crime, and their parents can be forced by the court and the police to pay fines or, in extreme cases, have warrants issued for their arrest.11 At the university level, the use of force can be deployed if the threat to the state or capitalist interests is great enough. When student protests of the Vietnam War grew too large at Kent State University, the state responded with the deployment of the Ohio National Guard, which fired on the crowd, leaving four students dead and nine injured.12 Although Kent State may be the most well-known instance of state-enacted violence against student protests, it is far from being the only occurrence. The many RSAs stand ready to quell any attempt to undermine the ideological goals of the University and broader education ISA.

comes. Only through the sheer ideological force wielded by the educational state apparatus could the sham that passes for a political system be considered acceptable or remotely reasonable. Mental health crises are skyrocketing,13 climate change is accelerating rapidly,14 and inequality abounds,15 yet the University apparatus proliferates the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism.16 Therefore, to work towards a more sustainable, equitable world unimpeded by the oppressive power structures of the current era, engagement in collective action is needed to push back against the ideological subordination upon which the University rests.

Endnotes 1. Louis Althusser, On Ideology (London: Verso, 2009), 1-60.

2. Althusser, On Ideology, 32 3. Althusser, On Ideology, 33 4. More specifically, the Church as used here refers to the Christian churches of various denominations popular in European feudal society.

5. Althusser, On Ideology, 25 6. The Enlightenment’s pivot to individualism and the prioritization of human reason helped to justify capitalism by substantiating the need for property rights, especially in the context of rebuking feudal systems of property.

7. Ibid., 4 8. Ibid., 29-30 9. Ibid., 20 10. Ibid., 31 11. Nadja Popovich, “Do US laws that punish parents for truancy keep their kids in school?,” The Guardian, June 23, 2014, https://www.theguardian. com/education/2014/jun/23/-sp-school-truancyfines-jail-parents-punishment-children.

12. “Kent State Shooting.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, September 8, 2017. https:// www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/kent-stateshooting.

13. Reinert, Maddy, Theresa Nguyen, and Danielle Fritze. “The State of Mental Health in America.”

Mental Health America, 2021. https://www.mhanational.org/issues/state-mental-health-america.

The effects of a triumph in the struggle for power over the University would be immense. In terms of its primary effect, wresting control of the University away from the hands of capital would disrupt capitalism’s ability to reproduce the labor-power necessary for its self-preservation, thus undermining the very mode of production, though likely not severe enough to be a catalyst for a more holistic shift. Perhaps more importantly, the weakening of the University within the educational state apparatus would reverberate throughout the rest of the ISAs that constitute state power. The military state apparatus, for example, relies upon the high costs of secondary education to recruit soldiers that it ships halfway around the world to secure the resources for production and conditions necessary for the low prices that sustain the capitalist mode of production. The political ISA is also dependent on the educational ISA—not because it desires well-educated voters to make the best decisions for our ‘democracy,’ but because the University and the school system conveys the ideological domination that capitalism and the neoliberal democracies we live under are the best of all possible social structures. Every societal ill could allegedly be waived away with the right bill passed by the right representative, yet this salvation never 48

14. Fountain, Henry. “Climate Change is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change.” The New York Times, December 4, 2019. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/12/04/climate/climate-change-acceleration.html.15. Gunn, Dwyer. “Why Racial Economic Disparity Keeps Growing in the U.S.” Pacific Standard, January 16, 2019. https://psmag. com/economics/why-racial-economic-disparity-keeps-growing-in-the-us. See also Heeb, Gina.

“US Income Inequality Jumps to Highest Level Ever Recorded.” Business Insider, September 27, 2019. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/ stocks/income-inequality-reached-highest-level-ever-recorded-in-2018-2019-9-1028559996.

16. For more information on the psychological destruction of alternatives to capitalism, Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism provides an in-depth account.

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In Defense of “Death”

more fortunate for one person to live longer than another person. Nagel writes, “If it is good to be alive, that advantage can be attributed to a person at each point of his life. It is a good of which Bach had more than Schubert, simply because he lived longer.

Death, however, is not an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust.”3 Here, Nagel demonstrates that the evil of death is not measured by how long someone has suffered the state of being dead, but by how long they had to live and participate in the joys that life can offer. The second way that Nagel defends his definition of the evil of death is by positing that “people who are averse to death are not usually averse to unconsciousness (so long as it does not entail a substantial cut in the total duration of waking life)”, so their fear of death likely does not stem from the state of being dead.4 Nagel’s definition of why death can be considered an evil serves as a foundation for his examination of the extent to which death—or more accurately, the loss of life—brings misfortune to its victims and thus can be considered an evil.

by Gloria Choi, Scripps ‘21 Introduction

In “Death,” American philosopher Thomas Nagel considers whether death is an evil—in other words, whether it bestows a misfortune on its subject. He ultimately concludes that death is an evil because it takes away the potential for all the good that life has to offer. Nagel frames his argument against questions of whether death is in itself an evil, and if it is, to what extent it is an evil.1 Nagel attempts to answer these questions in order to find an answer to the larger philosophical problem: is it rational to fear death? This question is significant because it can drastically change the ways in which people view their mortality. If it is rational for me to think death is an evil, I may live in heightened fear of the inevitable evil that will strike me once I die. I agree with Nagel that death is an evil, but I think his concept of death is complicated by the uncertainty of whom the misfortune applies to. I will explain how Nagel defines what he understands to be the evil of death and then uses this definition to answer three questions that he asks in his attempt to solve the larger philosophical problem. I will then evaluate the strength of his argument and describe what I believe Nagel’s critics overlook in their objections to his argument.

Three Problems with Nagel’s View Nagel identifies “three types of problems” to investigate the extent to which the loss of life can be considered an evil. First, Nagel writes, “it may be doubted that there are any evils which consist merely in the deprivation or absence of possible goods, and which do not depend on someone’s minding that deprivation.”5 Here, Nagel wonders if a misfortune can exist if the person, who is dead and therefore does not have any opinions or experiences, does not mind this misfortune.

Nagel’s View: Death’s Evil as the Loss of Good Nagel tries to solve the problem of death’s evil by first defining what he means by the ‘evil’ of death and then providing a defense for this definition. Nagel defines the evil of death not as the state of being dead but as the loss of access to all the good that life has to offer. He puts forth this definition of the evil of death by stating, “if death is an evil, it is the loss of life, rather than the state of being dead, or non-existent, or unconscious, that is objectionable.”2 Nagel defends this definition of death’s evil by invoking two views that people commonly hold on death. First, Nagel claims that it is not considered more unfortunate for one person to be dead for longer than another person, but it is considered

Second, Nagel questions who actually endures the evil of death and when they endure it, writing, “there are special difficulties, in the case of death, about how the supposed misfortune is to be assigned to a subject at all.”6 Lastly, Nagel considers “the asymmetry… between our attitudes to posthumous and prenatal nonexistence. How can the former be bad if the latter is not?”7 In his last question, Nagel borrows from Lucretius, a Roman philosopher, who asks why nonexistence after death should be considered an evil if nonex50

istence before birth is not considered an evil. In my assessment of Nagel’s solution, I will analyze Nagel’s response to each of these three questions.

as to when he undergoes it.”11 Earlier, I defined ‘evil’ as the negative valence that could be placed on death if I determine that death presents its victims with misfortune. However, does the victim that suffers this misfortune actually exist? I think it is not certain that the victim is completely non-existent.

Nagel uses an example of an intelligent man who suffered a brain injury that caused him to revert to the mental condition of his infant self.12 Nagel claims that the evil of death lies in the lost potential of the man and that “[t]he intelligent adult who has been reduced to this condition is the subject of the misfortune.”13 Critics may say that when the man becomes an infant, the man no longer exists; he has been replaced by the infant, and therefore, the ‘death’ of the intelligent man cannot be a disservice to him, because he no longer exists. Nagel mentions this problem, stating, “in any case, who is there to pity? The intelligent adult has disappeared, and for a creature like the one before us, happiness consists in a full stomach and a dry diaper.”14

The third question that Nagel considers while determining the evil of death is a question posed by Roman philosopher Lucretius. Lucretius argues that “it must be irrational to fear death, since death is simply the mirror image of the prior abyss”, questioning how posthumous nonexistence can be considered an evil if prenatal nonexistence is not.8 Nagel offers an objection to Lucretius by referring to Nagel’s own definition of the evil of death. Nagel argues, “It is true that both the time before a man’s birth and the time after his death are times when he does not exist. But the time after his death is time of which his death deprives him. It is time in which, had he not died then, he would be alive.”9 Nagel’s definition of death’s evil plays a crucial role in his objection to Lucretius because posthumous nonexistence is a time during which a person loses access to all the good things possible through life.

According to Nagel, the loss of potential life makes posthumous nonexistence more unfortunate than prenatal nonexistence. Although a critic might say that this lost potential could also be fulfilled if Person A were to be born earlier, Nagel points out that Person A “could not have been born earlier” because “anyone born substantially earlier than he was would have been someone else.”10 Born earlier, Person A would not exist, and a new person, Person B, will have been born at a different time, possibly to a different family, place, and culture.

Nagel’s objection to Lucretius is strong because it is consistent with the definition of the evil of death that Nagel previously establishes. Furthermore, it elucidates a fault in Lucretius’s argument and addresses a difference that Lucretius fails to consider.

My View

My response to this criticism is that I am hesitant to agree that the intelligent man is unequivocally non-existent after his injury. The intelligent man’s ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ into the mental condition of the infant is the result of severe brain damage. If the man is said to be a completely different person after this brain damage, does this also mean that less severe brain damage will also change who a person is, to a lesser degree than that sustained by the intelligent man? How severe does the brain damage have to be to constitute the ‘death’ of one being and the ‘rebirth’ of another? If the intelligent man were to undergo an injury that caused him brain damage which erased only the memories and skills that he acquired in the past week of his life, as opposed to the entire span of his life from infancy to adulthood, has he still become a different person, even if this person is similar in most ways to the person he was before his injury?

If there is reason to believe that the intelligent man is not completely ‘dead’ or non-existent, there may also be reason to believe that the misfortune of this situation is not entirely without a person to be at-

Nagel’s responses to the first and second question are not as straightforward as his response to the third question. In the first and second questions, he asks 1) whether something can be an evil if the person doesn’t mind it and 2) if the evil does exist, who the subject is that endures it and when they endure it. In Nagel’s own words, “[t]here is doubt both as to who [evil’s] subject is, and as to 51

tached to. In this case, I might still be able to say that the intelligent man suffered misfortune, avoiding the criticisms that say that the intelligent man no longer exists and that it is therefore not possible to attach misfortune and the evil of death onto him.

These boundaries are unclear, and defining them more clearly will allow me to explore more deeply the extent to which I can argue that death is an evil.

Endnotes 1. Thomas Nagel, “Death,” Noûs 4, no. 1 (February 1970): 74-75, https://doi.org/10.2307/2214297 2. Ibid.

3. Ibid, 75.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid, 75 - 76.

6. Ibid, 76.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid, 79.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid, 76.

12. Ibid, 77.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

Conclusion Nagel identifies the reasons to fear death if we are to understand death as the loss of all the good that can be experienced in life. By addressing the flaw in Lucretius’s proposed ‘asymmetry’ between posthumous nonexistence and prenatal nonexistence, as well as clarifying the ways in which people do not fear the state of being dead but actually death’s accompanying lack of potential for good, Nagel curates a strong defense for why the evil of death is the loss of life. Using this foundation, I further probe the problem of death to argue that, disregarding permanent, physical death, there are still unanswered questions about the ‘death’ of a person that may complicate the rationale behind this fear. While death’s evil is an inescapable reality, the answer to the question of who exactly suffers this evil is still unclear. Nevertheless, Nagel’s argument for the evil of posthumous nonexistence illuminates the rationale for fearing death.

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Antiphon the Sophist

by Joshua Suh, Pomona ‘23

To listen, go to https://tabularasaclaremont.com/Antiphon-the-Sophist-Joshua-Suh. Antiphon the Sophist, a pre socratic philosopher born ca. 480 BCE, wrote in his work The Tetralogies, three imaginary judicial trials and wrote speeches representing both sides. These works masterfully employed the use of the Protagorean concept, antilogic, which dealt with the idea that within any kind of case or scenario there are two mutually opposed sides you can take. It deals with the concept of persuasion and how one makes their own cases stronger and more convincing. Taking inspiration from Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question I decided to use this concept of antilogic, spurred on from Antiphon’s writings, to present a question that two parties attempt to answer. For those more musically inclined, it is an antiphonal piece (call and response) that incorporates polymodality between the G Lydian, G Dorian, and G Locrian modes. You have the universe silently playing in the background as two voices take turns trying to answer the one question. Do any one of the two succeed in their attempts at persuasion? What is the question ultimately being asked? Who or what are these voices supposed to represent? I encourage those, especially other musicians, to pick apart this piece, look for easter eggs and references, and ask questions that may help you come towards a conclusion.

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Trauma, Conflict, and Contradiction

Instead of the experienced world and the objective world as distinct and separate, Hegel defines the object through the friction of the two. For this reason, Hegel becomes a philosopher of subjectivity, useful for our analysis here, as we fail to distinguish the world from our experience of it. Distinct from opposition, which imagines a complete self-identity without the unconscious, contradiction recognizes the divide in the subject.6 Opposition constitutes a whole identity through opposition against an Other, whereas contradiction recognizes the divide in the subject. From this contradiction, truth prevails.

by Glen Skahill, Pomona ‘22

Foregrounding “The Guru” episode of Avatar the Last Airbender, this essay examines how the show’s representation of trauma extends to how it handles conflict. “The Guru” offers a pre-modern representation of the therapeutic clinic, offering firm ground for psychoanalytic theory to intervene. In the midst of its renaissance, Avatar the Last Airbender (ATLA)’s representations of trauma reverberate over a decade past its air.1 The representation of trauma in “The Guru” serves as a synecdoche for the series as a whole in how it connects trauma to conflict. Fusing the psychoanalysis of Jaques Lacan and the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The Guru” examines the contradiction of subjectivity or our split in being through the representation of trauma. This paper illustrates the contradiction through Todd McGowan’s emancipatory framework and Ryan Engley’s work on the serial cut.2 I argue that representing trauma requires embracing the contradiction of subjectivity. Through this embrace, Avatar the Last Airbender shapes its emancipatory politics.

Art attempts to express our subjectivity yet itself lacks subjectivity as a material object. Hegel begins with architecture as the most obvious example of this contradiction and moves through various forms of art. Architecture, as a material object, exists outside of us yet attempts to express our very subjectivity. This contradiction—between art’s expression of our subjectivity and art’s externality—constitutes architecture. While Hegel uses this contradiction to define most of the artforms he explores, materiality cannot explain the contradiction within poetry.7 The contradiction of poetry arises due to our separation from language. Language exists outside of us. When we put poetics out there for others, we lose control of the meaning that may arise. While poetics might appear as a pure form of expression, contradiction necessarily arises through the minimal distance of our separation from language. I contend that televisual media maintains this minimal distance of separation— and thus contradiction—through its visual poetics.

What constitutes the contradiction of subjectivity? Psychoanalytic theory answers with the split between the conscious and the unconscious.3 This split in subjectivity extends to how we relate to objects. For example, conscious wishes as children—such as for a doll to come to life—may return later in life in the form of the uncanny—such as seeing a doll that’s too lifelike or thinking it moved.4 Despite the external status of the object, the subject experiences the object’s uncanniness in a deeply internal manner. In this split, between the external object and internal experience, psychoanalytic theory does its work. Thus, the split in ourselves, between the conscious and unconscious, splits objects as well. Freud notes how our repressed desires—left in the unconscious—return to us in our view of the uncanny object extending our split in subjectivity to the objects of the world. Hegel determines that the split within the object constitutes the object.5

We must identify a visual poetics of the unconscious which extends to trauma for trauma’s location in the unconscious. Just as trauma brings us back to a moment of pain, flashback sequences in media offer the representational equivalent.

These moments of slippage of the past from the unconscious—repressed memories—to the conscious show the faltering of the unconscious’ protection against trauma, as the unconscious may only ever offer partial protection from traumatic experiences via the repression of them. Flashback sequences rely on the cut between shots. Engley, a 54

psychoanalytic theorist of seriality, identifies this cut—called the serial gap—with the unconscious.8

release.9 Without it, the subject remains in tension under the protection of the unconscious’ repression. This enunciation marks the beginning of the release of psychic tension. In similar terms, Aang— albeit at a pace fantastically rapid—begins to find release from the psychic turmoils that trouble him.

Herein, this episode reveals how ATLA takes on the contradiction of subjectivity as it relates to trauma.

In “The Guru,” we see Aang, the last of the airbenders and powerful avatar who can stop the fire lord, experience a series of flashbacks to repressed feelings and memories. Aang repressed these memories due to fear, guilt, shame, grief, and lies. For example, when guru Pathik, another character, asks Aang to meditate on shame, the episode flashes back to Aang losing control of his fire and burning his romantic interest, Katara.

Akin to a panic attack surfacing a traumatic memory, the cut interjects another shot, and therefore memory, into the moment. In the same manner that flashbacks of traumatic events confront us, the flashback in the episode confronts Aang. To understand repression, the media object must take on its own unconscious through the cut.

The episode spans the seven chakras, covering Aang’s various repressions. While the final two verge on religious instead of related to the psyche, the first five ideas serve as triggers that bring Aang’s repressions to enunciation. Guru Pathik goes through the seven chakras with Aang and explains what blocks each of them. Each time Pathik mentions what blocks the chakra, such as fear or guilt, it triggers a memory in Aang that he had been avoiding or repressing. These triggers serve as a springboard for analysis in the same manner that psychoanalysts use dreams to get patients talking and eventually confronting their traumas.10 Aang begins with fear, envisioning the firelord Ozai who everyone says he must kill to save the world. We come to understand his fear, as the show enunciates his fear through metaphors of Ozai after a flashback. The next chakra follows with guilt, as Aang remembers running away from his home which inadvertently saved him from the genocide of his people. After shame, the two meditate on grief during which Aang feels the grief of having lost his people, the air nomads, and home. Guru Pathik offers love as the cover against grief but asks Aang to let go of his earthly attachments on the final chakra release. In this final meditation, Aang senses the danger that confronts Katara. Herein, Aang faces conflicting desires as a traumatic encounter with the contradiction of subjectivity.

After the initial flashback, the consequent shot serves as what psychoanalysis might consider the point of enunciation. The next scene brings the point of repression to consciousness akin to verbalizing mental processes in the clinic as a point of enunciation. In the clinic, the point of enunciation verbalizes repressed mental processes, bringing them to consciousness. As mentioned, when guru Pathik asks Aang to think about shame, his repressed memory of hurting Katara while firebending comes up. Just as guru Pathik brings this memory to consciousness for Aang to enunciate his avoidance to firebending, the show represents this enunciation through the Kuleshov effect, looking at a character’s face then flashing to another scene to get a sense of their internal world. In this enunciation, the contradiction of subjectivity comes to fore in the contrast between the conscious view of the character and the enunciation of their repression.

Having gone through all but the last chakras, Aang then must choose between love and the cosmic energy that may give him the power to defeat the firelord. He chooses love. Aang’s choice extends ATLA’s commitment to the contradiction of subjectivity. It brings the relation of the internal and external into question once again, bringing considerations for the representation of

We may then read this enunciation back into the clinic, as guru Pathik and Aang meditate in what may have been a pre-modern clinical setup.

Just as Aang finds release against all the points of repression that become enunciated in the episode, Lacan—a founder of his own school of psychoanalysis—identifies this point of enunciation as a point of 55

trauma into the external world within the show.

While “The Guru” offers Aang the enunciation of his repressed traumas into consciousness, the finale of ATLA enunciates a new horizon of meaning, as Aang determines his relation to the grief of the fire nation destroying his culture. This enunciation comes in Aang’s choice to not kill the firelord and instead take his bending away. Taking the bending away thus preserves the culture that he lost, as he holds on to his culture’s nonviolence. However, taking away the firelord’s bending avoids a traumatic encounter within the contradiction of nonviolence. Aang spends the end of the final season dealing with the anxiety around this contradiction. Firelord Ozai threatens to kill him and friends and conquer the world. Without the ability to take away his bending, Ozai may have forced Aang to sacrifice his nonviolence or face annihilation. Instead, Aang maintains his cultural heritage with the ability to take his bending away, recognizing “universality over particularity.”13

Furthermore, Aang’s choice of love embraces the contradiction of subjectivity. As McGowan, a Hegelian psychoanalytic theorist, notes, “Love forces the subject to recognize that it is not a self-identical being but a being whose identity is out there in the other.”11 Aang embraces his own split in being with part of his identity in the external world in his lover. In the scene before, Aang opens the sixth chakra, blocked by illusion, through understanding the connection between things. However, Aang’s choice of love illustrates this in actuality, as love “creates a disturbance in the subject’s identity that transforms that identity, revealing that identity is never isolated.”12 Love integrates another into one’s own identity, despite both being external and having difference from the self, furthering ATLA’s logic of contradiction.

While we began with observations about flashbacks in shows, love extends the logic of representation in relation to trauma. Whereas other shows may represent trauma well, that representation configures into the show’s logic. The show’s relation to contradiction—as an inherent part of subjectivity—configures into the representation of trauma. Thus, any attempt to isolate a narrative arc of healing from an overarching narrative of opposition—overcoming one’s enemies to establish oneself or one’s identity—does disservice to the contradiction of subjectivity. Herein, every show takes up a position relative to contradiction due to the necessity of conflict in narrative that shapes the diegetic world’s relation to trauma.

Aang’s exemplification of Hegelian universality cultivates the emancipation that McGowan speaks of, as “...emancipation involves making explicit and embracing contradiction, whereas conservatism aims at repressing or eliminating it.”14 McGowan makes clear that contradiction constitutes universality, manifesting differently in all of us.

Firelord Ozai asserts his particularity, denying the shared universality of contradiction. Only through the universal, understood within contradiction, of which the contradiction of subjectivity lies, may emancipation prevail. Ozai defines the fire nation against the avatar and rest of the world. Instead of reconciling the contradiction within the fire nation and thus between the other nations, Ozai asserts a self-unified identity for the fire nation in this opposition. Albeit a fantasy of power, Aang reconciles Ozai’s opposition by denying his means to consolidate his particularity. In taking away his bending, Aang forces Ozai to confront the universal.

Trauma’s relational nature forces the narrative to contend with it as long as there appears some representation of subjectivity. This appears both in how the show structures conflict, around opposition or contradiction, as well as the constitution of characters. Of course, love must not always be the answer, albeit it embodies a good answer. Love must embrace its contradictory nature for a show to take on such a logic. Continuing this logic of contradiction allows the representation of trauma in the show multiple points of enunciation.

Aang—part of the oppressed group due to the genocide of his people—becomes the universal that the fire nation defines itself against in its particularity. The identity of the fire nation rests on Aang, as the limit against their world domination.

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Aang, as the avatar, becomes the barrier for the fire nation to overcome contradiction and achieve unity in self.

sality comes from confronting his contradiction, we may each find our own determinate universalities through the contradictions that define us.

However the fire nation raises a difficult question: how can we uphold the universal if someone maintains oppositional identity to us? With the example of the scentific racist who defines themself opposition against the racial Other, denying the Other’s contradiction, Hegel, quoted in McGowan, states to “smash the skull of a person who makes a statement like that,” whereas McGowan brings Hegel’s passion back to his philosophy to “reject it without any debate because the racist attempt to bypass universality in identifying the subject cannot be countered by a convincing argument, which would take place within the universality of language.”15 Thus, part of the reconciliation of contradiction may involve the violent rejection of opposition.

Within the representations of trauma that “The Guru” guides us through, it also offers the explosion of radicality simmering in the show. Guru Pathik describes the fifth chakra as truth, blocked by lies. Prompted by the trigger of the description, Aang thinks about how he began the show by running away from his role as the avatar. Scenes flash of Aang desiring to play with his other airbending friends, but his skill as the avatar far surpasses them.

The fifth chakra reveals why Aang ran away from home: due to his split in being as both a young boy but also the ever powerful avatar. When Aang opens his fifth chakra and accepts his role as the avatar alongside the contradiction of his desire to be a regular young boy, Aang finds his determinate universality.

This requires distinction between Hegel’s universality and the Enlightenment universality of the white European male, as Hegel’s universality saves us from the particularism of historical universality that predominates today. The fire nation takes on the logic of particularity for self unity and opposes themselves to Aang and the rest of the world.

To do so requires the denial of the universality and thus the contradiction of subjectivity, such as the many racist stereotypes that fixate a characteristic to a group of people. We all exhibit both hard work and laziness. To ascribe only one to a people denies their contradictory being. While others attempt to find recourse against the particularism that oppressors propagate in the assertion of their own particularity, the recognition of the universal contradiction that riddles us opens the door for emancipation. The particulars we have affect our relation to universality. Aang’s particularity as the last airbender does not immediately constitute his universality. Rather, Aang’s confrontation with his own contradiction—being the avatar that must save the world but also a young boy who wants to live a regular life with his friends—posits him as a “determinate universality.”16 Just as Aang’s determinate universality comes from confronting his contradiction, we may each find our own determinate univer-

Even more so, ATLA expands the logic of reconciliation that McGowan offers through Aang’s anxiety around upholding his philosophy of nonviolence. When seeking the other avatars for advice on how to defeat the firelord without killing him, all of the past avatars tell Aang that killing him, albeit against his principles as a monk, is necessary for protecting the world against the fire nation’s conquest. Only the lion-turtle that Aang finds gives him the knowledge to defeat Ozai without having to kill him.17 In a similar vein, we may extrapolate that reconciliation may require violence and force against those who determine their identity in opposition, such as the Nazis, but if we may find a manner of disarming the opposition that the assertion of particularity founds itself on, then we may find a more peaceful reconciliation of contradiction. However, this extra necessary wisdom must not be taken as lightly as ATLA portrays.

Aang takes great risk in preferring the nonviolent route, even with his immense power as an avatar.

Such an ability to disarm the force of opposition in our world would require cunning and guile.

Lastly, the radicality of the events in “The Guru” allow for the subsequent arc of the previous villain, Zuko. Throughout the show, Aang main57

tains his belief in friendship with Zuko and thus the contradiction in Zuko’s being, regardless of Zuko’s attempts to capture Aang. Despite previous statements about the potential need for violence in the face of opposition, contradiction opens the door for redemption in the path of the universal. “As Hegel sees it, movement in being and thought occur through contradiction.”18 Through this movement of contradiction, Aang moves through his own contradiction to embrace his determinate universality. In a similar manner, this redemptive quality opens the door for Zuko.

the trauma that confronts them.“The Guru” asks us to read the point of enunciation back into the clinic. The conclusion then offers a return to the clinic in Aang and Zuko’s reconciliation with the universal as part of their reconciliation with their trauma.

“The Guru” shows contradiction in its intersection as both the point of finding a relation to your trauma—for the similarities to the clinic— and as the point of emancipation. Aang’s choice of love over cosmic energy and power expands contradiction from the clinic to conflict. For this expansion of the logic of contradiction, “The Guru” serves as a synecdoche for ATLA. Aang and Zuko spend the next and final season working out their distinct traumas to find their determinate universalities. In their determinate universalities, they take on the task of defeating firelord Ozai who defines himself in opposition to Aang and the world as justification for world conquest. Aang and Zuko must perform the work that guru Pathik outlines in “The Guru”: reconcile their contradiction to find their relation to the universal, then defend it against the opposition of firelord Ozai.

Zuko openly wears the trauma that splits his being. Half of his face bears the scar that his father gave him; the other half bears his occasional smile. His connection to his uncle Iroh pulls him in the direction of care and love, whereas the pain of his scar pulls him towards the honor and glory of the fire nation and the desperation of his father’s approval. Only in the traumatic freedom that Zuko finds in his banishment—not to mention the immense care from his uncle—does Zuko move past his own particularity with the fire nation, towards reconciling his split as banished prince. Instead of taking on some sort of internal opposition or synthesis, Zuko embraces and lives within his contradiction. In doing so, Zuko finds his own idea of honor, after continuous confrontations with those hurt by the conquest of the fire nation.19

ATLA bridges the political emancipation that Hegel outlines and the enunciation of trauma that Lacan outlines. The Hegelian roots of psychoanalysis proffer an emancipatory logic when put in tandem. With the rise of serial narrative media, the potential for narratives of universality and logics of contradiction grows. We may measure the political axis of the narratives we consume based on their relation to trauma and consequently the contradiction of subjectivity. We may both determine the emancipation that a show might offer from psychic repression—in the enunciation of trauma—and political repression—in its commitment to or betrayal of the contradiction of subjectivity.

Aang and Zuko take on the reconciliation of contradiction and its connection to trauma.

While Zuko defines himself as whole in opposition to Aang, a villain who wishes to capture the hero and get back the family he lost, their relationship overcomes the contradictions that exist within their friendship. Their shared recourse to the universal in their determinate universalities emancipates Zuko and Aang to see the new consequences of the history they inherent.20 While each of them suffer in being lost at the beginning of the show, their respective traumas guide them to the universal that Hegel offers. In this manner, the emancipation that Aang and Zuko find coincides with the points of their enunciation. To reconcile their split beings, they must sit and face the

Endnotes 1. Butaney, Kaavya. “‘Avatar’’s Netflix Renaissance: The Gaang Returns.” The Talon, August 17, 2020. https://lahstalon.org/avatars-netflix-renaissance-the-gaang-returns/.

2. McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel: 58

Achieving a Contradictory Revolution. S.l.: Columbia University Press, 2021. & Engley, Ryan.

Henderson, Jess. “To Be Continued... An Interview on Seriality (Part I).” To Be Continued... An Interview on Seriality (Part I) |, August 6, 2020.

3. Fink, Bruce. “The Unconscious Is the Exact Opposite of the Conscious: How the Unconscious Manifests Itself in Speech and Symptoms.” Essay. In A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

4. Freud, Sigmund, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. “The ‘Uncanny’.” Essay. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 217–52. London: Vintage, 2001.

5. Engley, Ryan, and Todd McGowan. “Hegel’s Consciousness.” Why Theory. Lecture. Accessed April 30, 2021. https://soundcloud.com/whytheory/hegels-consciousness.

6. McGowan, 27.

7. Ibid, 37.

8. Engley, Ryan. Henderson, Jess. “To Be Continued...

An Interview on Seriality (Part I).” To Be Continued...

An Interview on Seriality (Part I) |, August 6, 2020. https://networkcultures.org/nofun/2020/08/06/ to-be-continued-an-interview-on-seriality-part1/.

9. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.

10. Fink, Bruce. “Dreams: The Royal Road to the Unconscious.” Essay. In A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice.

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

11. McGowan, 156.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid, 250.

14. Ibid, 286.

15. Ibid, 257.

16. Ibid, 253. For more, read McGowan’s argument on how Booker T. Washington versus W.E.B. DuBois relate to the universal.

17. Ehasz, Aaron. “Sozin’s Comet, Part 2: The Old Master.” Episode. Avatar the Last Airbender Book of Fire, no. 21. Nickelodeon, July 19, 2008.

18. McGowan, 25.

19. Ehasz, Elizabeth. “Zuko Alone.” Episode.

Avatar the Last Airbender Book of Earth, no. 7.

Nickelodeon, May 16, 2006. In this episode, Zuko hides his identity, and despite saving the people of a village from greedy soldiers, the villagers still hate him for his identity as the prince of the fire nation.

20. For more on this, the comics expand well on the consequences of fire nation colonies needing to pull out of colonized land and the fracture between Aang and Zuko in the legacies of their people as oppressed & oppressors, respectively. death, about how the supposed misfortune is to be assigned to a subject at all”6. Lastly, Nagel considers “the asymmetry…between our attitudes to posthumous and prenatal nonexistence. How can the former be bad if the latter is not?”7. In his last question, Nagel borrows from Lucretius, a Roman philosopher, who asks why nonexistence after death should be considered an evil if nonexistence before birth is not considered an evil. In my assessment of Nagel’s solution, I will analyze Nagel’s response to each of these three questions. perpetuate it.

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Counting at the Time of Death

tionalism and privileging of reason over faith, and the latter due to the distinctly pre-Enlightenment associations his view of the mind invokes. Despite relatively harsh treatment the Cartesian project continues to thrive in certain respects. I suggest some reasons for this throughout the paper.

by Eric Fossum, Pitzer ‘20

The mind-body problem has been a leading concern in the last three centuries of philosophical debate. The version of the problem familiar today has its origin in the assertion, made by Rene Descartes, that his mind—his first-person, conscious point of view—would survive bodily death.1 He reasoned that the mind and body are distinct entities, possessing contradictory properties that are united in an individual person while alive. Descartes’ motivations for holding this view were varied, as he was a prolific thinker with wide-ranging interests. His primary rationale, however, came from applying scientific and philosophical views that he held to the question of death. His research into the question converged on a central point: that the mind and body substantially differ. The consequences he drew from this extended into equally varied areas of inquiry, the most salient being doctrinal—in justifying the theological belief in the immortality of the soul. If the mind and body are not the same, then they do not share the same fate, according to Descartes. Many have taken this division to entail that reality might be composed of two fundamentally unlike things: minds, on the one hand, and physical bodies on the other.

The difficulty involved in working out how these two aspects of reality interact, however, led many card-carrying Cartesians in Descartes’ own time to outright reject, or, at least, heavily amend this feature of his philosophy. The last century has, arguably, treated Descartes’ views even less kindly. This treatment is epitomized in Gilbert Ryle’s caricaturization of the mind, according to Descartes, as a “ghost in the machine” subsequently burdening dualism with an air of old-timey superstition.2 The theologian, Paul Tillich, in a similarly dismissive manner, inveighs Descartes’ lasting influence on Christian thought, saying, “Arguments for the immortality of an assumedly better part of us cannot bring life out of the grave.”3 Religious and secular thinkers alike have been unfriendly to Descartes’ thought; the former due to its apparently cold ra-

A more philosophically, and less doctrinally oriented approach to the problem, locates death as the starting point into the problem rather than something to which we ad-hoc apply the consequences of prior conjecture, as Descartes famously did. Arthur Schopenhauer, for example, saw death as both impetus and terminus of all metaphysical reasoning.4 This paper will argue along somewhat similar (but more modest) lines by taking a path through the mind-body debate, and drawing a crucial parallel with another long-standing issue in metaphysics. The methodology I use brings out some salient themes of the debate and takes a metaphysical perspective on an overarching narrative that locates death as the origin of our intuitions about what the mind is. The examples used mostly focus on the mundane facts about death and extrapolate from them. I conclude that these mundane facts about death both confront us with the mind-body problem and constrain any potential answers that might be given. In other words, nonexistence, or life’s endpoint, throws a shadowy contrast over the self-image of human existence, and, at bottom, the mind-body problem is a question about what exists.

I view the competing answers to the mindbody problem though the lens of potential nonexistence in the way it is most commonly understood and dealt with, and judge them in accordance with how much insight is gained into our most basic intuitions regarding death. I claim that these basic intuitions lead one to view the problem in a specific way, which is sometimes labeled a ‘counting question’ in recent metaontology and, unavoidably, involve a group of concepts with a numerical connotation.5 What occurs at the time of death forces us to engage with this class of terms (unity, subtraction, identity, non-identity) because something of undeniable significance happens when a person dies, something is subtracted out of the world, and 60

the only compelling commonsense description we can give of that occurrence invokes these quasi-numerical terms. What this means, if not clear at first, will become so throughout the course of the paper. Further, by seeing where the mind-body problem is contiguous with another metaphysical issue, namely, the problem of universals, we are given a glimpse into the question in a more general form. Metaphysics, and the mind-body problem by extension, asks ‘what is there—what exists?’

This is by no stretch of the imagination a unique insight, but instead a reminder of why the problem is so engaging to begin with. Understanding where and how the problem originates—historically, philosophically, and prosaically—what it entails, and why it matters, are indispensable to finding an answer. The aim of this paper is to reframe some of the competing answers and to engage them slightly differently than how they are normally dealt with.

one maintains that the mind and body are one and the same, then they have to explain bodily survival after death intelligibly within the strictures of the identity relation. Briefly, consider an identity relation and, especially, its implications: if Marie-Henri Beyle dies, then Stendhal also dies. This happens because the two identities, or names, denote one and the same person. Similarly, if all the H20 disappears from the world, then all of the water disappears too, since water is H20 (is identical to H20).

What happens to Cicero necessarily happens to Tully too, since Tully is another name for Cicero.

Minds, however, conspicuously disappear while brains and bodies are often left behind when a person dies in a manner suggesting non-identity. As is apparent in the examples above, when two things are identical, they are necessarily tied to the same fate. What happens to one must happen to the other. If the mind and body are identical in some other way which concedes that the two are not tied to the same fate, then explaining this mismatch requires additional justification—justification which must satisfy deeply rooted linguistic and logical norms.

As W.V. Quine wonders, “If sheer logic is not conclusive, what is?” and we are forced by Kripke’s reasoning to ask ourselves the same question in regard to the mind-body identity, as identity is indisputably a logical-numerical concept.7 Kripke himself doesn’t explicitly state what conclusions should be drawn from this striking disanalogy, but he does advocate that views about the mind which take it to be identical to the brain cannot be strictly correct.

If the mind and brain, or mind and body, aren’t identical, then something like a view resembling a Cartesian union of the mind and body is still a legitimate competitor for our assent. However, Kripke’s own views are that, “the mind-body problem is wide open and extremely confusing” and, perhaps, given the current scientific and philosophical landscape, this might be the only intellectually honest position to take on the issue.8 Again, unanswered, Kripke’s observations—which owe their plausibility to the mundane facts about death—give compelling reasons why the mind is not the brain, reasons that are grounded in equally impactful applications of the logic of identity to the problem.

To begin with, a significant historical explanation for Descartes’ lasting relevance comes from a series of lectures given by Saul Kripke, which would later be transcribed into his classic work Naming and Necessity.6 Kripke’s contributions are important for a number of reasons, but one of the most intriguing aspects of his argumentation is the subtle interplay between technical and commonsensical that feature throughout the work, culminating in a distinctly Cartesian argument to the effect that mind and body can’t be identified. On the commonsensical end of Kripke’s reasoning is the observation, hidden in a footnote, that Descartes might have noticed that the mind and body were not the same thing because a person’s brain and body stick around as a corpse after their mind evidently vanishes. If the mind and body were strictly identical, then the two would disappear together. This conclusion would follow by virtue of how identity typically functions: entities that are identical share the same fate. The body is clearly a component of the identity relation and so, bodily fate after death cannot be overlooked or taken for granted. This insight, properly understood, conveys an important fact: the mind-body relation is not an identity relation. Identifying the mind with the brain, or body, is to say that they are one and the same thing. If 61

Kripke, in a later and lesser-known lecture titled, “The First-Person” elaborates apropos of corpses. He notes, “For Descartes, I say, was not his body when the body was a corpse. ‘Descartes had a serious accident, did he survive?’ ‘Yes, of course— take a look in his coffin.’ The response is absurd; rather, we have to say, ‘I am afraid Descartes is no longer with us.’’9 It is hard to see how anyone could disagree with Kripke here. And so, what, if anything, is subtracted out of the world when a person dies?

So far, two answers have been considered, though not yet explicitly described. First, the mind and the brain are the same. That is to say, the mind and the brain are identical, which is the antithesis to Descartes position. Second, the mind is unified with the brain, which is to say that they are not identical.

These views capture the essence of two competing philosophical views on the mind; the former view is called identity theory, and the latter, dualism. A third answer can be given, however, by saying that what is subtracted out of the world when a person dies is a pattern occurring in the brain. This view, which is the view that what the brain does is uniquely responsible for the conscious mind goes by the name functionalism in the technical literature.

prima facie metaphysical commitments. Therefore, we should ask a couple of follow up questions in line in the basic style of examination that has been utilized so far. To start, when a person dies, something is subtracted out of the world, and, when we think in these terms, we invoke the closely related logical-numerical notions of identity, which, naturally, leads to questions about what and how many things are involved in the event. Basic existence questions, identity questions being a species thereof, presuppose numeracy; if we were to say that two things exist, we would be implicitly saying that one thing is non-identical to another. This is the justification, though it hardly requires any sophisticated argumentation, for construing the issue in terms of a basic ‘counting question.’ The only way to miss this obvious point is to overcomplicate it. Notice that the metaphysical question, not the scientific or prosaic question—as these ways of asking questions are, perhaps, not obviously constrained by the same standards of explanation—is asking what the mind is. If the mind is the brain, then the mind survives death, at least, in most cases, for a while after. If the mind is an event, process, or pattern of activity in the brain, then the mind is identical to an event, or pattern of activity, not necessarily the structure involved in facilitating the event—remember, the ‘structure’ sticks around, in most cases, as a corpse. In this case, the mind does not survive death, but brain qua structure or object is decoupled from its processual aspect: the mind.

What are the merits of the functionalist view of the mind? For one, this view has considerable plausibility when considered in light of how we ordinarily feel about what occurs at the time of death: the brain ceases to act, events, presumably responsible for, perhaps even identical to (more on this to come), conscious experience can no longer take place, the processes involved in the production of consciousness come to a halt, and the storm of electrical and neurochemical activity subsides.

Identifying the mind with an event is not to identify it with something immaterial or nonphysical, contrary to what Descartes explicitly argued, although it does not in and of itself rule it out. Here’s why: an older and more deeply entrenched metaphysical problem makes an appearance when we ask about the physical status of events, patterns, functions, or processes. The reason for this being that events (brain events included) maintain a status as both interpretive practice, presupposing a human point of view, the very thing in need of explanation, and, when correct, represent the way the physical world really is.

Functionalism is commonly regarded the leading view of the mind in the last three decades. This view clearly captures many beliefs that we hold about death and mind-brain identity, as I briefly tried to illustrate above; however, we are capable of putting it to further questioning along lines developed regarding identity. When we do so, we find that functionalism is metaphysically ambiguous—it is open to being interpreted as dualist or otherwise. That is to say, functionalism has no

A similar line of thought led Richard Rorty to 62

blem of abstraction, or ‘the problem of universals’ of which functions, patterns, and other terms possessing a quasi-abstract valence are habitually associated in metaphysical debate.10 The problem takes a more general form than the mind-body problem, asking how abstract objects and concrete objects relate. Plato thought that concrete existence was an imperfect reflection of a more real and complete reality.11 By comparison, the patterns of activity that the brain instantiates are, taken in one sense, abstract objects not entirely unlike numbers or universals—those things belonging to Platonic reality.

Canonically abstract entities, of which mathematical objects form a paradigm case themselves raise fraught metaphysical problems—problems about what exists. Therefore, identifying the mind with a pattern of activity or event is to identify personhood with an abstraction whose concrete spatiotemporal status is vague, even on a charitable interpretation. At the very least, introducing potential abstraction into an answer to the problem feels, at first glance, comparable to defining a circle as a spherical shape. We are led to ask the mind-body question in a different way: how does the concrete world of bodies, tables, chairs, atoms, and molecules relate to the Platonic world of numbers, patterns, sets, and, perhaps, conscious minds? A similar point applies to views claiming the mind is a property of the brain. Rorty’s solution to this problem was to deny any reality to abstract objects.12 Regardless, the point here is that one of the main contending solutions to the problem seemingly doesn’t get us far outside of the Cartesian explanatory framework—a framework within which we are compelled by the apparent decoupling at the time of death to introduce basic counting questions into our methodological approach. Functionalism’s construal of mind is not exempt from the counting question, and I don’t see any reason why it is not equally plausible to claim that the abstract-functional aspects of the mind are unified, rather than identical to, physical brain structure. Decoupling at the time of death strongly suggests the former.

Here I again point to the suggestion that scientific, ordinary, and philosophical explanations don’t always perfectly overlap, but instead, might be thought of as mutually constraining one another.

The intended dialectical effect of my approach has been to underscore that the mind-body problem, considered in light of the intuitive way I’ve tried to present it, is an attempted identification, and, by implication, a question about the existential status of the mind and body. I think that the effect of my approach is of equal relevance to the so-called ‘is’ of predication too; the claim that consciousness is a property of the brain. One could observe that mind and brain are not strictly identical, but their identity is captured by the ‘is’ of predication, which is a looser sort of identity claim. For example, that a tennis ball is green is an example of the ‘is’ of predication and not strict identity. It should be roughly apparent, given the connection drawn between functionalism and the problem of universals, why the ‘is’ of predication, as opposed to the ‘is’ of identity, is subject to the same basic considerations that follow from decoupling at the time of death.13 To say that the brain loses a property, that the property of consciousness is subtracted out of the picture at the time of the death, cannot avoid raising the question of the existential status of abstract objects, since ‘property’ can be thought of as closely synonymous with ‘universal.’ To observe a tennis ball over time ‘losing’ the property of being green, we are in the territory of the problem of universals by virtue of greenness’s relation to instances of itself in physical particulars, such as tennis balls.

Physical particulars, such as tennis balls, limes, and Saint Patrick’s Day decorations share a property ‘green’ in common, a universal that all particular instantiations of green share in. Where limes and tennis balls have a definite location, the universals that comprise their characteristic features are spatiotemporally ambiguous, since they can be in many places at once, or nowhere at all. Again, we are compelled to ask what leaves—ceases to occur or is subtracted out of—the world in the example where the tennis ball is no longer retains its green coloration. This questioning still obviously bears the rudiments of an attempted identification. This attempted identification, again, involves a constellation of terms with a numerical connotation: identity, unity, subtraction, and so forth. The outcome achieved from considering the example of corpses was to illustrate that a reimagining of these basic 63

notions, seemingly necessary to any commonsense description of death, is not easily accomplished, though strategically required in order to avoid the argumentative route taken in this paper.

ly related, quasi-numerical description, such as unity. The possibility of separation, evidenced by the mundane, though morbid, reality of corpses, strongly urges us toward the kind of explanation whose satisfaction would require that we count entities. I submit with relative confidence that what ceases to exist is not the body, or, if it is, it will only be by coincidence, not necessity, that bodily structure and mental life simultaneously cease.

I doubt that this is a contentious point. If there is room for disagreement, it will be within this space that progress on the problem is made, that is, if my presentation of the problem is on the right track.

We can see how these issues of identity and how many existent ‘things’ there end up being, are inextricably linked, at least in the way I’ve presented the situation. The justification for my treatment of functionalism by putting it to further identity questions—what the brain’s activity is identical to—followed from this basic methodology. Considering the importance of how identity features in the problem, when hypothesizing what the mind is, we are seemingly compelled to make some form of an identity claim. So, to the compelling and commonsense answer that the mind is (identical to) what the brain does, the patterns it instantiates, we are obligated to pose the further question about the status of the abstract features of the world by virtue of the fact that the question finds us in the territory of identity.

Descartes would have likely agreed to this account of the situation by virtue of his insistence on mindbrain unity, and his intuition that the mind’s fate after death was not the same as the body’s. It is for this reason that we might see an invocation of brain activity as identical to conscious experience as hindering any attempt to outmaneuver the specter of Cartesianism that haunts the mind-body debate.14

Endnotes 1. Descartes, Rene. 1641. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Cambridge University Press. 1996.

2.

Ryle, Gilbert.

1949.

The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson, 17 3. Tillich, Paul. 1948. The Shaking of the Foundations. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, NY, 167.

4.

Schopenhauer, Arthur.

1844.

The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2. Dover Publications: New York, NY. 5. My thinking on the metaontological issues and that ground my methodological approach is influenced by Peter Van Inwagen’s “Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment.” In Existence: Essays in Ontology. Cambridge University Press.

2014, 61. Van Inwagen develops a version of Gottlob Frege’s claim that existence and number are analogous. Applying this insight to the mind-body problem, as far as I know, is unique to this paper.

6. Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

7. W.V. Quine. 1970. Philosophy of Logic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 81.

8. pp. 155 9. Kripke, Saul. 2011. “The First-Person.”

In Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, Volume 1. Oxford University Press, 310.

10. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

11. Plato. The Republic. New York: Books, Inc., 1943.

12. This philosophical position is usually referred

To recapitulate, I primarily focused on the example of brain activity to show how deeply intuitive answers like functionalism are explanatorily beholden to more basic, fundamental identity questions, which, in this case, seemingly alter the philphilosophical valence of possible conclusions. The considerations addressed in this paper resulted in motivating and elaborating some potential answers to the problem, all of which involve engagement with metaphysics more broadly, as illustrated in the approach to functionalist unification of mind and body (the disguised problem of universals) and identity theory, which is viable only if we deny reality to abstract objects. Death is unambiguously the end of something. What that something is can only be comprehended within the framework of an identity claim, or a closely related, quasi-numerical 64

to as nominalism.

13. A common distinction is usually made between the ‘is’ of identity (the ‘is’ that featured front and center in this paper), and the ‘is’ of predication, as in ‘the snow is white.’ Considering the ‘is’ of predication, we aren’t saying that snow is literally identical with whiteness, but rather, that it instantiates whiteness, or that whiteness is a property commonly associated with snow. See Frege, Gottlob. 1892. “On Sense and Reference’ In Geach, Peter & Black, Max (eds. and trans.), 1980, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford: Blackwell, 3rd Edition.

14. This is a play on the opening line of “The Communist Manifesto” ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.’ Marx, Karl., & Engels, Freidrich. 1848. In Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One, Progress Publishers, Moscow. 1969, 98-167.

65

American Discipline: Is the United States an Example of Foucault’s Carceral State?

an institution meant to achieve justice or reform.

Rather, the United States maintains its disciplinary power through panoptical 1 social norms and surveillance, and that while the United States seeks to maintain an efficient implementation of power, its plethora of pre-prison punishment resultantly leads to that very same power being challenged.

by Justin Peng, Harvey Mudd ‘24

In his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault details the birth of the modern prison, an evolutionary process that took place from the mid-18th to 19th century.1 Foucault argues that the evolution of punishment and the birth of the modern prison system was not a product of seeking to reform the treatment of prisoners but rather to improve the efficacy of the state’s exertion of power. Replacing the public execution and torture of the previous era, new methods of power sought to maintain power through more discreet methods. To Foucault, the state is the codification of all power relations in society - it is not the source of power, but instead seeks to control all the power in a given society. Foucault argues that this new method of power is formed through the development of discipline, a method in which every single aspect of an individual’s life is controlled, from constant surveillance and knowledge that permeates throughout various societal structures. In this paper, I will argue that the United States exemplifies certain aspects of Foucault’s theory of power and the prison. Specifically, the United States aligns itself Foucauldian paradigm because its goal is not to achieve reform or retribution to crime and its enforcement of the law is oriented toward mass surveillance and methods of self-governing. However, it falls short of a complete classification of Foucauldian carceral state as the United States has reverted to pre-prison forms of power that lessens its efficiency. This paper will explore Foucault’s theories of power and the prison in Discipline and Punish, specifically his analysis of the evolution of power as a violent public spectacle to less violent and more controlled methods, discipline as a means of power, and the concept of the modern prison. I will argue that certain aspects United States legal, penal, and carceral system are exemplifications of certain aspects of Foucault’s theories. I will point to specific examples that show that the United States prison industrial complex does not exist as

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault puts forward a theory of power and the rise of the prison system. Foucault argues that before the mid-18th century, power had been exerted in a public manner, through means of public torture or execution.

Gruesome executions of individuals like Robert-François Damiens were designed to inflict the most pain possible in order to inspire fear within the observers. The unintended consequences associated with this exertion of power drove society to the creation of more efficient means of power, first by gentling the punishment from the mid to late-18th century onward. From this evolution arose discipline in the late-18th to early-19th century, a method in which modern institutions control the most precise aspects of the body with complete control over the body’s natural actions, spatial presence, and temporal trajectory. Thus, Foucault argues that the modern prison system arose, an all-encompassing institution that seeks to regulate every aspect of society.

Foucault argues that prior to the mid-18th century, for the most part, power was exerted violently and publicly.2 Foucault begins Discipline and Punish by describing the gruesome torture of Robert-François Damiens, who was convicted of attempted regicide in the mid-18th century, “the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers.”2 The executions use of “red-hot pincers” to tear flesh from Damiens suggests that leading up to the mid-18th century, retribution for the crime committed was often achieved through inflicting excruciating amounts of pain that ultimately took the life of the convicted. Foucault argues that torture had several intended purposes. It was intended to terrorize the people and existed as a direct means of power, “reveal[ing] truth and show[ing] the operation of power,” extracting confessions, or publicizing the 66

investigation.3 Torture also made the body of the punished the locus of power, “the place where the vengeance of the sovereign was applied.”4 However, torture sometimes produced unintended consequences. Oftentimes, the public would sympathize with the condemned and vilify the executioner, and therefore “could express its rejection of the punitive power and sometimes revolt.”5 While torture proved to be the most direct and terrifying means of power, its opportunity cost was too high. Thus, in order for the state to maintain greater stability of power, the system needed to be reformed.

Foucault argues that this reform came first in the gentling of punishment. This gentling took the form of a public reformation of the convict. Foucault states that in the late-18th century, a reformist movement arose, “generalizing the punitive function and delimiting, in order to control it, the power to punish.”6 Reformists sought to make the display of power more controlled, and thus less likely to incite resistance to that power. Gentler methods like detention became the general form of legal punishment. Foucault provides several examples of this new form of punishment, one of which was the Walnut Street Prison. At the prison, prisoners were subject to a hyper-regulated lifestyle, “life was partitioned, therefore, according to an absolutely strict timetable, under constant supervision.”7 Instead of seeking to reflect the crime directly onto the convict’s body, the convicted would repay society through work that was proportional to and reflected their crimes. Although these methods may have had overlapped legal theory, held their basis in institutions, and employed moral justification, Foucault argues that these new methods of punishment are “modalities according to which the power to punish is exercised.” The beginning of generalized punishment, for Foucault, does not mark the beginning of criminal reform but instead marks the beginning of the optimization of power.

Immediately after the late-18th century’s experiment of gentle punishment, further optimization would come in the form of discipline.9 In the early-19th century, discipline became the new basis of criminal punishment, becoming the modern prison’s defining feature and characterized by 67

complete control over the most precise aspects of the body. Discipline seeks to create an individuality of the body, or in other words, regulate where it exists, how it acts, and the order in which an individual performs its acceptable actions. Foucault argues that discipline was constructed so that “each individual has his own place, and each place its individual.”9 This new form of discipline’s purpose was to eliminate any uncontrollable aspects of society, aiming to “establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals… to supervise the conduct of each individual.”11 Discipline also functioned to control the activity of individuals, determining what actions are “natural” to their bodies. Specifically, discipline determines the correct use of the body and sets “relations that the body must have with the object that it manipulates.”10 The pupil is required to have good handwriting, which in turn requires the proper use of the body in the form of proper posture. The soldier must interact with their rifle in a specific way, manipulating it by flipping and turning it in a predetermined set of steps.12 In addition, discipline also seeks to control the temporal aspects of the body.

It seeks to break down time into threads, organize these threads and assign them to a body, orienting it towards a “terminal, stable point,” regulating their time with tasks that mold the individual toward a state of greater controllability.13 Finally, discipline regulates the combination of bodies into one. The body and its temporal regulation are a part of a “multi-segmentary machine” that requires a “precise system of command” that must carefully and methodically apply discipline to create docile bodies and requires disciplinary institutions to constantly observe and monitor the bodies they control to ensure the cementation of individuality.14 Foucault argues that discipline within 19th-century prisons required careful observation and that this observation was exemplified by Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon: to ensure disciplinary control, an institution needed to “induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”15 Discipline at this point can be seen as functioning as the ultimate culmination of power, one that seeks to control every aspect of the individual and requires absolute control.

Foucault argues that this absolute control required the disciplinary institution to encompass all of society, and thus as the prison developed more efficient means of power, it became a part of a larger societal carceral system. Specifically, Foucault argues that the modern prison or penitentiary exemplifies discipline and power in society, describing the prison as “an institution that is able to control all aspects of the individual.”16 The modern prison isolates the convict from the outside world, completely regulates their time, and quantifies their punishment, that is, the modern prison disciplines its prisoners. Additionally, Foucault argues that the prison, “under the authority of medicine, psychology or criminology,” sought to transform the concept of the prisoner into that of the delinquent, a criminal set apart from society due to social norms rather than legal action.17 The prison system ensured it could not “fail to produce delinquents.”18 Foucault argues that prison was never meant to reform, but instead to produce a criminal class, delinquents, that are associated with the lower orders of society. Unlike the prisoners of the past, delinquents are not meant to be carefully controlled by the prison but instead can be used as a tool of the state. Their small size makes them easy to surveil, they are easily redirected to less dangerous forms of illegality, they can be used in colonization such as in the case of Guiana or New Caledonia,19 and can function as a “sub-police,” working with the police and becoming an instrument of the state as their willingness to inform allows for indirect surveillance of other individuals.20 Foucault thus concludes that the prison has become a part of Foucault’s state, an all-encompassing penal institution focused on the preservation of its power rather than its explicitly alleged purpose of reform and justice.

States Department of Justice, and the mission of the Federal Bureau of Prisons more specifically “is to protect society by confining offenders in the controlled environments of prisons… provide work and other self-improvement opportunities to assist offenders in becoming law-abiding citizens.”21 However, according to a 2011 Pew Center report, the United States has a 43% recidivism rate.22 Additionally, a third of prison admissions in 1997 were parole violations.23 Evidently, the United States prison system is ineffective at prisoner reform, creating a class of pseudo-delinquents by trapping criminals within the control of the state. If the goal of justice is to achieve retribution proportional to the crime committed, then the United States does not achieve it in many instances. Additional examples of failures of the proportional dispensation of justice include mandatory minimums for drug offenses that often provide disproportionate punishments for the crimes committed. Consider, for example, that a large majority of drug cases involve low-level offenders and distributing as little as 1 gram of LSD or 5 grams of crack cocaine carries a minimum five-year sentence without parole.24 The United States prison system functions similarly to Foucault’s penitentiary: the length of detention is not determined by the severity of the crime but instead by the power dynamics that function within the prison-industrial complex. The United States prison system fundamentally fails at its advertised goals to reform prisoners and achieve justice.

Although the United States prison system appears to be an institution with Foucauldian motivations, it falls short of success, reverting to pre-prison forms of power in certain instances.

Foucault directly emphasizes the move away from violent punishments directed on the body in the modern prison. To Foucault, modern punishment and discipline were obtained through the coercion of the prisoner’s mind and body to obtain complete control rather than physical punishment.

The complete control of the prisoner’s behavior and life is prioritized over exceedingly inhumane conditions and conspicuous physical punishments.

However, prison conditions in the United States create an environment that is filled with these in-

Now that we have established the characteristics of discipline and punishment in Foucault’s carceral state, it is evident that many modern institutions embody these characteristics. I will next explore the prevalence of Foucauldian characteristics of one of these such institutions, the United States of America. First, I will examine the role of the prison system of the United States and disciplinary ethos will help demonstrate this point. The United 68

humane conditions and violent punishments. In the United States, the prison system fails to protect its inmates from physical harm and sexual assault. More than half of prisoners in the United States have some form of mental illness and prison officials frequently fail to provide proper services, instead of resorting to physical punishment from violent correctional officers and psychological torture in the form of prolonged solitary confinement.25 Although the United States prison industrial complex does not seem to be successful in its advertised correctional goals, it also does not align with all of the characteristics of Foucault’s coercive power. The prison perhaps fails to effectively implement Foucault’s discipline, giving up on subtle coercive power and relapsing back to violent and less sophisticated forms of punishment. Rather, it exists as a direct symbol of the state’s power, aligning itself with premodern methods that focus on isolation and physical punishment more than the mental manipulation of Foucault’s modern prison.

are fifteen times more likely to be charged with a felony.26 The American dream exists not necessarily to demonstrate the plethora of opportunity for economic growth within the United States but to serve as an efficient ideological means of disciplining its citizens. The system is designed to form productive bodies, relegating its delinquents to an area where it will have greater control over them.

In addition to social norms, the United States employs methods of observation and the threat of observations to prevent them from breaking laws or behaving undesirabely, conducting surveillance akin to the Foucauldian panopticon. A significant portion of crime deterrence in the United States comes as a threat of observation. For example, grocery stores greet you with a message informing you that you are being recorded. Legal authorization from the Patriot Act and Protect America Act facilitates the government’s panoptical monitoring of phone calls and internet activity of its population to prevent any activity deemed dangerous by the state.27 In an effort to control its citizens, the United States exercises methods of surveillance, deterring them more easily from acting undesirable and thus preserving their controllability.

According to Foucault, the modern prison is a component of the carceral state, an encompassing-societal system that functions utilizing the discipline of its citizens, extending beyond the prison walls and into schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Next, I will examine methods of discipline in the United States, and their ability to deter certain behavior in citizens. A social norm that has held great and lasting influence over the lives of individuals within the United States is the concept of the American dream, the ideal that within the United States that great socioeconomic mobility exists as long as an individual is willing to work hard enough to achieve it. Much like Foucault’s theory of control over the activity of the individual, within the American land of opportunity, for most individuals, it is natural to display hard work and productivity within legal economic systems. Those who are deemed unproductive to these legal economic systems are relegated to the lowest ends of society, where the state is better able to exert its influence on them. For example, in the United States, adults living in poverty are three times more likely to be arrested than those who are not and individuals whose income is less than 150% of the Federal poverty guidelines

If the United States reflects Foucault’s theories of power and the prison, then displays of previous power should serve as a deterrent to the power-driven goals of the state. That is, misapplications of power should have negative consequences for the efficiency of the state as Foucault’s theory predicts. I will next examine misapplications of power within the United States, specifically direct punishments of the body, and their consequences for the state. The simplest example of this misapplication is that of capital punishment. The death penalty is one of the only legal forms of direct punishment to the body. It is thus no surprise that due to questions surrounding the ethicality of executing a prisoner, there exists a large movement to abolish its practice. Many states in the United States have already succumbed to these demands, removing them from their catalog of legal punishment and thus weakening state power. Another salient example of these direct punishments of the body is that of police brutality. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an African 69

American man was killed when Derek Chauvin, a police officer, knelt on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. The killing of George Floyd holds similarities to executions of the past: a public spectacle in which punishment is directed toward the body of the convicted for the crime the convicted had committed.28 This application of power directed toward the body demonstrated the inefficiencies that Foucault described. George Floyd became a focal point of sympathy and admiration. Stories were shared about his personality, family, and other elements of his life before death. Like the revolutionary uprising against public violence of the past, Derek Chauvin was immediately vilified, with many calling for his arrest along with the three other officers.

Protests erupted around the nation, calling for the defunding or even abolition of police forces. Similar behavior of the populace occurred previously and continued to occur with the killings of individuals like Eric Garner or Breonna Taylor, thus providing evidence in favor of Foucault’s theory of torture and portraying its nature and consequences.

actions by those who work within the prison industrial complex compromise the efficiency of the control. The United States functions as a pseudo-carceral state, one which can discipline its citizens but cannot do so efficiently. Society is blind to these efforts to optimize its power, intimidated by the threat of observation, unaware of the secretive punishment within the prison system, or coerced by disciplinary power. To create real change within the systems of power, one must learn to recognize instances of the carceral state’s attempts to improve the efficacy of its power. We only see the egregious misapplications of power, not the forces that control the way we operate our bodies and interact with the world around us.

Endnotes 1. The panopticon is a prison first devised by Jeremy Bentham, composed of a guard tower surrounded by cells in which the guard could see into every cell but the prisoners could not see into the tower. Foucault uses the panopticon as an exemplification of surveillance: the prisoners must behave themselves as they will never know if a guard is watching.

2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans.

Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (Vintage Books, 1995), 11.

3. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 55.

4. Ibid., 55.

5. Ibid., 59.

6. Ibid., 101.

7. Ibid., 124.

8. Ibid., 131.

9. Ibid., 143.

10. Ibid., 143 11. Ibid., 152 12. Ibid., 153.

13. Ibid., 160.

14. Ibid., 166.

15. Ibid., 201.

16. Ibid., 235.

17. Ibid., 256.

18. Ibid., 268.

19. Foucault states that the colonization of territories like Guiana and New Caledonia was facilitated through the deportation of criminals. Ibid, 279.

20. Ibid., 278-280.

The United States displays many characteristics of the Foucauldian carceral state. Legal methods and social norms can produce docile bodies that are easily controlled by the state. Power is most efficient when the state employs methods for its citizens to control themselves, not through forcible instillation of behavior. Misapplications of power in the form of torture as a public spectacle have disadvantageous consequences for those in power, as public executions like that of George Floyd have led to calls to dismantle systems of power within the United States. Although the prison system may not necessarily be designed to reform its prisoners, it also fails to do what Foucault deems a necessary characteristic of the modern prison: the coercion and training of the prisoner.

Although the United States holds many similar characteristics to Foucault’s description of the prison, its disciplinary power is not yet optimized as Foucault’s theory predicts. Specifically, while the United States government functions like a codification of power that seeks to control the systems of power within its borders, violent actions by those 70

21.

“Organization, Mission and Functions Manual: Federal Bureau of Prisons,” August 27, 2014, https://www. justice.gov/jmd/organization-mission-and-functions-manual-federal-bureau-prisons.

22. “State of Recidivism: The Revolving Door of America’s Prisons,” June 11, 2014, https:// web.archive.org/web/20140611173030/http:// www.michigan.gov/documents/corrections/ Pew_Report_State_of_Recidivism_350337_7.pdf.

23. Paula Ditton and Doris James Wilson, “Truth in Sentencing in State Prisons,” n.d., 16.

24. Eric Sterling, “Drug Laws And Snitching - A Primer,” n.d., https://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer/.

25.

“Prison Conditions,” Equal Justice Initiative, accessed April 2, 2021, http s : / / e j i. org / issu e s / pr is on - c ond it i ons / .

26. Bailey Gray and Doug Smith, “Return to Nowhere: The Revolving Door Between Incarceration and Homelessness,” February 2019.

27. “What Is the USA Patriot Web,” United States Department of Justice Archive, https:// www.justice.gov/archive/ll/highlights.htm; “What Is the Protect America Act?,” United States Department of Justice Archive, https://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/index.html.

28. In this case, the punishment was disproportionate to the crime, contrary to Foucault’s analysis

71

MORAL DILEMMA Every semester, Tabula Rasa formulates a moral dilemma and solicits responses from readers. Below is the Issue I dilemma and our top two responses. Response 01, by Andy Han, was selected for our Moral Dilemma prize. Response 02, by Joshua Suh, was our runner-up. All responses are available on our website at https://tabularasaclaremont.com/Moral-Dilemma.

A COVID CONUNDRUM You have an agreement with your roommate not to attend large gatherings because she is severely immunocompromised. Your roommate has been adamant about your upholding this agreement.

Your best friend (who is not your roommate) calls you in distress at a St. Patrick’s Day party and tells you that she has just received an email notification that she has tested positive for Covid-19. Her only options to get home are to take the crowded bus (which lacks adequate ventilation) or to have you pick her up. You and your roommate have no housing options other than your shared studio apartment. Do you choose to pick your friend up, breaking the agreement with your roommate, or do you choose to let her get on the bus, potentially infecting dozens of strangers?

Response 01

erings have moderate risk r. If you’ve promised not to expose yourself to moderate r, then surely you have also promised not to expose yourself to even higher r—such as giving a known infected person a ride.

It is also important to note that you probably have some sort of implicit promise with your friend that you’ll help her when she needs it, if you’re able.

(If you don’t have an implicit promise with your friend, then it’s difficult to see why this is a question at all. While we can have duties without having corresponding promises, these “natural duties” are due to everyone.1 And therefore your friend asking you for this favor would be the same as a stranger asking you, which you are well within your rights to deny.)

by Andy Han, Pomona ‘23 Winner of Moral Dilemma Prize

Since a major distinction between this and the nearly intractable Trolley Problem is the addition of promises, I will focus on the role that they play. At first glance, you don’t seem to be breaking your promise to your roommate if you give your friend a ride. After all, you’ve promised not to go to any large gatherings, and you and your friend in your car isn’t a large gathering. But this facile way of escaping between the horns of the dilemma seems wrong—your roommate would justifiably be upset with you if you gave your friend a ride.

On further reflection, our intuition leads to the idea that we’re breaking the spirit of the promise.

The natural question is therefore what that spirit is.

So: first, you have a promise to your roommate that you would be breaking if you give your friend the ride; second, you have a kind of implicit promise to your friend to help her. Now I will give a proposition which drives my argument that you should not give your friend a ride: all other things being equal, it is worse to break promises of a type that causes harm to the promisee when broken than to break promises of a type that doesn’t cause harm to the promisee when broken.

Why would your roommate be upset if you gave your friend the ride? It seems that what you’ve really promised is something like “I will not put myself in non-essential situations where I’m at some level of risk [r] of contracting the Virus, so long as I live with you” (this is, of course, imperfect, but my argument doesn’t rest on it entire). Now, large gath72

Imagine that someone has entrusted you with ten dollars, and you have promised her not to spend it. Suppose that you’re out with (another) friend, and he asks you to buy him lunch. It would be impermissible for you to spend that ten dollars on him (although you could, of course, spend your own money). Now, let us consider a different situation: imagine you’re trying to be more careful with your money, and you have promised someone (an accountability partner) that you wouldn’t spend your money on unbudgeted things. Suppose you’re out with that same mooch from above, and he asks you again to buy him lunch. If you do, you would be breaking the promise—but it seems preferable to break this promise than the one previous.

peer-reviewed) results from a study that show a less than 0.5% risk of infection at even one foot if both people are masked.2 3 Further, severe immunocompromisation is relatively rare (although there are no comprehensive statistics on the matter). Without hard data on the makeup of the bus riders, it is difficult to categorically say that ceteris paribus, but these statistics show at least that things are not too disparate—the greater number of people on the bus may be cancelled out by the unlikelihood of severe immunocompromisation. And I haven’t even touched the distinction between action and inaction (or, commonly, killing and letting die). If one accepts the distinction, as many philosophers do, the balance tips even more in the bus’s favor.

While there are clever ways to escape from the dilemma—such as putting your friend in the trunk, or lending her a(n electric) bike, or calling a paddy wagon with a Plexiglas barrier—if we accept the dilemma on its face, the most ethically sure path is to do nothing and let her ride the bus. The best we can do is to deliver to her a fresh pack of masks and the bus fare, and to follow behind to make sure she gets home safe.

The only relevant difference between these hypotheticals is that, in the first, breaking the promise means pecuniary harm to the person to whom you have promised (the promisee), while in the second, breaking the promise does not mean pecuniary harm to the promisee. It may be objected that the second case is still bad, because (while you aren’t causing pecuniary harm) you’re still causing harm to the promisee by breaking their trust. In reply, I say that first, I’m not claiming that either situation is good, but merely that the first is worse than the second; additionally, you cause that same trust-breaking harm to both promisees, so it can’t affect their relative merits.

Back to the problem at hand. In the car case, you would be breaking a promise of a type that causes severe harm to the promisee (your roommate). In the bus case, you would be breaking an implicit promise of a type that doesn’t cause (physical) harm to the promisee. (Your friend could suffer all sorts of harm on the bus, especially if it’s an LA bus, but this is outside the scope of this discussion.) There is much empirical uncertainty here that prevents us from clearly seeing whether the ceteris paribus holds: e.g., how many people would be infected on the bus? How many of those are severely immunocompromised? In want of space to deal with these contingencies of fact in a more systematic way, I have but recourse to statistics. The Mayo Clinic has preliminary (non-

Endnotes 1. In one system, Kant’s, there is little allowance for special relationships between moral subjects; indeed, he says in the Metaphysics of Morals that while “human beings have a duty of friendship… if one of them accepts a favor from the other, then he may well be able to count on equality in love, but not in respect; for he sees himself obviously a step lower in being under obligation without being able to impose obligation in turn” (4:469470). The primacy of respect in Kantian ethics means that this loss of respect is something grave.

2. We should cancel out the first addition of 0.005, as you in the car run the same risk. This is also assuming your friend actually is infectious, which may not be the case if she had just been infected today. It also assumes everyone is wearing a mask on the bus, but if they aren’t, that’s not your problem.

3. “Masks Play Critical Role in Preventing COVID-19 Spread, Infection.” Mayo Clinic Health System. November 25, 2020.

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Response 02

have no choice but to take public transportation and aren’t breaking the contract by their own liberty.

by Joshua Suh, Pomona ‘23

While it is safe to say you made an agreement with your roommate that should be honored, I argue that you also made an agreement or contract with society in general. This contract entails ensuring the well-being of your community with the expectation that other people would be doing the same as well. If there were no such contract, we would just do whatever we would like, with no guarantee of safety. People who do not follow this contract run the risk of endangering their own lives as well as the lives of others in their community.

By ensuring the well-being of your society, you are guaranteeing your safety, as well as others’, in the long run by curbing infection rates, flattening the curve, and allowing doctors to be able to handle the wave of Covid patients. Thus, while your friend should, and is, getting punished by receiving the Covid virus, other people, such as those in the bus, should not get punished because of your friend’s actions. This is to ensure the well-being of the community as well as to not deal any unneeded punishment to those who do not deserve it.

Some may argue that the people in the bus made the conscious judgement to ride it and should be accountable for their own health, since they made the judgement that transportation outweighed risk of infection. However, it’s to shift the moral burden away from you to argue that, since people made the judgement to take public transportation, they are automatically willing to get Covid. They’re doing the best they can given their varying scenarios and circumstances. Because you know your friend has Covid, letting them ride the bus is almost a guarantee that some lives on that bus will get it. You, in essence, would have given those people Covid, because you had the ability to step in and stop your friend from boarding the bus. Inaction is action in this case. As well, it’s far more likely to see that people riding public transport (now more than ever) are those that need to because they genuinely don’t have other options.

Even if one person in the bus is in the same boat, it’s morally irresponsible to let them get Covid, as they

There is a cop-out that fixes this whole dilemma in the first place that I would like to acknowledge. It’s that you can quarantine in your car for two weeks after picking up your friend, completely precluding the event of your roommate getting the virus in the first place. But doing so would undermine the whole point of the debate, as you can absolve all responsibility by simply saying your friend won’t end up getting it, making it the clearer choice to make. In actuality, the debate really is about you and your friend potentially getting the virus or people in the bus potentially getting infected.

The catch is, we don’t actually know the true impact of what will happen if your friend rides the bus; therefore, it’s a lot more risky of a decision. If the people on the bus get Covid, they can spread it to their friends and colleagues and you might end up doing a lot more damage than expected. Ultimately, because we don’t necessarily know the true impact of this decision, we need to take responsibility and be careful in understanding that there could be a chance that this situation will bring us grave consequences.

Even if one person dies due to the Covid incident in the bus, that’s still substantial. That’s still a person—a person with family and friends.

But if you disregard that one life on the bus in favor of your not breaking the agreement with your roommate and potentially taking their life, at what amount of deaths does there need to be for you to change positions? At 5? At 20? At 100? The argument here lies in the fact that if you choose to dehumanize or lessen even just one life in the bus, it automatically puts you on a darker path. Yes, your roommate’s life is important, yes, your agreement is important, but the people on the bus as well as the agreement you made with society to ensure the general well-being of the community is just as, if not more, important. It’s similar to the classic trolley problem, except that the trolley problem doesn’t account for the fact that if the people on the bus.

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Moreover, there is a factor that makes it a drastically better choice to pick up your friend. It’s the fact that the probability of you (and in essence your friend) catching Covid is a lot less likely than the probability of the people in the bus getting it.

You have the ability to minimize your friend’s infectivity if you choose to pick them up. You can double up on masks for both you and your friend, you can open the windows to ensure steady ventilation, you can sanitize your seats and door handles, and you can have your friend sit in the back seat furthest away from you. On the other hand, while you have some control over what your friend does on the bus—as you can tell them what to do over the phone or drive over and bring them masks, due to the lack of ventilation and crowded nature of the bus—it is almost guaranteed that some people on the bus will end up getting the virus. Since it is a lot less likely that you will get Covid over the bus riders, and because you don’t know the true impact of what happens if your friend does ride the bus, it’s a more responsible choice to pick up your friend. It’s a decision between either putting you and your friend at a slight risk or letting a bus full of people get Covid.

By accounting for the well-being of your community, you’re helping others as well as yourself in the long run and ultimately following suit with the contract between you and society. That’s what this contract entails, because if you aren’t going to ensure the well-being of your community, then who will?

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