Tabula Rasa Issue 2 (Claremont Colleges Philosophy Journal)

tabula rasa

the philosophy journal of the Claremont Colleges

issue 2 • fall 2021

Cover art by Ian Baime Cover design by Patrick Liu

Letter from the Editor I am thrilled to finally share the culmination of a year’s work by the wonderfully passionate staff of Tabula Rasa. The essays and art comprising this volume are at once timely and timeless, engaging forcefully with pressing questions surrounding abortion ethics and effective altruism, offering comparative perspectives on Hegelian and Daoist metaphysics, and mobilizing existentialist frameworks toward lyrical analyses of pop anthems, to offer but a taste. Tabula Rasa has the twofold mission of cultivating analytical rigor and helping make philosophy accessible by promoting its exploration through creative media. Between these two goals, the art contained in this issue—ranging from musical improvisation and an analytical podcast to collage and acrylic—strike an ideal middle ground.

We are deeply indebted to Michael Green for his endless support for the journal as faculty advisor, host of our first in-person writing workshops, and member of the Writing Prize Selection Committee, as well as to all the faculty members who participated on this committee: Adrienne Martin, Yuval Avnur, Mukasa Mubirumusoke, Ellie Anderson, and James Kreines. I want to thank Emily Jiang, our first Editor-in-Chief and Pomona Class of ’21, for having been an incomparable mentor, lodestar, and friend. I am grateful to our Senior Editors: Jenny Park, SeoJin Ahn, Soo Bin Cho, Sam Hernandez, Abigail Tulenko, and Rachel Corbett. If writers and artists are the hull of Tabula Rasa, our editors have been its keel and oars, its guiding hand.

Finally, of course, I have such gratitude for my partners and Managing Editors Laura Mora and Jenna Lange, for the generous backing of the 5C student governments, and for the dedication and initiative shown by our incoming board: Sam Hernandez, Sunny Jeong-Eimer, and Jon Joey Telebrico. Where they steer this ship, I eagerly await.

Please visit our website, tabularasaclaremont.com, to view previous issues or submit to the next.

We always welcome external submissions and questions at tabularasaclaremont@gmail.com.

Happy reading!

Patrick Liu, Pomona ’22 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 (/’,täb(y)oolə ‘räzə/) 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 Patrick Liu (Pomona ’22) Managing Editors Laura Mora (Pomona ’22) Jenna Lange (Pomona ’23) Senior Editors Soo Bin Cho (Pomona ’22) Sam Hernandez (Pomona ’24) Abigail Tulenko (Scripps ’22) Rachel Corbett (Scripps ’24) Senior Art Editors Jenny Park (Pomona ’22) SeoJin Ahn (Pomona ’23)

Staff Writers Nathaniel Braswell (CMC ’23) Derek Li (HMC ’23) Justin Peng (HMC ’24) Glen Skahill (Pomona ’22) Drey Diggs (Pomona ’24) Phillip Kong (Pomona ’24) Hannah Frasure (Pomona ’24) Amiri Rivers-David (Pomona ’24) Sunny Jeong-Eimer (Pomona ’25) Kevin Park (Pomona ’25) Resident Artists Ian Baime (CMC ’24) Joshua Suh (Pomona ’23) Tristan Latham (Pomona ’23) Gabriella Meerwarth (Scripps ’23)

Table of Contents WRITING On Fetal Rights: Killing vs. Letting Die in Abortion Ethics, Jenna Lange, Pomona ’23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 A Tale of Two Philosophies: Phenomenology and Buddhism on the Ethical, Jon Joey Telebrico, CMC ’23 . . . . 9 Animating Hegel’s Mysticism, Glen Skahill, Pomona ’22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Panem et Circenses: On Anti-Capitalist Mass Spectacle, Sunny Jeong-Eimer, Pomona ’25 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 80,000 Ineffective Hours, Drey Diggs, Pomona ’24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Problems for a Platonic Idea of Logic, Derek Li, HMC ’23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Copeland on Searle: Tensions Between Competing Chinese Rooms, Nathaniel Braswell, CMC ’23 . . . . . . . . . 48 Overwork: Ancient and Contemporary Self-Help, Amiri Rivers-David, Pomona ’24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Fearless Love: An Existentialist Analysis of Taylor Swift’s Fearless, Phillip Kong, Pomona ’24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59

ART a. HeGeLOgy___, Tristan Latham, Pomona ’23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 The Struggle, Hannah Frasure, Pomona ’24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Workers, Gabriella Meerwarth, Scripps ’23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Cat and Mouse, Joshua Suh, Pomona ’23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Chromatic Thought: Finding Freedom while Working for the Knife, Emma Paulini, Pomona ’22 . . . . . . . . . . 47 UN-19K, Ian Baime, CMC ’24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

On Fetal Rights: Killing vs. Letting Die in Abortion Ethics Jenna Lange, Pomona ’23

Managing Editor – Winner of the Issue II Writing Prize Introduction When someone becomes pregnant but does not wish to carry the pregnancy to term, it seems there is a conflict of rights. On the one hand, there are the rights of the pregnant person1—such as the right to decide what happens to their own body, the right to not be killed by the fetus2 (as in when the pregnancy is lifethreatening), and so on. On the other hand, there are the rights of the fetus, such as the right to not be killed. In general, if right P takes precedence over right Q, then we must act in accord with right P—or otherwise we violate a right, which is always morally impermissible.

So, with respect to abortion, the three questions to consider are: which rights does the fetus have; do these fetal rights conflict with the rights of the pregnant person; and if they do conflict, which right takes precedence (i.e., overrides the other)?

The two rights at issue that the fetus might have are the right to not be killed and the right to not be let die (i.e. to life-sustaining aid).

However, to understand the difference between these two rights, one must first understand the difference between killing and letting die—and resolve the question of whether abortion counts as killing the fetus or as letting the fetus die. To this end, in Section IA I describe Philippa Foot’s and Jeff McMahan’s contrasting accounts of the distinction between killing and letting die, and end up siding with not only McMahan’s way of drawing the distinction but also his account of why some withdrawals of aid are killing while others are letting die. In Section IB, I apply McMahan’s account to abortion, showing that most abortions involve letting the fetus die, not killing— roughly because they involve the withdrawal of

life-saving aid whose continuance comes at a cost to the pregnant person.

In Section II, I follow in the footsteps of Judith Jarvis Thomson and Phillipa Foot by assuming that the fetus is a person,3 and thus has the right to not be killed. But what about the right to life-sustaining aid? I discuss Thomson’s argument for the claim that most fetuses lack such a right; though fetuses do have the right not to be killed, they do not have the right not to be let die. Focusing only on what McMahan calls “merely extractive abortions,” which are the most common type, I show that in these types of abortions, the pregnant person’s right to decide what happens to their body and the fetus’ right not to be killed are not in conflict. And so, for extractive abortions, we will not have to adjudicate which right—the pregnant person’s or the fetus’—takes precedence.

Section IA. Killing vs. Letting Die In Philippa Foot’s view, the difference between killing and letting die is not merely the difference between doing and allowing.4 Her defense begins with the premise that, if there is a case in which one kills by allowing a threatening sequence to continue, then the distinction between killing and letting die does not map onto the distinction between doing and allowing. Foot then presents the following example: Involuntary Donor: A’s body is plugged into B’s, and A is dependent on this arrangement for lifesaving aid. B unplugs A’s body from hers, and A dies.5,6

Since Foot thinks this is a case of killing by allowing, she concludes that not all killings are

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doings; some are allowings. So, Foot concludes that we cannot clarify the distinction between killing and letting die by aligning the two with doing and allowing respectively.

To build an account of killing vs. letting die, Foot introduces the idea of a “fatal sequence.”7 In most cases8 of killing and of letting die, Foot thinks, there is a single sequence of events that resulted in someone’s death. For instance, in a case where someone died of poisoning, the fatal sequence was initiated by the agent who put the poison into their cup.9 Foot defines killing as “originating or sustaining” the fatal sequence.10 If A is the agent who initiated the fatal sequence that resulted in B’s death, Foot claims, then A killed B.11 If A did not initiate the fatal sequence that resulted in B’s death and A could have intervened to stop the sequence from continuing but did not do so, then in Foot’s view A let B die.

I find Foot’s account of killing to be overly narrow. Diverting fatal sequences strikes me as a type of killing, even if one did not initiate them. Consider the following case,12 originally posed by Foot herself:

their lung cancer, which I had nothing to do with. However, intuitively it is clear, I think, that I did kill this person. So, a further exploration of this metaphysical difference is needed, particularly regarding cases involving the withdrawing of aid (as in the case of unplugging someone’s ventilator).

McMahan undertakes exactly this project.

Though he shares Foot’s view that the distinction between killing and letting die does not align with the distinction between action and omission, he thinks that Foot mischaracterizes “Involuntary Donor” as a killing when in fact it is one of refusing to save a life.15 In McMahan’s view, P’s refusal to save Q’s life is not killing unless P herself initiated the fatal sequence. For instance, if P pushed Q into deep water knowing that Q could not swim, and then refused to save Q’s life by not pulling Q out of the water, P nonetheless killed Q by pushing Q into the water in the first place.

McMahan points out that “Involuntary Donor” is not one of these special cases – since in “Involuntary Donor” B allows A to die from a preexisting threat that B herself did not cause.16 So, McMahan concludes that “Involuntary Donor” is not a case of killing.

Though McMahan objects to Foot’s characterization of this example, he agrees with her conclusion that the distinction between killing and letting die is not the same as the distinction between act and omission. McMahan provides his own example to defend this claim, using the same argument structure as Foot. Recall that this argument hinges on identifying a case in which one kills by allowing a fatal sequence to continue. McMahan identifies two such cases:

Runaway Trolley: An out-of-control trolley is on a track headed for five people, all of whom will certainly die if the trolley hits them. A is a bystander with the option to redirect the trolley onto a track containing only person B. A redirects the trolley. The trolley hits B and B dies.13

Foot claims that this is a special kind of case involving “the diverting of a fatal sequence and not the starting of a new one.”14 Since in this case A did not initiate the fatal sequence that resulted in B’s death, according to Foot A did not kill B. I find this very odd. Since B was in absolutely no danger except because of A’s action, it seems suspect to claim that A did not kill B. The issue here is further demonstrated by another example, which I draw from Jeff McMahan: Suppose that I intentionally unplug the ventilator on which an individual with lung cancer depends for life support, and this individual dies. In Foot’s view, I would not be killing them – since the fatal sequence began with

Respirator: Due to an illness, B is dependent on a machine to sustain her life. A, with full knowledge of B’s situation, unplugs the machine.

B dies.17 Burning Building: B jumps off of a burning building towards a net that C set up to save B’s life. A, with full knowledge of B’s situation, removes the net. B hits the ground and dies.18

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Both of these are cases of allowing harm to continue that are also clear cases of killing. So, McMahan concludes, Foot was correct that the distinction between killing and letting die does not map onto the distinction between doing and allowing.

McMahan points out that all three of these cases involve the withdrawal of aid. But, as McMahan points out, “Involuntary Donor,” is letting die while “Respirator” and “Burning Building” are killings. Why are some withdrawals killing and others letting die? This motivates his development of two principles for distinguishing these, the final iterations19 of which are:

Our intuition is that all three of these cases are of letting die, not of killing. So, if Principle 1 classifies all of these cases as letting die, then Principle 1 aligns with our intuitions about these cases. In all these cases A withdraws a barrier that protects B from death that A provided, but which requires further contributions from A in order to protect B from death.

In “Involuntary Donor” these further contributions are the continued use of A’s body for life support; in “Aborted Rescue” these further contributions are A’s continued efforts to save B from drowning; and in “Dutch Boy” these further contributions are A keeping his finger on the crack in the dike. So, the antecedent of Principle 1 is satisfied in both “Aborted Rescue” and “Dutch Boy,” and thus Principle 1 categorizes both as cases of letting die. Therefore, Principle 1 aligns with our intuitions about “Involuntary Donor,” “Aborted Rescue,” and “Dutch Boy.” Principle 1 also aligns with our intuitions about the following cases involving as-yet-inoperative aid:

Principle 1: If A withdraws a barrier that protects B from death and that A provided but which requires further contributions from A in order to protect B from death or if A withdraws a barrier that would protect B from death and that A provided but that has not yet come into effect, then A lets B die.20 Principle 2: If A withdraws a barrier that protects B from death that A did not provide21 or if A withdraws a complete and self-sustaining barrier that protects B from death that A did provide, then A kills B.22

Abdul 3: B’s life could be saved by a donation of money at t3. At t1, A writes a check and mails it to save B’s life. At t2, A intercepts the check and tears it up. B dies.26,27

In the paragraphs that follow I will both justify these principles with examples and explain what they mean (including their technical terms), just as McMahan does.23 Principle 1 aligns with our intuition of the three cases, “Involuntary Donor” and these two additional cases:

Abdul 4: B’s life could be saved by a donation of money at t3. At t1, A writes a check and gives it to C, instructing C to mail it to save B’s life. At t2 A instructs C not to mail the check. B dies.28

Intuitively, both of these are cases of letting die.

Unlike the previous cases of letting die, however, it is not clear that the barrier requires further contributions from A in order to protect B from death – after all, if A were to not do anything, B’s life would be saved, but it is nonetheless the case that A’s help is required in saving B. Instead of clear-cut “further contributions,” both of these cases of letting die involve as-yet-inoperative barriers – thus satisfying the right disjunct of the antecedent of Principle 1.

In “Abdul 3,” when A intercepts the check, and in Abdul 4 when A instructs C not to mail the

Aborted Rescue: A is trying to save B who is drowning, but realizes that doing so may result in A herself drowning. A abandons the rescue attempt by pushing B off of her. B drowns.24 Dutch Boy: A notices that a dike is beginning to crack, and plugs it with his finger to stop the sea from flooding his town. After several bored and hungry hours in which A tried and failed to alert others of the situation, A removes his finger from the crack, which results in a flood that causes several people to die.25

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check, A withdraws what would have become a barrier protecting B from death but that has not yet come into effect.29 So, the antecedent of Principle 1 is satisfied in both cases, and thus Principle 1 classifies both of these as cases of letting die – which aligns with our intuitions.

Principle 2 aligns with our intuitions that “Respirator” and “Burning Building” are cases of killing, since in both cases A removes a barrier protecting B from death that A herself did not provide.30 Principle 2 also aligns with our intuition that the following is a case of killing:

intervened in the life of a deceased person must have killed them. However, with the addition of this clause, these two claims are consistent with McMahan’s earlier principles about withdrawals of aid. Recall that Principle 2 says that A’s withdrawal of a barrier that protects B from death that A did not provide is one sufficient condition for A’s killing B, and that A’s withdrawal of a complete and self-sustaining barrier that protects B from death that A did provide is another such sufficient condition. Both of these are situations where B will live in the absence of any further intervention in his life

by A, and thus “McMahan on Killing” is compatible with Principle 2. Recall also that Principle 1 says that A’s withdrawal of a barrier that protects B from death and that A provided but which requires further contributions from A in order to protect B from death is one sufficient condition for A’s letting B die, and that A’s withdrawal of a barrier that would protect B from death and that A provided but that has not yet come into effect is another such sufficient condition. Both of these are cases in which B would not have lived without some present or future intervention by A, and in which A neither caused B’s need for aid nor caused a further, independent threat to B’s life.

So, Principle 1 is compatible with “McMahan on Letting Die.” Though these two principles are specific to cases that involve the withdrawal of aid, they are compatible with McMahan’s characterization of the broader distinction between killing and letting die.

Pipe Sealer: A notices a crack in a pipe that threatens to spill poison into B’s water supply. A repairs the crack at t1. At t2 A returns and removes that repair. B dies of poisoning.31

In this case, unlike in “Respirator” and “Burning Building,” A did provide the barrier that protected B from death. However, McMahan characterizes this particular barrier as “complete and self-sustaining,” since it requires no further contributions from A in order to protect B from death.32 So, Principle 2 classifies “Pipe Sealer” as a case of killing. Therefore, Principle 2 aligns with our intuitions about this case, along with “Respirator” and “Burning Building.”

Having determined which cases of withdrawing aid are killing and which are letting die, McMahan returns to the topic of killing vs. letting die more broadly. He distinguishes them in the following way: McMahan on Killing: “If the situation is such that [B] will live in the absence of any further intervention in his life by [A], then, if [B] nevertheless dies, [A] has killed him.”33

Section IB. Application to Abortion In order to apply McMahan’s view of killing vs. letting die to abortion, we must first distinguish between two different types of abortions. The first type is what McMahan calls “merely extractive” abortion, which involves the removal of the fetus from the womb, but its body is not damaged. The second type of abortion involves causing of the fetus’ death by craniotomy, lethal injection, et cetera.

McMahan on Letting Die: If B would not have lived without some present or future intervention

by A and if A neither caused B’s need for aid nor caused a further, independent threat to B’s life, then, if B dies, A let B die.34

To be sure, the first of these principles is clearly missing a clause about B dying because of A’s action. Without this, the principle is absurd, since it implies that anyone who has ever 5

C. So, the fetus is a [moral] person from the moment of conception.40

In McMahan’s view, merely extractive abortion is letting die. Merely extractive abortions, McMahan thinks, are best characterized as the withdrawal of life-supporting aid.35 Moreover, since this life-supporting aid is provided by the pregnant person’s body, it requires continuous contributions on the part of the pregnant person.36 Recall that, according to McMahan’s Principle 1, if A withdraws a barrier that protects B from death and that A provided but which requires further contributions from A in order to protect B from death, then A lets B die.37 So, merely extractive abortion ought to be characterized as letting die.

However, McMahan thinks that when the fetus’ death is caused by craniotomy, lethal injection, a coat hanger, et cetera, the abortion counts as killing, not the mere withdrawal of aid. According to McMahan’s general principle about killing, if the situation is such that B will live in the absence of any further intervention in his life by A, then, if B dies because of A’s action, A has killed him. Without the surgical intervention damaging he/she/its body, the fetus will live. If the pregnant person authorizes this kind of abortion, the fetus dies because of their action. So, in this case the pregnant person kills the fetus.

Thomson does not think that C follows from A and B, pointing out that this argument commits the “slippery slope” fallacy.41 She demonstrates the fallacy by giving the counter-example of an acorn that becomes an oak tree: Though at some point in its continuous development an acorn surely becomes an oak tree, and no non-arbitrary point can be found at which the acorn becomes an oak tree, it does not follow from this that all acorns are oak trees.42 However, Thomson concedes that there is not a good way to pick a point in fetal development at which the fetus becomes a person. So, for the sake of argument Thomson accepts the claim about fetal personhood in C.43 When we combine our assumption of fetal personhood – and thus of the fetus’ right not to be killed – with what we established in Section IB, we may conclude that crushing a fetus’ skull violates this right and thus is impermissible (and likewise for abortion by lethal injection).

What about extractive abortions? Thomson convincingly argues that moral persons do not have the right not to be let die – i.e., the right to life-sustaining aid.44 Thomson points out a counterexample demonstrating that we do not in fact have this right. Suppose that A is on her deathbed, and the only thing that could save A’s life is some gesture from B who is a stranger to A – say, B’s flying across the country to be with A. While it might be charitable of B to perform this gesture, B certainly is not morally required to do so, even though this is what A requires in order to stay alive. If A had such a right against B, then B’s not doing so would violate this right – and thus B one would be morally required to do so. So, if it is not required of B, then A has no such right. Thomson concludes that A does not have the right to what she requires in order to stay alive. In this way, Thomson demonstrates that moral persons do not in fact have the right to life-sustaining aid. Therefore, since moral persons do

Section II. On the Rights of the Fetus I follow in the footsteps of Judith Jarvis Thomson and Philippa Foot by assuming for the sake of argument that the fetus has a right to not be killed. For both Thomson and Foot, this follows from their assumption that the fetus is a moral person – since if A is a moral person, then A has the right not to be killed.

Thompson considers the following argument for the claim that the fetus is a moral person from the moment of conception: A. The development of a human being from conception until birth is continuous.38 B. It is quite arbitrary to choose a point in development past which the fetus is a [moral] person, and prior to which it is not.39

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not have this right, neither do fetuses (by virtue of being moral persons).

When we combine this understanding with what we established in Section IB, we may conclude that merely extractive abortions are morally permissible. Merely extractive abortion is a kind of letting die, and the fetus has no right against being let die. So, performing a merely extractive abortion is morally permissible.

9 10 11 12

Endnotes 1 Many of those who write on this topic use the word “mother” to describe the person carrying the fetus. Julie Tannenbaum and others opt to use the term “pregnant woman” instead, because to call this person a “mother” already entails that they have certain duties to the fetus. In this paper I will opt to use the term “pregnant person,” because gender identity does not map to biology and thus not every person who becomes pregnant is also a woman.

2 To refer to the developing embryo I will exclusively use the term “the fetus” in this paper. Making a choice about pronouns entails an answer to the question of fetal personhood.

3 Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971): 47. Thomson offers a justification of this assumption by pointing out that embryonic development is a continuous process from conception to birth, and thus it is quite arbitrary to pick a point at which the fetus becomes a person. Though Thomson herself critiques this as a “slippery slope argument,” she accepts it as sufficient justification for the adoption of this assumption for the sake of argument. See Section II for more.

4 Philippa Foot, “Killing and Letting Die," in Abortion: Moral and Legal Perspectives, eds. Jay L. Garfield and Patricia Hennessey (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 178.

5 Foot, 184.

6 Foot notes that this example comes from Thomson’s earlier work, which I discuss in later sections.

7 Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 178-79.

8 The “in most cases” clause is important here, Foot notes, because there exist examples in which

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26

27

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it is impossible to identify the fatal sequence. For instance, in the case where A requires a water barrel to survive, B drills a hole in the barrel, and C fills the barrel with brine, it is not possible to pick out a single fatal sequence that led to A’s dying of thirst – since each of B and C’s actions was sufficient for A’s death (Foot 179). However, Foot maintains that these kinds of cases are unusual, and thus proceeds with her “in most cases'' claim.

Foot, “Killing and Letting Die,” 179.

Foot, 179.

Foot would say here that A is the agent of B’s death.

This case, along with its various iterations, is famously known as “the trolley problem.”

Foot, “Killing and Letting Die,” 183.

Foot, 183.

Jeff McMahan, “Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid,” Ethics 103 (1993): 252.

McMahan, “Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid,” 253.

McMahan, 254.

McMahan, 254.

McMahan presents these principles first in what he calls the “crude view” and then in several further refinements. In this review I have chosen to present only McMahan’s final principles, setting aside those versions that he himself discards along the way.

McMahan, “Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid,” 258-61.

Julie Tannenbaum has pointed out that it is not merely A’s provision of the barrier that is important; it is also necessary that A have full rights to provide the barrier in question. For instance, if B is freezing to death and C gives B a winter coat that belongs to A, and A steals it back to prevent herself from dying, A lets B die rather than kills B. However, the wording of McMahan’s principles could be adjusted to account for this.

McMahan, “Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid,” 256-61.

In this review I do not include all of McMahan’s cases (as they are quite numerous), but select those that I find to be the strongest.

McMahan, “Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid,” 251.

McMahan, 257.

McMahan notes that he draws both “Abdul 3” and “Abdul 4” from Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989).

McMahan, “Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid,” 259.

28 McMahan, 259.

29 It is important to note here that it makes no difference whether A herself withdraws the barrier (as in Abdul 3), or instructs a third party (C) to do it for her (as in Abdul 4). In both cases, the barrier is withdrawn by A’s agency.

30 See endnote xxi.

31 McMahan, “Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid,” 256.

32 McMahan, 256.

33 McMahan, 277.

34 McMahan, 277.

35 McMahan, 268.

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

McMahan, 268.

McMahan, 258-61.

Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” 47.

Thomson, 47.

Thomson, 48.

Thomson, 48.

Thomson, 48.

Foot, “The Problem of Abortion,” 19. Foot also discusses this difficulty, in pointing out what she calls the “deepest source” of the abortion problem – the issue of fetal personhood.

44 Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” 55-56.

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A Tale of Two Philosophies: Phenomenology and Buddhism on the Ethical Jon Joey Telebrico, CMC ’23

External Submission – Second Place for Best Essay I. Introduction The dominant tradition of phenomenology is characterized and known as a philosophical methodology through which one’s “lived experiences” are described. In doing so, the fundamental subjective insights developed through the practice and application of phenomenology serve to illuminate broader notions of philosophical significance. This essay is concerned with two primary questions: first, how do we achieve the moral experiences that guide us to the ethical, and second, what do these experiences tell us about that which is ethical? To resolve these two questions, I first ground my analysis of the subject within moral strands of phenomenology and its relevance to ethical matters and move to highlighting the affective dimension of Buddhist ethics and practices such as Qigong as one possible means of guiding moral experiences and ethical orientations. Throughout this essay I aim to ultimately examine phenomenology’s value as a means with which to arbitrate over ethical concerns, drawing upon moral phenomenology to identify a metaethical paradigm made possible through alternative Buddhist philosophies and their phenomenological undertakings.

the centuries-long historical contingency of Buddhist reflection on how consciousness is affected through various meditative states, arguing that this is indeed a form of phenomenology. While there are certainly differences between the tenets of Buddhism and phenomenology—namely, the ontological characterization of essence—Jingjing Li argues that the overlap between particular ideas within Husserl’s phenomenology, such as emptiness as the affirmation of the existent and the situation of essence within Buddhist idealism, are actually compatible with one another, and function to resolve some of the differences that would function to delineate the two as incommensurable traditions. Similar to comparative scholars who turn to epistemology to prevent dichotomizing the two,1 I seek to analyze the traditions’ affective moral dimensions and construct a broader metaethics by illuminating how particular Buddhist meditative practices can achieve moral phenomenological reflections.

To begin, my analysis is rooted at the primary site of the body and more broadly, the key phenomenological concept of embodiment. Rather than conceptualizing the body as a physical substance, Edmund Husserl—one of the most prominent of phenomenology’s scholars—considers the body as a locus, or lived center, of experience defined by our movement capabilities, sensations, and perceptions.2 Building upon this insight, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty establishes in Phenomenology of Perception that the body and the world are inextricably linked: we come to know the world through the medium of our bodies.3 In coming to understand that the body both structures the self and our experiences,

II. Phenomenological Perspectives and Groundwork First, I will outline how the bifurcated Eastern and Western philosophical traditions might come into dialogue with one another in order to establish a conceptual framework that the essay’s analysis will build off of. One might presume that the relation between Buddhist philosophy and phenomenology’s place in continental European philosophy appears loosely connected. However, the essay turns to 9

the dimension of embodiment emerges as a constitutive component of articulating how one navigates the world and interacts with other embodied agents within it. Indeed, the core idea to be examined herein is that the body can function concretely as a value modality with which one is able to embody and enact their moral bearings or beliefs.

Where might this connection between embodiment and morality come into play? Again, we turn back to Merleau-Ponty’s account in Phenomenology of Perception, wherein he argues that “one phenomenon releases another, not by means of some objective efficient cause, like those which link together natural events, but by the meaning which it holds out.”4 Specifically, we can situate his account of motivation and the apparent linkage between phenomena within what Bryan Lueck describes as “virtue ethics’ commitment to metaethical internalism.” In its most basic principle, metaethical internalism holds that moralistic value judgments entail a sort of motivation to do some action. Lueck argues that this motivation is internal to a moral sensitivity and evaluation derived from a Merleau-Pontean model of perception: a perceived situation offers us moral reasons to respond with and enact an action.5 The basis for Lueck’s argument extends Merleau-Ponty’s description of “gearing in” to a particular situation, where “to be geared in in the right way is to experience the situation itself as motivating an appropriate response.”6 Gearing in—in this sense—can be considered adopting an orientation towards things that is necessary to bring out their moral sense. Indeed, if we are to take this idea of gearing in as a sufficient condition for achieving an appropriate moral response to a situation we perceive, then we must examine where this motivation for gearing in comes from and what specific orientations of gearing in might entail.

For our purposes, I identify two ways of gearing in that aligns with the Merleau-Pontean account: gearing in to the world and

gearing in to others. I will explore both cases, although the Buddhist articulation within this essay will primarily focus on the latter. Beginning with the former, however, we can use the terminology of Husserl wherein he articulates an operant intentionality: “the corporeal subject is inserted into the world that provokes questions or problems that must be resolved.

Therefore, one can speak of a motivation on the part of the world, although not of a necessity, because the response is not mechanical or determined.”7 Thus, in order to respond to the moral provocations of the world one finds themselves in, one must then undergo an active process of adaptation to the world, modifying one’s moral responses and actions. Merleau-Ponty more accurately describes how this process works: My body is geared onto the world when my perception presents me with a spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible, and when my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they expect from the world. This maximum sharpness of perception and action points clearly to a perceptual ground, a basis of my life, a general setting in which my body can co-exist with the world.8

In other words, “the posture that the body adopts in a situation is its way of responding to the environment” in order to establish its existence and respond to what it perceives.9 This dynamic posturing of the corporeal scheme, however, can be best understood by how subject-environment interaction occurs vis-à-vis the body. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes a dialectic that occurs between two layers: the present body which possesses capacity for action, and the habitual body, which “presupposes a form of ‘understanding’ that the body has of the world in which it carries out its operations.”10 Here, habit is expressed as reconciliation between the environment and subject, a relational understanding between oneself and the world prior to engaging in any sort of conscious or moral evaluation. To MerleauPonty, habit is distinct from the normative

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sense of the word: it “is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action… It is knowledge in the hand, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made.”11 The idea of knowledge or understanding as intrinsic to the body appears novel and incomprehensible, but this is precisely why Merleau-Ponty aims to reconceptualize it.

Merleau-Ponty, in clarifying this form of bodily understanding or knowledge, furthers: “To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance— and the body is our anchorage in a world.”12 As an example, when we touch another object, we fulfill an intention or conviction that is directed towards that object in the world—it “expresses our power of dilating our being-in-theworld, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.”13 As we navigate the world, then, we are necessarily conditioned by a prereflexive projection of intention that posits meaning about our being and the world as a sort of bodily knowledge central to habit. To be geared in towards the world thus draws upon a worldly motivation that is achieved when we orient our bodies to respond to the environment before us within the possibilities carved out by habit.

Next, we examine what it means to be geared in towards others. Here, emergent strands of morality become more evident as we engage with other embodied agents or perceivers. Indeed, “for Merleau-Ponty, that is, the body plays a constitutive role in experience precisely by grounding, making possible, and yet remaining peripheral in the horizons of our perceptual awareness”—our body is constantly perceived by others and we even come to understand ourselves as being bodies.14 In this way, we experience phenomenological intersubjectivity which tends towards a reality in which we possess—in relation to others—similar bodily gestures aimed at a shared world.

Merleau-Ponty calls this process an “intentional coupling or impregnation of gestures,”

which Douglas Low argues, carves out moral possibilities through recognition of the other as another human being and recognition of the other’s human world. Here, Low notes that the Merleau-Pontean idea of recognizing man qua man is accomplished through a recognition of the unique structure of the human body and the gestural coupling of human bodies.

Through this, Merleau-Ponty articulates a morality of experience, “evoking and invoking ‘an ideal community of embodied subjects, of an intercorporeality.”15 One might consider this intercorporeality as a bodily being-in-theworld and personal bodily awareness of the world that is shared and intertwined with others.16 On this account then, Merleau-Ponty is able to create a moral orientation towards others through the body, developing a theory of human nature that is necessarily perceptual, experiential, and perspectival.

Gearing in, however, must first be achieved as opposed to being a presupposed state that one embodies. Indeed, as understood

by Merleau-Ponty, “it is something that must be accomplished; the fit is not guaranteed in advance. As a result, the process of gearing in can fail in a way that it rarely does in the literal case.”17 I argue that to circumvent the possibility of failure outlined here by Lueck’s reading of Merleau-Ponty, gearing in towards others requires apprehending or interrupting the habitual action we foster from gearing in towards the world. This is to say that habit is still necessary—for “habit represents the overarching disposition in virtue of which we respond more easily to certain possibilities, because we possess a pre-reflective attunement that guides our behavioural response.”18 This guided behavioral response, however, does not always embody the proper moral response. For example, you might consider that someone who can become extremely frustrated might subjectively express this frustration through a forceful physical action such as kicking a rock—this perhaps could be considered their subjective gearing in towards the world, in which “my

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perceiving body ‘has already sided with the world’ and ‘is already open to certain of its aspects and synchronized with them.’”19 When interacting with others, we are often already faced with moral situations that resemble the moral questions the world provokes at us. Yet in this instance, we observe that while we have similar moral propositions to resolve our frustration, we cannot resolve it in the same way— such an action enacted towards others would not be an appropriate moral response, as a gearing in towards others demands an emotional expression that does not cause harm to others. Gearing in towards others may therefore require that an individual first processes a moral situation through habitual action, and then proceeds to redirect a course of action after further conscious evaluation. In this way, gearing in towards others represents a sort of attitude shift that allows us to foster a moral attitude—wherein we do not automatically act upon our prereflexive habitual response, but instead evaluate the moral sense of a situation at hand and act upon that evaluation.

inherently existent, substantively real, solid thing. It’s actually a bunch of processes that are… converging and intersecting and always moving.”21 This is perhaps encapsulated by Lao-Tze’s description of Qi, a central Eastern philosophical concept that can be understood as a substance of “vitality” or “life energy” that flows through our body along meridians—or pathways—where both Qi and blood circulate throughout the body: “Qi exists throughout the universe. When it assembles, the human dies. Therefore, do not worry about life and death. Live naturally and freely as you are.”22 Rather than viewing the human body as an essential and finite existence, certain Buddhist principles hold that the body is simply an assemblage of the universal Qi. If this is the case, does Qi offer us an alternative conception of being that can be applied towards our phenomenological orientations?

Here, I turn back to phenomenology’s emphasis on affect, and how that manifests as a particularly moral phenomenology. Locke articulates, “the real ethical work that moral phenomenology suggests lies in addressing the contradiction between our reflective, consciously avowed values and our pre-reflective unconscious feelings and responses that comprise the conditions under which we gear into our ethical lives.”23 Not only does Locke use the Merleau-Pontean notion of “gearing in” to our ethical lives, but she claims that the comportment of ourselves in the world is conditioned by the aforementioned habitual, phenomenological structures that exceed epistemic commitments to the ethical. Locke argues to move away from a deluded egocentrism—placing oneself at the center of the world—toward a liberated state of non-clinging, which she conceives as a process of ethical self-cultivation.24 Buddhist monk Zhiyi also points out that “both ‘meditation with prolonged sitting’ and ‘meditation with prolonged walking’ are needed for self-cultivation.” Thus, an affective measure moving from the phenomenological sense of self to the self-

III. Affect and Phenomenology in Buddhist Ethics In “Making Consciousness an Ethical Project: Moral Phenomenology in Buddhist Ethics and White Anti-Racism,” Jessica Locke outlines further connections between Buddhist ethics and phenomenology. Indeed, she notes that “the entire Buddhist path is predicated upon human beings’ ability to work to transform our phenomenological orientation in order to extirpate ourselves from the fundamental ignorance that causes our suffering and our ethical failures.”20 In the previous section, we articulated how one might phenomenologically orient the self towards the world and towards others. However, Buddhism here departs from one of the premises of this notion with defining an essential self, wherein Buddhism in contrast possesses “the no-self doctrine, that the self, what we experience as the self, is actually not some permanent,

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cultivation described by both Zhiyi and Locke appears necessary.

This affective component links back to the idea that our bodies are constituted by Qi. Incorporating the meditative components discussed by Zhiyi is the practice of Qigong, “a combination of meditation, breathing and physical movements that is used to manage the vital energy (Qi) in the body and improve spiritual, physical, and mental health.”25 Resembling our discussion of habit as subject-environment interaction, Qigong is an ancient mind-body exercise that uses breathing or movement to emphasize a harmonious interaction between humans and the environment’s Qi energy.26 Analyzing the practice of Qigong in urban green spaces, researchers from Taiwan conducted a survey of Qigong practitioners in order to compare it to the Western concept of flow, in which when activities go smoothly, so too does the subject doing the activity experience similar feelings.27 Finding positive correlations and similarities between the Qi and flow experiences, the researchers noted participants’ experiencing loss of selfawareness, embodied energy transfer, and even the transformation of time. Qi here, functions as a sort of bridge between the subject and the external wherein “it is believed that an exchange of [Qi]28 between the external world and the internal body occurs. In other words, Eastern medicine understands the body as an ‘open system’ connected to the external world.”29 Already, one can see how Qi is distinct from the Western tradition in its lack of dualistic orientations towards the world and how one might navigate one’s own environment.

How does a practice like Qigong affect our bodily orientations and responses? In Alia AlSaji’s “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing,” she describes a process in which the hesitation induced by meditation is a form of waiting, and to “to wait is to testify that that time makes a difference for experience, that all is not given

in the present. To wait, without projection, is… to be open to… a past that can be dynamically transformed through the passage of events, and that grounds the creative potential of events.”30 Indeed, in relation to habit, hesitation takes one’s bodily knowledge and maps out new possibilities through a temporal modification. By slowing down the subject—to the point that meditated hesitation may even allow one to “step out” of time—hesitation seeks to unroot our tendency to act upon seemingly sedimentary habits and turn them into ongoing activities that are instantiated continually.

In a Merleau-Pontean sense, habits “are not an absolute acquisition; they feed off my present thought at each moment; they offer me a sense, but this is a sense that I reflect back to them. In fact, the acquisition that is available to us expresses, at each moment, the energy of our present consciousness.”31 I am interested in what Merleau-Ponty describes here as “a sense that I reflect back to them.” Tracking our previous discussion of metaethical internalism, we find that gearing in causes the expression of bodily habits to emanate a moral sense which we can act upon, as articulated by Merleau-Ponty.

Here, what we are reflecting is a comportment or orientation that has been acquired, shaped, and enacted within the site of the body—a reflection made possible through a responsive hesitation operating at the level of habit that opens up new possibilities that can transform the moral imperatives that define our action.

Where does this reflection come into play in terms of our orientation to a given situation?

Let’s consider the previous example of a person who is frustrated, only this time, the cause of their frustration is recognition of their enemy, or a person who has caused immense harm to them in some way. Here, recognition has taken a negative directionality, spurring the subject to express their frustration as violence enacted upon that person. Sustained practice of something such as Qigong, however, possesses the capacity to condition our habits such that a similar person in this

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instance might be able to “suspend the movement… and to stay with the present thought, emotion, or bodily sensation.”32 The suspension of movement and mindful awareness of the situation made possible through the affect of Qi flowing through one’s body demonstrates how a phenomenology of hesitation leads one to necessarily be “conscious of his bodily spaces as the matrix of his habitual action.”33 Indeed, Al-Saji notes that “responsive hesitation inserts indeterminacy into habit… other responses to this map… creates possibilities that have been hitherto foreclosed and which can transform actuality. This is to say that for responsive hesitation the future is unpredictable and open; it is yet to be created.”34 Indeed, in the face of a competing habitual response and its competing moral compulsion, one necessarily overcomes habit to achieve a proper moral response. This reflection thus operates through an ethically salient emotion as a modality of attunement to one’s embodied experience—rather than using their body to enact violence as a manifestation of their frustration, one comes to reconsider their moral stance and response after hesitation and reflection.

This idea of utilizing Qi as bodily affect appears in other parts of Buddhist traditions as well. In the Si-Meng lineage of Confucian ethics, the opening lines of the Chinese text “Discourse on Nature and Feeling” provide a phenomenological description of how a person might ethically evaluate some moral situation, reading, “affective energies (qi 氣) of happiness, anger, longing, and sadness are a matter of nature naturing… If in beginning one remains close to feeling, consummating one will be close to optimal appropriateness (yi 義).”

Indeed, our feelings about situations can be understood as determinate of how we imaginatively ameliorate our situated experience and realize relational flourishing through ethical agency, evoking the Merleau-Pontean notion of gearing in towards others.35 The metaethical dimension is illustrated more

clearly with this example in which the affective dimensions of Qi lead one to sustain feelings and hold them close to moral appropriateness.

In this way, it becomes possible to attune one’s own self to the continuous nature of one’s bodily habits, the reactive emotions it embodies, and reflective consideration of appropriate responses to moral perceptions, engaging in a broader, virtuous project of self-cultivation evident within the Buddhist tradition.

IV. Conclusion While the disciplinary conceptions of phenomenology within Eastern and Western philosophical traditions seem to come into conflict, this essay demonstrates that we can turn to the site of the body as a way to reconcile matters of moral and ethical concern. Analyzing moral phenomenology and the affective role of Buddhist ethics, one can come to cultivate a metaethics that informs our subjective moral experiences and collective ethical modalities.

Therefore, Buddhist philosophies and its affective phenomenological tenets emerge as a critically valuable means with which to develop models of moral behavior that guide our orientations to the ethical.

Endnotes 1 Jingjing Li, “Buddhist Phenomenology and The Problem of Essence,” Comparative Philosophy 7, no. 1 (2016): 62.

2 Elizabeth A. Behnke, “Husserl’s Phenomenology of Embodiment,” in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. James Fieser & Bradley Dowden (2011).

3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and Perception (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 94.

4 Merleau-Ponty, 57.

5 Bryan Lueck, “Merleau-Ponty, Moral Perception, and Metaethical Internalism,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 34, no. 3 (2020): 266.

6 Lueck, 266-267.

7 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), quoted in Patricia Moya, “Habit and

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10 11 12 13 14

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17 18

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embodiment in Merleau-Ponty,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014), 1-2.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and Perception, 292.

Sean Gallagher & Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (New York: Routledge, 2008), quoted in Moya, “Habit and embodiment in Merleau-Ponty,” 2.

Moya, 1.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and Perception, 166.

Merleau-Ponty, 167.

Merleau-Ponty, 166.

Taylor Carman, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,” Philosophical Topics 27, no. 2 (1999): 208.

David Michael Levin, “Tracework: Myself and Others in the Moral Phenomenology of MerleauPonty and Levinas,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 6, no. 3 (1998): 361.

Douglas Low, “The Foundations of MerleauPonty’s Ethical Theory,” Human Studies 17, no. 2 (1994): 181-182.

Lueck, “Metaethical Internalism,” 269.

Elisa Magrì, “Towards a phenomenological account of social sensitivity,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (2020): 644.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and Perception, 251, quoted in Lueck, “Metaethical Internalism,” 268.

Jessica Locke, “Making Consciousness an Ethical Project: Moral Phenomenology in Buddhist Ethics and White Anti-Racism,” In Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections, ed. George Yancy and Emily McRae (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 161.

Jessica Locke, interview with Ellie Anderson and David Peña-Guzmán, “Buddhist Practices and Anti-Racism,” Overthink (podcast), 25:31, January 26, 2021, accessed January 2, 2022, https://www.overthinkpodcast.com/episode-14transcript.

22 S. Tsuyoshi Ohnishi and Tomoko Ohnishi, “Philosophy, Psychology, Physics and Practice of Ki,” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 6, no. 2 (2009): 177.

23 Locke, “Making Consciousness an Ethical Project,” 163.

24 Locke, 164.

25 Shih-Han Hung, Ching-Yung Hwang, and ChunYen Chang, “Is the Qi experience related to the flow experience? Practicing qigong in urban green spaces,” PLoS One 16, no. 1 (2021): 1, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240180.

26 Hung et al., 2.

27 Hung et al., 3.

28 This modification is because the authors of the following citation use the Japanese word Ki for the Chinese equivalent of Qi, whereas the essay discusses Qi within Chinese Buddhism and the diasporic practice of Qigong.

29 Ohnishi and Ohnishi, “Philosophy, Psychology, Physics and Practice of Ki,” 176.

30 Alia Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing,” in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, ed. Emily S. Lee (Albany, SUNY Press: 2014), 148.

31 Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Helen Ngo, “Racist habits: A phenomenological analysis of racism and the habitual body,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 29, no. 9 (2016): 863.

32 Céline LeBoeuf, “Reforming Racializing Bodily Habits: Affective Environment and Mindfulness Meditation,” Critical Philosophy of Race 6, no. 2 (2018): 172.

33 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and Perception, 119.

34 Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 154.

35 Joseph Harroff, “Resolute Agency in Confucian Role Ethics,” PhD Dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, April 30, 2018, https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/62668/2018-05-phd-harroff.pdf.

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a. HeGeLOgy___ Tristan Latham, Pomona ’23 Resident Artist Medium: Digital “The words we speak are our own, yet they exist outside of us and in the objective world.” In this work I tried to harness lines into the “right” configurations (alphabetic characters), knowing all the while that they are just an endless maze, a sea of consciousness that doesn’t speak any language we can decipher. Until we come along and assign them a communicative value, these lines are just lines, and they are happy simply being that. The ideas for this piece lie in asemic writings, a corollary idea to the main point of the essay but an important one nonetheless.

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Animating Hegel’s Mysticism Glen Skahill, Pomona ’22 Staff Writer – Third Place for Best Essay I will critique Hegelian metaphysics using the Daoist philosophy of Zhuangzi (Chuangtzu 莊 子 ). Hegelian thought conceptualizes the object, and thus existence, in the friction of our perception and its external existence, causing the split in the object. This split traces back to the primary split within the subject, our subjective alienation of ourselves from ourselves, which Freud later develops into the conscious and unconscious split. Zhuangzi’s philosophy offers a way of critiquing how this alienation always returns to the individual subject, exposing a foundational metaphysics of the unconscious within the object for the intersection of critical psychology and religion. Zhuangzi’s retroactive intervention thus outlines the possibilities for what constitutes subjecthood, and the sacrifices in those determinations, and reveals Hegel’s ability to speak on human experience.

This critique proceeds twofold: towards the mysticism that speaks to human experience inherent in Hegel’s thought and towards bringing Hegelian thought towards the animacy of objects. Zhuangzi’s skeptical Daoism and famous short stories pose as powerful points of criticism for this analysis. Moreover, while Zhuangzi’s philosophy retains certain key differences in its metaphysical foundations, some of these key differences aid the criticism at hand and others reveal the psychoanalytic value of Hegelian thought, which always returns to the subject’s psyche.

Thus, for this paper, I will use the short stories from Zhuangzi’s philosophy and historian Theodore de Bary’s analysis of Zhuangzi to comprise the Daoist philosophical critique of Hegel, and I will turn to Todd McGowan’s Hegel—corrected from the mistranslations and misinterpretations of Alexandre Kojève.¹ McGowan’s Hegel distinguishes himself

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through the emphasis on irreconcilable contradiction that requires dialectical movement rather than Hegel’s supposed aim towards synthesis in the popular canon.² Geist—spirit in the English translation—arises out of the irreconcilable contradictions that constitute something.3 The foundational contradiction that comprises Hegelian metaphysics is the split between objectivity—the external world as it exists—and subjectivity—our perception of the external world as it exists. As perceiving subjects, our perception always clouds our view into the external world as it exists. The friction in this contradiction gives rise to the Freudian parapraxis: when our perception overrides the world as it exists. Most may think of parapraxes in the classic Freudian slip—saying something you did not mean to say—but parapraxes may occur in mis-seeing or mishearing things as well. These moments make the foundational Hegelian contradiction apparent to us in the friction between perception and reality. Even when we watch movies, we may feel the shock and awe that the protagonist or other characters feel despite sitting in a comfortable chair with popcorn to our side. These jarring moments that shock us into remembering this fundamental contradiction—between reality as such and our perception of it—mark Hegel’s continuous return to the human psyche in his thought.

Rather than the seemingly contradictory movement of yin and yang, Zhuangzi’s Dao, best translated as ‘way’ to describe the order of the universe or governance, creates the basis for extending Hegel’s geist beyond the human psyche.4 To make this move with Zhuangzi, we must articulate the unconscious within the object—object here in the general sense of anything besides human subject.

significance here.6 Zhuangzi wonders aloud about what may have caused the skull’s death for it to return to him in his sleep to speak with him about his assumptions regarding death.

The skull replies that “No monarch on his throne has joy greater than ours,” implying that his and others’ experience of death is desirable. Rather than contending that death is objectively greater than life, Zhuangzi uses the narrative device of the skull to voice this possibility without claiming it as absolute. What sort of joy does this skull have in the afterlife?

Is this afterlife available to all or merely the owner of this skull? He goes as far to leave open the possibility that the entire conversation is some form of trickery. Through Zhuangzi’s method of skeptical suggestion, the skull takes on the unconscious within the object, as Zhuangzi bestows animacy to it in how it speaks to Zhuangzi in his dream.

Zhuangzi’s story of carpenter Shi considers the utility, or lack thereof, of trees in the forest. Here, Zhuangzi builds upon the reasoning inherent in the story of the skull, revealing the potential for a Hegelian theory of animacy.

In the story, carpenter Shi enters the forest to cut down trees, but becomes dismayed when he observes that certain trees cannot be used for the village. He thinks to himself that such trees are useless. That night, as he dreams, the tree that Shi had commented on speaks to him, chastising him for his remarks. The tree explains that useful trees get torn apart in their use and live shorter lives because of it, whereas trees that humans see as useless live longer lives.

Unconsciousness provides the basis for animacy—and thus mysticism of the object— through the way that it emphasizes a point of unknowability beyond the mere consciousness of animals. While most generally agree that animals have consciousness, the unconscious opens the door for the point of mystery and spirit that animates life. In this manner, subjecthood—being with the unconscious as this point of unknowing—demarcates animacy, especially for the manner that the unconscious bestows excessive desire. In dialectics, we may think of this in two key ways. First, friction occurs between our unknown desires that seep into our perception of the world without our knowing and the world as it exists as such, for example the Freudian slip. These desires, though unknown to us, are nevertheless the part of us that make for the animated mystery of humanity. Second, we may also think through this in terms of language. The words we speak are our own, yet they exist outside of us and in the objective world. Through this necessary process of speaking, and creation in a broader sense, we generate parts of the objective world that reveal truths about us that may remain hidden to ourselves. Befitting, Zhuangzi’s Dao remains more mysterious and unknowable than Hegel’s geist; since Hegel’s geist arises between the friction in an irreconcilable contradiction, its ‘place’ remains knowable.5 Hegel’s geist arises in the friction of the individual and social organization, as emblematized through his Freudian, Marxist, and Fanonian successors. As we will see with the case of Cook Ding, one cannot speak Zhuangzi’s Dao and the Dao exists in the transformation of nature rather than a locatable irreconcilable contradiction in the subject or society.

Zhuangzi’s imaginative skepticism allows for the unconscious in the object as seen through his use of objects to speak to people in his short stories. We may consider Zhuangzi’s story of walking along the road and stumbling upon a talking skull, which takes on great

As for me, I’ve been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I’ve finally got it.

This is of great use to me. If I had been of some great use, would I have grown this large? Moreover, you and I are both of us things. What’s the point of this—things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die—how do you know I’m a worthless tree?7

With this story of carpenter Shi, we may extract two key observations.

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First, Zhuangzi achieves dialectical movement through his usage of yin and yang in this story—thought here through usefulness and uselessness. Zhuangzi employs the Daoist method of emphasizing the undervalued aspect, such as the tree’s yin in its useless beauty.

This emphasis pushes Zhuangzi towards a Hegelian dialectic of contradiction internal to the object rather than acceding to the mistake of conflating transformation with contradiction.

As Zhaungzi uses stories, the yin-yang emphasis takes on a process akin to the manner that dialectics involves movement. This narrative emphasis distinguishes Zhuangzi’s skeptical Daoism from the popular Daodejing that makes Zhuangzi preferable as a basis for comparative philosophy with Hegel. Revealing the movement of this process distinguishes Hegelian dialectics from the Buddhist observation on impermanence in the constant transformation of things. Zhuangzi’s use of stories to articulate his skepticism mirrors Hegel’s dialectical movement in the contradictions that arise through Zhuangzi’s stories.

Second, Zhuangzi’s tendency to use otherwise inanimate objects to deconstruct the assumptions of dreamers reveals his animating mysticism. Both the skull in his journey and the tree for carpenter Shi come to life as speaking subjects. And not only do they maintain status as speaking subjects, but their speech reveals that they have some knowledge that the dreamer themself lacks about the world. Their knowledge that they speak to the dreamers distinguishes them by the subjective knowledge that they hold and reveals their status as animate objects in their desire to be heard by the dreamer. Animating these objects through speech and therein the desire to be heard bestows subjecthood unto them.

Dreams become Zhuangzi’s space for considering the unconscious, then, in a manner akin to Freud. However, Zhuangzi uses dreams to animate objects rather than to perform therapy on the dreaming subject. The point of unknowability for Zhuangzi features in the

hidden yin or yang that he emphasizes to the speaking subject. Nevertheless, the dream still reveals hidden truths to the subject. With this qualification, we may imagine the manner that Zhuangzi uses objects in the dreams to articulate the basis of a Hegelian animacy or Hegelian mysticism, befitting of the very nature of the unconscious.8 On the one hand, we know that of course trees cannot speak, but Zhuangzi offers us the image of the speaking tree in keeping with his skeptical imagination. This skeptical imagination in combination with a Hegelian metaphysics reveals the mystical element of the unconscious, what is thought of as this point of unknowability in psychoanalytic thought.

Zhuangzi utilizes the unconscious to animate supposed nonsubjects through his imaginative skepticism, which offers insight into thought or imagined contradictions, whereas psychoanalysts—through their implicit use of Hegelian metaphysics—uncover the psychic conflict within the subject via the unconscious for therapeutic treatment. Zhuangzi’s preference for animism serves to reveal the inherent individualism within Hegel’s philosophy of contradiction, which always returns to the split subject. The subject—or individual—remains as the center of thought, even if the split occurs in a necessarily social manner.9 Thus, through this comparative analysis, we reveal some distinctive aspects of the foundational metaphysics between these systems of thought. Rather than decrying Western individualism, Hegelian thought founds the basis for a metaphysics that speaks to human experience alongside the therapeutic clinic for easing humanity’s difficulties with life. Zhuangzi—centuries before the secular rise of psychology to replace religion in answering the difficult questions of life—imagined the various spiritual possibilities latent in an agnosticism remarkable for his premodern times.

In short, if we follow Zhuangzi’s animism, then we may sacrifice the ability of Hegelian metaphysics to work through the turmoil of

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the psyche; regardless, this move reveals the mysticism inherent to either approach, and in this mysticism may we find the power of both approaches. Hegelian metaphysics through the turmoil of the psyche in its constant return to the split in the subject.10 Zhuangzi’s animism sacrifices this continuous return to the split in the subject to consider the various animacies in the world around him, sacrificing Hegel’s therapeutic potential for Zhuangzi’s imaginative skepticism. Hegelian dialectics distinguishes itself from knowledge-seeking positivistic scientism in the manner that dialectics produce geist, whereas positivism produces truth. On the one hand, positivism retains the ability to produce truth and knowledge that aid in a systemic understanding of the world around us in the way that understands the objects and objective world around us. However, geist, through dialectics, speaks to human experience better than scientific claims can, especially when considering the history of scientific racism and eugenics.11 Scientism’s hegemonic grasp on society has perhaps cast widespread aspersions on Hegelian dialectics. Freud contends psychoanalysis to be a science as an attempt to overcome its accusations that it is a “Jewish science” due to his Jewish background.12 Freud even considered Carl Jung his “arian prince” who would continue the project of psychoanalysis that he had developed. This false hope later haunted Freud, given Jung’s fascist tendencies and ultimate betrayal of Freudian psychoanalysis.13 In contrast, I position Zhuangzi as offering a retroactive, proto-Hegelian intervention, speaking to the importance of mysticism for grappling with human experience. Hegelian thought analyzes the necessity of religion—or meaning-producing mysticism more broadly—in human life, which takes the form of psychological theory or capitalist monetization in secular modernity. Hegelian dialectics shine in their ability to grapple with this exigency, offering the mysticism that we

necessarily imbue into some part of our world to make sense of it.

Zhuangzi’s retroactive elucidation of Hegel’s latent mysticism culminates in his famous dream of being a butterfly: “...he didn’t know if he was Zhou [Zhuangzi] having dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly having dreamed he was Zhou [Zhuangzi].”14 Zhuangzi implies two important ideas. First, Zhuangzi keys us into the fact that we cannot know some truths about the world. We must live with some epistemological assumptions, lest we float free of any meaning to grasp onto in the world. In this sense, Hegelian dialectics assert their value to navigate the point of unknowability—the unconscious within the structure, often the psyche—that arises with the contradiction at hand between the two dreams. Second, Zhuangzi cues us into the mystical manner in which our assumptions must occur through the parallel dreams at hand. Whereas the Freudian analyst may interrogate Zhuangzi’s unconscious desire to become a butterfly, Zhuangzi reveals the mysticism inherent to human life as we attempt to fill in the gaps of our understanding of the world. As a premodern thinker involved in religious discussion, Zhuangzi remains aware of the human necessity of religion—better understood here as mysticism in the general sense of meaning-production. In this manner, his imaginative skepticism takes form, and his doubt becomes productive of possibility. In the productivity of Zhuangzi’s doubt, we both find Hegel’s mysticism as speaking to this human need for meaning and as part of the imaginative animism that Zhuangzi opens for Hegel.

The world of the butterfly speaks to Zhuangzi’s Hegelian animacy in its imagined power. As aforementioned, it seems obvious on some level that the butterfly may not dream of Zhuangzi, but the thought poses a philosophical directive: to doubt our metaphysical assumptions of existence. In this place of imagination, and in a sense speculation (as Hegelian thought creates), Zhuangzi poses stories to

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induce doubt in the reader and engage new forms of animism that allow for the unconscious within the object. If we extend this unconscious beyond the scope of dreams, then we may consider the various spiritual existents in our world—perhaps in the form of nature spirits or other supernatural phenomena used to explain the precarity of life.

Furthermore, we may look to Zhuangzi’s example of Cook Ding, who had found the Dao in his activities as a butcher, to extend the unconscious to action itself. Zhuangzi’s natural Dao emphasizes the nature of relations between things. In this sense, one may experience the Dao in a state of ‘flow’—that is, when performing some action well. Cook Ding finds the Dao when chopping meat on the butcher block; he skillfully avoids the bones in the meat to preserve the quality of his knife.15 In this sort of spiritual action in everyday existence—later emphasized in Chan Buddhist thought, especially with the role of the cook—Hegelian dialectics locates the unconscious in the contradiction of the relation between two things that comprise the action itself. Perhaps the tension between Cook Ding’s knife and the meat that he cuts gives rise to a Hegelian geist that mirrors Zhuangzi’s Dao. Cook Ding, however, shows the difference between Zhuangzi’s Hegelian animism and a psychoanalytic return to the psyche in the distinction between naming in Zhuangzi and language in Freud. The contradiction at hand for Zhuangzi appears in the physicality of the material objects, and Zhuangzi could still contend that labeling—with language—detracts from the knowledge of the actual things themselves.

Per the parapraxis in psychoanalytic theory, language retains its power to reveal more about the subject than the subject might consciously want or even know to speak. Cook Ding thus reveals the final major distinction between Zhuangzi’s animism and Hegelian metaphysical emphasis on the psyche in their respective distrust of labeling and reliance on signification.16

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In considering the unconscious within the object as Zhuangzi’s stories do, the enduring individualism of Hegelian metaphysics becomes apparent. Today, Hegelian metaphysics retain a central place in political thought and leftist thought in particular, both in the form of psychoanalysis (most commonly encountered through gender theory and Slavoj Zizek) and in the enduring legacies of Marx and Fanon.17 Due to this importance, I reveal the potential for a Hegelian animism through the works of Zhuangzi whilst defending McGowan’s Hegelian metaphysics for their clinical value. Hegelian animism opens the door for considerations of theorizing collectivity and the environment against the continuous return to the individual.

Beyond the possibility of Hegelian animism, the articulation of Hegel’s latent mysticism reveals the role of geist in knowledge discourse. Hegel’s mysticism opens the path for a leftism that speaks to human experience to combat the rise of conservative figures that predominate psychological discourse such as Jordan Peterson. In the manner that psychology has taken the place of religion, Hegel’s mysticism and emphasis on the psyche gives his theory the tools to expand our notions of the self, as well as what constitutes animacy.

Endnotes 1 Todd McGowan, Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021); Zhuangzi, “The Way of Laozi and Zhuangzi,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition, ed. De Bary Wm Theodore and Irene Bloom (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), 77-111.

2 Ryan Engley and Todd McGowan, hosts, “Alexandre Kojeve,” Why Theory (podcast), May 21, 2021, accessed December 20, 2021, https://soundcloud.com/whytheory/alexandrekojeve.

3 Glen Skahill, “Trauma, Conflict, & Contradiction,” Tabula Rasa 1, no. 1 (2021): 54-59.

4 McGowan, Emancipation. See chapters one through three of McGowan’s book for the difference between opposition and contradiction. In

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6

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short, opposition works to define oneself against something, whereas contradiction sees how the subject is internally divided. Yin-yang thinking can tend towards posing the subject as whole through oppositional forces coming together, rather than the geist that arises out of the irreconcilable contradiction that composes the subject. In this manner, yin-yang thought can risk the idea of overcoming our constitutive contradictions, which is impossible in Hegel’s metaphysics.

Paul J. D’Ambrosio, “The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Daoist Sage,” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 9, no. 3 (2017): 202-217, https://doi.org/10.1080/17570638.2017.1356016.

Place in the sense that the contradiction between two conceivable things reveals some geist or spirit upon the matter of conflict.

Arthur Waley and Zhuangzi, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (London, UK: Allen & Unwin, 1969).

Zhuangzi, “The Way of Laozi and Zhuangzi,” 107.

This fits the nature of the unconscious insofar as the unconscious cannot be ‘proven’ through scientific means. Its precise value is in how it speaks to human experience outside of positivist epistemologies. Many detractors remark that the unconscious is a mystical object that you have to believe in for psychoanalytic theory to work, whereas this paper contends that this mystical element of psychoanalysis, rooted in Hegelian

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11 12

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14 15 16 17

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metaphysics, reveals the epistemological strength of psychoanalysis in speaking to human experience.

The split in Lacanian psychoanalytic thought— that which largely informs the academic left today—occurs with the subject's entrance into signification.

McGowan, Emancipation, 257.

Ryan Engley and Todd McGowan, hosts, “Defending Freud (side a).” Why Theory (podcast), October 23, 2019, accessed June 20, 2020. https://soundcloud.com/whytheory/defendingfreud-side-a.

Jung’s ultimate betrayal of psychoanalysis came in his move towards the collective unconscious away from the subject’s unconscious.

Zhuangzi, “The Way of Laozi and Zhuangzi,” 103.

Zhuangzi, 103-104.

For more on the psychoanalytic emphasis on signification, see the works of Jacques Lacan.

Hegel’s influences spreads wide across critical theory, assisting Karl Marx’s class conflict, Franz Fanon’s writings on internalizing colonization, Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles in the difficulty of coming into being, and in the manner that Laura Mulvey utilizes the Lacanian gaze—itself indebted to Hegelian thought.

Panem et Circenses: On Anti-Capitalist Mass Spectacle Sunny Jeong-Eimer, Pomona ’25 Staff Writer Give the people panem et circenses, “bread and circuses,” and they will sacrifice their political freedom for the delight of spectacular entertainment. This phrase, first coined by Roman poet Juvenal in A.D. 100 to describe how Roman politicians deployed spectacle as a means of public diversion and domination, captures a running theme throughout human history: namely, the inextricable relationship between mass consumption of spectacle and the construction of power. Of course, the Roman circus is now a relic of the ancient past. In contemporary times, the spectacle is artistically rendered for the silver screen, presented as commodities of mass television and cinema with ideological strings attached. The ‘ideological strings’ attached to much of contemporary media in the age of advanced capitalism, then, must constrain the public social imaginary to accept the hegemonic interests of Capital as eternal, absent any alternatives. At the same time, we increasingly see the proliferation of so-called ‘anti-capitalist media’ in the twentyfirst century, calling into question the conflicting potential of mass media as an avenue to both social control and class struggle. Using the works of Gilles Deleuze, Guy Debord, and Mark Fisher, I first evaluate the mass media spectacle as a primary constituent of social reality and tool of capitalist domination. Then, with the support of Toward a Third Cinema by Fernando Solans and Octavio Getino, I consider the possibilities of creating mass media by and for the masses—in other words, how the oppressed might seize the means of production of spectacle to construct alternative futures beyond capitalism.

Early twentieth century films existed in the era of what Gilles Deleuze, in his essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,”1 described

as the disciplinary society—a term first coined

by Michel Foucault. This model of control is best represented by the factory: an enclosed brick-and-mortar environment in which individuals are ordered in time and space, gathered into a labor force intended to generate value that exceeds the sum of its labor force parts (i.e., machinery, human laborers). The role of film in the disciplinary society is to generate normative standards of obedience to environments and institutions of enclosure: the factory, but also the nuclear family home, school, prison, and so on. The disciplinary society demands that individuals find themselves enclosed in a social monolith; they are the good American citizen, the hard worker, domestic wife, breadwinning father—these media tropes construct each individual into their prescribed role in the social hierarchy. One’s subjectivity predictably adheres to a metastory of where they fit in the historical moment.

Censorship, then, becomes a strategy the film industry employs in order to guard the ideological foundation of this closed hierarchy from potential breaches. As an example, one need only look to the Hollywood blacklist of the mid-20th century, the post-WWII Cold War period, when American disciplinary society was at its height. Organized by the U.S. government’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC),2 the blacklist sought to end the employment of entertainment industry professionals suspected of being or sympathizing with Communists: Nothing subversive or un-American has appeared on the screen, nor can any number of Hollywood investigations obscure the patriotic services of the 30,000 loyal Americans employed in Hollywood who have given our government invaluable aid to war and peace.

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The Waldorf Statement, read at the first HUAC trial by Motion Picture Association of America president Eric Johnston

The surface abundance of ideological diversity in postmodern mass entertainment is less a new freedom than it is a new form of control, evolving upon, rather than abolishing altogether, the ideological enclosures of the disciplinary society. The societies which populate postmodernity, in which meaning has shifted from the form of coherent metanarratives to fragmented, nonlinear flows of information, are what Deleuze calls societies of control.

Whereas discipline locked the individual into an ideological metanarrative propagating the defined barracks of work-home-school-prison, control now “liberates” the individual onto a highway where it appears one is newly autonomous and mobile. Roads are continually opened so you may travel anywhere you want, as fast as you like (within limit), so long as you submit to disclosing at every road’s checkpoints, entrance, and exit where and who you are, know that you may be subject to surveillance at any time, that at any moment you may be pulled over and revoked of your freedom.

Every road which supposedly represents your freedom also entails multiplied mechanisms of surveillance and control that render your freedom conditional. Moreover, your imagination of free mobility is wholly resigned to areas the state has sanctioned and littered with control technologies; to consider movement beyond the paved highways is unthinkable.

In the society of control, anti-establishment entertainment commodities operate like highways. On the condition that you defer your objectless rage and despair to the cues of mass media and channel your revolutionary zeal into ritualistic consumption—all the while allowing corporations and the state to surveil every movie ticket and TV title you consume— you may proceed to more sanctioned content.

There is an enormous market for anti-capitalist media that dramatizes, often with ample gore and death, the systemic and everyday cruelties of capitalism. Parasite (2019), directed by Bong Joon-Ho, is nominally considered a timely critique of the brutality, delusion, and

Hence, the first half of the twentieth century largely saw the Hollywood screen remain uncontaminated by “subversive or un-American” activities. The blacklist is a testament to the state’s fear that mass entertainment might threaten the project of embedding American nationalist family-work values in the social fabric of society—values, which, at the time, were integral to the developmental motions of neoliberalism. Propaganda lived in the coherence of grand narratives which imposed a sense of universal truth in terms of ordering hierarchical relations of social power as well as distinguishing good from bad, us from them.

Come 1975, the House Un-American Activities Committee met its demise, roughly coinciding with the decline of modernism. Six years later, MTV began broadcasting its dizzyingly limitless (or so it seemed) spectacular explosions of sounds, colors and words too irreverent to care about the confines of old-fashioned American sensibilities. In other words, the channel becomes a poster child for the dawn of postmodernity. The smell of teen rebellion and subversive anti-establishment aesthetics suddenly make their big break onto national TV, suggesting that the hegemonic reign of ‘The System’ is faltering. Coincidentally, the genesis of MTV also inaugurated the rise of Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism, not to mention the intensified government repression of the 1960’s anti-capitalist, Black liberation, and youth counterculture movements. Hence, Fisher argues that the proliferation of anti-establishment entertainment, as seen on TV as well as embodied in despairing celebrity figures such as Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, were telling, not of new freedom, but of the market’s response to aimless generational despondency at neoliberalism crushing the prospects of alternative futures beyond capitalism.

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desperation involved in class violence, which we see personified in the conflict between the impoverished Kim and ultra-wealthy Park families. The film has been celebrated by the most elite sectors of the Hollywood entertainment complex, notably making history, for example, as not only the first non-English language, but as the first supposedly anti-capitalist film to win Best Picture at the Oscars3. The artistry and talent behind Parasite are certainly deserving of recognition, but it is worth wondering what becomes of a work’s political meaning as it is assimilated into the same structures it supposedly seeks to critique.

Moreover, one must question whether a film that raked in $259 million in global revenue4 can truly transcend its role as a commodity sustained by and for the oppressive forces of capital. The success of Parasite suggests that capital has advanced to the point where it no longer needs to make an explicit case for itself in order to persist—further, that capital can even make highly profitable gestural critiques of itself to reproduce its own logic.

Dominant images of mass media delivered in the form of audio/visual spectacle serve as effective mechanisms of control because their very nature is to simulate reality with such precision and authority that the simulation of reality overcomes one’s original experience of social life. As Guy Debord argues in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, the spectacle is not merely an assembly of images, it is “a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”5 The spectacle does not exist as a stand-alone decoration of the world, born of neutral technologies; it is rather a direct reflection and justification of the conditions and projects entailed by the preexisting mode of production. As the spectacle, explicitly or not, reproduces signs of advanced capitalist production, signs come to replace the lived reality of everyday social life. Social life learns to organize itself around its very negation, the spectacle. In a context where social relations are colored by the exploitation and alienation

characteristic of capitalism, the foremost goal of the spectacle is merely to continue developing itself and the ruling economic order which sustains it. It is no coincidence, then, that the elaboration of contemporary capitalism (and its respective hegemonic nation-states) have coincided with the intensification of spectacle’s omnipresence in everyday life—surely in the accelerated production of longer form media such as television and film but increasingly so as the constant flows of rapid-fire images and short form video clips encountered on social media as well. Though the latter form is not the focus of this paper, social media is another clarifying example of a case where spectacle has monopolized individual reality by devaluing the state of being in favor of appearing; with this example, one can also note how Deleuze’s society of control is expressed in corporate and state hyper-surveillance of user behavior as it relates to the abundant, apparently free-flowing diversity of spectacular content on social media feeds.

The shift from Foucault’s disciplinary society to the society of control expresses power’s adaptation to modes beyond repression in order to sustain itself and further develop capital.

Societies of control exchanged the mode of repression for the guise of freedom and pleasure, resulting in a condition Fisher describes as depressive hedonia,6 a compulsive need for instant pleasure that remains unsatisfactory. The spectacle lives at the heart of this new mode of repression, presenting itself as a form of pleasure and leisure where the subject can supposedly experience some level of freedom and escape from the drudgery of their active, working hours.

The anti-capitalist film implies a glimmering promise in its apparent declaration of rebellion against the bleak, dead-ended economic system the average consumer finds themself ensnared in. The blockbuster anti-establishment film masquerades as a fundamentally oppositional force to the very system of capital which sustains it, constructing, instead,

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the appearance that it is allied with the interests of the economically exploited class. Bo Burnham’s Netflix comedy special Inside (2021) makes a claim to authenticity in its premise: a sheepishly self-aware white man in quarantine (who happens to have a $4 million net worth)7 films a series of tongue-in-cheek musical numbers that offer social commentary through songs like “How the World Works” where a sock puppet sings a grab-bag of what they didn’t teach you in history class, covering everything from worker alienation and Indigenous genocide to the “pedophilic corporate elite.” There are two songs maniacally cheering on hyper-villainized Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—satirically, of course. Similar to Parasite, the special won three Emmy awards, proclaimed by Hollywood critics to be a masterful representation of the universal despair and anxiety felt by everyone living through COVID confinement, not to mention the myriad other political and economic crises characteristic of contemporary life. By personifying real time mass death and social turmoil into a one-man Netflix comedy show that makes a series of sweeping, vaguely anti-establishment generalizations about the state of the world, Inside masterfully compels its mass audience to adopt the commodity’s ironic distance from real social life. Relatedly, Debord writes that “complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness.”8 Deleuze discusses how in societies of control, corporations have souls; with Inside, we see how a multinational media conglomerate like Netflix can conceal its investment in the further development of capitalist exploitation by impressing upon consumers the notion that it cares to platform edgy, politically-conscious media while transposing Burnham’s self-awareness onto their corporate branding.

In relating to spectacle, the individual relinquishes their autonomous experience of social reality in favor of a social reality directed and produced by capital. When the individual relates their social experience to an artifact of

mass entertainment, they are ultimately relating to the systems of production which that entertainment commodity represents in its form and content. This is fundamentally distinct from relating one’s social experience to that of another human because mass entertainment mediates social relations through the alienating and subjectless impulses of capital flow. In identifying oneself and the world with the purely capital-driven commodity form, even as it pretends to perform the subjective human experience, the individual abandons their subjecthood for a state of objecthood. The active labor of processing the social world as it is in its immediacy is deferred to the passive labor of endless pleasurable consumption. Watching anti-capitalist spectacle is a self-soothing mechanism that absolves the individual of their own responsibility in condoning capital—the multinational media conglomerate seduces the individual into believing their pursuit of commodity pleasure can exist separately from, and even in resistance to, the violence of capital. The passive spectator who aspires to conform their subjective world to the unreality of commodity objecthood merely becomes a receptacle for capital’s desires. This reflects Robert Pfaller’s notion of interpassivity9 wherein the anti-capitalist commodity absorbs and performs the labor of anticapitalism for the passive spectator who, in exchange, surrenders to the commodity’s primary desire: to further its reproduction via mass consumption that persists with impunity.

Gestural performance of anti-capitalist ideas lived vicariously through spectacle now constitutes evidence of one’s real political freedom and material resistance. It is easier to contemplate anti-capitalist spectacle and revolution than to contemplate the real conditions of capitalism and material possibilities of revolution beyond spectacle. Political empowerment is felt, not in bringing one’s body to protest or in organizing one’s immediate community, but rather in the performative act of retweeting alongside tens of thousands of other heavily

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surveilled anonymous users the phrase “eat the rich.” Public discourse around real life events of worker exploitation are mediated by viral screencaps of television shows like Netflix’s Squid Game (2021), assimilating agitation around real instances of human injustice into the obfuscated unreality of corporate entertainment spectacle. If one cannot process social life and exercise political empowerment beyond the spectacle, the subject becomes entirely dependent on the continued generation of the mass commodity form.

The habitual concession of one’s subjecthood associated with the act of consuming anti-capitalist entertainment spectacle reinforces what Fisher calls capitalist realism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”10 Though the anticapitalist film never makes an explicit argument for capitalism—in fact, appears to argue against it by representing it at its worst—space to imagine other viable political and economic systems is typically omitted. We see effects repeated in the highly stylized depiction of social violence but causes are mystified into implicit gestures at something or someone exceptionally evil. If the film discusses the cause of status quo social violence at all, it is a one-dimensional portrait of individual bad apples: the cruel corporation, the depraved and omnipotent CEO. On the other hand, anti-capitalist narratives may portray the exploited as powerless victims whose efforts to transcend their circumstance largely end in failure. At times, there may be the valorized individual who manages to transcend circumstance against all odds and acts as savior to the sorry masses. The exploited masses are cast as a character of pity and lost cause, met with short-lived shock but otherwise shown as fundamentally disposable.

Repeated simulation of violence against the exploited for entertainment value desensitizes audiences to real-world brutality. The line between real and fictional images of oppression

are blurred, building resemblance between the oppressed person and the movie character who ultimately only exists as an object of commodity.

Though less common, there are examples of mass entertainment which appear to break past capitalist realism, harnessing speculative science fiction to envision socially liberated futures. Directed by Ryan Coogler, the film adaptation of Marvel’s Black Panther (2018) weaves historical realities of Black diaspora, revolutionary decolonial struggle, and cultural lineage into the imagined world of Wakanda: an Afrofuturist utopia that rewrites dominant perceptions of Africa and the Black experience.

The widely-felt significance of Black Panther as a profoundly celebratory and empowering tribute to Black culture and liberatory political futures is irrefutable. Still, as Achille Mbembe argues in a critical reading of the film,11 it simultaneously dilutes radical Afrofuturist aesthetics in favor of appeals to non-speculative American capitalist mythology. The destiny of the never-colonized utopic Black nation revolves around the extraction of a natural resource called ‘vibranium’—though, like in an Apple commercial, the exploitation of humans and the earth that is inherent in all extractive economies is never mentioned. The dream of Wakanda is individualized through savior protagonist T’challa whose character assimilates into the classic American dream male quest trope which the Marvel franchise is notorious for. In the last scene, under the approving gaze of Agent Ross, a white male character personifying the US government, T’challa declares to the United Nations in Vienna that Wakanda will end its vacation from history and open itself up to the rest of the world.

Imperialism and capitalism alike rely on denying human subjectivity its very existence, insisting that the value of humanity lies only in its potential to be exploited either as or for the commodity form. The spectacle, when it is deployed as a weapon of domination, follows this same logic when it generates

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hegemonic fantasies that themselves replace human subjective experience of reality with capital-driven social reality. If all the anti-capitalist film does is denounce the effects of this reality to the masses, told in a way permitted by the ruling class of Hollywood—and ask only that the masses contemplate these effects as the passive, innocent consumer, thus becoming stranger to their collective and personal social circumstance—then there is no such thing as the anti-capitalist film. As Irwin Silber writes:

sell workers of the world a ticket out of capitalist realism. The works that will collectively erode away and build past capitalist realism will have nothing to do with Hollywood superhero tropes and Academy Awards because they will be fundamentally indigestible to the architecture of capital.

Niels Niessen discusses an example of Third Cinema aesthetics as they were deployed by the Black Panther Party in 1969, Oakland: The film’s opening is jarring. On the sound of drums, the film shows a montage sequence of the windows of its party’s offices smashed by police bullets, followed by an interview with Newton from jail. “In America,” Newton speaks, “the police . . . are there to contain us, to brutalize us, to murder us, because they have their orders to do, just like the soldiers in Vietnam.”14

In reality the area of ‘permitted protest’ of the System is much greater than the System is willing to admit. This gives the artists [and subjugated art spectators] the illusion that they are acting ‘against the system’ by going beyond certain narrow limits; they do not realize that even anti-System art can be absorbed and utilized by the System, as both a brake and a necessary self-correction.12

Here, reality is not mystified or hidden; it is directly implicated through human testimonial.

There is no stylized superhero nor villain, but rather an international ‘us’ against militarized actors carrying out orders—orders intended to suppress resistance and further the developments of US imperialist capitalism. In the foreground of the film is Huey P. Newton, a revolutionary organizer speaking both through his personal experience of the world as well as in solidarity with Black liberation and decolonial movements. A “jarring” and unapologetically political film that explicitly indicted the U.S. on charges of ordering murder and brutality on a global scale could not have fed capital’s insatiable appetite for a circus of phantasmic realities. However, what it could do, along with other cinema of liberation that insist on operating outside and against capital, is help the masses feel and, most importantly, act upon a hunger they may have lost sight of prior—a way out of the circus.

The society of control subtly modulates itself by castrating and assimilating all works of culture that might allow the exploited human to move past the ruling class’s assembly of mirages. For the exploited class to recognize reality absent inversion and distortion would reveal far more than its profound violence because of this we are already well aware. More importantly, this would expose the naked fragility of a reality wholly directed by appearances and hence, the urgent possibilities to subvert hegemonic spectacle in favor of a culture that is actively created, not passively consumed, in the spirit of militant revolution. The audiovisual cinematic spectacle has unparalleled power to seduce individuals into aestheticized reality just as much as documented reality, to gather attention and incite the exchange of testimonial by everyday people, to locate again truth in all its lived expressions. This is the third cinema as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino envision it: “films that the System cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its needs, […] that directly and explicitly set out to fight the System.”13 Hollywood will never

Endnotes 1 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7.

2 “Waldorf Statement,” 1947.

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3 Dan Hassler-Forest, “Bong Joon-Ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 1, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bong-joon-ho-love-in-the-time-of-capitalism/.

4 “Parasite,” Box Office Mojo, 2019, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt6751668/.

5 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black and Red, 1977).

6 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010).

7 Rybecca Quinn, “What Is Bo Burnham's Net Worth?,” The Cold Wire, December 22, 2021, https://www.thecoldwire.com/bo-burnham-networth/.

8 9 10 11

Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 23.

Fisher, “Bong Joon-Ho,” 12-13.

Fisher, 2.

Niels Niessen, “Black Panther Transmedia: The Revolution Will Not Be Streamed,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 5 (2021): 121-149, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2021.0022.

12 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “TOWARD A THIRD CINEMA,” Cinéaste 4, no. 3 (1970): 1-12, https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/41685716.

13 Solanas and Getino, 12.

14 Niessen, “Black Panther Transmedia,” 136.

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The Struggle Hannah Frasure, Pomona ’24 Staff Writer – Second Place for Best Artwork Medium: Graphite and Ink

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This piece portrays some of Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical concepts via an unconventional redrawing of one of the most famous sculptures in Western art history, The Kiss.

While at first glance, the original work, depicting the embrace of a naked man and woman, seems to be an innocent (if not scandalous, given where and when it was created—France, 1882) representation of love, its sculptor, Auguste Rodin, was implementing a darker idea.

It represents two characters from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy who were based on real-life lovers in medieval Italy. The pair was murdered by the jealous husband of the woman. But while they represent the sin of lust, some academics contend that Dante renders the two in a sympathetic light, as does Rodin, who it has been argued—by focusing on anatomical correctness and emotion—chooses to render women as subjects, fully capable of reciprocal, mutual interactions with others, as opposed to relegating them to be the objects of men’s desires. However, in my rendition, I wanted to depict a version more accurate of heterosexual relations throughout history— where if they are not forced, are fake.

Here, I engage with Beauvoir, who consistently discusses this kind of fake relation in her works in contrast with her existentialist contemporaries. While other existentialists address the dangers that come from our relationships with the “Other,” it is only Beauvoir who addresses the gendered aspect. She posits women have historically been the “Other,” denied the freedom to engage in the kind of personal projects that allow them to transcend time and space, to be subjects of their own life in the sense that men are. This kind of relationship makes for authentic love between heterosexual partners, where both fundamentally respect the freedom and subjecthood of the other, difficult. In The Second Sex, she provides the specific example of how in sexual interactions, the woman’s participation tends to only a

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means for the man’s pleasure, rather than an ends in and of itself. So, as you can see in my work, there is a shallowness to the interaction, which mirrors the one the sculptor had with the likely model and assistant, Camille Claudel, a 19-year-old who became a contemporary of his, and who he ultimately betrayed and destroyed the career of. One can see how even as the woman appears to be a willing partner in the embrace, there are parts of her that are not—in the form of the ghost-like arm that limply hangs by her side or defiantly pushes away from the man and claws at the air—suggesting these interactions, once again, fail to allow women to transcend their reality. Moreover, in viewing women only as objects, men too lose their subjecthood, as Beauvoir would have it, because they sublimate their selfhood to something that will nonetheless perish upon death (the cultural idea that one is rewarded with manhood if they succeed in multiple heterosexual conquests). So, in my work, the pair remains in hell even as it is an existential as opposed to biblical one. Neither realizes the true freedom of the other, and so both fail to authentically love. The elements and principles employed in this piece point to that. The contrasting direction of pencil strokes in the background texture resemble the expressionist style of Rodin’s sculpting, with the overlaying finer lines of pen overlaying giving the impression of how sculptures are created—from large detail to smaller ones. The grey monotone conveys the ethical muddiness and strips the piece of any eroticism that was present in the original work. As a result, it defies the commodification of female sexuality and the objectification of female bodies. Ultimately, I wanted to portray something that would resonate with the intended audience of this journal—college students—and as a blind eye is often turned to the gendered reality of hookup culture, which permeates college campuses, I wanted to do just the opposite.

Workers Gabriella Meerwarth, Scripps ’23 Resident Artist Medium: Collage "Workers” explores the relationship between labor and identity. Through mixed media collage, crowds of faces are interwoven with abstracted texture and color.

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80,000 Ineffective Hours Drey Diggs, Pomona ’24 Staff Writer At the end of four years of intellectual exploration, college students are tasked with making a choice to begin their careers. This choice weighs heavily on many, and 80,000 Hours, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to helping people make an effective career choice, does nothing to ease minds. The bold letters on their starting page are a stern reminder: “This is your most important decision.” Although 80,000 Hours seeks to help make this choice easier, the moral weight they place on careers and the specific advice they give is highly problematic. 80,000 Hours has roots in Effective Altruism, a philosophy and organization that suffers from moral urgency gone awry. This moral urgency has led to an underdeveloped philosophy that gives individual solutions to systemic issues. As a result, the advice of 80,000 Hours is often inaccessible and reinforces the systems that create and perpetuate the very issues it seeks to address.

Effective Altruism refers both to a general philosophical movement and to a specific registered charity. As an organization, Effective Altruism emerged as an umbrella term for 80,000 Hours and another organization, Giving What We Can, which asks members to pledge 10% of their lifetime income to charity.1 The overarching goal of Effective Altruism and its associated organizations is to use evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to use one’s time and money to do the most good possible.2 However, the philosophical groundwork for these organizations existed long before they were given a name, and their motivation and justification largely lie in the concept of impartiality. Effective Altruists are supposed to act in a way which accurately reflects the fact that there is no true difference between good for the self and good for others, or for someone near or far. This extends to the

more controversial notion that one is equally as responsible for the bad that one allows to occur as they are for the bad that they themselves cause. Peter Singer credits himself as one of the contemporary influencers of Effective Altruism due to his work in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” in which he argues that, given this impartiality, we must donate our resources up until the point of marginal utility where continuing to give would cause a level of harm that would outweigh the good it accomplishes.3 Singer also suggests that Effective Altruism is more fundamentally derived from and justified by Henry Sigdwick’s Maxim of Benevolence, which states “that each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainable by him.”4 Essentially, Singer argues that the practical application of this maxim would entail giving one’s own excesses to those in need in the most efficient way possible. Effective Altruism, then, determines what are supposed to be the most efficient and effective ways to give and morally requires that one acts accordingly. Guides to Effective Altruism for more general audiences, such as effectivealtruism.org and Singer’s own book The Most Good You Can Do, tend to be significantly less demanding than Singer’s earlier work, which was aimed at an academic audience. Still, the lowered expectations to appeal to a wider audience do not indicate any change in the actual moral principles that motivate Effective Altruism, nor do they necessarily indicate that people would be evaluated any less stringently.

With its job board5 and free career coach6 ing, 80,000 Hours doesn’t immediately appear philosophical. However, there is a moral weightiness to its advice. The articles and

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forums don’t teach people how to make best lives for themselves, but to make themselves into vessels for positive change for others. Because Effective Altruism views the efficiency of this task as morally relevant, following the advice of 80,000 Hours is morally required. Thus, the guidance of 80,000 Hours should be viewed philosophically as an illustration of how the moral principles of Effective Altruism can be applied to a particular context. It is in this context of work and career choice where the sloppiness and underdevelopment of Effective Altruism is the most apparent. As clever as it is to give moral counsel where so many are already seeking practical guidance, this makes negative consequences all the more salient. However, these criticisms which focus on the content of 80,000 Hours are actually reflections on the broader philosophy of Effective Altruism, and my condemnations hold for other facets of the broader organization and philosophy.

Common criticisms of Effective Altruism tend to echo Bernard Williams’ classic critique of Utilitarianism, arguing that the impartiality of Effective Altruism backfires and leads to a loss of integrity on the part of Altruists.7 In his reflection on philosophical critiques that have been brought up against Effective Altruism, Jeff MacMahan accuses critics of relying too heavily on attacking the Utilitarian roots of the philosophy when, in fact, Effective Altruism can stand alone and is not actually tied to any particular ethical theory.8 This, although concerning in its own right, also leads Altruists to actively cause harm in the name of alleviating the human suffering caused by others. Although I am not fully convinced by MacMahan that Effective Altruism is not inherently reliant on Utilitarian thinking, that is not the concern of this paper. Instead, I aim to raise a criticism that would satisfy MacMahan by avoiding discussions of Utilitarianism and its shortcomings wherever possible. Instead, I intend to focus on the intense urgency behind Effective Altruism and the resulting philosophical underdevelopment.

The urgency itself is more than justified.

The issues which are the focus of Effective altruism—fighting extreme poverty, animal suffering, and improving the long-term future9— are dire. The effects of climate change and the risk of catastrophic global warfare grow more concerning by the day, and it is clear to anyone who cares to consider the situation critically that something must be done. Unfortunately, the urge to do something quickly can undermine the ability to do it well. Effective Altruists have created a philosophy that appears to be fittingly demanding for a demanding period of human history. Unfortunately, the demands are misdirected. For some, the guidance of 80,000 Hours is virtually impossible to follow.

In cases where it can be followed, it may be more harmful than helpful in the long-term.

The urge to make some change as quickly as possible results in a philosophy that approaches systemic issues with individual solutions. Extreme poverty, the factory farming which causes such high levels of animal suffering, and the various risks to our long-term future are all caused at least in part by the longstanding systems of capitalism, (neo-)colonialism, and imperialism. In its haste, Effective Altruism is effectively blind to these systems. It overlooks how they may prevent people from engaging in the altruistic behaviors it demands.

Worse still, the career paths suggested by 80,000 Hours reinforce these very systems, perpetuating in the long-term the exact issues they aim so solve.

The underdevelopment of Effective Altruism clearly manifests in the inaccessibility of the advice of 80,000 Hours. To moralize career choice so strongly, as 80,000 Hours does, is to operate under the assumption that all individuals have the privilege to choose their own career path. In fact, much of the working class struggles to find work that meets the cost of living, much less anything that would be deemed sufficiently altruistic. 80,000 Hours tends to suggest career paths such as government policy, AI or climate research, and

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grantmaking. This sort of work usually requires at least an undergraduate degree and tends to expect graduate study, not to mention the sort of social status and connections required to do the work well (to be effective in one’s altruism) For those who struggle to find any job at all that will hire them, who lack a college (or high school) diploma, who don’t have the social resources to change career paths, or who otherwise find these career paths inaccessible, 80,000 Hours seems to make a few exceptions, suggesting that one can still donate money, engage in advocacy, and volunteer. Still, these options also require time and money that many people simply don’t have. It is unclear, then, how Effective Altruists would evaluate those who work at factory farms (in an industry which Effective Altruism hopes to end) and in other jobs that may not be feelgood but which put food on the table for working class families.

If 80,000 Hours were like many of the other career advising services, it would be significantly less concerning. It is unfortunate, in any case, that career advising would be aimed at those who are likely already secure. But it is the moral component of 80,000 Hours that makes this so much more severe. It’s unclear to what extent individuals with ineffective or completely non-altruistic careers are condemned, but at the very least they lack the opportunity to do right in the eyes of Effective Altruism. A well-developed moral philosophy should be accessible to all; Effective Altruism doesn’t even seem to be conscious of how out of reach its ideals are to the majority of the population. If it is self-conscious, that is perhaps worse. To intentionally write moral standards which can only be achieved by the rich is to deny all others the opportunity to live a moral life. The working class, to the Effective Altruist, is a group which is only acted on but which can’t be granted the privilege of acting for itself.

For those who do have a substantial amount of freedom with regards to their career

choice, the advice of Effective Altruism is often ineffective or even harmful. One of the career paths endorsed by 80,000 Hours is called Earning To Give, which involves working in high earning positions in order to donate money to effective nonprofits. Among the highlighted figures who have taken this path are the founder of a cryptocurrency exchange and a Wall Street trader. Although 80,000 Hours explicitly condemns certain careers they deem harmful, these positions, which perpetuate existing systems of harm, are explicitly endorsed.

Many of the other positions that would qualify for Earning To Give involve exploiting and underpaying workers in order to turn a profit. In The Most Good You Can Do, Peter Singer suggests that an individual who sets up a factory in a developing country qualifies as an Effective Altruist so long as they pay somewhat more than the local factories and give away a substantial amount of their profits.10 This is highly troubling. That the factory has profits at all is an indication that the workers are not being compensated for the full value of their labor. But Singer and other advocates for Earning to Give encourage individuals to exploit workers, who are themselves struggling to get by, so that they can steal the value of their labor and donate it to organizations who will use the money more “effectively.”

Here, a major issue with the very notion of giving only where most effective, the heart of Effective Altruism, becomes apparent. What is given must come from somewhere, and that place is often from those very people who are supposed to be the recipient of aid. An effective Altruist may start a factory, hire a worker, exploit that worker, and donate the profits to an organization that serves that worker (and others like them). In trying to make the money go further, the Effective Altruist denies the worker the agency to determine themselves what they need most. This, although concerning in its own right, also leads Altruists to actively cause harm in the name of alleviating the human suffering caused by others. Not only is

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the worker denied their agency, but the fact that the causes that Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours support work within and reinforce existing systems of harm is an indication that they are not as effective as they claim to be.

In the long term, the exploited worker could very well have been better off without the interference of the Altruist.

Endorsed careers outside of the Earning to Give umbrella can be harmful as well. Among the other recommended paths is Government and Policy. Attempting to counter the point that Effective Altruism ignores systemic change, 80,000 Hours specifically suggests work within party politics.11 This recommendation, and the reasoning behind it, is bizarre at best. Suggesting that working within party politics to change policy falls within the category of systemic change indicates a complete misunderstanding of the very nature of systemic change. Working within party politics only validates a system that has been proven to be incredibly inefficient and which disproportionately benefits the ruling class. Suggestions to work for or monetarily support non-profits are similarly harmful, although less direct.

Non-profits protect governments from accountability for failing to support their citizens.

In her review of Peter Unger’s Living High and Letting Die, Martha Nussbaum also notes that non-profits are simply unprepared to deal with the practical complications that would come with the level of funding Effective Altruists hope will be directed towards organizations such as Oxfam and UNICEF.12 This concern is very much hypothetical, as it is more than unlikely that these organizations would ever amass the kind of wealth that Nussbaum imagines. In fact, Effective Altruism is supposed to be fluid, so it would stop recommending the donations to any particular organization if it were to be overfunded, Still, this fluidity is yet another indicator of a rushed philosophy.

The fluidity of Effective Altruism is surely meant to come across as a sign of maturity,13 but it is quite the opposite. Working minute-

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to-minute on whichever cause appears the most promising is essentially a search for instant moral gratification. Rather than examining opportunities for systemic changes that would have a much larger long-term impact, Effective Altruists work with whatever they are given. The tenants of impartiality and benevolence that form the backbone of Effective Altruism are commendable, and it is unfortunate that principles are advice were so hastily derived from them. A philosophy should, at the very least, hold up to its own standards. Unfortunately, the desire for speedy change has caused Effective Altruism to become irrational and ineffective. In the face of moral urgency, it is the task of philosophers to do what they do best and truly reflect on which of the nearly infinite options should be perused. The poor and inaccessible advice of 80,000 Hours demonstrates the disaster that can arise when haste meddles with philosophy.

Endnotes 1 Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 11.

2 “Introduction to Effective Altruism,” Effective Altruism, March 1, 2020, https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism/.

3 Singer, “The Most Good You Can Do”, 13.

4 Singer, 82.

5 “Job Board,” 80,000 Hours, accessed October 12, 2021, https://80000hours.org/job-board/.

6 “Speak with Us,” 80,000 Hours, accessed December 10, 2021, https://80000hours.org/speak-withus/?int_campaign=2021-08__primary-navigation.

7 J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 108–18.

8 Jeff McMahan, “Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism,” The Philosophers' Magazine, no.

73 (2016): 92–99, https://doi.org/10.5840/tpm20167379.

9 Effective Altruism, “Introduction to Effective Altruism.”

10 Singer, “The Most Good You Can Do”, 10.

11 Benjamin Todd, “Misconceptions about Effective Altruism,” 80,000 Hours, June 1, 2021, https://80000hours.org/2020/08/misconceptionseffective-altruism/#misconception-3-effective-altruism-ignores-systemic-change.

12 Martha Nussbaum, “If Oxfam Ran the World,” London Review of Books, November 7, 2019,

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n17/martha-nussbaum/if-oxfam-ran-the-world.

13 “Frequently Asked Questions and Common Objections,” Effective Altruism, accessed December 24, 2021, https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqscriticism-objections/#if-everyone-followed-theadvice-of-effective-altruism-wouldnt-that-leadto-a-misallocation-of-resources.

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Cat and Mouse Joshua Suh, Pomona ’23 Resident Artist – Winner of the Issue II Art Prize Medium: Musical Improvisation Listen at tabularasaclaremont.com/Cat-and-Mouse-Joshua-Suh The problem of definition defined in Part I of Derek’s paper formed the main impetus of the piece. I was attached to this concept of regression and felt that it reminded me of a cat and mouse game. As Derek puts it, in order to define a concept you need to assume some other set of definitions, but what defines those other definitions? As such, there is this constant cat and mouse as you’re chasing towards a definition of a concept yet the words used to define this concept need to be defined themselves and those words need definitions as well, ad infinitum. This piece is a fully improvised saxophone and piano duet that plays a similar game. The saxophone plays a note and the piano plays an accompaniment that harmonically gives that note context (in other words, defining what that note is in relation to a key). The saxophone then moves to a new note, one that needs to be redefined by the piano, and the two instruments are locked in this back and forth until the end of the piece. I encourage listeners to hear how each note the saxophone plays skirts with tension and resolution as the background piano changes contexts.

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Problems for a Platonic Idea of Logic Derek Li, HMC ’23 Staff Writer What is logic? If Plato, in observing instances of virtuous actions, posited an encompassing Form of the Good, then shall we not, by discerning in every piece of reasoning the course of logic, acknowledge a Form of Logic on which is predicated every idea? No one has ever reconciled a contradiction or understood an illogical thought. A concept, to state that it has meaning, that it is conceivable, implies it is logical. Logic, by which I understand deductive logic,1 is but another name for concept; it is a relation of concepts immanent in the concepts themselves.

Such is the Platonic conception of logic, as I’ll refer to it. I do not intend it as an interpretation of Plato’s view of logic but wish to employ the name to characterize the universal applicability of logic and an affirmation of concept as a primary epistemic entity. This view, of logic as the necessary relation of concepts, is itself a simple concept. That poor bachelor invoked by logic instructors expects us, by the nature his name indicates, to understand that he has no wife. Say you introduce to me your father and your daughter, I cannot be helped from the conclusion that this man is the grandfather of this girl. And, of course, mathematicians undertook great inquiries in logic: just as the ancients admired mathematics as the model of philosophical knowledge, the subject of modern logic was motivated by an examination of mathematical reasoning.2 One preliminary question is regarding the ambit of logic.

Does deduction pertain solely to mathematical concepts3 or more fundamentally to any idea which has sufficient clarity to be called a concept? I will treat this question more fully in the second section of the essay, though I expect the foregoing examples of the bachelor and the grandparent to express my position that the inferences drawn in these cases, accepting such

premises as a person cannot simultaneously be present in multiple places, is no less deductive than the mathematical statement that an odd number cannot have four as a divisor. All that we require of a concept is that it be of sufficient clarity so that deduction may operate upon it.

Let this be a necessary condition we assume for a concept—amenable to deductive reasoning.

I. Priority of Concept Yet herein a problem reveals itself: what is a concept? Can a definition be provided which encapsulates its essence? What common content can we gather under the summary term of a concept? It appears reasonable to consider any notion with sufficient clarity as a concept.

But, as a consequence, nothing substantive is capable of being ascribed to the word concept itself, rendering it as vacuous as the term being.4 Nonetheless, if we are capable of rendering a definition that subsumes the nature of all concepts, we may confront the foundation of logic and all intellectual inquiry. Well, what would such a definition look like? Likely, as all of our definitions, expressed as a sentence, which involves concepts. If this definitive sentence doesn’t invoke the definiendum itself, it must construct it via other relevant concepts.

This then is a regress in that to articulate the essence of all concepts, we must presume other concepts to be understood. Let us refer to this as the problem of definition. We cannot define ‘concept’ without assuming some set of concepts. The quality of mathematics that constitutes it as a deductive subject is its specification of definitions, from which all its knowledge derives. Yet what are the foundations of definitions? A triangle can be defined as the figure closed by three mutually nonparallel lines in a Euclidean plane. What then is a Euclidean plane? Meno, in objecting to Socrates’s 39

definition of shape as “that which alone follows color” by asking, “if someone were to say that he did not know what color is,”5 may be voicing a kindred sentiment. Let us presently waive the difficulties of communicating the concept implied by a definition to others, a problem long presented by the Greek sophist Gorgias. It appears that the concept of a Euclidean plane6 is so lucid that it requires no further clarification. Is this then a sure foundation on which we would rest our understanding? The apparent necessity of entertaining certain unspecified concepts is the problem of definition, and it invites us toward the question on the foundation of our conception.

An attempt to address this fundamental question considers logic as a natural phenomenon. When my mind moves through the lines of a proof, proceeding to deduce consequences from definitions, are the relevant ideas not necessarily conceived in my mind? When I think of a Euclidean plane, does not that present thought realize and thereby contain the concept? To negate this position is to concede that there is no validity in reasoning, and that our thinking bears no relation to the concepts supposedly grasped by thought. The philosophical identification of ourselves as rational beings, then, has no meaning. Consequently, the empiricist is disposed to observe that whatever meaning is to the idea of a triangle, it is what occurs in my mind when I do mentally conceive of a triangle and perform deductive operations thereon. So, whatever a triangle is, it must be contained in the thought of it when I conceive it in my mind.

This is a psychological7 position, reducing logic to the natural phenomenon of thinking, which I’ll refer to as the empirical reduction of logic. To be constructive, it of course needs to rid itself of that “whatever that occurs in the mind” and render the phrase meaningful by specifying what is supposedly captured in that phenomenon of thinking. Then it may proceed to explain with sophisticated scientific theory capable of constructing the concept as a mental

phenomenon. This reduction of a concept to physics8 broaches two domains of philosophy—ontology, of existence or reality in our world, and logic, of concepts, which are considered as independent of physical reality— commonly treated as independent. The question is whether such a psychological position which breaches this distinction is viable. Another consequent problem of this empiricist position is subjectivity. Is my triangle the same as your triangle? Though the mental image you have of a triangle—your subjective idea of a triangle—differs from mine, is it sensical to say that the concept of triangle itself depends on the particularity of the mind in which it is conceived? In other words, though the idea is subjective, can we proceed to assert subjectivity of the concept.

Nevertheless, the empirical reduction engages a deeper problem in its attempted mode of exposition; to wit, can we articulate a concept without using one? Can we define logic without assuming it? Does not the empirical reduction, which is a physical position, imagine a concept as a phenomenon that occurs within some cognitive apparatus or constitution, namely the mind, and hope to capture it there? But whatever specific concepts we use here to construct the cognitive constitution, to be used in the definition, cannot be explained by the account itself, which assumes such a cognitive constitution. As great a psychologist as you are, when you expound to me your theory of the concept, it perforce involves concepts complex enough to describe the nature of thought. Probably, you will assume concepts such as the laws of nature. And I, a humble philosophical questioner, cannot accept this as an ex nihilo construction of logic or of concept, given that the very power and elegance of your theory derives from the clarity of your foundational concepts, which you assume. Put simply, as any ontological account, that is, an explanation of some phenomenon, is construed via concepts, we cannot therein seek an absolute definition of concept. From the problem of

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definition, there is no non-conceptual way of constructing a concept.

There is a more fundamental way of establishing the epistemic priority of concepts— that it is absolutely necessary to any meaningful reasoning to assume concepts objectively.9 By objective I claim not that my concept objectively represents some physical reality. But, in regarding concepts as objective, I only state that it is impossible to conduct reasoning at all without taking concepts by their own meanings. Let us demonstrate the objectivity of concepts in relation to the problem of subjectivity prompted by the empirical reduction: are concepts subjective to the thinker? When considered as thoughts, it seems that concepts exist, strictly speaking, only when they are thought of, and the nature of the concept is that instantiating thought. This suggests that my triangle can be different from yours and from that which I conceived moments ago. Very well.

Consider my or your triangle, then. Is there anything in my concept of the triangle which renders it peculiar to my mind? Is it the line? the enclosing? Or is it the Euclidean plane? There is nothing additional to the concept of a triangle. What can be the meaning of ‘subjective’ in this context? To make it meaningful, it is necessary to introduce a concept of cognitive agents, with constitutions having the potential of conceiving different ideas of a triangle. But now subjectivity is in the concept of the variation of cognitive agents, which is merely an additional concept. Would you say that, indeed, this concept of subjectivity is subjective too?

But it is impossible to give a meaning to subjectivity without introducing it as an additional concept, the subjectivity of which now cannot be established. This is a regress and the word subjectivity has no independent meaning.

There is nothing subjective in the concepts themselves, but, for the term subjectivity to have meaning, a concept must construct it.10 This is different from the physical possibility of subjective experience.11 The matter here is the subjectivity of concepts. It is possible for

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me to conceive of a transcendent state of being which projects onto my subjective perception.

This possibility is justified by the concept of such a reality and the limitations in my perception. Yet it is not possible for me to imagine a state of being not described by objective concepts. To illustrate, suppose, to the contrary, you say my concept of a triangle is subjective.

How? Because it is conceived within my peculiar mental constitution. But if you intend to use this as a piece of reasoning—that it follows from different cognitive constitutions that the conceptions may be different—you are precisely taking ‘cognitive constitution’ as an objective concept in that you infer, in virtue of the concept itself, differential conception. I cannot imagine how otherwise you can obtain such an inference. To state that it is because anything else but the concept of different cognitive constitutions is nonsensical. The inference cannot be drawn from anything else but from the concept itself, which is the definition of deduction, operating objectively on the concept. There is no such thing as subjective deduction, so concepts cannot be regarded as subjective.

Indeed, when we say anything of a thing, what is the ‘thing’? We cannot say it is my subjective concept of that thing, where the term ‘subjective’ is undefined. Instead, if we go forth to recognize that thing at all, it has to be a concept to be taken with its peculiar meaning, and in this it is objective. Otherwise, we cannot reason at all: a triangle has three sides in virtue of its being a triangle—I cannot analyze this deduction more. Any other explanation which does not suppose an objective concept of a triangle with the property of three sides is capable only of incoherence. So concept, the unit of reasoning, is of necessity objective, so long as we reason. This situation can be compared with that of the sceptic, who, in order to convince us of the subjectivity of our perceptions, posits a transcendent reality not directly accessible to our senses. By this logical possibility, we are drawn to doubt the correspondence of

our sensations with reality. Yet whereas a hidden reality is logically possible, to discard the objectivity of concept cannot have any logical warrant, for so it does away with logic and reasoning as well.

Succeeding our analysis above, we may summarize our tenets succinctly. Reasoning is in the strict sense, such as in mathematics, and in the loose sense, such as the opening examples of the bachelor and the boy, deductive.

Deduction assumes and operates on concepts based solely on their own meanings. Thus, concepts are necessarily assumed for reasoning, so are irreducible, and they are taken solely by their own meanings, thus are objective. As there is no other mode of logical reasoning other than deduction, these conditions of deduction establish the absolute priority of concept to reasoning.12 It was Frege who introduced the distinction between logic and psychology and exposed the problems and insufficiency of psychological descriptions employed as definitions of number. What I attempted above are more direct arguments against the subjectivity of the psychological position. Naturally disposed as we are to ascribe thinking to a cognitive phenomenon, which is nothing but an affirmation of fact, we are obliged to acknowledge that never can we hope of extricating ourselves from the supposition of objective concepts, which is the method of our thought. Beyond it I can see naught, and herein, I believe, is the limit of epistemology. Within it, we shall seek ever greater clarity of our concepts in philosophy and ever finer understanding of our cognitive constitution in psychology. Alas, Platonists we must be toward concepts.

Let me conclude this section by addressing the question regarding the existence of concepts, which might have troubled the reader for some time. The difficulty here is similar to philosophical questions concerning the term existence in general: what do we mean by existence? If we were to adopt the phrase, existence of concept, the existence here is clearly

different from the existence of a physical object, which exists in space and time and is observable. Is it more akin to the existence of a law of nature, which is not directly observed but requires an epistemic leap to construct? But the purview of such a law is still physics—it purports to exert something of the reality which comes to be perceived. Yet a concept, say three-dimensional geometry, although its origin may be from our senses, once the concept is abstracted to stand on its own, such as the Euclidean space in analytical geometry, it has no relation whatsoever to anything physical. When I state that infinitely many different triangles can be formed within a Euclidean space, I am asserting nothing that is physically happening but only remarking on the meaning of the concept of Euclidean space itself. Indeed, Kant’s observation that the word existence contributes no additional meaning seems the most germane when we say, “a concept exists.”

Saying that a triangle exists is merely to restate what a triangle is. We feel there is something profound behind the fact that some concepts are possible while others not, and so we think that, for this, concepts exist in a special sense.

But then, we are reminded of the priority of concepts, that it is impossible to seek the origin of concepts beyond the concepts themselves— so the existence of some concepts need always be assumed—and the word existence, when it has meaning, is but another concept.

II. Problem of Form Is logic a meta-conceptual discipline? Are such axioms of non-contradiction and the excluded middle prior to the mathematical theorems which apply them? It is true that in mathematical, scientific, and any theoretical reasoning such laws of logic obtain, but need this entail that there is a separate, more fundamental realm in which logical truths are established apart from the specific definitions and concepts which constitute the subject? How indeed is the validity of such laws established?

These coupled questions let us denote the problem of form.

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The problem of form can be aptly represented in the student’s disaffection with the definition of the conditional. The definition of the conditional in propositional logic is as a function of the truth values of the atomic propositions. We may accentuate this feature by writing 𝑝 ⊃ 𝑞 in the functional form ⊃ (𝑝, 𝑞).

To the mathematician, who uses ⊃ to symbolize valid deduction, this definition brings out none of the idea that the antecedent conceptually implies the consequent, such as A is a triangle implies that A is a planar figure. Of course, we have no reservation to the proposition 𝑝 ⊃ 𝑝, or if we prefer a more meaningful statement, (𝑝 ⊃ 𝑞) ⊃ (¬𝑞 ⊃ ¬𝑝). The difficulty, herein, is that this system of logic has no more fundamental concepts than the atomic propositions 𝑝, 𝑞 . So, any logic that is contained in a mathematical proposition which we like to designate 𝑝, say A is a triangle, is not represented in the logical system and so cannot be reasoned. Yet this naturally prompts the questions: are such logical laws, e.g., the contraposition (𝑝 ⊃ 𝑞) ⊃ (¬𝑞 ⊃ ¬𝑝) , not also results of deduction; and on what grounds do we regard them as prior and also applicable to mathematics and other disciplines? Propositional logic, constructed in the truth-functional approach as for our example of the conditional above, is simply a mathematical system of functions on the binary set {T, F}. It is due to the preciseness of the mathematical concepts of functions and sets the celebrated clarity of this system of logic derives. Hence it is strictly no more than any mathematical system with clear definitions. 𝑝

𝑞

𝑝⊃𝑞

T

T

T

T

F

F

F

T

T

F

F

T

A student familiar with the natural deductive approach to propositional logic may agree with us in disapprobation of the truth-functional approach as representing logic, and recommend that logical truth be grounded in the system of natural deduction. Let us examine natural deduction then and hope to find the prior realm of logic there. That system declares a set of primitive rules of inference, an example of which is simple disjunction elimination, which states that when we have some set of propositions Δ which necessarily leads to the truth of either proposition 𝑝 or that of proposition 𝑞, formally Δ ⊢ 𝑝 ∨ 𝑞, and some other set of propositions Φ which falsifies the proposition 𝑝, formally Φ ⊢ ¬𝑝, then combining the set of premises Δ, Φ, it follows that 𝑞 is true, or formally Δ, Φ ⊢ 𝑞. This rule is merely a formalization of our mode of arguing by cases: when one of two things are true and one is false, the other must be true. Here the symbol ⊢ means derives or necessarily follows, and it symbolizes valid deduction in the logical system. The meaning of the symbol is functionally defined by the set of inference rules, which dictates when we may obtain a statement of the form Θ ⊢ 𝑠. Indeed, a proof done in natural deduction aptly encapsulates our process of reasoning, so may appear more distinctly logical.

Nevertheless, our question is of the soundness of this system of logic, which leads us to inquire the soundness of the primitive inference rules. How do we know that they are true?

The problem is that we cannot address this question without defining what are meant by propositions 𝑝, 𝑞 and such connectives as ∨ and ⊃. Yet to these the system of natural deduction does not answer, since such rules are effectively definitions. There is no additional definition of an atomic sentence 𝑝 , and we cannot revert to the simple definition given in the truth functional approach of 𝑝 as having either a truth value of true or false. Also, there is no definition of the connectives besides how they may be applied, which is given by the rules

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of inference. We are disposed to declare such rules, like disjunction elimination, as self-evident: obviously if one of two statements is true and one of them is false, the other is true! Yet this leads us straight back to the problem of providing a definition for what concepts are— what are such 𝑝 and 𝑞 that we’re talking about, and what does it mean by taking their conjunction? Unless we can provide such an abstract definition and prove its applicability to all the different species of reasoning, we cannot definitively assert meaningfully that such rules of inference are sound. What indeed can soundness mean here? Put another way, the only method of reasoning that definitively establishes results is deduction. And to employ deduction, we require well-defined concepts as premises from which to deduce. To make a study of deduction itself, we must attempt to encapsulate the process of deduction in a set of concepts, which we call a logical system, and then proceed to deduce from these concepts.

Thus, the purview of the results we establish is, just as in any mathematical system, within this set of concepts that constitute the logical system.

Several objections are in order for us to answer. The reader observes, truly, that we have only established that the system of propositional logic is a system that operates on specific mathematical definitions, but we have not demonstrated that prior logical truths cannot exist. Surely, the law of non-contradiction, ¬(𝑝 ∧ ¬𝑝) applies universally! Let us take this logical law then. What mental justification do we actually think of when we consider this law to be self-evident? Usually, something like this object has a uniform color of white so it cannot simultaneously be black, or that a circle cannot be a square. Yet what does non-contradiction mean in these contexts but that two particular concepts are incompatible, incompatible as defined by those particular concepts! That the rule of non-contradiction applies universally does not entail that contradiction (or non-contradiction) is a fundamental concept that has a

meaning apart from the particular cases of its application. I would be gratefully edified if anyone can justify non-contradiction in a higher level with an abstract notion of a concept. This requires, as belabored, an abstract concept for concept itself. Furthermore, it requires a definition of negation, which is a non-trivial matter, for it must consider the entire space of concepts and select only those which necessarily refutes the given concept, i.e., to exclude the middle. In light of our earlier demonstration of the priority of concepts to any reasoning whatsoever, the plenary word ‘concept’ subsuming all concepts is really vacuous, for if not, the set of concepts that constitute ‘concept’ must underlie each and every concept. I for one struggle to identify any common concept between a bachelor and a triangle that suffices in showing that the former cannot be married and that the latter is incapable of having four sides, without using the nature of these concepts themselves.

Figuratively, there can be no separate Platonic form of logic from the other forms. Why do we think there is such a logical principle of noncontradiction presiding over all reasoning? We observe an instance of it in the former reasoning and another instance in the latter. By an instinct for generalization, we fashion to ourselves that the reason of the similarity is that this law operates at the level of ‘concepts’, so extends to all reasoning. But when obliged to clarify what we mean by concept in general, we make specific definitions as in propositional logic and reason about these and forgo thinking of concepts in general. This means that our systems of logic are truly models which approximate our common forms of reasoning, so are a formal subject in the sense that it does not warrant, by itself, validity in applying to these other systems of reasoning.

Another objection that leads directly to the heart of the subject is as follows: if logic pertains to deduction proper, it should not be studied as a deductive system, i.e., using deduction, but of necessity requires a more prior consideration. My question here is simply

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what this ‘prior consideration’ is. Deduction is the only certain mode of reasoning. In fact, if we analyze any argument that is only based on the meaning of relevant concepts, the only meaningful components which provide justification are precisely the deductive elements. All arguments are deductive, strictly or loosely.

Thus, I know not of any other mode of ideation which can establish the soundness of the laws of logic, especially when we conceive of such laws to be prior to all theorems of mathematics and thus more fundamentally necessary. Rather, it occurs more direct and reasonable to my mind that what we denote as the laws of logic are patterns of deduction which appear universally in our theoretical reasoning in various subjects. Their validity is separately established in these respective subjects using the particular concepts with which they are concerned.

The remaining question is, of course, whence arise such patterns of universal applicability? A simple though not superficial response is that they arise from the very process of classification and synthesis of our modes of reasoning, where we seek patterns of argument.

The modern study of logic originated with a close examination of mathematical reasoning.

Aristotle invented his syllogistic logic by considering related types of arguments and abstracting away the respective contents by constructing a common form. To verify that an intuitively accepted logical pattern, say the principle of non-contradiction, on some concepts, we need only instantiate it in terms of the concepts involved. For the case of an even number, having a remainder of zero when dividing by two excludes the possibility of having a remainder of one, so non-contradiction applies.

I have referred to the view presented in this essay of logic as Platonic, by which I mean to emphasize, first, the universality of logic—that it applies to all concepts; and second, its priority to reasoning—that a concept cannot be reduced to anything else, e.g., physical phenomenon, but must always be assumed to reason.

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The misnomer may be that I do not think there is a separate realm for logic, i.e., a separate form of logic, which is independent of particular definitions and concepts, but it is to the nature of the concepts themselves logic ultimately pertains.

Endnotes 1 I will justify this identification after some illustrations of my concept of logic. The objection, I anticipate, is our common use of the term ‘inductive logic,’ which truly concerns matters of fact regarding existence rather than matters of concept, of which logic is properly concerned.

2 Gottlob Frege, a reputed founder of modern logic, writes in the opening section of his Foundations of Arithmetic, “After declaring for a time the old Euclidean standard of rigour, mathematics is now returning to them, and even making an effort to go beyond them.” Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic: A logico-mathematical enquiry into the concept of number, trans. J. L. Austin (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 1.

3 One who holds such a strict position regarding deduction needs to explain what constitutes a mathematical concept. Mathematics has seen such expansion and development since modernity that the terms ‘number’ and ‘geometry’ are no longer adequate to provide a functional definition of the range of concepts studied in mathematics. Thus, it appears to me that by a mathematical concept, we mean a concept of such clarity that we are capable of distinctly grasping and reasoning about it, in the rigorous form of deduction.

4 The consideration of existence as an abstract entity originated with the Greek philosopher Parmenides, who declared that being cannot originate from unbeing (nothing), or at least this is inconceivable. Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2011), 145. It was Immanuel Kant who observed that being is not a property and has no conceptually distinct property but is always only assumed. Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason” in Modern Classical Philosophers, ed. Benjamin Rand (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 450-451.

5 Plato, “Meno,” trans. G.M.A. Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, eds. John M. Cooper and

6

7

8

9

10

Douglas S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), 875.

There probably exists mathematical theory which constructs the concept of a Euclidean plane from more general concepts. There, the pertinent question is whether generality entails their being more elementary. Even so, the problem of definition still pertains to the definition of those more elementary concepts.

‘Cognitive’ is the more modern parlance. Yet ‘psychological’ has become an established term to signify views of logic as a natural phenomenon due to human physiology, subject to empirical investigations of science. For an example, see Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic, 33-36, §26.

I use the words physical, natural, and ontological interchangeably, with no special qualification attached to each, to refer to reality. They are contrasted with logical, conceptual, or analytical. For simplicity, I’ll mostly be using physical and logical.

It sounds awkward to say “assume concepts.”

What does it mean to assume a concept? By this awkward phrasing, my intent is to avoid the more problematic one, “assume concepts exist.” The problem there, which I’ll address later, is the meaning to the existence of a concept is utterly different from the usual meaning of the term that refers to a physical entity. To assume a concept is not to accept that the concept is true or false but to simply construe it and allow it to stand without further definition. When you say to me, “a Euclidean plane,” I grasp the concept in my thought clearly and do not require from you further clarification.

I do not at all deny that what occurs to mind when the word ‘triangle’ is uttered may be

different from that which occurs to you. I do not even doubt that such essential thoughts which you rely on to deduce a triangle has three sides are different from mine. The brain activities may be different. What is, albeit, the point of argument is that if any person, in reasoning about a concept can sensically incorporate a meaning of subjectivity, which is not introduced as a separate concept, but is somehow interjected into all concepts concerned. ‘Objective’ here is not a claim on the uniformity of the thoughts of all people, which is a physical claim, but merely stating the irrelevance of the term ‘subjective’ in referring to the concepts themselves.

11 Again, using ‘physical’ as relating to existence, or ‘ontological.’ The subjectivity of experience is a metaphysical problem in that one can never have experience out of oneself, so experience is subjective by definition.

12 Our use of the phrase ‘inductive logic’ seems to present a contradiction. But if logic is the discipline concerned with the relation of the meaning of concepts and not a science that concerns physical reality, such a name as ‘inductive logic’ is truly a misnomer. There is nothing logical in the inference, the sun has always risen so it will rise tomorrow. Whether it would or not is solely a question about reality, and there is nothing in a simple concept of the sun as a hot radiating object that necessitates its future behavior. Thus, inductive reasoning, as it is essential to the generalization of observations to the formulation of scientific theories, is a topic for epistemology, which studies, in part, the validity of our claims about reality, and does not properly pertain to logic.

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Chromatic Thought: Finding Freedom while Working for the Knife Emma Paulini, Pomona ’22 External Submission Medium: Podcast Listen below or at tabularasaclaremont.com/Chromatic-Thought

Have you ever noticed how music can ignite this glorious feeling of freedom inside yourself? Produced to explore public philosophy within Professor Ellie Anderson's Existentialism class, I created this podcast episode to engage with the philosophical undertones of a favorite musical artist, Mitski. In this episode, I analyze the singer-songwriter's latest piece, "Working for the Knife," under an existential lens, delving into the lyrics to take a close look at the song's ideas of freedom according to the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Despite Mitski's lamentation of the harsh realities of life, her song's themes and motifs express an approach towards an existential sense of freedom.

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Copeland on Searle: Tensions Between Competing Chinese Rooms Nathaniel Braswell, CMC ’23 Staff Writer In this essay, I present the Computational Theory of Mind and explain Searle’s objection via his Chinese Room Argument (CRA). I then present the “Systems Reply” to the CRA and Searle’s response to that reply, which I adapt from Copeland (2002) into the “Revised CRA.”1 Finally, I object to the CRA on the grounds that its two versions possess contradicting entailments.

The Computational Theory of Mind is the view that the brain is a naturally occurring computer. According to the theory, a computer is any system that undergoes rational transitions between representational states by manipulating symbols according to an algorithm. A primary aim of the computationalist view is to demonstrate that rational transitions between representational states give rise to cognition. Computationalism defines cognition as the ability to rationally transition between representational states using physical symbols according to an algorithm. “Rationally transition” refers to employing rules that track reality or, in other words, rules that allow representational transitions to result in truth.

If I see 2 bananas and 2 apples and need to count the number of fruits, I can sum up the bananas and apples by using the rule of addition. I thus rationally transition from 2 bananas and 2 apples to 4 pieces of fruit. Representational states occur when there are symbols that aim to pick out or express something about an object. “2” is a symbol that picks out a property and is thereby a representational state. Thus, according to the computationalist, the physical manipulation of symbols according to a rationally transitioning algorithm is sufficient for cognition. This makes computers—including naturally occurring computers

such as the brain—inherent owners of cognition. In this way, computationalism stages the computer as a functional equivalent to the human mind, thereby claiming computers possess understanding, as human minds possess understanding and minds are just computers.

To object to computationalism, Searle’s Chinese Room Argument presents the scenario of an individual (hypothetically named ‘Gabby’) with no knowledge or recognition of Chinese. Gabby is placed in a room with a manual of Chinese characters, a filing cabinet, and infinite paper/pencils. The manual provides if/then statements that tells Gabby what to write in response to any string of characters she might receive. One rule might read: 你為什麼要翻譯這個 –> 我沒有線索 With this, Gabby knows that if she were to read “你為什麼要翻譯這個,” she would reply with a written piece of paper that reads: “我沒有線 索.” Once placed in the room, Gabby starts receiving slips of paper with Chinese characters on them. For every slip of paper that comes into the room, Gabby checks the manual, writes down the manual’s appropriate response, and slips the paper back out. For the sake of the thought experiment, the manual is theoretically limitless; Gabby could receive any number of Chinese symbols and respond. The argument takes the following syllogistic form: 1. If computationalism is true, then Gabby understands Chinese.

2. Gabby doesn’t understand Chinese.

3. Therefore, computationalism is false.

I now explain each premise in turn. Premise 1 claims that if computationalism is true,

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Gabby understands Chinese. According to the definition of computationalism, to understand Chinese is to rationally transition between representational states using physical symbols according to an algorithm. Thus, if Gabby’s presence in the Chinese Room meets the conditions of computation, Gabby should be able to understand Chinese. The Chinese Room embodies all conditions of a computer. Rational transitions between representational states are realized in Gabby’s correspondence with someone outside the room. As Searle articulates, this person would view their correspondence with Gabby as indistinguishable from a conversation with any native speaker. The manipulation of physical symbols is realized in the physical Chinese symbols in the manual and on the input slips. The algorithm component is satisfied by Gabby’s use of the manual, which lists if/then statements in terms of physical symbols (Chinese text). For any symbols, Gabby finds the matching text in the manual and copies down the accompanying characters, thereby following sets of rules. Thus, Gabby in the Chinese Room embodies rational transitions between representational states by manipulating physical symbols according to an algorithm. Therefore, Gabby is a computer and understands Chinese, since understanding necessarily arises out of computation, as demonstrated earlier.

Premise 2 is that Gabby does not understand Chinese. To arrive here, say Gabby (who speaks English fluently) is given sets of English questions and Chinese questions. There is a difference in how she feels about her response to each, even though her responses are equally understandable by native speakers of both languages. Gabby’s first-person experience of speaking, writing, and thinking in English confirms that she understands it. If Gabby is bilingual in English and Spanish, she might not have the same feeling in her L2 (her secondlearned language) as in her L1, but would still have the experience of understanding both, just to potentially varying degrees. Likewise,

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Gabby might be able to speak fluent Chinese but not read/write it, in which case Gabby would have some experience of understanding spoken Chinese words. This differs from her experience of written Chinese words, which requires her to utilize the manual and thereby demonstrates that she does not understand Chinese.

Thus, with premises 1 and 2 correct, computationalism is false. Searle concludes is that Gabby can complete any number of responses and still not understand Chinese. Accordingly, writing more responses is uncorrelated with a better understanding of the language.

A popular rebuttal against the Chinese Room Argument premise 1 is the “Systems Reply,” which concedes that Gabby doesn’t understand Chinese but maintains that she is a member of a larger system, the whole of which understands Chinese. In other words, Gabby might be a sort of central processing unit, but the manual, the cabinet, the symbols, and the pencils/paper constitute a larger system of which Gabby is only a part. All these parts together do understand Chinese, but any one of the individual items might not. Thus, the Chinese Room could still exhibit cognition (and understanding) without Gabby understanding.

At first, it might seem counterintuitive that a system of mainly inanimate parts could host cognition at all, but since computationalism defends computers (which are inanimate) as viable hosts of understanding, the systems reply likewise dispels the “animacy” requirement, reducing understanding to purely physical terms. The systems reply refutes premise 1; it is no longer true that for CTM to be true, Gabby must understand Chinese.

An example is warranted. Say there are two people: one is incapable of addition but can multiply numbers, and the other cannot multiply but knows addition. If instructed to solve “5*5+6,” the multiplication expert would perform the multiplication and give his product to the addition expert, who would compute 25+6.

Neither person understands how to solve the

original problem, but together—as a system— they do. The systems reply thus stands against premise 1 since it is not necessary for understanding that any individual element (Gabby) understand Chinese.

Searle responds by theorizing a scenario in which the entire system is internalized in Gabby’s head. Imagine a version of Gabby who has infinite long-term memory and has memorized the entire rulebook, replacing the need for a manual or filing cabinet. With these newfound abilities, Gabby could even walk around outside and respond to Chinese writing with her own. But Gabby’s production of relevant Chinese output is still a function of her ability to memorize and reproduce allegedly meaningless terms. Memorizing the rules does not magically expose the meaning of their symbols; they are mere syntactic specifications with no semantic value to Gabby. Internalizing the system only allows Gabby fluency in manipulating symbols, not in understanding them.

To show the weaknesses of this reply, I will systemize the argument into the following syllogistic form: Premise 1: If CTM is true, then the system understands Chinese.

Premise 2: Gabby encompasses the system.

Premise 3: Gabby doesn’t understand Chinese.

Conclusion: Thus, CTM is false.

This syllogism is invalid. Even if the whole system does not understand Chinese, it might still be true that part of the system understands Chinese. Premise 2 states that Gabby does not understand Chinese. It does not follow from this that the system does not understand Chinese; what if the system (which understands Chinese) exists as only a mere part of Gabby, and that the rest of Gabby does not understand Chinese? Gabby encompasses the system, but this does not mean that every part of Gabby is equal to the system. Thus, what if Gabby does not understand, but a subpart does? Assuming this is possible (which I will defend momentarily), the error in Searle’s response is the

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inverse of that in Searle’s original CRA. With the original CRA, claiming that part of the room does not understand fails to show there is no understanding from the whole. With the Revised CRA, claiming that the whole of the room fails to understand does not deny understanding from a part. Saying that Gabby “encompasses the system” does not require Gabby’s lack of understanding to apply to every system part. Searle thus needs to add a fourth premise to achieve validity: Premise 1: If CTM is true, then the system understands Chinese.

Premise 2: Gabby encompasses the system.

Premise 3: Gabby doesn’t understand Chinese.

Premise 4: If Gabby doesn’t understand Chinese, then no part of her understands Chinese.

Conclusion: Thus, CTM is false.

I will refer to this fourth premise via Copeland’s term “Part-Of Principle.” If true, it must also be true that when part of Gabby understands something, the whole of Gabby does too. Recall that under CRA premise 2, Gabby does not understand Chinese because she has different intuitive experiences of understanding for English. I will refer to this as Searle’s “Incorrigibility Thesis.” Thus, if the whole of Gabby understands something, we would expect her to have an experience of that understanding. However, it is conceivable that part of Gabby can understand something in the absence of that experience.

An example of this is blindsight. Blindsight patients have lesions in their primary visual cortex that prevent conscious recognition of objects in their visual field. Despite this impairment, patients can detect, localize, and discriminate stimuli. In one instance, researchers set up obstacles (e.g., trash cans, filing cabinets, etc.) in a hallway and instructed a blindsight patient to walk to the end. Despite having no awareness of the items (and thus no experience of understanding them), he easily navigated around the hurdles.

For this to stand as a valid counterexample, two clarifications are warranted. The first is

that the blindsight patient has no subjective experience of understanding that the hurdles exist. This is true in virtue of him lacking introspective access to the contents of his visual field. When asked why he didn’t walk straight down the hallway, the participant appears confused and is unable to answer, indicating that he has no memory of experiencing an understanding of the obstacles. The contrast of this experience against that of a neurotypical patient facing the same task reveals that he does not understand that the obstacles are present, as per Searle’s own logic under CRA premise 2.

The second argument is that the patient’s visual system (and relevant motor areas) understands the obstacles to be navigated around.

According to CRA, the system would need a subjective experience of understanding to grant this condition. This is obviously wrong.

Understanding arises anytime we causally relate encoded information to implied goals.

When learning how to skip rocks, we would say I understand when and only when the information I’ve acquired from practice and observation translates into a consistent and effective execution of my goal to skip a rock. Patients with severe anterograde amnesia (such as the famous Patient H.M.) can still learn skills without recalling 1) specific episodes of their learning or 2) a broader awareness of their progression.2 In one notable case, Patient H.M. was trained on a mirror tracing task, which requires participants to trace the outline of a star while looking at their drawing through a mirror. This task is generally difficult for participants and requires multiple reiterations to adequately complete.3 After a few sessions of practice at delayed intervals, Patient H.M. successfully completed the mirror tracing task without any memory of his practice sessions.4 From this, we might still say that the amnesiac understands rock skipping because they have acquired information about it that enables them to achieve its cohesive goal. The causal link between acquired information and pre-determined goals is distinct from an

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experience of the acquisition. It is therefore conceivable that the visual system understands the presence of obstacles; it has causally related representations of the hurdles to its harm minimization goal.

Thus, part of a person can understand something without the person intuitively experiencing understanding. If true, a part can understand something while the whole does not, since a whole entity understanding something is analogous to the entity experiencing that understanding (as per Searle’s incorrigibility thesis). Searle now confronts a dichotomy. On one hand, he could maintain his partof thesis and claim that part of an entity’s understanding necessitates the whole entity’s understanding. If so, the entity’s understanding no longer aligns with its experiencing of understanding, defeating the incorrigibility thesis needed for the original CRA. On the other hand, Searle could admit that, despite the part, the whole entity does not understand, thus defeating his Part-Of principle. Searle must either abandon CRA premise 2 or Revised CRA premise 3. Either way, Searle cannot claim an absence of understanding Chinese. It is no longer clear that computation in the Chinese Room is insufficient for understanding, or that additional ingredients are necessary to produce cognition. Searle’s conclusion that computationalism is false is unwarranted.

Endnotes 1 Jack B. Copeland, “Hypercomputation in the Chinese Room,” Unconventional Models of Computation in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2509 (2002), https://doi.org/10.1007/3-54045833-6_2.

2 Larry R. Squire, “The Legacy of Patient H.M. for Neuroscience,” Neuron 61, 1 (2009): 8, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2008.12.023.

3 Mona Sharon Julius and Esther Adi-Japha, “A Developmental Perspective in Learning the Mirror-Drawing Task,” Front. Hum. Neurosci. 10, 83 (March 2016), doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00083.

4 Squire, “Legacy of Patient H.M.,” 8.

Overwork: Ancient and Contemporary Self-Help Amiri Rivers-David, Pomona ’24 Staff Writer It does feel sometimes as if we were born to work. Especially as a student, near-total time efficiency is assumed to be indispensable; if there is a goal and progress is not actively being made toward that goal, time is being wasted.

Too, that goal must be respectable and in some sense lucrative. In these moments, where one sees endless drought-saddened fields of labor in their future—in these moments where one feels moon-landed, working infinitely to work infinitely more—in these moments of great stress and worry, it is quite easy to jump feetfirst into the pool of self-help. It is a shame, then, that much of the self-help that is appealing in these states results in deep dissatisfaction. It is of great utility to know exactly why this is the case—if one were to understand the fundamental axioms upon which this unfulfilling advice stands, not only does the advice become easier to rebut, but the individual’s relationship with work and productivity is also deepened and educated.

The drive to work tirelessly stems often from the unquenchable thirst for socioeconomic success. The notion that more labor equates to more happiness is stirred by the echoic memories of the ever-dead American Dream, an ideal still pervasive in the American collective unconscious. Of course, the emphasis on tireless work is not exclusive to American culture, but America’s particular history with respect to the idea influences the way it manifests. Many people still see America as a land of opportunity, through which one’s excellence will pervade and immortalize them with fortune and fame if they should desire it.

However, even this fanciful meritocracy is deeply frayed at the seams. Edward Lyttleton, an ethicist writing about work culture in the 20th century, writes how, “A great deal of the work which has been most permanent in its

effect has been done by men on the brink of breaking down.”1 Even those great among us, those brilliant young minds who have slaved through the proverbial ranks and have been acknowledged for their ingenuity—even these minds too often suffer still. We repeat, as a mantra, that hymn that tells us of the infinite value of work and blind ourselves to the often unfortunate reality of those legends; we repeat that hymn and continue to sow our tears into that barren field of labor.

Other times, the impulse to work beyond one’s capabilities is not fueled by those echoic memories aforementioned, not driven by any consumerist desire to spend or to be admired in legend. Work itself has become an ideal of sorts, a virtue; someone who works as hard as possible is seen as exemplary, as a paragon of spirit and discipline; they are seen as, in some ways, more honorable people. They are envied for their work ethic, regardless of whether they achieve the sky-scraper heights of a realized American Dream. Here too Lyttleton informs how an able-bodied person impossibly ought both not to injure their health nor turn down work: Work cannot be refused, though the limits of energy have been reached... However formidable the increase of burden may be, the worker should say to himself “I can do it: it will not tire me—not a bit.”2

Youth as an ideal collides with work, as if one of the core and incorrigible qualities of youth is the production of labor, as if it were a rite of passage. Young, spry, and able-bodied all imply one’s readiness to produce to that maximum capacity; a young person doing exactly that is seen as taking full advantage of their youth, of seizing their days of good health, and is further exalted as “one of the good ones”

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by peers and elders alike. These two concepts of labor and youth coincide in such a way that, regardless of one’s socioeconomic aspirations, they are hurled headfirst just as quickly and in the same direction as some money-crazed Bezos wannabe. Work, by any means necessary.

To succumb to these practices in an extreme sense is to succumb to their dire effects.

We see those once bright lights totally submerged in the pursuit of the American Dream, or perhaps in pursuit of work as an ideal, or most likely both—mudded down with boots in black water, eyes darkened and sleep-deprived, tone low. Of course, any positively hard-working laborer will dip a toe in that mud, occasionally; even a healthy schedule can be overwhelming sometimes. But these people, they have convinced themselves of the never-diminishing returns of present-day sorrow. They do not have bad days; they are bad days, in a way they believe is commendable. The unsustainable becomes sustainable clenched in the fist of unshakeable will.

To them it may come as a surprise, or an expense, that this behavior has not only emotional consequences—like those of depression and anxiety—but physical ones too. In many ways, the road paved with intense suffering leads not out of it but only deeper into its gaping maw. Evidence strongly suggests that one can even die from overwork; and if one can die from the most severe overwork, surely the more common, milder practice of it results in physical health complications. Michie et. al. write how, “A Danish study, which followed up 2,465 bus drivers over seven years, found that objective workload was the factor most strongly associated with death...”3 Another study on 500 retired Swedish men also concluded that “high demand and low control”, combined with a lack of social contact resulted in increased mortality. One can see how an overworked lifestyle precludes engagement in other important aspects of life, casting the overworked deeper into their struggles.

As is now evident, the person condemned to even a more moderate case of being overworked can experience not only serious mental and emotional strain but physical decline as well. As the amount of non-laborious time in their day is already so miniscule, and what time they do have is under the duress of such bad health, for many the concept of getting professional help is inconceivable. Still many companies fail to provide resources for a stressed employee to seek counsel and respite, at least not until it’s too far gone. Professional care, like therapy, can also be very expensive, making it further unavailable for those who may need it. In these scenarios, the only possible medium through which to search for aid is the internet. There are countless online personalities with innumerable pieces of advice, inescapable and most apparent to the overworked in the little time they can spare.

These resources can be greatly beneficial, of course. It would be false to assume that any advice one finds on the internet is incoherent or misleading by mere virtue of its domain.

However, for this particular demographic of help-seekers, the kind of guidance they will gravitate towards often fails to be satisfying and will only serve to entrench deeper the premises that caused their predicament in the first place. People naturally are attracted to spaces in which their values are shared—for this reason, the overworked are likely to find themselves in a place where work as an ideal and the American Dream are preserved.

Hearing counsel of this nature perpetuates a feedback loop, where the worker’s problematic beliefs are confirmed and they work even harder, causing even more dissatisfaction and a further sink into the negative online hustlepromoting environment. Built into these spaces are refrains essentially the same as the hymn Lyttleton mentioned, meant to condone and even encourage extreme suffering on the cross of labor. We must investigate—if not out of curiosity, then for the sake of the souls in this tragic riptide—and interrogate the

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assumptions implicit in these spaces and understand what an alternative must provide to help free them.

To understand the nature of these social spaces in which the overworked find themselves, we must first understand the axes on which self-help is oriented. Foucault in his History of Sexuality Volume 3: The Care of the Self provides an excellent outline for how the notion of self-care came to be in the Hellenic and Roman periods of Europe.4 These traditions and ideals have proliferated over the eons to be fundamental to our contemporary image of self-help, and have only become more stated in the advice provided over the Internet.

Importantly, Foucalt tracks the development of self-care as it became akin to doctrine, rather than disparate advice. It became something one was, not just an aspect of what one did; it became an all-encompassing worldview, totalizing, and not a mere opinion or perspective one had among many others. It became an imperative. Socrates particularly incorporated this into his very influential methodology; selfcare in his view was an “art of existence.”5 Foucault writes how “It also took the form of an attitude, a mode of behavior; it became instilled in ways of living; it evolved into procedures, practices, and formulas…”6 This more complete and unifying view of self-care is far more compelling, and encourages one to structure the entirety of one’s life around a typically narrow set of principles.

When applied correctly, this more focused basis for maintaining oneself can be quite effective; it makes requisite that one highlights exactly what they find important to do and to value, and emphasizes that they live in accordance with those ideals. However, when we observe the spaces in which the overworked tend to congregate, we find that work itself is the end-all be-all of value, honor, and practice.

This is to say that work as an ideal and the American Dream have substituted for the ordinarily well-rounded prescriptions of quality self-help. A well-known influencer named

Gary Vaynerchuk, or Gary Vee, serves as an excellent case-study for this kind of behavior.

The very first thing one notices about what Vee advocates for is that work itself is the absolute virtue. While wealth and luxury goods are romanticized to some degree, the work it takes to achieve that lifestyle is romanticized to a far greater extent. As is common in these social spaces, the self-help doctrine’s imperative becomes overwhelmed with the command to work. To care for oneself is to not only earn money but to implement as the primary motivation in one’s life the search for monetary success. Vee says how, “If you want bling bling, if you wanna buy the jets, if you wanna do shit—work! That’s how you get it,”7 and that “If you are actually happy it’s the weekend, or are pumped to go on vacation, your shit is broken.”8 In this view, if you are not working tirelessly, you are doing something critically wrong.

More practically, self-help is not just a general attitude but is a labor of constant examination of one’s representations and values; one must scrutinize how they see the world and what they give importance to. In the Roman and Hellenic periods, an art of self-knowledge developed: to know oneself implies understanding oneself along certain lines. An “ethics of control” is implied in traditional care for the self. Foucault writes how “It is to assess the relationship between oneself and that which is represented, so as to accept in the relation to the self only that which can depend on the subject’s free and rational choice.”9 To care for oneself well, one must consistently examine what it is they believe and their relationships with rigor—additionally, they must eliminate those relationships and beliefs that are not extensions of their “free and rational choice.” In the rhetoric of Vee and his followers, it seems as though all that one can count on to be free and rational in one’s life is one’s own work ethic. For this reason it is overwhelmingly magnified.

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This self-examination takes some strange forms in online “overwork spaces”; because the ultimate virtue of their philosophy is work, the only real self-examination one can do is concentrated around that. Vee tells his followers: “Look yourself in the mirror of your hotel room and ask yourself, is your work ethic mapping the bullcrap that’s coming out of your mouth?”10 To want to do something and to work tirelessly for it are, to him, indistinguishable, and anything less than that tireless work is a sign of weakness. Failure itself is, in a way, glamorized for that reason—it allows one to work even harder and immortalize their struggle even more in achieving what they desire.

The following dialogue between Vee and a follower of his shows very well how he thinks of failure. She asks him how to deal with business failure, and he responds: “Who do you love most in the world?”

“My family.”

“Every day, literally once a day, genuinely sit there for five minutes and make pretend that one of them got shot in the face. I’m being dead serious with you.”11

He asserts that, after doing this kind of practice, one’s business failures will seem insignificant in comparison to what horrific events they have imagined. It should be clearer now just how extreme this doctrine can be, and how business failure and work are contextualized: let nothing, including failure, prevent you from working at all costs.

Naturally, then, leisure is made to be a kind of enemy of the state. Work ethic is so bulbous in Vee and his contemporaries’ thought that it precludes almost any form of entertainment or relaxation. He preaches, “If you are listening and are fucking complaining, you gotta audit yourself. You can’t watch House of Cards, you can’t go to ballet shows… you gotta work!”12 and “If you are actually happy it’s the weekend, or are pumped to go on vacation, your shit is broken.”13 It is no secret that actual productivity suffers from the lack of any kind of leisure,

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so these statements are very interesting. They demonstrate that actual productivity is far less important than the appearance, or sign, of productivity. The act of working is in itself valuable, while the importance of the product and efficiency of the work is diminished.

One of the larger differences between overwork spaces online and ancient self-help is the former’s disproportionate focus on practice. In ancient Rome and Greece, examination of practice existed in an intrinsically dual state with examination of theory. A healthy person studied their representations and their practices in tandem, each given a significant amount of importance. Vee, however, virtually always advocates for an examination of theory for the end of practice. In other words, in these overwork spaces, the practice is the benchmark for the efficacy of the theory. To evaluate the quality of the doctrine, one must simply observe how hard it causes one to work; if it inspires them to work exceptionally hard, the theory is exceptional, and if not, the theory is lackluster. Because work is the ultimate virtue and ideal, it is the only metric one can use in determining the strength of the theory that is supposed to underpin it. Vee encourages his listeners to, “Enjoy eating shit, and dirt, and bleeding, and the grind… have four jobs: fuckin’ Wendy’s, Walmart, your side-hustle— work!”14 and that, “by the way, you can work at night! This is when you put in the 18 hours a day to make the life that you want happen.”15 It is clear that any concept that comes between a worker and their work is a concept that must be done away with.

Now that we’ve both outlined the ancient origins of self-help and how they relate to online overwork spaces, we are still left with a question: why is any of this appealing to anyone? It seems awful from the outside looking in. But upon closer study, the answer becomes clear. This doctrine of work is so captivating because it inverts the suffering of the overworked into self-flagellation, a betterment of oneself through intense torment. This is

furthered by the charismatic and bold nature of the purveyors of this knowledge, or the philosophers in the ancient model. Foucault writes of the “extreme eagerness of adults to look after their souls, the zeal with which, like schoolboys grown old, they sought out philosophers so they might be shown the way to happiness…”16 The overworked reach out to the Gary Vees of overwork spaces with similar zeal, hoping to find some way to turn their agony into something redeeming.

Additionally, the achievement of the end goal of all this work is seen to be more gratifying the more that was sacrificed. Inherent to the ancient model of self-help is the pleasure that one achieves after having adopted all of its practices and notions. Foucault mentions how this pleasure is “defined by the fact of not being caused by anything that is independent of ourselves and therefore escapes our control.”17 It is appealing because it is not fleeting like many bodily pleasures, and is engendered by things entirely within our sphere of influence. With Vee, however, because intensity of work is the only variable one is able to change freely, the pleasure one gets as a result of the doctrine must only be a function of the intensity of that work. In other words, the harder one works at something, the more pleasure they will receive from the doctrine that these overwork spaces provide; inversely, if something was achieved without much work, its associated pleasure and value decreases proportionally. Vee comments frequently how the sweetness of achieving the goal that one has shed blood, sweat, and tears for makes everything worthwhile.

What can be done, then, after having been sucked into the never-ending, self-flagellationadvocating online overwork spaces? Interestingly, in order to begin freeing oneself from their grip, no immediate action must be taken.

Rather, one must de-emphasize the act of working and reincorporate other values into the premises of their self-help methodology.

Having done this, one realizes that they must balance productivity—which itself is more

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useful of a metric than mere work—with other things, like day-to-day pleasures and leisure.

Naturally the ramblings of the Gary Vees of these online spaces will begin to feel myopic (because they are), and if the proper steps are taken in accordance with this newfound, balanced idea of self-help, the barriers to actually ceasing the overwork are lessened.

Obviously, the complexity of overwork is far greater than what a simple methodological explanation could account for. There are innumerable influences, ranging from socioeconomic to cultural to biological, all weaving together and manifesting in the behavior of the overworked. Undoubtedly, however, a confused or unhealthy ideal of self-care can contribute to the severity of unhealthy work habits; therefore, it is very important to not only understand what kind of self-help the overworked consume, but how that self-help came to be. For only through a thorough understanding of online overwork spaces can remedies be prescribed—remedies that some may be in desperate need of in the twilight of their lives.

Endnotes 1 Edward Lyttleton, “The Present-Day Problem of Overwork,” International Journal of Ethics 38, no.

3 (1928): 336, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2378158.

2 Lyttleton, 337-338.

3 Susan Michie and Anne Cockcroft, “Overwork Can Kill: Especially If Combined With High Demand, Low Control, And Poor Social Support,” British Medical Journal 312, no. 7036 (1996): 921, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29731290.

4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1986).

5 Foucault, 44.

6 Foucault, 45.

7 The Hustle Lyfe, “HARD WORK ALWAYS PAYS OFF - Motivational Video For Success | Gary Vaynerchuk Motivation,” Youtube Video, 4:24, May 3, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhxcgMbX1 44.

8 The Hustle Lyfe, 6:55.

9 Foucault, Care of the Self, 64.

10 The Hustle Lyfe, “HARD WORK ALWAYS PAYS OFF,” 4:05.

11 Gary Vaynerchuk, “Imagine The Most Important Person to You Was Gone Tomorrow | DailyVee 577,” Youtube video, 0:12, September 14, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0P8tlc2Xe4.

12 The Hustle Lyfe, “HARD WORK ALWAYS PAYS OFF,” 4:00.

13 The Hustle Lyfe, 6:55.

14 The Hustle Lyfe, 1:35.

15 The Hustle Lyfe, 3:28.

16 Foucault, Care of the Self, 49.

17 Foucault, 66.

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UN-19K Ian Baime, CMC ’24 Resident Artist Medium: Acrylic As a continuation of my work in spring 2021, I set out to explore three-dimensionality in painting with monochromatic features. 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. With this piece, I chose to work purely in black and white to push myself to create depth without relying on color.

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Fearless Love: An Existentialist Analysis of Taylor Swift’s Fearless Phillip Kong, Pomona ’24 Staff Writer I. Introduction Taylor Swift is a household name in Western pop music, taking the industry by storm for most of the twenty-first century with recognizable melodies about heartbreak and romance. A decorated artist, Swift won her first Grammy Album of the Year in 2010 with Fearless, making her the youngest recipient of the award. The album was touted by critics for its nostalgic reflections on her younger self.1 Additionally, Swift’s lyrics convey intimate confessions about her experience with love.2 Among her reflections are life lessons she learned about freedom and defining herself in relationships. A close reading of Swift's debut album Fearless reveals prominent existentialist undertones. In this paper, I will examine the album through a Sartrean existentialist lens to dissect Swift’s reflections on her romantic life.

In Fearless, Swift addresses how one might live in bad faith as a young person in a romantic relationship and the possibility of transitioning to living authentically, offering a positive outlook on overcoming existential anxiety.

Existentialism, broadly speaking, is an ontological theory concerned with human existence that emphasizes freedom as integral to the human condition.3 French philosopher JeanPaul Sartre was one of the first thinkers to adopt explicitly the term in their philosophy.4 In his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre describes existentialism as “a doctrine that… render[s] human life possible.”5 The foundational premise in Sartre’s lecture is the absence of a predetermined purpose for human existence. That is, unlike a designed artifact such as a spoon – which was made with the intention for it to serve the function of transporting food while eating – human existence

was not manufactured with a purpose in mind.6 Further, Sartre argues that humans determine what it means to be human through their own will—by conceiving of themselves after existing—a concept he terms “subjectivity.”7 The combination of these two principles is summarized by Sartre’s motto “existence precedes essence,” as the invention of oneself comes only after their existence.

However, Sartre recognizes the difficulties of existing subjectively—namely, there is a profound experience of anguish associated with freedom. The feeling of anguish is founded upon a sense of “complete and profound responsibility” on the part of the individual.8 Faced with an infinity of choices, we become overwrought by our own transcendent agency. Coupled with the fact that there is no one but ourselves who is able to choose, we therefore also face inescapable responsibility.

Anguish has the potential to manifest whenever humans make a decision. In everyday life, we often follow routines and seek the comfort of objects or concepts that act as “guardrails against anguish.”9 For instance, we initiate and cease our actions based on the temporal movement of a rod on a disc with numbers. For Sartre, it is not uncommon for one to attempt to ignore the feeling of anguish by evading it.10 He termed this phenomenon “bad faith,” when one lives inauthentically and succumbs to societal pressures to deceive themselves of the fact that they are, indeed, free.11 In this paper, I present a close-reading analysis of the lyrics in Fearless in relation to Sartre’s existentialism.12 In particular, I will focus on the manifestation of existential ideas in romantic relationships of young people—a common theme in Swift’s music beyond

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Fearless. Swift models the human journey from anguish to authenticity as it plays out on the micro level in one individual’s journey from adolescence to late early adulthood. Only textual lyrics will be subject to analysis, though the exclusion of visual and musical elements is not intended to suggest that such a perspective cannot be adopted to also examine non-lyrical aspects of the album.

Fortunately, though, Swift later suggests a way to shed this way of living in the lines “I've found time can heal most anything… I didn't know who I was supposed to be / At fifteen.”

She affirms the potential for one to feel uncertain at this point in their life, therefore validating the feeling of anguish that is founded upon the encounter of nothingness – that there is not a mode of existence prescribed for humans.

There is no sense in which she’s “supposed to be” anyone at all; she is ultimately free to create her own essence through time. She begins the song hiding from the anguishing uncertainty of human life, feeling “like there’s nothing to figure out.” By the end of the song, she realizes that it is only by honestly facing this uncertainty, admitting all that “I didn’t know,” that she can attain authenticity. Additionally, she proposes optimistically that authenticity is achievable with time and maturity and that one’s transcendent freedom is not reliant on others; “but in your life you’ll do things greater than / Dating the boy on the football team.”

“You Belong With Me” taps into the pervasive feeling of jealousy one experiences in the development toward authenticity. Beauvoir succinctly explains this experience:

II. Barriers Against Living Authentically In the songs “Fifteen” and “You Belong With Me,” Swift discusses common pitfalls in romantic relationships or the pursuit of them.

In “Fifteen,” Swift addresses the comfort one can find in narratives of love to evade anguish.

In “You Belong With Me,” Swift focuses on how being attached to an individual can lead to feelings of envy and jealousy, which in turn prevent one from living authentically.

“Fifteen” is centered around the experience of a young student in high school who has an idealized view of romantic relationships.

On the track, Swift sings “Hopin' one of those senior boys will wink at you and say / ‘You know, I haven't seen you around before.’” In these lines, Swift addresses an individual’s desire to be noticed by someone else, affirming their existence and importance to them. This mindset is an example of a particular narrative that can act as a guardrail against anguish. In other words, it provides a sense of certainty and identity when “you walk through the doors / … [on] the mornin’ of your very first day.” However, it is not possible to live authentically while simultaneously holding on to this idea as it implies that the essence of one’s high school experience is dependent on others – being noticed by “senior boys.” Furthermore, it relies on the illusion that there is a predetermined facticity surrounding who she is, or ought to be, that requires external recognition.

Swift’s lyrics indicate that this predetermined essence was already set before her time in high school even began, rather than freely shaped through her actions.

A young man wills himself free… This spontaneous liberality which casts him ardently into the world can ally itself to what is commonly called egoism. Often the young man perceives only that aspect of his relationship to others whereby others appear as enemies…The first movement is to hate them.13

On this track, Swift vividly explores this egoism and hatred of the Other through describing a relationship between a person she is romantically interested in and their current partner.14 Some examples include “she's going off about something that you said,” “she doesn't get your humor like I do,” and “she'll never know your story like I do,” revealing that Swift does not believe her love interest should remain in their current relationship. Instead, she believes that they belong with her. This track

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exemplifies Swift’s feeling of romantic jealousy—that the ability for her existence to be affirmed by the attention of a love interest is under threat by a rival.15 Indeed, Swift behaves as Beauvoir’s metaphorical young man: she “sees in every other…and particularly in those whose existence is asserted with most brilliance, a limit, a condemnation of” herself. The occupation of this individual by a partner that seemingly mistreats them prevents Swift from entering into a relationship with them herself.

She feels that “indeed at every moment others are stealing the whole world away from [her].”

One can see the connection between the emotion of jealousy and existentialism in how one conceives of self-value. McMullin argues that when one feels jealous, believing that they are entitled to the affirmations found in a romantic relationship, they are defining their identity based on the freedom of others – that is, one loses the ability to determine their own self-value – and is hence living inauthentically.16 Indeed, Swift’s lyrics in this track imply that she stands to gain self-value when her love interest notices her in the lines “Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find / That what you're looking for has been here the whole time.”

conventionally good partner. They “say everything [she] needs to hear,” “respects [her] space,” and “never makes [her] wait.” Yet, Swift feels torn over the fact that she misses her imperfect yet passionate relationship with her former partner. In particular, she misses “screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain.” Swift is conflicted between her feelings toward her current partner, with whom she is socially expected to feel happy, and her desires for her past relationship. This internal tension is indicative of her awareness that her own desires are distinct from the desires prescribed by societal standards. On a Satresian reading, Swift is experiencing anguish—the frightening feeling that she is free to choose between the two and solely responsible for her choice.

In “Tell Me Why,” Swift subsequently struggles with the consequences of her decisions as a human with ultimate responsibility.

Her transition to authenticity is not linear. According to Sartre, our transcendent freedom entails that we are also painfully responsible for how we fashion ourselves—with no essence preceding our existence.17 In his terms, we are “abandoned,” left to create ourselves and our experiences in life.18 In the beginning of the track, Swift sings “I took a chance, I took a shot,” emphasizing her own responsibility, but shortly launches into a polemic on an individual from a past romantic relationship. When Swift repeats the line “tell me why” in the chorus, she seems to be seeking some form of explanation from that individual so that she can rationalize her painful experience as a consequence of their choices, not her own. She begs “Why do you have to make me feel small / So you can feel whole inside? / Why do you have to put down my dreams / So you're the only thing on my mind?” Here, she attempts to flee from her own freedom, preferring inauthenticity to bearing the full responsibility of her actions.

In “White Horse,” “Forever & Always,” and “Breathe,” Swift details her experience with anxiety, an encounter with the absurd

III. Transition Towards Authenticity As the album progresses, Swift turns her attention toward her own experiences with anguish and anxiety—the negative feelings one has when transitioning towards living authentically. In “Tell Me Why” and “That’s the Way I Loved You,” she sings about the moment she discovered that she was condemned to be free, while in “White Horse,” “Breathe,” and “Forever & Always,” she addresses the mood of anxiety and its manifestations in her life.

Swift discovers that she has ultimate responsibility for her own life in “That’s the Way I Loved You.” She describes an internal conflict over her feelings regarding a past relationship compared to her current one. Her current partner fits every societal standard of a

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that is a characteristic experience of the human condition.19 Heidegger describes encountering the absurd as a moment when “beings as a whole become superfluous.”20 In other words, commonplace experiences, from the way we pronounce words to the organization of sidewalks, are transfigured in our view; we become aware that they are strikingly contingent, superfluous, absurd. For Sartre, this encounter with absurdity, with all its accompanying anxiety, is precisely an experience of freedom that can propel one towards authenticity. Swift’s account of anxiety surrounds the painful endings of her past relationships. First, in “White Horse,” she sings “That [she’s] not a princess / this ain't a fairytale.” These lines suggest a rejection of idealized romantic narratives that she might have believed in previously. Swift’s preconception of herself in romantic relationships begins to fade away, socially prescribed essences giving way to the nothingness of subjective existence. Secondly, in “Forever & Always,” her expectations of her partner likewise appear absurd. In the lines “Thought I knew you for a minute / now I'm not so sure,” she indicates that despite her partner promising to love her for “forever & always,” their words become meaningless as the relationship fades away.21 Finally, in “Breathe,” Swift acknowledges the fact that anxiety is often not a pleasant feeling, but one that she will be able to move past and grow from. At first, she clings to bad faith, shirking her own absolute freedom and insisting that others define her: “Now I don't know what to be without you around.” But ultimately, she arrives at an epiphany: there is “no one here to save [her]”; she is ultimately free and responsible to shape her own essence. She repeats that “[she] can’t can't breathe without you, but [she has] to.”

While “you” likely refers to a partner in a romantic relationship, it also implicitly symbolizes the feeling of stability and order that comes with being defined by other beings in the world, which is taken away in the mood of anxiety.

IV. Positive Outlook Up to this point, Fearless does not appear very optimistic, with glorified ideas about love that sound dangerously naïve and sad heartbreaks that leave Swift unable to breathe. However, the essence of the album is anything but a tragedy. Rather, Swift provides positive messages about overcoming anguish and anxiety in order to live an authentic life. In “You’re Not Sorry” and “Change,” she welcomes her newfound freedom and everything that comes with it. Then, in the title track “Fearless,” she offers a mantra for living authentically.

Swift conveys a sense of excitement for the future; celebrating the end of her past life and optimistically embracing a world of the unknown. In “You’re Not Sorry,” Swift sings “But you don't have to call anymore / I won't pick up the phone” and “You can tell me that you're sorry / But I don't believe you, baby, like I did before.” These lines stand in stark contrast to her sentiments before, where now she seems much more certain about moving on from external definors of her essence and freeing herself from societally imposed romantic narratives that shackled her in the past. In “Change,” the lines “Because these things will change / These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down” suggest a positive view of anxiety as opposed to the negative one she held before. She sees the shattering of “guardrails” against anguish as an opportunity and the established norms and customs as restraints that preceded her existence. In particular, in the second verse and bridge of the track, she sees it as an opportunity for triumph, singing about fighting and winning against an unnamed challenge. Overall, Swift relays an optimistic message about overcoming anxiety. Echoing the philosophy of Sartre, she suggests that the experience of anxiety provides a chance for reinventing oneself, more than merely an uncomfortable feeling.

Finally, in “Fearless,” Swift applies her newfound concept to romantic relationships, giving advice for how one should search for

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and enter them. On the track, she recounts her feelings during the beginning of a relationship.22 In the bridge, she sings “Well, you stood there with me in the doorway / My hands shake,” suggesting that she still has fears about entering this relationship. These fears may include the mismatch of the relationship to a romantic narrative or the inevitable painful feeling of anxiety that may accompany its ending.

However, in the chorus, she sings “And I don't know why, but with you I'd dance / In a storm in my best dress, fearless,” telling the world that although she has fears and reservations, she is able to overcome them and live freely.23 This line is the epitome of a Sartresian mindset—facing the nothingness and accompanying anxiety of existence head-on and taking full responsibility for one’s transcendent freedom. Importantly, she does not say that she is acting from sort of passion or “right feeling.”

For Sartre, acting so would actually be living inauthentically because it appeals to some formula that tells the individual how to act.24 Instead, she honors her own freedom, and does not appeal to any external guide for her actions.

Swift, in this track, becomes truly existentialist.

V. Conclusion Swift’s debut album Fearless contends with various issues in existentialism such as anxiety, anguish, and freedom in the context of romantic relationships. She identifies potential obstacles to living authentically, recounts her personal experiences with anguish and anxiety, and offers an optimistic message about how one can overcome challenges towards authentic living. Swift’s appeal to common experiences in romance is one of many reasons why she achieved superstardom status at the beginning of her career, with catchy and melodic music accompanied by lyrics that anyone can find refuge in. Her core message captures her view on how one should find love—by being “Fearless.”

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Endnotes 1 Alexis Petridis, “Pop Review: Taylor Swift: Fearless,” The Guardian, March 6, 2009.

2 Jody Rosen, “Fearless,” Rolling Stone, October 25, 2019.

3 Steven Crowell, “Existentialism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, June 9, 2020.

4 Crowell, “Existentialism.”

5 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed.

Walter Kaufmann, (New York, NY: Meridian Books, Inc.: 1956), 288.

6 Sartre, 290.

7 Sartre, 291.

8 Sartre, 292.

9 Jack Reynolds, Understanding Existentialism (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2007), 72.

10 Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” 292.

11 Thomas Flynn, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, December 5, 2011.

12 “Fearless by Taylor Swift,” Genius, accessed December 18, 2021, https://genius.com/albums/Taylor-swift/Fearless.

13 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York, NY: Open Road Integrated Media, 2018), 36.

14 The inclusion of an excerpt from Beauvoir is intended to support the Satresian view of existentialism. Sartre’s parallel concept introduces a state of “being-for-others,” where one treats themselves as an object, defined by how the Other looks at them.

15 Gregory L. White, “A Model of Romantic Jealousy,” Motivation and Emotion 5, no. 4 (1981): 295-310.

16 Irene Mcmullin, “Love and Entitlement: Sartre and Beauvoir on the Nature of Jealousy,” Hypatia 26, no. 1 (2011): 102-122.

17 Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” 290.

18 Sartre, 298.

19 Crowell, “Existentialism.”

20 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964) (New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008), 102.

21 Randy Lewis, “She's Writing Her Future,” Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2008.

22 Genius, “Fearless by Taylor Swift.”

23 Genius, “Fearless by Taylor Swift.”

24 Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” 308.

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