GLOBAL CONVERSATIONSAN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE

ISSN 2434-5687

VOLUME III, NUMBER 01 / 2020

Publisher
Society for Philosophy as Global Conversation
EditorFrancesc Passani

Executive Editor
Tomokazu Baba

Consulting Editors
Fiona Tomkinson
Rossen Roussev

Issue Editor
Rossen Roussev

Art Director
Joanna Tiele
Editorial correspondence:
global.conversations.ph@gmail.com

Cover image© Joanna Tiele

ISSN 2434-5687

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONSAN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE

VOLUME III, NUMBER 01, 2020

Varia Issue

To the victims of the global coronavirus pandemic and the medics andresearchers who fought to contain it...

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONSAN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE
Volume III, Number 01 (2020)

Varia Issue

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial
Introduction
Rossen Roussev

7-8

Literature and Remix
Ho ili , Ho pi ali and A oimm ni in De Berni re Cap ain Corelli Mandolin
Catherine MacMillan

9-25Remi o Rec cle: An En ironmen ali

Approach o Re ing Work

Stefan Stefanov

26-35

Neo-Napoleonism and the Politics of Trust
Pompeo Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime
Eric C. Hendriks-Kim
Iden if ing he Poli ic of Tr

36-49
and Belonging in No ada

Democracie : A S d of he

Public Consensus in four European countries
Davide Orsitto

50-62

Logos, Non-Conceptual Experience, and Philosophy
Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditation
J. Jeremy Wisnewski

63-80

Philosophy as Competence and Art of Self-creation: Bringing Habermas and Foucault
Together
Rossen I. Roussev

81-95

Notes on Contributors

96-97

Information for Authors

98

Introduction
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 07-08

Editorial
Introduction
The selection in this varia issue includes six articles from the areas literary criticism, cultural
studies, political science, and philosophy. Thematically they fit nicely into the scope of interestof the journal Global Conversations, which spreads over humanities, social sciences,interdisciplinary and other relevant research addressing issues of global cultural exchange andconversation in a broadest sense.
The opening pair of articles dwell on challenges of cultural intermixing and coexistence
in volatile times. Catherine MacMillan approaches Louis de Bernières no el Captain Corelli’s
Mandolin for a revisit of the concept of the Other via Derrida s vocabulary of hospitality andautoimmunity. Set against the background of the Italian and German occupations of the Greek
island of Cephalonia during the second World War, the novel involves characters from all
warring sides in various relations of friendship, love, and enmity amidst most precarious ofpolitical circumstances. Following de Bernières subtle depicture of friendships between
putative political enemies and enmities between putative political friends such as Corelli sfriendship with Dr. Iannis and love with Pelagia, (for whom Corelli is an occupier), which arejuxtaposed with enmities among Nazi soldiers, as well as with the brutality of the Greek
resistance group ELAS towards the local population and fellow communists MacMillan
unveils the binary opposition of friendship and enmity as deeply shattered. For his part, Stefan
Stefanov focuses on challenges for the coexistence of different forms of creativity and art posedby the currently predominant cultural attitudes and copyrighting regulations. Tracing the rootof the problem to the dominance of the concepts of originalit , genius author, anduniqueness firmly fixated in both aesthetic valuation and copyright legislation since the 18th
century, he points to the emergence of the remi author ho appears on the creative stage asworking in a situation of tight cultural and legal constraints. In support of the remix art,
Stefanov advances the view that reusing works of others allows a wider range of possibilities
for creativity and that an en ironmentalist approach endorsing rec cling art can flourish
upon the removal of the existent obstacles to it, noting positively recent changes in attitudes
and legislation as more adequate to the nature of creativity.
The second pair of articles address issues of politics in national and global affairs thathave become particularly pressing in recent years. Eric C. Hendriks-Kim draws attention tocertain Western political attitudes toward People s Republic of China, which regard it as themightiest deviation from the liberal political model and call for liberation of the Chinese
people from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The author terms this approach neoNapoleonism associating it with Napoleon s expansionist politics of soldier of freedom
fighting against Ancien Régime, and tracing it in the American foreign policy under Secretaryof State Mike Pompeo. Pointing that mainland China s theoretical response to this approach

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Introduction

sees the harmonious Tianxia tradition as a civilizational guard against aggressive ideologies
from the West, and that the relationship between CCP and Chinse people is rather complex,
Hendriks-Kim suggests that this ideological debate is far from over, especially as the current
Chinese political system is a modern revolutionist replacement of Ancien Régime on its own.
For his part, Davide Orsitto focuses on the popular support for the communitarian critique ofpolitical liberalism, which sees the latter as placing emphasis on human rights to the detrimentof the values of trust and belonging to community. He backs up his investigation with empirical
data attesting to changes in the public attitudes towards both communitarianism and liberalism
in the four largest European countries France, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom forthe last half a century. Based on the empirical findings, Orsitto signals that while there havebeen different trends in the fluctuation of the public attitudes to these two political value
systems during this period, the overall tendency is towards a greater support for communitariansociety that advances the values of trust and belonging, and towards a lesser support forindividualistic values.
The final pair of articles are philosophical in focus exploring the interminglings of logos,
non-conceptual experience, and philosophy. J. Jeremy Wisnewski focuses on the relation
between logos and non-conceptual experience searching for answers on whether the latter could
be in estigated ithout being coloni ed b the former; that is, outside the realm of thefounding presumption of the Western philosophical tradition that the language of reason isadequate to reality. He brings the relevance of the Indic meditative practice of samādhi as away to a non-conceptual experience unmediated by logos, while also comparatively exploring
the possibility for the former to found knowledge independently of the latter, making in theprocess numerous allusions to well-known Western viewpoints. While Wisnewski asserted thathe could find no argument for privileging samādhi over logos, the same applies also the otherway around, thus suggesting that Western philosophers still need to address their unfounded
presumption of privileging logos over experience on its own. The final article explores the roleand place of philosophy in our contemporary world issuing primarily from the work of Jürgen
Habermas and Michel Foucault. Based on Habermas ie of modernit , which situates therole of philosophy as mediating interpreter in the exchange of expert knowledge between andwithin the levels of theoretical culture and practical application, the role of philosophy isultimately specified as competence, in distinction from expertise. Then, in a supplementary
fashion, based on Foucault s in estigations on the so-called technologies of the self practiced
within the art of li ing of Antiquit and Middle Ages, the role of philosoph is identified
along the principles of self-knowledge and self-care also as art of self-creation.
We hope you enjoy these articles and find there something for yourself. Thank you foryour time!
Rossen Roussev

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GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 9-25

Literature and Remix
HOSTILITY, HOSPITALITY AND AUTOIMMUNITY
IN DE BERNI RES CAPTAIN CORELLI S MANDOLIN
Catherine MacMillan
Abstract
The article explores Louis de Be i e
el Captain Corelli s Mandolin from thee ec i e f De ida c ce
f h i ali a d a i
i . I De ida
work, the concepts of unconditional hospitality and autoimmunity overlap in theirfocus on openness to the Other, which constitutes both a threat and an opportunity,
while destabilizing the binary opposition between friendship and enmity. This paper
claims that the novel, which is set mainly during and following the Italian and Nazi
occupations of the Greek island of Cephalonia in World War II, also deals withsuch themes, questioning and deconstructing the division between friendship andenmity. This is particularly evident, for instance, in the love story between the
Italian soldier Captain Corelli and the local girl Pelagia; there are, however, manyother incidences of friendship between political enemies and enmity between
supposed political friends in the novel. In this regard, this paper focuses on foure i de /e e i heel hich, ead h gh De ida c ce
f h i ali
and/or autoimmunity, destabilize the binary opposition between friendship ande i : he hi
f Ce hal ia a de ic ed i D . Ia i A Pe
al Hi
f Ce hall ia , Ca ai C elli ela i hi
i h hi h
Pelagia a d he
fa he D . Ia i , hef The G d Na i G e Webe h i f cedhhis Italian friends and, finally, the disastrous takeover of the island by theCommunist Greek resistance group ELAS.

1. Introduction
British author Louis de Berni res 1994 novel Ca ai C elli Ma d li is set primarily on
the Greek island of Cephalonia, an island seemingl accursed and destined fore er to be partof someone else s game . 1 The events in the novel take place mostly during the Second World
War and its aftermath, when the island is occupied first by the Italians, then the Nazis andeventually, following the departure of the Nazis, by ELAS, the Greek Communist resistance.
1

Louis de Bernières, Ca ai C elli Ma d li (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 361-362.

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In this context, the novel focuses on the love story that develops between a local girl, Pelagia,
and a mandolin-playing Italian soldier, Captain Antonio Corelli, who is billeted with her andher father, Dr. Iannis. Indeed, as Sheppard argues, the no el is normall and e clusi el readas a lo e stor .2
In addition to love, however, war is an important theme of the novel: the story of theSecond World War is told from the perspectives of multiple characters, including those of thesoldiers Mandras (Pelagia s fianc ) and Carlo Guercio, a closet homose ual Italian soldier ho,
eventually, sacrifices his own life to save that of Captain Corelli. In addition, the story is also
recounted from the points of view of those who make (and break) history, including, among
others, Mussolini, hose fateful attempt to restore the Roman empire is presented in the no el
as a tragic farce and a farcical traged , 3 and the dictator Metaxas, 4 who tried to resist
Mussolini s ultimatum.
Indeed, then, the themes of love and war overlap in the novel, which depicts the love,hospitality and friendship that can flourish even across the borders of political enmity.
However, Ca ai C elli Ma d li also portrays hostility and aggression amongst those whoare, supposedly, political friends; the Greek resistance group ELAS, for instance, terrorizes thevery islanders whom it is supposed to protect from the fascist occupying forces. Like Derrida,then, de Bernières challenges the idea that friendship and enmity are mutually exclusive
opposites.5
Thus, the novel not only explores the themes of hospitality and hostility, enmity andfriendship as they relate to the borders between states; it also arguably questions the semantic
borders bet een these binar oppositions: as Sheppard argues, Within this kind of historicalconte t, things turn into their opposite at e er le el. 6 In this sense, the themes of the novel
arguabl resonate ith Derrida s deconstructi e project, and, more specificall , ith his ork
on hospitality and autoimmunity.
The ord hospitalit , as Derrida notes, carries its o n contradiction incorporated into
it ; it is parasiti ed b its opposite, hostilit , the undesirable guest hich it harbors as theself-contradiction in its o n bod . 7 Hospitality, then, derives from the Latin hospes, meaning
host, guest or stranger which itself derives from hostis, which originally meant a stranger, andcame to refer to an enem , or hostile stranger (hostilis).8 This etymology thus hints at the2Richard Sheppard, Sa ager , Sal age, Sal es and Sal ation: The Historico-Theological Debate of Captain
C elli Ma d li , J
al f Eea S die xxxii (2002), p. 51.
3
Ibid., p. 52
4
It should be emphasized here that, despite the popularity of the novel, it generated a considerable amount ofcontroversy particularly among Cephalonian veterans and survivors of the Acqui division. Among other issues,
such criticism has focused on an arguably idealized and romanticized depiction of Metaxas and of the Italiansoldiers, and an o erl harsh portra al of the Greek resistance. See, for instance Seumas Milne, Greek M th ,The Guardian, 29 July 1997.
5
Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time. (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 46
6Ibid., p. 56.
7Jacques Derrida, Hostipitalit , Angelaki 5, no.3 (2000), pp. 3-18.
8John Caputo, Deconstruction in a nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham
University Press, 1997), p. 110.

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CATHERINE MACMILLANii i De Be i e Ca ai C elli Ma d liinterchangeable status of host and guest, as well as at how the concept of hospitality isapparently intertwined with that of hostility.9
For Derrida, as explored further below, hospitality is ideally unconditional; thus, theOther must be welcomed no matter who they are, and they should be accepted as they are,without being expected to adapt to the rules or conditions of the host. Thus, unconditional
hospitality implies a risk, as the (uninvited) guest may turn out to be a destructive enemy.
However, the absolute openness to the Other in unconditional hospitality is also, potentially, an
opportunity as the stranger may also be someone who brings friendship and renewal. In thissense, unconditional hospitality can be compared to Derrida s concept of autoimmunity, which
he describes as that strange beha ior here a li ing being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, itself
orks to destro its o n protection, to immuni e itself against its o n immunit . 10 Thus, as
in unconditional hospitality, in autoimmunity the border between self and other disintegrates;
the openness to the Other that this implies can be understood as both a threat and a promise.
In this conte t, follo ing a brief discussion of Derrida s concepts of hospitality andautoimmunity, the paper focuses on four episodes/events from Ca ai C elli Ma d li inorder to explore the inseparability of hostility and hospitality, and that of friendship and enmity
in the no el. Firstl , Cephalonia s long histor of invasion and occupation, through a discussionof Dr. Iannis A Personal History of Cephallonia, is examined through the lens of(auto)immunity and unconditional hospitality. The interwoven theme of hospitality andhostility is then discussed in the context of Captain Corelli as (unin ited) guest in Dr. Iannis
home. Following this, the theme of friendship and enmity is explored in the story of Günter
Weber, the Good Na i , ho is e entuall forced to shoot his Italian friends . Finall , thecollapse of the distinction between friend and enemy implied in the takeover of the island by
the (supposed) anti-Nazi Greek resistance group ELAS, perhaps the most destructive of all theisland s occupations, is e plored from the perspecti e of autoimmunit .
2. Derrida on Hospitality and Autoimmunity: The Risk of Welcoming the Other
2a. Hospitality
For Derrida, hospitality is ideally unconditional, involving welcoming the Other without evenasking questions about his or her identity or origins; this can be contrasted with conditional
hospitality, which is restricted and regulated by the state, and grounded in law. 11 Conditional
hospitality, then, requires the guest to adapt to the cultural norms of the host; it implies that thehost maintains control over the guest, and can be understood in terms of closed borders andnationalism.12
However, for Derrida, true hospitality is unconditional; it involves welcoming
whoever, or whatever, may be in need of that hospitality, and relinquishing claims to property
9

Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo and Jesús Benito Sánchez, Hospitality in American Literature and Culture: Spaces,
Bodies, Borders (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 5.
10Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 100.
11
Marguerite La Ca e, Terrorism and Trauma: Negotiating Derridean Autoimmunit , Philosophy and Social
Criticism, Vol. 37, No. 5 (2011), p. 614.
12
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, translated by Anne Dufourmantelle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000),
p. 135

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and ownership. Thus, unconditional hospitality involves openness to the stranger, whoever heor she may be:a foreigner, an immigrant, an uninvited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the newarrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal or divine creature, a living or dead thing,
male or female.13

According to Derrida, then, the Other must be welcomed no matter what thecircumstances and without questioning or even knowing their identity:
I have to and that s an unconditional injunction I have to welcome the Other whoever he or she
is unconditionally, without asking for a document, a name, a context or a passport. That is the very
first opening of my relation to the Other; to open my space, my home my house, my language, myculture, my nation, my state and myself.14

Thus, in contrast to conditional hospitalit , hich limits the Other s sta as a isitor,
demands that they act in certain ways, and recognizes the sovereignty of the host, 15
unconditional hospitality does not require the guest to assimilate or to adapt to the host s rules.
As Derrida argues, then, hospitalit should be neither assimilation, acculturation, nor simpl
the occupation of m space b the Other. 16
Unconditional hospitality therefore potentially leaves us open to abuse, as we can neverbe sure hether the one e are elcoming into our home is a friend or an enem , someone
ho ill help us or harm us, aid us or destro us 17: it can thus be compared to a Trojan horse,as
hat seems promising could contain our enem . 18 As Derrida emphasizes, then,unconditional hospitalit implies a risk: I ha e to accept if I offer unconditional hospitalitthat the Other may ruin my own space or impose his or her own culture or his or her own
language 19; indeed, there is a risk of them initiating a re olution, stealing e er thing, or
killing everyone. That is the risk of pure hospitality and pure gift, because a gift might beterrible too. 20 Emphasizing the common root shared by host/guest (hôte) and hostage, Derrida
argues that, in unconditional hospitalit , The one in iting becomes almost the hostage of the
one in ited, of the guest, the hostage of the one he recei es, the one ho keeps him at home. 21
In this context, Derrida emphasizes that an important aporia exists at the heart of theconcept of hospitalit . This aporia results from the opposition of The law (of hospitality), in
its uni ersal singularit , to a pluralit that isa number of la s that distribute their histor
13

Ibid., p. 77.
Geoffre Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Politics and Friendship: A Discussion ith
Jacques Derrida, 1997.
http://www.dariaroithmayr.com/pdfs/assignments/Politics%20and%20Friendship.pdf
15
Marguerite La Ca e, Terrorism and Trauma, p. 615.
16
Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Politics and Friendship.
17
Michael Naas, Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), p. 32.
18
Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 128.
19
Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Politics and Friendship.
20
Jacques Derrida, Hospitalit , Justice and Responsibilit , p. 71.
21Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 9.
14

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and their anthropological geograph differentl . In this sense, The law is above the laws. It
is thus illegal, transgressi e, outside the la . 22
Unconditional hospitality is, then, seemingly impossible, as it involves the hostcompletely relinquishing control over the guest, and thus over his own space:
For there to be hospitality there must be a door. But if there is a door, there is no longer hospitality.
There is no hospitable house. There is no house without doors and windows. But as soon as there
are a door and windows, it means that someone has the key to them and consequently controls theconditions of hospitality. There must be a threshold. But if there is a threshold, there is no longer
hospitality.23

As the passage above suggests, for Derrida such unconditionality is fundamental to the conceptof hospitality itself; however, this is a two- a dependence as the unconditional law of
hospitality needs the laws, it requires them in order to become effecti e, concrete,
determined. 24
Thus, unconditional hospitality will always be haunted by conditional hospitality, andvice versa: We ill al a s be threatened b this dilemma bet een, on the one hand, One ofthem can always corrupt the other, and this capacity for perversion remains irreducible. It mustremain so. 25
In this sense, referring to his concept of autoimmunity, which will be further discussed
in the following section, Derrida argues that these contradictions result in hospitality autoimmunizing itself:
Hospitality is a self-contradictory concept and experience which can only self-destruct
put otherwise produce itself as impossible, only be possible on the condition of its impossibility
or protect itself from itself, auto-immunize itself in some way, which is to say, deconstruct itself
precisely in being put into practice.26

2b. Autoimmunity
Derrida s concept of autoimmunit as de eloped throughout the last decade of his life, 27 and,as Inge Mutsaers points out, he uses the notion of autoimmunit in different a s. 28 Indeed,
he proposes that the logic of autoimmunity, which is a medical term, albeit one whose roots

22

Ibid., p. 79.
Jacques Derrida, Hostipitalit , p. 14.
24
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 79.
25
Ibid., p. 135.
26
Jacques Derrida, Hostipitalit , pp. 4-5.
27
Derrida s first use of the concept of autoimmunit dates to the 1990s, in Spectres of Marx (1994), Politics ofFriendship (1997) and Faith and Knowledge. However, it arguably becomes central to his philosophy following
the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, most notably in an interview with Giovanna Borradori (2003), and,
subsequently in Rogues (2005). In these works, Derrida applied his concept of autoimmunity to a variety ofcontexts, including religion and science and, perhaps most famously, in his analyses of reactions to terrorist attacks
and of democracy.
28
Inge Mutsaers, Immunological Discourse in Political Philosophy: Immunisation and its Discontents (London:
Routledge, 2016), p. 103.
23

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ere originall political, can be e tended to life in general. 29 Generally speaking, there aret o major, and intert ined, implications to Derrida s ersion of autoimmunity. Firstly, it isself-destructi e; it is a quasi-suicidal dri e30 hich amounts to the self s attacking its o norgans, tissues and processes, including the very immune system which was to have protected
it and its identit . 31 Secondly, as in absolute hospitality, the destruction of the immune
system32 leaves the self open to the intrusion of the Other.33 Thus, according to the logic ofautoimmunity,
the greatest threat of terror comes from within, in that destruction of the immune system which
allo s the relati el strict border bet een one s self and the outside to collapse, not because of ane ternal enem s attack but as a result of internal corruption.34

As La Caze points out, autoimmunity can be understood in terms of the integral
protections found at the level of state or community and even at the level of the psyche35: ineffect, it destroys the integrity of all these sovereign forms. In Specters of Marx, for example,
Derrida explains that,the living ego is auto-immune. To protect its life, to constitute itself as unique li ing ego
it musttake the immune defenses apparently meant for the non-ego, the enemy, the opposite, theadversary and direct them at once for itself and against itself.36

Thus, for Derrida, whether at the state, community or psychic level, autoimmunity is,fundamentally, a relationship between self and other; however, it also deconstructs the
traditional opposition between self and non-self, 37 so that the relation is neither one ofe teriorit nor one of simple opposition or contradiction. 38

29

Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 187.
30
Ibid., p. 124.
31
Michael Lewis, Of (Auto) Immune Life: Derrida, Esposito, Agamben, in Medicine and Society, New
Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, ed. Darian Meacham (New York: Springer, 2015), p. 216.
32
Derrida s definition contrasts ith the actual medical definition of autoimmune disease, hich results not fromthe destruction of the immune system by the body, but rather from the destruction of the bodily tissues by its own
immune s stem. Indeed, as Tim r (2014), for instance, has argued, Derrida s definition of autoimmunit seems,
rather, closer to the bod s response to infection b the AIDS irus which, as Timár points out, stands in asome hat spectral relationship to autoimmune disease. See Andrea Tim r, Derrida and the Immune S stem, Et
al: Critical Theory Online, 2015, http://etal.hu/en/archive/terrorism-and-aesthetics-2015/derrida-and-theimmune-system
33
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 123.
34
Michael Le is, Of (Auto) Immune Life: Derrida, Esposito, Agamben, p. 219.
35
Marguerite La Ca e, Terrorism and Trauma, p. 606.
36
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamouf (London: Routledge, 1994), p., 177.
37
Andrew Johnson. Viral Politics: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Auto-Immunity and the Political Philosophy ofCarl Schmitt (Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010), p. 12.
38
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 114.

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In a similar vein, autoimmunity also deconstructs the oppositional structure between
friend and enem ; indeed One function of the concept of autoimmunity is to act as a third term
bet een the classical opposition bet een friend and foe. In this sense, it can be understood asa characteristicall deconstructi e mo e aimed at displacing the traditional metaph sicaltendency to rely on irreducible pairs. 39
In fact, as Johnson argues, Derrida s deconstruction of Carl Schmitt s friend-enemy
dichotomy in Politics of Friendship can also be understood in terms of autoimmunity.40 For
Schmitt, as Derrida points out, the distinction between friend and enemy is the foundation ofpolitics itself; notabl , in Schmitt s theor , enem is the pri ileged term of the t o; friendshipis defined in relation to enmity. However, as Derrida argues elsewhere, the breakdown of theclear distinction between friend and enemy leads the way to autoimmunity:41
One would then have the time of a world without friends, the time of a world without enemies. The
imminence of a self-destruction by the infinite development of a madness of self-immunity.42

As has already been touched upon, autoimmunity is intimately bound up with theconcept of hospitality 43 in that both involve an openness to the outside which implies risk. As
Michael Naas explains,
If autoimmunity describes the way in which an organism, an individual, a family, or a nation,
compromises its own forces of self-affirmation so as to become open and vulnerable to its outside,then autoimmunity is always a kind of hospitality the welcoming of an event that might wellchange the very identity of the self, of the autos, the welcoming of an event that may thus bringgood or ill, that may invite a remedy or a poison, a friend or a foe. To be open to the event, to offer
hospitality, it is essential not to know in advance what is what or who is who.44

Thus, immunity can be likened to conditional hospitality where we are able to assert
and defend our sovereignty and thus to protect ourselves from the potential excesses of the
Other. In contrast, although autoimmunity is not entirely equivalent to unconditional
hospitality,45 both share the feature of receptivity or susceptibility to the unexpected. 46 In thisway, then, autoimmunity, like unconditional hospitality, is imbued with both risk andpromise47; it is a double bind of threat and chance, not alternati el or b turns promise and/or
threat but threat in the promise itself. 48 As Derrida argues, autoimmunity,
39

Ibid., p. 152
Andrew Johnson, Viral Politics, p.33.
41
Ibid., pp. 9-10.
42Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 76.
43
Andrea Tim r, Derrida and the Immune S stem, Et al: Critical Theory Online (2015), p. 4,
http://etal.hu/en/archive/terrorism-and-aesthetics-2015/derrida-and-the-immune-system/
44
Michael Naas (2009) Derrida from Now On, p. 32.
45
Marguerite La Ca e e plains that unconditional hospitalit is a complete defencelessness in the face of the
Other, hile autoimmunit implies an eroding of our defences through our o n decisions to protect oursel es.
See Terrorism and Trauma, p. 115.
46
Ibid., p. 615.
47
Andrea Tim r, Derrida and the Immune S stem, p. 5.
48
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 82.
40

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is not an absolute ill or evil. It enables an exposure to the other, to what and who comes whichmeans that it must remain incalculable. Without autoimmunity, with absolute immunity, nothing
would ever happen or arrive; we would no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer expect another,or expect any event.49

On this basis, for Derrida, autoimmunity, despite the risk it entails, appears to be vitalfor the health of any community:50 it is thus both self-protecting and self-destroying, at once
remed and poison. 51 In this context, then, according to Naas, both deconstruction as
hospitality and deconstruction as autoimmunity help explain,
Not only how we live, how we remain open to the future and to a renewal of life in the future, how
we remain open to innovation and invention through the reception of others, but how we die, how
we inevitably turn against ourselves, against the very principles that constitute and sustain ourselves
and our identities.52

3. Hospitality and Autoimmunity in Four Episodes from Captain Corelli s Mandolin
In his A Personal History of Cephallonia, Dr. Iannis describes the island s long histor ofinvasion and domination by various imperial forces, including the Romans, the Venetians, theOttomans and the British. Its openness to outsiders, its lack of immunity and sovereignty, havearguably long obliged the island to an attitude of unconditional hospitality towards thesefrequently destructive strangers:
Because the island is a jewel it has since the time of Odysseus been the plaything of the great, thepo erful, the plutocratic, and the odious
There began a long and lamentable histor of its being
passed from hand to hand as a gift, at the same time as it was repeatedly being raided by corsairs
from all the man corners of the mal ersated Mediterranean Sea
From the time of the Romans,53
the only prize for us was survival.

In this sense, unconditional hospitality can perhaps be enforced; Derrida suggests thatthe distinction bet een in itation and isitation ma be the distinction bet een conditional
hospitalit (in itation) and unconditional hospitalit . In this conte t, a isitation can e en be
an invasion; as Derrida notes,
if I accept the coming of the other, the arriving [arrivance] of the other who could come at any
moment without asking my opinion and who could come with the best or worst of intentions: avisitation could be an invasion by the worst. Unconditional hospitality must remain open without
horizon of expectation, without anticipation, to any surprise visitation.54

49

Ibid., p. 152.
In this context, Derrida gives the example of immune-depressants, which prevent the body from rejecting organtransplants; these drugs act against the bod s o n immunit to something from the outside.
51
Ibid., p. 124.
52
Michael Naas, Derrida from Now On, p. 33.
53
Louis de Bernières, Ca ai C elli Ma d li , p. 341.
54
Jacques Derrida, Hostipitalit , p. 17.
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Judith Still also appears to understand Derrida s conception of unconditional hospitalitas, potentially, a hospitality which is, in some cases, enforced; she notes that the dangers of
welcoming guests might be illustrated by the fate of Native Americans or that of the indigenous
peoples of man formerl coloni ed peoples. 55
However, while the invasions certainly brought their share of death and destruction to
the islanders, they also played an important part in shaping the culture of Cephalonia. The sixhundred-year Venetian occupation, for instance, gave the island a distinctly Italian flavor,
influencing its architecture, hich, as Doctor Iannis notes, is highl conduci e to a ci ili ed
and sociable pri ate life. The occupation also influenced the dialect of the island, rendering it
replete ith Italian ords and manners of speech, hile the educated and the aristocrac ,including Doctor Iannis and Pelagia, speak Italian as a second language. 56 Overall, then, as theDoctor continues, the Venetian occupation left the islanders ith a European rather than aneastern outlook on life, ith a considerabl freer attitude to ards omen than else here in
Greece. Indeed, Dr. Iannis evaluates the Venetian occupation in relatively positive terms; while
the islanders ere glad to see the Venetians departure, there as far orse to come:they were undoubtedly, along with the British, the most significant force that shaped our history andculture; e found their rule tolerable and occasionall amusing
Abo e all, the had the57
inestimable merit of not being Turks.

In this context, the Venetians left the island with a culture that is arguably hybrid;
Golban, for instance, argues that the identity of Dr. Iannis himself can be understood in termsof h bridit as he represents a clear case of dislocation of the self, his position in relation to
the notion of the Greek or the Italian describing a situation of ine orable ambiguit . 58
The double-edged risk of opening to the Other is, however, perhaps most notably
illustrated in Dr. Iannis depiction of the British occupation of the island, which, he argues, wasboth beneficial and devastating:
The British were worse than the Turks for some of the time, and the best of all of them for the rest
It teaches us that to be associated ith the British is to be offered the choice of one of two bags
tied at the neck with string. One contains a viper, and the other a bag of gold. 59

In this context, despite some thieving on the part of the occupying soldiers, the 19411943 Italian occupation of Cephalonia was a relatively benign one; according to Dr. Iannis, theislanders even came to feel affection for their Italian oppressors. Indeed, following thedevastating Nazi occupation of 1943, the Doctor remembers the Italian invaders with nostalgia:

55

Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality, p. 267.
Ibid., p. 146.
57
Ibid., p. 147.
58
Tatiana Golban, Reconstructing the Ancient M themes: Thematic Enclosure of Dr. Iannis as a Postmodern
Odysseus in Ca ai C elli Ma d li . A ka a i e i e i Dil e Ta ih-C af a Fak l e i De gi i 54, no.
2(2014), 347.
59
Louis de Bernières, Captai C elli Ma d li , 177-178.
56

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Now there were no more Italians working amid the vines beside the farmers in order to escape theboredom of garrison life
there ere no more tenor oices to send snatches of Neapolitan songand sentimental aria out across the pine of the mountains.60

In contrast to the Italians, whose attempts to cover up their misdemeanors at least
disclosed that the kne that hat the did as rong, 61 the Nazi occupation is portrayed asa brutal one, hich the doctor records as the direst time of all. 62 The German soldiers attitude
to the islanders, in Dr. Iannis account, as a callous one; the frequentl beat up the islanders
regardless of their age, destroyed their houses, and stole their possessions:
It was amusing and appropriate to humiliate the negroids whose culture was so paltry. Casually they
let the people starve, and made the sign of thumbs up when Greek coffins passed over the stones totombs.63

In the context of the Italian occupation, Dr. Iannis and his daughter, Pelagia, areintroduced to the Italian soldier Captain Corelli when they are ordered to host him for theduration of the occupation. Although Corelli is imposed on them, the hospitality that Dr. Iannis
and Pelagia offer him, despite his status as an enemy soldier, and despite wartime foodshortages, appears at first sight to be unconditional, with Pelagia even giving up her bed for the
Captain. Thus, although Captain Corelli s sta is enforced on the Doctor and Pelagia, the grant
him access to their living space as though he were a valued guest. For the Doctor, however,such hospitality is a point of honor, something which he does not neglect to point out to Captain
Corelli:
Kyria Pelagia will bring water, some coffee, and some mezedakia to eat. You will find that we do
not lack hospitality. It is our tradition, Captain, to be hospitable even to those who do not merit it. It
is a question of honor, a motive which you might find somewhat foreign and unfamiliar. 64

Indeed, the father and daughter, who both speak Italian as a second language, even adapt
themselves linguistically to their new guest, speaking to him in his own language rather than
forcing him to attempt to communicate in Greek. Notably, for Derrida, language is a vital
component of hospitality; as he argues, the requirement to speak in a foreign language isusuall the first iolence to hich foreigners are subjected. 65 Hence, Dr. Iannis and Pelagia s
willingness to communicate with Corelli in Italian is arguably an indicator of unconditional
hospitality.
However, at least at first, their hospitality is also heavily tinged with hostility,
hospitalit s parasitic double . 66 In their (understandable) hostility to Captain Corelli, then, the60

Ibid., p. 438.
Ibid., p. 439.
62
Ibid., p. 439
63
Ibid., p.439
64
Ibid., p. 205.
65
Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, translated by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p.
68.
66
Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo and Benito Sánchez, Hospitality in American Literature and Culture, p. 4.
61

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Doctor and Pelagia attempt to imbue their hospitality with resistance to the Italian occupationof the island. Indeed, their hospitality is arguably offered in a spirit of hostility in that its goal
appears to be that of making the Captain feel guilty and inferior, as in the following extract:offering Corelli dinner, Dr. Iannis e plains that, This is Cephalonian meat pie [ ] e cept that
thanks to our people, it doesn t ha e an meat in it. 67
Gi en Corelli s pleasant and pla ful nature, ho e er, their hostilit is usuallof itself playful, although it sometimes seems almost to border on cruelty, and is generally
expressed in misleading the Captain and/or playing practical jokes on him. One of the morehumorous e amples of Dr. Iannis gentle torture of Captain Corelli is hen he teaches him
some Greek swearwords, misinforming him that they are greetings.68 Pelagia also attempts toimitate her father s treatment of Corelli, tr ing to treat him as badl as she could. In thefollo ing passage her beha ior to ards Corelli can perhaps be described, in Derrida s terms,
as hostipitable:
If she served him food she would set the plate before him with a great clatter that sent the contentsof the bowl splashing and overflowing, and if by any chance it did spill onto his uniform, she would
fetch a damp clout, omit to wring it out, and smear the soup or stew in a wide circle about his tunic,
all the time apologizing cynically for the terrible mess.69

Golban reads the relationship of hostility/hospitality between Dr. Iannis and Captain
Corelli in terms of the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey, where the Cyclops Polyphemus is boththe oppressor and the host of the island and cave, while Odysseus is a guest and later an
oppressed subject in the ca e. 70 However, for Golban, this relationship is reversed in Captain
C elli Ma d li in that here it is the Odysseus figure Dr. Iannis who is the host, and Corelli,
the Pol phemus figure, ho is the ( ictimi ed) guest: the doctor/hero is the host on the island
and a Master in his house, while the invader Captain Corelli/Cyclops (who is supposed todominate the doctor s space), becomes ictimi ed in the house. 71
Meanwhile, Pelagia has lost contact with her fiancé, Mandras, since he left for the front,
as she comprehends that their relationship, at least from her perspective, had been based on
physical attraction only. Thus, if Mandras can be read as a postmodern Odysseus figure, 72
Pelagia is arguably a failed Penelope, a comparison that is further entrenched by her
unsuccessful attempt to crochet a cover for their marriage bed which she is constantly forced to
unpick.73 Unlike Odysseus, however, when Mandras returns, he finds that his beloved greets
him not ith lo e but ith despair, unbearable e citement, guilt, pit , re ulsion. 74 Here, then,Corelli can perhaps be compared to Penelope s suitors; in contrast to the suitors, however,
67

Louis de Bernières, Ca ai C elli Ma d li , pp. 236-237.
Ibid., p. 206.
69
Ibid., p. 246.
70
Tatiana Golban, Reconstructing the Ancient M themes, p. 353.
71
Ibid., p. 353.
72
Tatiana Golban, Reconstructing the Od sseus M th: The Postmodern Condition in Ca ai C elli
Ma d li , Medi e a ea J
al f S cial Scie ce 23, no.5 (2014), pp. 2497-2512.
73
Emil A. McDermott, E er Man s an Od sseus: An Anal sis of the Nostos-Theme in Corelli's Mandolin .
Classical and Modern Literature 20, no. 2(2000), p. 22.
74
Louis de Bernières, Ca ai C elli Ma d li , p. 130.
68

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whom Penelope tries to keep at bay and who are killed by Odysseus upon his return, Corelli
e entuall displaces Mandras in Pelagia s affections.
Corelli s lo e for Pelagia, then, is e entuall reciprocated; Corelli s irtuosit on the
mandolin and his composition of Pelagia Ma ch arguably play an important role in this. The
Doctor, too, also gro s fond of Corelli, e en entrusting him ith his most precious treasure
his daughter Pelagia a fact which can be considered as a supreme form of hospitalit . 75
However, while Corelli turns out to be, quite unexpectedly, a friendly guest, he remains a
political enemy, at least until the overthrow of Mussolini and the subsequent Nazi invasion of
the island. Thus, while accepting Corelli as a potential son-in-law, Dr. Iannis remains deeply
concerned about the difficulties that Pelagia would face in a marriage with Corelli who is, after
all, a member of the occupying army. As he counsels Pelagia,
Technically the captain is an enemy. Can you conceive the torment that would be inflicted upon you
by others when they judge that you have renounced the love of a patriotic Greek, in favor of anin ader, an oppressor? You ill be called a collaborator, a Fascist s hore and a thousand things
besides 76

In other words, the Doctor implies, Pelagia would be left with the choice of remaining
on her island, where she would be treated as an enemy Other, or emigrating to a strange land,
Italy, where she would be at the mercy of her new hosts, and be required to adapt to their culture,to their rules of hospitality.77
As is further discussed in the following section, the friendship between Pelagia/Dr.
Iannis and Corelli thus apparently deconstructs the binary opposition between friend andenemy, as put forward by Carl Schmitt. As Derrida notes, Schmitt argues that the political ischaracterized by the distinction between friend and enemy; 78 for Schmitt, the concept of enmity
is dominant in this regard as the meaning of friend is onl determined ithin the oppositional
distinction friend-enem . 79
Thus, as Derrida emphasi es, one has a feeling that the er sphere of the public
emerges ith the figure of the enem in Schmitt s ork.80 However, for Schmitt, the enemy
in politics is always the public enemy; i.e. the hostis, rather than the inimicus, with whom weha e a personal relationship of enmit . Here, Derrida notes that Schmitt s argument flounders
as we can wage war on and destroy our friend while continuing to love him:
The friend (amicus) can be an enemy (hostis). I can be hostile towards my friend, I can be hostile
towards him publicly and, conversely, I can, in privacy, love my enemy. From this, everything would
follow, in orderly, regular fashion, from the distinction between public and private. Another way ofsa ing that at e er point here this border is threatened, fragile, porous, contestable
the81
Schmittian discourse collapses.
75

Tatiana Golban, Reconstructing the Ancient M themes, p. 357.
Louis de Bernières, Ca ai C elli Ma dolin, p. 344.
77
Ibid., p. 344.
78
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 373.
79
Ibid., p. 375.
80
Ibid., p. 356.
81
Ibid., p. 88.
76

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In this sense, for Derrida friend and enem are not mutuall e clusi e opposites. 82
Similarly, as has alread been suggested in the case of Corelli s friendship ith Pelagia and Dr.
Iannis, de Bernières also highlights this semantic slippage between (private) friend and (public)
enemy in Ca ai C elli Ma d li . Perhaps the most notable example of this the novel,
however, is the stor of G nter Weber, The Good Na i , ho is required to shoot his Italianfriends.83
While relations between the German and Italian soldiers garrisoned on the island weresuperficiall friendl and co-operati e, there as, in realit , no lo e lost bet een them, ith
the Na i soldiers regarding the Italians as raciall inferior negroids, and the Italians perple edb the Na is cult of death, their iron discipline, their irrational and irritating uniformity ofie s and con ersation, and their incomprehensible passion for hegemon . 84 However,
Captain Corelli, along with his opera club and a group of Italian military whores, does befriend
one young Nazi soldier, Günter Weber, whom they encounter sunbathing on a local beach in a
desperate attempt to become blond. 85 Despite the political differences between them, Corelli
and Weber strike up a friendship, with the latter, despite his inability to sing, even joining
Corelli s opera club.
Following the fall of Mussolini and the subsequent Nazi occupation of the island,
however, Weber and the Italian soldiers become political enemies as Weber, despite his
protests, is ordered to shoot his Italian friends. However, threatened with being shot by firingsquad himself, and reminded that the Italian soldiers will be shot by someone else in any case,
Weber reluctantly agrees to participate in the massacre. Before the shooting, however, he begs
forgiveness from his (former) friends:
Antonio, I am er sorr , I tried
I am sure ou did, G nter. I kno ho it goesWeber s face trembled ith suppressed tears and desperation, and at last he said suddenl , Forgi eme.
Carlo sneered, You ill ne er be forgi en. But Corelli put his hand up to silence his friend, andsaid quietl , G nter, I forgi e ou. If I do not, ho ill . 86

In addition, the binary opposition between friend and enemy, as well as that between
self and other, is also deconstructed in the episode in the novel, which depicts, in the context of
the Greek Ci il War, the takeo er of the island b ELAS, the Communist Greek People s
Liberation Army, following the departure of the Nazis. Arguably, this can be understood in thecontext of an autoimmune logic: indeed, as Johnson argues, civil war is autoimmunity. 87
Derrida himself emphasizes the autoimmune nature of civil war, and the complete breakdownof the division of friend and enemy it entails, even leading people to go against their own allies
as ell as against the principal, declared enem in a quasi-domestic confrontation. Indeed,82

Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time, p. 46
Louis de Bernières, Captain C elli Ma d li , p. 239.
84
Ibid., p. 240.
85
Ibid., p. 240.
86
Ibid., p. 397.
87
Andrew Johnson, Viral Politics, p. 36
83

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for Derrida In all ars, all ci il ars, all partisan wars or wars for liberation, the inevitableescalation leads one to go after one s ri al partners no less than one s so-called principal
ad ersar . 88
ELAS, the military wing of the EAM, with connections to the Greek Communist party, 89
had supposedly formed a part of the resistance against the fascist occupations; however, despite
the brutality of the Nazi occupation, it is ELAS itself which arguably constitutes the greatest
threat to life on the island. ELAS, according to de Bernières, had learned much from theirformer oppressors:
From a safe distance, they had watched the Nazis for years, and were well versed in all the arts ofatrocity and oppression. Hitler would have been proud of such assiduous pupils. Their secret police(OPLA) identified all Venizelists and Royalists, and marked them down for Fascists.90

Like an immune system gone haywire, then, ELAS, apparently formed to protect Greece
from fascist/Nazi rule, turns against the very people it was supposed to protect. In this way, theautoimmune entit turns on itself, and must then come to resemble [its] enemies, to corrupt
itself and threaten itself in order to protect itself against their threats. 91
Having left home for a second time following his rejection by Pelagia, Mandras joinsa small group of andartes, or guerrillas, ho ere dri en b something from the er depthof the soul, something that commanded them to rid their land of strangers or die in theattempt. 92 Mandras and his comrades are, however, forced at gunpoint to join ELAS when
they are attacked by a group of its members.93 However, they appear almost relieved to be taken
under ELAS ing; as Mandras notes,
It was good to have found a leader who might know what ought to be done. It had been demoralizing
to wander like Odysseus from place to place, far from home, improvising a resistance that neverseemed to amount to anything.94

Far from being directed against the Nazis, however, the ruthlessness of ELAS is
primarily focused on EDES, a rival resistance group and, perhaps especially, on the ordinary
inhabitants of the island, the very people whom it was supposed to protect. Notably, following
the departure of the Germans, ELAS imposed themsel es on the people ith the aid of British
arms and irreparabl blighted the li es of the islanders. Mandras er first mission, forinstance, is to brutall murder an old man, aguel reminiscent of Dr. Iannis, hose crime
was to take a bottle of whiskey from supplies dropped by the British. 95 Mandras time ith

88

Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 112.
Louis de Bernières, Ca ai C elli Ma d li , p. 229.
90
Ibid., p. 442.
91
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 40.
92
Louis de Bernières, Ca ai C elli Ma d li , p. 228.
93
Ibid., p. 229.
94
Ibid., p. 231.
95
Ibid., p. 234.
89

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ELAS, then, eventually corrupts him completely, turning him into a man capable not only ofstealing from the starving, but of cold-blooded murder and rape.
As has been emphasized above, the division between friend and enemy collapses
completely in civil war; despite their supposedly Communist ideology, ELAS appears to haveno qualms in attacking fellow Communists. After beating up Pelagia, ELAS drag Dr. Iannis
a a on suspicion of being a bourgeois fascist; his friend Kokolios Communist beliefs do not,ho e er, protect him from sharing the Doctor s fate:
When Kokolios emerged from his house to defend the doctor, he too was carried away, even though
he was a Communist. By his actions, he had betrayed the impurity of his faith, and he was supported
on the arm of the monarchist Stamatis as all three were herded to the docks for transportation. 96

Indeed, Golban 97 argues that Dr. Iannis o n ps che, hich had remained intact
through the Italian and Nazi occupations, itself undergoes an autoimmune destruction as a resultof his e periences at the hands of ELAS, hich lea e him speechless and emotionall
paralyzed :He would hear the cries of villagers as their houses burned, the screams of live castration andextracted eyes, and the crackle of shots as stragglers were executed, and he would witness over andover again Stamatis and Kokolios, the monarchist and the Communist, the very image of Greece
itself, d ing in each other s arms 98

Mandras is also, ultimately, destroyed by his experiences with ELAS, as well as by his
earlier artime e periences and b Pelagia s rejection. Returning home after three ears ith
ELAS, he attempts to rape Pelagia, accusing her of being a traitor slut. 99 Shot in thecollarbone by Pelagia, he is then forced out of the house at gunpoint by his mother Drosoula. 100
Returning to the sea, where he had spent many happy hours as a fisherman in his pre-war life,
Mandras decides to commit suicide, rendering him a victim of war as well as a war criminal:
It did not occur to him that he was a statistic, one more life warped and ruined by a war, a tarnishedhero destined for the void. He was aware of nothing but a vanishment of paradise, an optimism that
had turned to dust and ash, a joy that had once shone brighter than the summer sun, but now had
disappeared and melted in the black light and frigid heart of massacre and cumulative remorse.101

As Derrida argues, then, Autoimmunit is al a s more or less suicidal, but more
seriously still, it threatens al a s to rob suicide itself from its meaning and supposed integrit
as it consists not onl in committing suicide but in compromising sui- or self-referentiality,
the self or sui- of suicide itself. 102 In this sense, Mandras suicide can also perhaps be96

Ibid., p. 444.
Tatiana Golban, Reconstructing the Ancient M themes, p. 361.
98
Louis de Bernières, Ca ai C elli Ma d li , p. 445.
99
Ibid., p. 449.
100
Ibid., p. 451.
101
Ibid., p. 451.
102
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 44.
97

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understood in terms of autoimmunity, in which the integrity of self-identity itself is threatened;he has merely become a statistic.
4. Conclusion
In conclusion, de Berni res Cephalonia is an island which, attractive yet vulnerable, has long
been forced into an attitude of openness, of unconditional hospitality towards the Other. In thissense, the wartime invasions of the island by the Italians and then the Nazis are just the latest
in the island s long histor of domination b outsiders, conquests hich, for better or worse,
ha e shaped the island s culture. In this conte t, then, the binar oppositions bet een hostilit
and hospitality, friendship and enmity are constantly challenged in the novel, as unconditional
hospitality brings friends as well as enemies, love as well as war and devastation. Thus, politicalenemies, such as Captain Corelli and Dr. Iannis, become friends or even, as in the case of
Pelagia and Corelli, lovers. In other cases, friendships, such as that between Weber and the
Italian soldiers of the Acqui division, become overwhelmed by political enmity, with tragic
results. Finally, in the takeover of the island by ELAS, the distinction between friend and enemy
collapses in a nightmare of autoimmunity.
The horrors of the civil war destro the pre iousl patriotic Pelagia s pride in her Greek
identit to the point here she pretended to herself that she as Italian. 103 Ironically, it later
turns out that Corelli, also motivated by shame in his national identity, moved to Athens andbecame a Greek citizen instead of returning to Italy after the war:
After the war all the facts came out. Abysinnia, Libya, persecution of Jews, atrocities, untried
political prisoners by the thousand, everything. I was ashamed of being an invader. I was so ashamedthat I didn t ant to be Italian an more. 104

Tragically, the relationship between Corelli and Pelagia is not revived until their oldage; although Corelli secretly visits the island regularly, leaving what Pelagia perceives asghostly traces, he never approaches her as, seeing her with her (adopted) daughter, he assumes
she has got married. Thus, neither Pelagia nor Antonio ever marry; Corelli later tells Pelagia,
You ere al a s m Beatrice, m Laura. I thought, ho ants second best?, 105 while
Pelagia confesses that she feels like an unfinished poem. 106
Corelli is, however, eventually reunited with an ageing and querulous Pelagia throughher grandson, Iannis, whom Corelli encounters playing Antonia, his beloved mandolin.
Meanwhile, Cephalonia is already subject to a new influx of outsiders; these new and benign
in aders are tourists ho bring a ne
a e of prosperit to the islanders. Pelagia, ho e er,cannot escape from the trauma of her past in her dealings with the tourists who fill her taverna;
while she enjoys speaking Italian with the Italian customers, who remind her of Corelli and herlong-departed Italian friends, her hospitality towards her German guests is, despite her best
intentions, heavily tinted with hostility. As she explains to Corelli,
103

Louis de Bernières, Ca ai C elli Ma d li , pp. 462-463.
Ibid., p. 519.
105
Ibid., p. 521.
106
Ibid., p. 520.
104

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I still have trouble being pleasant to Germans. I keep wanting to blame them for what their
grandfathers did. The re so polite and the girls are so prett . Such good mothers. I feel guilt forwanting to kick them.107

107

Ibid., p. 523.

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Remi

STEFAN STEFANOVRec cle: An En i nmen ali A

ach

Re ing W k

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 26-35

REMI TO REC CLE: AN ENVIRONMENTALIST APPROACH TO
REUSING WORKS
Stefan Stefanov
Abstract
The technological advancement in the realm of communications and cultural
exchange, along with the facilitation of artistic creativity and publication, which itaffords, has contributed to a major shift in our understanding of the governing
principles of culture. While largely obliterating the distinctions between high andlow culture, and between producer and consumer of culture, the shift in question
has demolished the publication hierarchy of previous centuries by exposing the
c nce
f geni a h ,iginali , and ni ene
a nainable.
Al e na i el , i hahe ed in he emi a h , endea ing
alida e hereuse of existing works as an equal creative principle. Still, an artist or participant
in the cultural exchange, who ventures into this new realm of creativity, faces afundamental problem the copyright framework that has, in more recent times,
become little more than a money-making machine, which interferes inadequately
with furthering knowledge and creative expression. This has resulted in a culturalen i nmen hich can be een all ed b eg la i n . B anal gihindustrial practices, the remedial course this paper stipulates is one of endorsing
ec cling a a ac ical l i n, which removes the obstacles that corporate
interests have placed on the way of the new remix creativity. This approach ofc ea i e e e f e i ing
k i
ed a being b h en i nmen all f iendl and a l ng-due acknowledgement of the nature of creativity. It shows thatcreativi ha been e i l eiled and h hinde ed b a n i n f
iginali ,first introduced with the eighteenth-cen
man ic c nce
f a h hi andthen enshrined in an extensive copyright legislation. The inhibitory effects of thestatus quo f eg la i n and he indica ed a ha d a healing change a e
indicated by examples.

Introduction
A notable portion of new productions in cinematography, released in the past couple of decades,
are reworkings of familiar stories: from interpretations of Shakespeare, to versions of fairy tales,
to different readings of Biblical stories, to subversive adaptations of Ancient Greek myths. A
similar observation can be made about music as well, where many new productions are covers

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Re ing W kor remixes of earlier works. While audiences and critics will generally be divided in theiropinions ith regard to the faithfulness-to-the-source criterion, a no less significant aspect ofsuch re orkings needs to be addressed: the relationship bet een rec cling culture, on the
one hand, and its sustainabilit , on the other. In hat follo s, I propose a peculiar
environmentalist approach to the issue of reusing narratives, themes, and elements thereof incontemporary artistic productions. This strategy of comparing cultural with industrial
production aims to show that adopting the ecological norms of the latter will foster and ensurea more viable, fair, and emancipatory model of cultural creativity. To show why this isnecessar , I ill first offer an overvie of hat conditioned the present polluted state of
popular culture, supported by examples of its detrimental effects on both the consumption anda recycling reinvention of art. I will then discuss a new model of culture that can be properly
called greener, as ell as a culture of inclusion and participation, hich can legitimatel
replace the one that is currently dominant but can be shown to be a culture of exclusion,
exclusiveness, and overregulation. Finally, I will discuss two recent legal developments thatcan be seen both as milestones and as a promise for the eventual embrace of the creative reuseof works as a legitimate, natural, and sustainable mode of artistic expression, which has been
also immensely facilitated and made immediately possible by the fast-developing technologyof the twenty-first century.
Reuse vs. Originality
From the vantagepoint of a contemporary ecological thinking, recycling is integral toenvironmental protection: along with waste recovery, it helps reduce the negative impact that
economy and industry have on nature. Today, the reuse of discarded products and materials
toward a more sustainable development of human civilization is mandated by laws andregulations; the failure to salvage or reutilize such products and materials is condemned andpenalized. But in the realm of culture in general and in artistic production in particular, thesituation is very much the opposite it is the reuse of (material from) existing works that isbeing vilified and punished by the law, unless of course the right to such reuse is purchased. In
my view, this leads to the gradual exhaustion (through restricted access) of creative resources
and provides for an unsustainable model of popular culture. The latter may appear to be thriving
because of large profits but is unfeasible in the long run because the copyright legislation that
regulates it serves much less for furthering creativit than for enriching those possessing thecultural products. The copyright industry is geared predominantly toward the consumption ofculture and, while seemingly not inhibiting recreative artistic endeavor, it discourages many
aspiring artists, especially little known and new on the horizon, by levying fees for the lawful
reuse of material from existing works that are well beyond their means.
This state of affairs is conditioned by the present-day consumerist society, where
cultural artefacts and works of art are largely objectified as commodities and are frequently indemand not only for their aesthetic but also for their exchange value. The exchange value of art
is principally determined by its uniqueness and originality the more abundant it is in terms ofavailable copies, the lesser its value. In the cases of mass-production and availability, the firstreleases of a new music record or the first screenings of a new film, for example, tend to sell
for more than their subsequent issues or showings. The same applies to rare print publications,

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Re ing W kcopies, tapes, and so on the more unique they are, the higher their price. Thus, it is not somuch the direct gratification value of a work of art (the beauty of the painting, music piece,text), as its exceptionality that determines its economic worth, although arguably thepsychological link between the singularity of an object (an artwork) and the pleasure derived
from it plays its part as well.
This is owed to a model of perceiving creativity and authorship as extraordinary
activities requiring unique talent and skills traditionally associated with the idea of artistic
genius, no ada s firml rooted in the definition of the term artist. Conceived in theeighteenth centur , this model is built around the shift in meaning of the concepts of art andartist , hich prior to that commonl meant skill and skilled person, respectivel , todismiss the sense of acquired or taught aptitude and defy the requirements of the compoundmodel of writing with regard to form and suitable theme, 1 in favor of an intrinsic quality
possessed b the genius author. The meaning of genius also changed from characteristic
disposition to e alted special abilit 2 one who could [act] creativel under la s of its
o n origination. 3 This model, often referred to as the genius author, is the result of theprofessionalization of writing and the commodification of art as elements of the industrializedsociety,4 to which the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
is often seen as a reaction. Romanticism was the response of certain poets and thinkers who
refused to accept that the quality of art is to be assessed in terms of popular taste. Instead, theysa art as a superior realit
hose merit could not be properl esteemed, in the ords of Sir
Egerton Br dges, b the multitude of readers that an author can attract, for [ ]ill theuncultivated mind admire hat delights the cultivated? 5
Two general categories of art were conceived in the eighteenth century, which drew adivision line bet een orks based on the originalit
criterion: organic versus
manufacturedorks, here the former gro
spontaneousl , and the latter are made6
under the dictation of learning. Consequently, a clear pattern of denunciation of the previous
model of writing-as-craftsmanship was installed with the help of both lawyers and poets (theearliest lawsuit on ownership of work and originality being the 1741 Alexander Pope vs.
publisher Edmund Curll), and eventually came to serve as the benchmark for quality poetry andart in general, as opposed to the reuse of pre-existing themes or materials as a second-rate work.
This model developed and became firmly established during the nineteenth century,then came to dominance and continued to prevail (outside of academic circles) during the1

Martha Woodmansee, The Genius and the Cop right, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, Special
Issue: The Printed Word in the Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1984), p. 427.
2
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780 1950 (New York: Anchor Books, 1960), p. 47.
3
Samuel T. Coleridge, C le idge Lec e n Shake ea e and S me O he P e and D ama i (London:
J.M.Dent & Son; New York: E.P.Dutton & Co, 1907), p. 46; Archive.org,
https://archive.org/stream/coleridgesessays00cole#page/n7/mode/2up.
4
Martha Woodmansee discusses this at length in On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivit , Cardozo Arts
& Enttertainment Law Journal, Vol. 10:279 (1991), pp. 279-292, and The genius and the cop right: economic
and legal conditions of the emergence of the 'author', Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, Special Issue:
The Printed Word in the Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1984), pp. 425-448.
5
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780 1950, p. 38.
6
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, edited by Edith J. Morley, 1918 (Cornell University
Library, 2009), §43, §105 §115.

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Re ing W ktwentieth century and into the new millennium. In this way, uniqueness and originality becameand still largely are the prime selling points of art, which in turn became a commodity
having a price tag attached to it. For protection of the genius element of art, that hich madeit distinctive, copyright legislation was put in place, whose fundamental purpose was toencourage learning and creativit b safeguarding the creator s interest and effort for a limited
period of time, which was to allow for the artist and/or publisher to make sufficient earnings,
before releasing the protected idea into the public domain for use by others.7 Production anddistribution times significantly shortening as industrialization progressed, and sales turnoverconsiderably expanding over the years, it was not unreasonable to expect that the better a given
artwork sells, the sooner it would be released into the public domain, especially once certain
profit levels were reached.
However, a trend remarkably converse to such expectations was observed as the timespan of copyright protection repeatedly increased over the years from the initial 14 years 8 tothe current life of the author plus 50 or 70 ears ( here cop right duration is based on theauthor s death), or 50 or 70 ears from publication ( here this duration is based on publicationand creation dates). As a result, in toda s rapidl developing world, it is virtually impossible
for an artist to borrow from a copyrighted work, or to use the entire work to produce a newversion of it, without first having to conduct negotiations with and pay substantial fees to its
copyright holders, who these days are rarely individuals but most commonly corporate entities.
Nowadays, copyright protection and, more importantly, prosecution for infringement
extends to areas one can find it hard to conceive reasonable. An apt example is the case, one ofmany, described by Lawrence Lessig, in which a mother made a 29-second home video of her
toddler son dancing in their living room to the barel discernible beat of a song b Prince
pla ing on a radio some here in the background. 9 Soon after uploading the video toYouTube for her parents to see, Universal Music Group representatives ordered removal of thevideo and then threatened the mother with a $150,000 fine for violating their copyright property
in Prince s song (the ensuing in legal battle lasted from 2007 until 2017 and ended in asettlement).10 In a similar vein, a two-decade-long legal saga came to an end in 2019 when the
British band The Verve were given back the rights to their second-biggest hit Bittersweet
S mphon in a generous gesture by the Rolling Stones, who had been collecting all therevenues made from selling the song since 1997. For their part, The Verve had been foundguilt of sampling a portion from the orchestral cover of the 1965 Rolling Stones song The
Last Time by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra (not even the actual song but a cover version ofit) that was longer than the five-note sample, whose rights they had duly secured in exchange
for 50% of the revenue Bitters eet S mphon would bring. Over this, The Verve lost 100%of the song s earnings for a period of t ent -two years, until Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
transferred the rights back to the band in hat The Verve s Richard Ashcroft called a fantastic

7

Statute of Anne, April 10, 1710, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/anne_1710.asp.
Ibid.
9
Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: The Penguin
Press, 2008), p. 1.
10
Ibid., pp. 1 4.
8

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and life-affirming development. 11 Ironicall , The Last Time had been copied from a 1955
gospel track b the Staple Singers, called This Ma Be the Last Time , which itself was basedon some traditional gospel songs 12 but the Rolling Stones never paid any royalties for it as
the copyright law was different in 1965. Another example of artwork reuse raising eyebrows is
attested b And Warhol s demand that Terr Gilliam pa him ( hich he did to avoid a lasuit) for showing briefly in the background of a scene from 12 Monkeys one of Warhol s
xeroxed copies of Da Vinci s Last Supper. I will mention just one more instance among
numerous others, hich is quite striking and all the same indicative: Walt Disne s irreciprocal
gratis reuse of characters and plots from fairytales from the public domain, as well as from theworks of authors such as J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan) or Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book).
Listing no less than thirty-two stories that have been freely sampled by Disney and thus
contributed to the creation of his both artistic works and media empire, a publication by the On
the Commons website ends up with an unambiguous and very indicative statement:
Stories that the Disney Corporation has In Turn Contributed to the Public Domain (Which Are
Not Legally Available for Anyone Else to Build Upon Because Copyright Limits Keep Being
E tended to Keep Micke Mouse locked up in Disne s Castle):
NONE!13

The DJ and Remix Culture
Reuse of pre-existing material to create a new work has gradually become a fundamental
principle of creativity since the time of the first photomontages, and since the deejays andselectors of Jamaica discovered that they could vary the existing music recordings bymanipulating the turntable and equalizers, as well as by overlaying it with vocalizations of beats
and chanting. Later on, as the budding craft of turntablism was exported to New York in theearly 1970s, a Jamaican-American teenager discovered that he could isolate and quickly repeat
short beat sections from jazz/funk records, thus inventing the popular hip-hop style.14 As Van
Dorston notes, by employing affordable equipment, the emerging figure of the hip-hop DJ
could selectivel take an sound and leave behind the posing rock star hero attitudes provided
by corporate rock, toss aside the leads [and] re-edit other people s te ts and call them theiro n. 15 This constituted an emancipatory act, an act of enabling social groups previously
excluded from the music-making elite to produce music.16 In less than 20 years, the practice of11Mark Savage, The Bitter S eet S mphon dispute is over (BBC.com, Ma 23, 2019),
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48380600.
12
Mike Masnick, A True Stor of 'Cop right Pirac ': Wh the Verve Will Onl Start Getting Ro alties No for
Bitters eet S mphon (TechDirt.com, May 25, 2019),
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190525/00140242276/true-story-copyright-piracy-why-verve-will-onlystart-getting-royalties-now-bittersweet-symphony.shtml.
13
On the Commons team, How Disney Raids the Public Domain and gives nothing back in return because Mickey
Mouse is locked up under copyright in the castle (On the Commons, 2013),
https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/how-disney-raids-public-domain.
14
Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved my Life (New York: Grover Press, 2000), p. 226.
15
A. S. Van Dorston, Postmodernist Music: The Culture of Cool Vs. Commodit : Shop as Usual and Avoid
Panic Bu ing (Fast and Bulbous, 1990), http://fastnbulbous.com/postmodernist-music-the-culture-of-cool-vscommodity-shop-as-usual-and-avoid-panic-buying/.
16
Ibid.

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Re ing W kappropriating from existing music recordings completely subverted the traditional notions ofmusic making and of the form of music in general, serving, among other things, as basis fort o of the orld s currentl most popular music st les: hip-hop/rap and electronic music (withthe host of all sub-genres they include).
In this way, the DJ, working in a club, constructing musical progressions (also known
as sets ) from pre-recorded compositions, or using sophisticated digital/computer equipment
to sample fragments of pre-existing music to re-mix with newly generated sounds, became
established as performer and composer. As Brewster and Broughton write in their detailed studyof the rise of DJ culture, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life,a DJ is an improvisational musician. It just happens that in place of notes he has songs, in place of
piano ke s or guitar strings he has records. And just like a musician, the DJ s skill lies in hothese are chosen and put together. Think of a DJing performance in a compressed time-frame andit might help. Where a guitarist can impress an audience by playing a 30-second improvised
sequence of chords and notes, what a DJ does takes a lot longer a DJ needs to be judged on a
two or three-hour narrative of records. And there are now so many records available, and so manymi es of most songs, that a DJ s records are full analogous to the notes of an instrument. [ ]The DJ is a musical editor, a metamusician, he makes music out of other music.17

Remix and its underlying principles of appropriation and recontextualisation cut/copy &paste, to use the popular computer terminology are today widely employed beyond the domainof music, with the most obvious manifestation in digital text being blogging and in video/film
being mashups. The principles of remixing are less conspicuously manifested in a large shareof works but in the beginning of the twenty-first century, a very significant part of new works
in all spheres of art are remakes, revisits, reproductions of familiar narratives, plots, and themes.
Such art products have amounted to a culture that is largely fashioned around building upon theorks of others, the reuse rather than the production of ne , original, unique material,
which was the main characteristic of nineteenth-twentieth century artistic creativity. This kindof culture has been dubbed Remi culture: a societ that allo s and encourages derivative
orks b combining or editing e isting materials to produce a ne product. 18
Lessig, to whom we attribute the coinage of the Remix culture concept, envisages as
desirable such a society which will no longer restrict and prohibit but will foster creative efforts
at remixing by integrating, modifying, and expanding on works with copyright holders. To thisend, in 2001, he founded the Creative Commons, a non-profit organization whose main function
is to develop, support, and steward legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digitalcreativity, sharing, and innovation 19 a service offered entirely for free to users. And yet, inorder for the ideas and principles informing the Remix culture to become a mainstream
philosophy of creativity in the Western and West-influenced societies, a more substantial shift
in the paradigm of thinking about art is necessary. We need to stop thinking of works that are

17

Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved my Life, pp. 19 20.
Kirb Ferguson, Ever thing is a Remi (Everything is a Remix, 2011, 2015),
http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/.
19
Creative Commons, Our Mission, http://oer2go.org/mods/enboundless/creativecommons.org/about/mission-and-vision/index.html.
18

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Re ing W kcreated using pre-existing material be they themes, plots, ideas, images, scenes, or melodies
as inferior; and equally, we need to remove the legal obstacles that still stand on their way.
Such a change will be possible in the conditions of a complete overhaul of ourunderstanding of the supporting media of the arts, which before the advent of the era of digital
storage and transfer were strictly dependent on materials that are, by nature, unalterable: canvas,
paper, tape, stone, or metal. Unlike the pre-digital artworks, which formed the backbone of aread-onl culture, orks are [no ] created in a continuous flo , ithout aspiring to become
immutable objects, al a s subject to the possibilit of being modified. 20 Such works enable aread/write culture21 and make it possible for the users to create art as easily as they consume it.
In the first decades of the new millennium, we already have a plethora of materiallybound works, as more novels, stories, poems, songs, melodies, photographs, videos, and films
were produced in the second half of the twentieth century than in the entire history of arts
before. This excess, occurring in the conditions of an artistic culture tightly regulated bycopyright legislation continuously amended to accommodate corporate interests at the expenseof individual interests, can no longer be perceived one-sidedly, as welfare, but must also beassessed for its impairing effect on creativit . The environmentalist approach to the questionof reusing existing materials in the arts promised in the beginning demands from us that we
consider the present situation from the position of people who are inundated with commodified
art, which we can only consume, and if we want to give expression to our inspired creative
impulses, we are required to pay amounts of money that are beyond the means of the vast
majority us. In a manner of speaking, we must ransom out what many believe should be auniversal right but has been curtailed by corporations and institutions governed by pecuniary
interests, unless we want to face and suffer penal actions. Lessig writes that the current
copyright legislation, inadequate as it is to deal with the twenty-first centur s remi creativit ,can only accomplish one thing, namely, to condemn entire new generations as criminals:
In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from
how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when
their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will tothem seem natural?22

Or, as Adolfo Estalella writes,
They are two paradigms of culture that are completely at odds with each other. One simply sees
culture as a commercial object from which it can extract full financial benefits. The other sees it
as a space for open participation, in which users can participate by constantly re-creating works,
thus participating in the remix culture.23
20

Adolfo Estalella, From Remix Culture to Collective Creation, in Creación e Inteligencia Colectiva(Asociación Cultural Comenzemos Empezemos, Instituto Andaluz de la Juventud, Universidad Internacional deAndalucía, Festival zemos98, 2005),
http://www.zemos98.org/festivales/zemos987/pack/pdf/adolfoestalellaeng.pdf.
21
The terms read-only (RO) culture and read/write (RW) culture were coined by Lawrence Lessig in analogy tocomputer file properties and modification rights. (Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid
Economy, p. 28).
22
Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, p. xviii.
23
Adolfo Estalella, From Remix Culture to Collective Creation, p. 189.

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Prior to the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, it was precisely thecontinuous reuse of plots and the reshaping of narratives that drove culture s recreation andevolution. The spread of the printing culture from the fifteenth century onwards, a period which
Thomas Pettitt refers to as the Gutenberg Parenthesis, changed the game all along. Whereas the
pre-parenthetical period as an era of a predominantl oral culture characteri ed b being recreative, collective, con-te tual, unstable, traditional, centered around performance, theGutenberg Parenthesis became an epoch of art ork that is original, individual, autonomous,
stable, canonical. 24 In order to sustain itself, the culture of printed text, whose center iscomposition, required and established strict regulations governing ownership, privileges, andrights. But they no longer reflect the reality of twenty-first century post-parenthetical culture,hich Pettitt describes as thriving b
sampling, remi ing, borro ing, reshaping,25
appropriating, reconte tuali ing.
The culture of the twenty-first century increasingly
gravitates around the remix, which largely draws on the creative reuse of already existingartworks. Thus, whereas the Gutenberg Parenthesis was a time of containment, the new epochof Remix culture appears to be a time of conjunction.26
It is extremely important to realize that unless culture in general and the arts in particular
are left unimpeded in their natural flow of recreation which is possible through recycling what
has been produced and what is available the tendency of exhaustion, of loss of meaning, andof becoming increasingly superficial of not only the objects of art but also of our entire sociocultural and individual existence will only aggravate further. We ought to see culture as anenvironment which has been polluted by the numerous unrecyclable artefacts piled in heaps, anenvironment which desperately needs recycling to be able to flourish. In this regard, in thesubtitle of his book Free Culture, Lessig makes an unambiguous statement on the culprit of thecurrent situation: the big media uses technolog and the la to lock do n culture and control
creativit . 27
I see a promising sign of healing from the containment of the Gutenberg Parenthesisin an announcement from June 2014 that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciencesof the United States (NARAS), the organization behind the Grammy Awards, amended its rules
and regulations to permit musical compositions featuring samples and interpolations of preexisting songs to participate in all Grammy Award song writing categories, including Song of
the Year. Such musical compositions were previously allowed only in the Best Rap Song
category. Commenting on the NARAS decision, contributing writer for a number of music andculture magazines Andrew Parks writes for Wondering Sound that hile this probabl
on terase their reputation of being oefull behind the times , it stands for a ground-breaking

24

Thomas Pettitt, Before the Gutenberg Parenthesis: Elizabethan-American Compatibilities, in Media in
T an i i n 5: C ea i i , O ne hi and C llab a i n in he Digi al Age, Plena 1: F lk C l e and Digi al
C l e (MIT, 2007), http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/legacy/mit5/papers/pettitt_plenary_gutenberg.pdf
25
Ibid.
26
Thomas Pettitt, The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies (MIT, 2010),
https://commforum.mit.edu/the-gutenberg-parenthesis-oral-tradition-and-digital-technologies-29e1a4fde271.
27
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How the Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock down Culture andControl Creativity (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004).

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Re ing W krecognition of an influential, valid form of e pression that s been around since the 80s. 28
This signals the reinstating of the remix to its proper position, of which Lessig writes,
We begin with some creative work, work which some author produced by mixing bits of culture
and his own creativity together. That work is then remixed by others, through the addition of othercreative work, or even through simple criticism of that work. This is remix. And in this sense, life
is remix. In this sense, culture is remix. Knowledge is remix. Politics is remix. Remix is how wecreate. Remix is how we recreate. Remix is how we are human, and how we as humans makeculture.29

Another recent development which is worth mentioning furthers the recognition of theremix and its principles as art proper in the strictly formal and mandatory definitions of thelegal domain. The Federal Supreme Finance Court (FSFC) of Germany ruled in the end of
October 2020 that turntables, CD players, and mixing consoles can be treated as musicalinstruments and, likewise, DJs as musicians:
The DJs not only play sound carriers from other sources, but also perform their own new pieces ofmusic by using instruments in the broader sense to create sequences of sounds with their own
character.30

The ruling was made in light of the current economic crisis impacting German business (andthe world) as a consequence of country-wide lockdowns to prevent the spread of the COVID19 virus, along with the legislation and regulations adopted to help businesses, including the
clubbing and nightlife business, survive. Recognizing that works created by reusing material
from pre-e isting orks should be treated on par ith originalorks (regardless of how
problematic the concept of originality may be) and that DJs and remixers are artists is a clear
indication of the direction in hich popular culture is going: abandoning the genius author
fallacy and restoring Remix as the ae as humans make culture. 31
Conclusion
Remix culture is an undeniable fact that has been enabled by readily available, affordable, anduser-friendly digital technology. Texts, songs, videos, and films are being produced now, somethirty years after the personal computer became ubiquitous, at an unprecedented speed and inpreviously inconceivable volumes. The automatic protection of copyrights that has been in
effect for the past forty years, along with the excessively narrow allowance for the free reuseof fragments of existing works, and the unaffordable fees payable for the lawful reuse and the28

Andre Parks, Gramm Board Finall Recogni es Sampling as a Form of Song riting (Wondering Sound,2014),
http://www.wonderingsound.com/news/grammy-board-finally-recognizes-sampling-form-songwriting/(archived copy available at: https://archive.vn/2fKbu).
29
La rence Lessig, (Re)creativit : Ho Creativit Lives, in Porsdam, Helle (ed.), Copyright and Other Fairy
Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the Commodification of Creativity (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar
Publishing Limited, 2006), p. 16.
30
Damion Pell, German has just declared that techno is music and the DJ is a musician (Decoded Magazine,
October 30, 2020), https://www.decodedmagazine.com/germany-has-just-declared-that-techno-is-music-and-thedj-is-a-musician/.
31
La rence Lessig, (Re)creativit : Ho Creativit Lives, p. 16.

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Re ing W klegal services required for arranging it, have had an inhibitive effect on culture s natural courseof progression. The legal framework controlling the access to and the reuse of works is the
product of the idea that the author draws inspiration solely from what enables them to claim
exclusive ownership of their creative output all conceived and developed in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. While the genius author concept has been proven untenable inacademic circles, its reign in popular culture remains largely undisputed. This has provided fora disparaging attitude to ard unoriginal artists ho sample, borro , and reuse e istingartworks. It has also enabled an array of preposterous demands for compensation for borrowing
from works that would have been quickly dismissed had the current copyright law not been as
exacting. In my view, it is an unambiguous ramification of this state of affairs that our culturalenvironment is a dangerously polluted and urgently needs remedial measures if we want to see
our artists and culture as a whole thriving. I see no more feasible a solution than the facilitationand encouragement of recycling of cultural products. This is not a novel idea, as I incidentally
discovered while researching one of the examples given here. In the conclusion to their comicsbased discussion of cop right and ho it s supposed to ork, Aoki, Bo le, and Jenkins rite,
The ecological idea really works. What we need here is sustainable development. We ve learned
that development must be balanced with environmental protection. In the cultural realm, we needto have a similar balance bet een hat is o ned and hat is free for ever one to use a culturalenvironmentalism.32

It can only be regrettable that to this day all that we have is the recognition that songs madeusing samples and interpolations should be treated as equal to any other musical composition,and that DJs are creative musicians and producers, too. It seems the emancipation of creative
work still has a long way to go.

32

Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins, Bound by Law? (Duke University Press, 2008), p. 64.

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Pompeo Neo-Napoleonism and the CCP Régime
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 36-49

Neo-Napoleonism and the Politics of Trust
POMPEO

NEO-NAPOLEONISM AND THE CCP RÉGIME
Eric C. Hendriks-Kim
Libe al o inion
ill le he ni e e. The
illbecome the faith, the religion, the morality of all nations;andhi memo able e a ill be in e a abl connec ed
i h m name. 1
Na oleon Bona a e

Abstract
The People Rep blic of China a g abl ep e en he o ld mo poli icall
significant deviation from the liberal democratic model. Anglo-American foreign
polic di c ion f e en l e p e f
a ion a China defiance of libe al
democratic norms, especially in recent years, as the China debate re-ideologized.
Under Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, the White House rebranded thetechnology-oriented Trade War as a world-spanning ideological struggle between
the US-led F ee Wo ld and he Beijing egime. Pompeo
gge ion ha he
Chinese people should be liberated from an evil regime echoes not only American
neo-conservatism but also, ultimately, the anti-regime-ism of the French
Revolution. The overthrow of the Ancien Régime from which the contemporary
egime eman ic de i e is the paradigmatic modern regime change. Since
Napoleon e po ed hi egime change andled him elf he fi
oldie oflibe
global p opaga ion, one ma call he libe a ioni
and in mode npolitical ideali m Napoleonic . Napoleonic c i ici m of China poli icalem
ea i a an ancien gime anding in he a of libe
global ma ch.
Pompeogge ion of b inging egime change o China eem o n e io ,however, that it might be better understood as a hyper-real simulacrum of
Napoleonism. Such Neo-Napoleonic he o ic eek o delegi imi e China poli ical
leade hip, ke ching a dicho om be een he e il Chine e Comm ni Pa(CCP) and he good Chine e people. Thi mo al dicho omization may seem
mpa he ic and h mani ic a i e one a e he people , e i , in fac , e e ojustify and encourage unrestrained ideological aggression against the CCP by
1

Comte Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné Las Cases, Memoirs of the Life, Exile, and Conversations of the Emperor
Napoleon, Vol. II, translated from French by W.J. Widdleton (Auckland, NZ: Pickle Partners Publishing,
2013[1855]), Cha e : Poli ic : The S a e of E o e.

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painting it as a target isolable from the rest of Chinese society. In response,
mainland-Chine e poli ical heo i of en concep ali e he We
ideological
agg e ion a he ci ili a ional an i he i of China
ppo edl ha monio
Tianxia tradition. However, this overdrawn civilizational dualism is complicatedby the fact that the CCP, ironically, also comes out of the anti-regime-ist modern
revolutionary tradition.

The mode n We
con i i e e ol iona ho ili o he Ancien R gime echoe h o gh
the centuries. I propose to call this tradition of aggressively idealistic, liberationist anti-regimei m: Na oleonic . A con em o aeinca na ion of hi Na oleonic ideali m a ea in an
ideological hostility to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Many Anglosphere intellectuals
and politicians deem the CCP-led Peo le Republic of China (PRC) which is perhaps
e en l he o ld mo
oli icall ignifican and ooken de ia ion f om libe aldemocratic normativity an ancien gime anding in he a of libe
global ma ch.
The long-standing controversy aro nd China egime de ia ion f om libe al democ ac
has flared up as part of the recent Sino-American or Sino-Anglosphere conflict. In its intensified
form, this conflict, which unfolds in both diplomacy and intellectual and academic spheres,probably goes back to 2017. It has various complexly interrelated causes, the relative weightsof which can be disputed. Among these causes are less ideological ones, such as the economic
power struggle between China and the US and the dramatically increased Western anxieties
about Chinese information technologies. 2 O he fac oe e China
inc ea ed
authoritarianism during the 2010s; the 2017-e o e of M lim ma in e nmen in
Xinjiang, hich com lica e defen e of he Chine e go e nmen legi imac in We ern
public spheres; and the corona pandemic. 3 One e l of he conflic in en ifica ion a herise (or revival) of a hyper-idealistic, neo-conservative and Cold War-like discourse vis-à-vis
the PRC in geopolitical discussions in the Anglosphere (and to a lesser extent in the EU). 4
This essay will first touch upon the aggressive liberationist idealism claimed and,indeed, epitomized by Napoleon. Second, it will show how some reincarnation of this idealistic
imagining is at work in the speeches of US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. Third, it will
analyze the specific vehicle through which this discourse legitimizes and maximizes its
2

Kai e K o, Fea of a Red Tech Plane : Wh he U.S. i S ddenl Af aid of Chine e Inno a ion, SupChina
blog, October 13, 2020, https://supchina.com/2020/10/13/fear-of-a-red-tech-planet-why-the-u-s-is-suddenlyafraid-of-chinese-innovation/
3
Dali L. Yang, The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Estrangement of US-China Rela ion , Asian Perspective, Vol.
45, No. 1 (2020), pp. 7 31.
4
The E o ean Commi ion fo he fi ime b anded China aemic i al in i e o European Commissionand HR/VP contribution to the European Council: EU-China A strategic outlook, March 12, 2020, p. 1. Also,
Dr. Janka Oertel, director of the Asia Programme of the European Council on International Relations, suggested
ha China ma ha e an in e e in de o ing he E o ean Union. She added ha China c en l a emodivide Europeans during the crisis, along with its fierce and openly hostile rhetoric targeting the capacity of
We e n democ ac . Tho e a e a he bold a emen fo an chola o di loma o make, le alone in he ab enceof e idence o f he elabo a ion. See Janka Oe el, China, E o e, and Co id-19 Head ind , a commen aarticle on the website of the European Council on International Relations from July 20, 2020,
https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_china_europe_and_covid_19_headwinds/

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ideological agg e ion. Thi ehicle i he o e d a n mo al dicho omi a ion of he e il
egime and he good eo le . La , hi e a
ill com a e he Na oleonic label i h heimage of a ne Roman Em i e , hich i in oked b con em o a Chine e oli ical heo ich a Zhao Ting ang and Jiang Shigong o
if he Weim e iali ic ideali m.
Napoleonic idealism
Imagining a possible world that, in some respects, is better than the one that currently exists iswhat allows us to envision improvement. In this sense, idealism is indispensable, creative, andquintessentially human. But idealism is also unavoidably aggressive. In any idealism, there isinherent aggression, no matter how subtle. The idealist slams an idea against an existing,evolved, complex reality which she swears to eliminate and overwrite. Admittedly, many formsof idealism are modest in scope. An idealism can be ethical and even merely personal, as in theca e hen one hink : I am no he e on ho I an o be, and illo de o m badhabi ! In ha ca e, all he iolence of one ideali m i di ec ed again one e i ing habi ,no again o he eo le. Ye , if an ideali m i oli ical, a ge ing a change in ocieorganization, then particular people or groups or even entire societal orders may appear to standin he a of he igh idea eali a ion. Tho e ob acle m st be denounced, pressured, andreformed or cast aside or overthrown.
Arguably no strand of political idealism has been as politically ambitious and influential
and violently destructive on a global scale as that which finds its ultimate source in the
French Revolution. The Revolution enabled us to imagine the possibility of a society-wide,c l all an fo ma i e egime change . In fac , he con em o aage of he o d egime
derives from polemics against the French Ancien Régime. Its original referent the first objectof egime change was the system of aristocratic, clerical, city, and university privileges thatthe revolutionaries abolished. Hence, it is a legacy of the Revolution that we call supposedly
unenlightened, authoritarian poli ical
em : egime . Take he A ad egime , he
A a heid egime , he Na i egime , e ce e a: e im lici l (and ncon cio l ) a ocia ech oli ical
em i h F ance Ancien R gime.
However, the continuity is not merely linguistic, for the Revolution lives on in ourpolitical imagination. We keep discovering new (kinds of) ancien régimes to overthrow. After
Lo i XVI e ec ion, he Gi ondi
an ed o e o he Re ol ion o he e of E o e. A
decade later, the Napoleonic Code began o e i ing he Con inen ancien gime o de . Fo
the next half-century, liberal and liberal-democratic revolutions spread globally.
Sim l aneo l , Ma ie anded he Re ol ion goal o incl de f ll e ali in heeconomic realm, turning capi ali m in o an ancien gime o be o e h o n. And ecen l ,Ame ican ac i i ha e di co e ed an ancien gime in Ame ica e hnic a ifica ion. 5Groups like BLM have reintroduced the concept of privilège;6 i i j
ha no
hi e , a he
5

See for example: Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020).
The o di ilege de i e f om he La in privus and legum and mean
i a e la . Unde E o e ancien
régime, the privilege system included tax exemptions for aristocrats and clerics, as well as self-determination rights
for universities, monastic orders, free cities, and guilds. In France, during the night of August 4, 1789, the French
revolutionaries of the National Constituent Assembly officially abolished all privileges. Little did they know that
one da fe ac i io ld iden if a ange of nei ilege , incl ding hi e i ilege .
6

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than aristocrats or clerics, are deemed to be the bearers of an oppressive system of privilege. In
each of these outbursts of modern political idealism, there is an echo of the French original.
This modern (Western) political idealism, which forever seeks to liberate people frome e ne ancien gime , can al o manife i elf a an ideologicall agg e i e ni e ali min he domain of fo eign olic . If one
o e ha he eo le m be libe a ed in e e
co n on ea h, and ha a fe leading a e al ead ho he a , i o ld be ha d otolerate substantial politico-ideological diversity on the world stage. And it would be temptingo d eam ofhing all illegi ima e egime off he ma .
We may call such a geopolitical and political- hilo o hical ideali m Na oleonicbecause Napoleon embodied the intertwining of liberal idealism with expansionist imperialism.
He a indeed he g ea fo nde of he mode n, fo eign e o ed egime change . T ocenturies before the neo-conservative Bush administration ordered the Iraq invasion in the nameof Liberté and Égalité, Napoleon rode through Europe under the banner of freedom ande ali , na ion-b ilding all o e he Con inen . The Em e o a a neo-con pur sang, avant
la le e. In hi Sain Helena memoi , he
led him elf he fi
oldie of libe
andprophesized the global hegemony of the liberal ideas:
Liberal ideas flourish in Great Britain, they enlighten America, and they are nationalized in France;
and this may be called the tripod whence issues the light of the world! Liberal opinions will rule theuniverse. They will become the faith, the religion, the morality of all nations; and, in spite of all that
may be advanced to the contrary, this memorable era will be inseparably connected with my name;for, after all, it cannot be denied that I kindled the torch and consecrated the principles; and now
persecution renders me quite their Messiah. Friends and foes, all must acknowledge me to be theirfirst soldier, their grand representative. Thus even when I shall be no more, I shall still continue tobe the leading star of the nations...7

This Napoleonic imagining continues to inform and reemerge in strands of Western
geopolitical and political-philosophical thought. At present, its arguably most prominent objectof (frustrated) idealism, and its biggest stumbling block and target is the CCP-led PRC.
Reemerging with some frequency in Western discussions about China is the backgrounda m ion, he i , o o he ha he CCP PRC must fall, eventually, perhaps inevitably.
The e ha been, a Xi Jin ing com lain , no end o he diffe en fla o of [We e n] China
colla e heo . 8 The CCP m fall beca e i i nf ee, a ho i a ian, and on he ong ide
of hi o . Tha i , i i e ano he ancien gime anding in he a of a f ll libe aldemocratic indeed libe a ed
world. In response, the post-Maoist Chinese government
officialle en i elf a he ole an one. In he o d of Fo eign Mini e Wang Yi: We
are not interested in [the] rivalry of systems, or ideological confrontation with any country.

7

Comte Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné Las Cases, Memoirs of the Life, Exile, and Conversations of the Emperor
Napoleon, Cha e : Poli ic : The S a e of E o e.
8
Jin ing Xi, U hold and De elo Sociali m i h Chine e Cha ac e i ic , an la ed f om Manda in b Tanne
Greer, Palladium, May 31, 2019, https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translation-chinas-guidingideology/

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Likewise, we ho e ha he U.S. ill e ec China ocial
em and he Chine e eo le9choice, and gi e
i failed in e en ioni m.
The i on of We e n imagining of he CCP a an ancien gime i ha he CCP i
itself a revolutionary party drawing on a branch (the Leninist Stalinist one) of the Westernrevolutionary tradition. Accordingly, the Party has always, and especially during the Cultural
Revolution (1966 1976), led i elf he e ol iona elimina o of he emnan of China
feudal ancien régime (though the Republic of China and the late Qing arguably have a stronger
claim to that title10). Also, the CCP continues to assert that instead of being in the rear, its
ociali m make i he o ld a an -ga de. A Xi a ed in 2013: [C]a i ali m is bound to die
out and socialism is bound to win. This is an inevitable trend in social and historicalde elo men . 11 Th , o he e en o hich CCP ideolog e ha e an e i alen mi ionazeal to their Western liberal-democratic counterparts (a subject of dispute, which I will touchupon below), we continue to face competing Napoleonisms.
However, the preoccupation of Western and Chinese intellectuals and politicians withthis ideological opposition and with the putative dawning demise or damning divergence ofthe other side ebbs and flows. Over the last three years, but especially since the beginning of
the 2020-coronavirus crisis, suggestions, predictions, and legitimizations of regime change in
China together with expressed frustrations o e he CCP con in ed defiance of he We e nliberal democratic norms have again moved to the forefront of the Western, and especiallyAnglo-American, foreign policy discussions. Illustrative in this regard is the recently intensified
ideologization of he T m admini a ion a oach o China.
Pom eo egime change alk
This summer, the Trump administration and right-wing intellectual America had a particularly(neo-)Napoleonic moment. When the American presidential elections emerged on the horizon,
and China o la i among he We e n ci i en l mme ed o an all-time low,12 American
fo eign olic he o ic ook an ideali ic
n. Mo hea ical e e S e e Bannon, he fo me
White House adviser, and anti-CCP businessperson Guo Wengui. In front of the Statue of
Liberty, they launched the lobby group The New Federal State of China, whose stated aim is
he o e h o of he CCP. Mean hile, he Whi e Ho e co e hif od ced a e io
endbreak in its foreign policy. After three years of spewing America First rhetoric and couching
the Sino-American Trade War in economic terms, the Trump administration suddenly sought

9

Wang Yi, F ll Te : Wang Yi' In e ie on C en S a e of China-U.S. ela ion , CGTN, August 6, 2020,
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-06/Full-text-Wang-Yi-s-interview-on-current-China-U-S-relationsSJ8tae0mIw/index.html
10
See Frank Dikötter, The Age of Openness: China Before Mao (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 2008), p. 15.
11
Jin ing Xi, U hold and De elo Sociali m i h Chine e Cha ac e i ic , an la ed f om Manda in b Tanne
Greer, Palladium, May 31, 2019, https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translation-chinas-guidingideology/
12
Pe Re ea ch Cen e , Unfa o able Vie of China Reach Hi o ic High in Man Co n ie , Oc obe 6,2020,
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-historic-highs-inmany-countries/

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o eclaim he leade hi of he F ee Wo ld, calling on allie o ando he Chine e
government on ideological grounds.
The olic a e Uni ed S a e S a egic A oach o he Peo le Re blic of
13
China broadened a conflict over primarily economic power to the domain of ultimate values.
I oclaim ha Ame ican ha e mo e ea on han e e o nde and he nature of the regime
in Beijing and he h ea i o e o Ame ican economic in e e , ec i , and al e . 14 The
paper sketches a world-ideological conflic , a e ing ha he CCP omo e globall a al e
proposition that challenges the bedrock American belief in the inalienable right of every persono life, libe , and hei of ha ine . 15
F he
omo ing hi e i ion a a e ie ofeeche , b Robe O B ien,
Christopher Wray, and William Barr on, respectively, June 24th, July 7th, and July 16th, whichc lmina ed, on J l 23 h, in Sec e a of S a e Michael Pom eoeech The Comm ni
China and he F ee Wo ld F
e. Pom eo al o made hi o i ion kno n in hi No embe
10 h eech i led The P omi e of Ame ica, in hich he oclaim ha he figh i be eena ho i a iani m, ba ba i m on one ide and f eedom on he o he . 16
Pom eo gge
ha Ame ica co ld and ho ld i e o change China
oli icalegime: We, he f eedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China o change. 17 His
paean to regime change may be echoing the neoconservative rhetoric of the Bush-era, but incontrast to the Bush administrationhich no onl called fo egime change in Ba a hi I a
but actually executed it through military means Pom eo den ncia ion of he CCP i me ela performance of assertiveness for the domestic audience. He did not seem to have a plan forfurthering its overthrow; instead, he appeared to address the domestic audience within anelection season. His speech moves within Baudrillardian hyperreality. If Napoleon was thefioldie and g and e e en a i e of he ni e ali a ion of libe ali m, Pom eo mighbe seen as its latest simulator and great poser. His call for regime change in China is asimulac m of Na oleonic ideali m; in hi en e, e can alif i a neo-Na oleonic .
T o fea e of Pom eo di co e e cala e i ideological and agg e i e cha ac e .
The fi i Pom eo con i en efe ence o he CCP o he Beijing egime in ead of he
Chine e go e nmen , hich ha he effec of fo eg o nding he ideological diffe ence . Thie minological choice i
iking. A Ame ica highe di loma , Pom eo doe no deal di ec l
i h he CCP; he mee
i h China go e nmen al officials who, though doubling as Party
members under the party-state structure, speak to him in their role as representatives of thegovernment, and not of the party. This may seem a trivial distinction, but as former French

13

National Security Council, Uni ed S a e S a egic App oach o he People Rep blic of China, Report, May
26, 2020,
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/united-states-strategic-approach-to-the-peoples-republic-ofchina/
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Michael R. Pom eo, The P omi e of Ame ica, S eech, Ronald Reagan In i e, Wa hing on, D.C., No embe
10, 2020, https://www.state.gov/the-promise-of-america/
17
Michael R. Pom eo, Comm ni China and he F ee Wo ld F
e, S eech, Yo ba Linda, Califo nia, July23, 2020, https://www.state.gov/communist-china-and-the-free-worlds-future/

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di loma G a d A a d commen ed: Thi e of CCP
b i e ideological i alwhich
18
is unbridgeable fo di lomac .
The second escalating feature, which I will deconstruct in the next section, is the CCPdelegitimizing dichotomy of Party and people. Pompeo sharply distinguishes between the evil
CCP and he good Chine e eo le: We m al o engage and em o e he Chine e eo lea dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist
Pa . The la e he call : hi Ma i -Lenini mon e . 19 In his narrative, Chinese peoplea ea a ec e l i hing hei libe a ion f om he Pacomm ni a ho i a iani m, a i h
at least in part inspired by the American-led Free World:
I grew up and served my time in the Army during the Cold War. And if there is one thing I learned,
communists almost always lie. The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion
people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out.20

Cen al in Pom eo
e ec i e i he mo al claim ha , by being against the CCP, theAmerican government is on the side of the Chinese people. As he asserted in an interview on
Fo Ne : We con in e o eek a be e life fo he eo le of China. I im o an o . I
personal for me too as a man of fai h. I m ho ef l ha e oge he ill be able o achie e be eo come fo eligio mino i ie in ide of China. 21 In another interview, when asked what hecon ide ed hi g ea e accom li hmen a he S a e De a men , Pom eo an e ed:[W]o king on religious freedom. We ha e f ndamen all eo de ed he o ld a en ion ohe challenge e en ed b he Chine e Comm ni Pa , be e done good hing fo he
22
eo le of China.
Ye , com lica ing hi mo al claim and he Whi e Ho e ideological-humanitarian
rebranding of its conflict with China was a revelation by the former security advisor John
Bol on. In hi memoi , hich a ea ed on he ame da a Pom eoeech (J l 23), Bol onreports that Trump had told Xi in 2019 that he was fine with the anti-Muslim crackdown in
Xinjiang.23 The US was indeed the only major Western country not to join the 22 nation-statesha oge he , on J l 8, 2019, decla ed hei o o i ion o M lim ma inca ce a ion in
Xinjiang (even though the US joined similar declarations at later moments). That the WhiteHouse had not led the international human rights criticism on Xinjiang, but had, to the contrary,joined la e in he game af e ha ing aken he o o i e o i ion in he fo m of T m off-therecord con en , conflic ed i h Pom eo
o hoc claim o in e na ional h man igh
leadership.
18

Gérard Araud, Tweet, July 23, 2020, https://twitter.com/GerardAraud/status/1286196242226257920
Michael R. Pom eo, The P omi e of Ame ica.
20
Michael R. Pom eo, Comm ni China and he F ee Wo ld Fe.
21
Michael R. Pom eo, Sec e a Michael R. Pom eo i h Am Kellogg of FOX Ne , In e ie , Fox News,
October 1, 2020, https://www.state.gov/secretary-michael-r-pompeo-with-amy-kellogg-of-fox-news/
22
Michael R. Pom eo, Sec e a Michael R. Pom eo i h Ton Pe kin of Wa hing on Wa ch i h Ton
Pe kin . In e ie , No embe 10, 2020, h ://. a e.go / ec e a -michael-r-pompeo-with-tony-perkinsof-washington-watch-with-tony-perkins-3/
23
John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), p.
312.
19

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E laining he a a en lack of con i enc in he Whi e Ho e China olic nde
Trump, political scientist Andrew Nathan points to a combination of incompetence andideological divisions,
The dirty little secret is that the administration has no strategy. It is a snake pit of competing policy
entrepreneurs, most of whom understand little about China or world affairs. For many, domestic
politics is the key consideration.24

Nathan argues that Pompeo is part of a newly emerged dominant faction that interprets the
Sino-American conflict in terms of a world- anning ba le o el ima e al e andideological domina ion. Thi ne fac ion ideological and ideologizing interpretation differsfrom that of Trump, who narrowly frames the conflict as an economic competition (in the
beginning, making a deal had been hi ke h a e). Al o, i diffe f om he i ion of Pe e
Navarro, the Director of Trade and Manufacturing Polic , ho a a en l d eam of di iding
he o ld in o o economic and echnological bloc . 25 Pom eo ideological fac ion, Na hanargues, is deeply wrong in assuming that China wants to export its political model:[An] apparently now dominant faction consists of people like Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Steve
Bannon (out of the administration but still influential), and Newt Gingrich (also influential), who
appear seriously to believe, as Gingrich put it, ha China o e he g ea e h ea oince theBritish Empire in the seventeen- e en ie , m ch g ea e han Na i Ge man o he So ie Union .
This group has turned the competition into a life-and-death struggle over ultimate values. They seemto believe that China wants to extend its political model to the rest of the world, including America.
This is a deep misunderstanding of Chinese strategy, which is assertive, helpful to authoritarians,
and in many ways dangerous, but not ideologically ambitious.26

Sinologists and China-oriented political scientists disagree, as mentioned, on just how
ideologically ambitious the Chinese party-state really is.27 The question of the extent and the24

And e Na han, In: Wha No ? A ChinaFile Con e a ion, China File, August 5, 2020,
https://www.chinafile.com/conversation/what-now
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Fo e am le, con a o Na han a e men , Cli e Hamil on and Ma eike Ohlbe g a n in hei book Hidden
Hand (2020) ha The Chine e Comm ni Pa i de e mined o e ha e he o ld in i image. In hi e ioo k, Hamil on, ho o k a A
alian Na ional Uni e i , e en de c ibed Beijing a A
alia enem .
(Silent Invasion: China's Influence in Australia (San Francisco: Hardie Grant, 2018), Conclusion).
Mo e ca ef ll , bikingl , he E o ean Commi ion fo he fi
ime e lici l labeled China asystemic rival omo ing al e na i e model of go e nance. (European Commission and HR/VP contribution to
the European Council: EU-China A strategic outlook, Report, March 12, 2020, p. 1).
Indeed, he Chine e oli ical
em in ellec al o onen of en claim ha i i a legi ima e and e ensuperior alternative to liberal democracy. Still, because such claims tend to be formulated against the backgroundof, and as a counter to, Western ideological pressure, one can often also read them as primarily defensive, which
creates ambivalence. An example would be this strong yet seemingly defensive statement by the CCP-supporting
geopolitical analyst Andy Mok in an op-ed on a Chine e a e media eb i e: Man a o nd he o ld, e eciall
in the United States, are still trapped in a benighted, primitive and perniciously toxic superstition that, of all theavailable choices, a democratic free market system is the best and most moral form of government. B
mo e
and mo e eo le a o nd he o ld a e coming o ee China a he e hining ci on a hill. (And Mok, La e
5-Yea Plan ho bene olence of Chinaem, O -ed, CGTN, November 2, 2020,

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na e of he Chine e go e nmen in e na ional ambi ion in hi ega d lie fa be ond boththe scope of this essay and my knowledge although the answer would, indeed, bear on thedence of defending democ ac h o gh ha dline con ainmen and deco ling olicie i à-vis the PRC. Instead, I will analyze the central rhetorical simplification by means of whichhawkish or idealistic Anglo-American politicians, pundits, and intellectuals rebuke anddelegi imi e he CCP leade hi of China, namel , he mo al dicho omi a ion of Pa andChinese people.
Dichotomizing Party and people
The sharp Party-people dichotomy which Pompeo puts forward in a crude form, but which,as illustrated below, is widely employed by hawkishly idealistic China pundits and public
intellectuals in the wider Anglosphere
allows the critic to condemn the CCP without
implicating hundreds of millions of Chinese people. Of course, there is much sense in avoiding
stigmatization; it would be mistaken and unethical to blame individual Chinese for an entire
oli icalem. One ho ld no ake one g ie ances with the CCP out on any Chinese
individual, nor consider a whole people as tainted due to political differences.
On the other hand, radically divorcing the object of criticism from its cultural andsocietal embedding licenses the critic to denounce it in full. The reasoning is that there could
be no harm in condemning, even demonizing, the CCP since one has clarified that the CCP
does not represent or reflect the character of great masses of Chinese people. Therefore, thedichotomous conception, which superficially appears merely to reflect a sympathetic
humanistic concern for empathetic interpersonal communication, is, in fact, also a vehicle for
maximizing idealistic aggression.
In hi e a The Comm ni Pa of China and he Idea of E il , inologist Kerry
Brown depicts the Party-people dichotomy, which he subsequently dismisses as simplistic andpatronizing, as follows:
The Communist Party is evil. Chinese people are good. They are oppressed, downtrodden. It is easy
to progress beyond this to the heroic statement that we, outside of China, with our enlightened ways
are those who will be key in delivering this salvation. We are on our way. Freedom is nigh. The
neatness of this approach is attractive. Binary, black and white systems are always easy to engage
with. It also evades some of the pointier, more complex issues. We have located the single sourceof the problem the evil Communist Party. Once that is out of the way, everything will be plain
sailing.28

More nuanced variants of this dichotomous construct frequently appear in scholarly andintellectual discourse. Most directly, the dichotomy serves to preempt the accusation of
stigmatizing ordinary Chinese people. The political scientist and public intellectual Andreas
F lda e lain , [W]ild accusations of racism are the key context to understand and appreciate
why many non-Chinese discourse participants go to great length to distinguish between thehttps://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-11-02/Why-China-s-five-year-plans-work--V5Gn4iu5vW/index.html).
28
Ke B o n, The Comm ni Pa of China and he Idea of E il , Oxford Political Review, April 24, 2020,
https://oxfordpoliticalreview.com/2020/04/24/china-series-1/

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political regime and Chinese citizens in their critique of the political situation in mainland
China. 29
Addi ionall , in chola l and in ellec al di co e, a in Pom eoeech, hedichotomy suggests that the CCP is at least partly illegitimate. Tellingly, Fulda, who employs
and defends the dichotomy, adds to his explanation that despite ha ing a con i enc ofo e , he CCP, like o he a oc a ic egime , e.g., in S ia and I an, lackoli ical30
legi imac ; o a lea he CCP doe n ha e democ a ic legi imac . It is not a coincidence
that upholders of the dichotomous conce ion of en ejec he CCP legi imac ; he dicho om
is the very form of delegitimizing criticism.
Finally, upholders of the dichotomy also attach to it a moral weight as a means to
e one a ing he eo le . Fo e am le, jo nali Tanne B o n (no to be confused with Kerry
B o n) a n ha i ho i , one o ld ha e o e end he mo al acco n abilio omeh nd ed million eo le. Acco ding o him, one o ld ha e o con ide all ho e eo le o bein o o i ion o ni e al ff age [and] ino of concen a ion cam and mock ial . 31
Since it would be immoral to cast such a negative light on so many people, it would seem tofollo ha e mea he Pa (o he Pa
eli e) a loca ed in a e a a e mo al ni e e.
Relatedly, dichotomy- holde in i ha e ho ld ab ain f om he blanke e m China amuch as possible because it could lower awareness of the need to treat the Chinese people
differently and better than we do their government. There are the CCP and its leadership,hich ho ld be c i ici ed, e
ed, and nego ia ed i h, and he Chine e blic, hich[Ame ican] olic makeho ld e ec in o d and deed, 32 as historian Pamela Kyle
Crossley of Dartmouth College argues.
However, as sinologist Kerry Bro n e lain , a nea di i ion be een Pa
ando la ion i n enable beca e he Pa i a of ocie , and i [nine million] membea e, ni ingl , mo e of en han no
ical Chine e eo le. 33 Thus, though one obviously
should not conflate the categories of the CCP and the general Chinese population, theirela ion hi i , a B o ni , com le . I i al o o be no ed ha he CCP go e ningstyle and claim to legitimacy creatively interact with various critical Chinese political andpolitical- hilo o hical adi ion . G an ed, China go e nance co ld be f ndamen all be e
and freer. Providing indications of this are the Republic of China on Taiwan and phases ofo enne in China modern history.34 Nonetheless, political China cannot be cleanly separated
f om he eo le and he e of ocie .
29

And ea F lda in a i e e on e o Ke B o n a icle The Comm ni Pa of China and he Idea of
E il , A il 24, 2020, h :// i e .com/AMFChina/ a /1253699200631652352
30
Ibid., https://twitter.com/AMFChina/status/1253699204536549377
31
Tanne B o n, Commen on Ke B o n, The Comm ni Pa of China and he Idea of E il . Oxford
Political Review, April 24, 2020, https://oxfordpoliticalreview.com/2020/04/24/china-series-1/
32
Pamela K le C o le , In: Wha No ? A ChinaFile Con e a ion, China File, August 5, 2020,
https://www.chinafile.com/conversation/what-now
33
Ke B o n, The Comm ni Pa of China and he Idea of E il .
34
In the above cited book The Age of Openness: China Before Mao (2008), Frank Dikötter develops the claim that
the Republican Era (before the Japanese invasion of 1937) had been surprisingly cosmopolitan and forwardlooking. The republican government oversaw the modernization of the state apparatus and the legal system, andintroduced mass education.

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It follows, then, that the CCP is not a boxing sack that one can punch with trade
sanctions or decoupling policies without thereby also hurting he eal China o he o dina
Chinese people. The same counts for its denunciations. Kerry Brown recommends moderationand n ance: [I]f o an o a de lo ing lang age like e il abo he Pa , hen o a egoing to have to start labeling a good number of Chinese people that way too. Party members
are Chinese people, after all no ome e a a e ecie ! 35 The dichotomous discourse, which,by contrast, pictures the CCP as an isolatable target, legitimizes a maximization of ideologicalaggression and potentially obscures its effects on real groups and individuals.
O i i Roman ?
Of co e, he mainland
oli ical heo i a e all oo a a e of he di c ed ideologicalpressure because it targets ideologies that they either hold or are otherwise profoundly familiar
i h. The of en de c ibe We e n in ellec al agg e i el ni e ali ing ideali m, no a
Napoleonic, but as Roman. Jiang Shigong, for example, claims that American geopolitics aims
o c ea e a ne Roman Em i e on a global cale. He a g e ha Ame ican libe alage
a ne Cold Wa again China o of a dee -fel e en men
i h he fac ha he CCP
leadership and socialist system with Chinese characteristics became a stumbling block in the
Uni ed S a e conc ion of a Ne Roman Em i e fo he en i e o ld. 36 His colleague at
Peking University, Zhao Tingyang, has constructed an entire philosophical framework aroundthe conceptional o o i ion be een he Roman and Tian ia . He claim ha , The o ld
order has two traditions: imperialism invented by the Romans and the Tianxia system inventedb China. 37
Tian ia mean all under heaven . I i an ancien Chine e conce ha varyingly
deno ed he em e o com le e e i o , he ci ili ed o ld, o he en i e o ld. Bo h Jiang
and Zhao believe that Tianxia has existed for millennia, not only as a word covering a changing
semantic field but also as an imagined order and political practice. They claim that from these,a model for a culturally all-inclusive world universalism can be extrapolated, one in which there
i ha moni ho [ o ld- egional ideological] a imila ion (hé ér bùtóng). Zhao claims
that the Tianxia ideal a conce of e e al eace ba ed on non-e cl ion transcends thedifferent cultures and political systems and is not he ni e ali a ion of Chine e al e . 38
S ill, he al o a g e ha China [i ] an e i ome of Tian ia, ha i ha ca ied he Tianxia
i i f om he ancien ime o he e en , and ha i ha been, in effec , a o ld- c ed
co n . 39

35

Ke B o n, The Comm ni Pa of China and he Idea of E il .
Jiang Shigong, Zh ng m i g nji n h ni n : X n l m d g
n de
id d h ng . G ancha
eb i e, Ma 9, 2020. Q o e: Y c , i men de l j h ng, ji ng h ngg g ngch nd ng de l ngd o h
h ngg
h h
h
hd k nm ig ji ng
n l m dg
ng h h ji de b nji o h .
(https://www.guancha.cn/QiangShiGong/2020_09_05_564144.shtml).
37
Zhao Tingyang, Redefining a Philosophy for World Governance, translated from Mandarin by Liqing Tao(Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2019). p. 11; cf. p. 58.
38
Ibid., . 89. Cf. R gi Deb a and Zhao Ting ang, Tian ia: All Unde Hea en. Noema, June 19, 2020,
https://www.noemamag.com/tianxia-all-under-heaven/39
Zhao Tingyang, Redefining a Philosophy for World Governance, pp. 38-39.
36

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According to Zhao, a future world order inspired by the ideal of Tianxia would bedomination-free, while allowing for much cultural diversity under a gently harmonizing
federalist world government informed mainly by New Confucian and Buddhist values. In
contrast, on the same view, any neo-Roman imperialism wants to universalize its values
liberal democracy, individualism, the formal diplomatic equality between nation-states, and aliberal understanding of human rights by pushing the ideological others off the map. Crudely
put, Zhao and other Tianxia theorists suggest that in a Tianxia-led world, China and other nonliberal democracies would coexist harmoniously with liberal democracies; whereas in a
Roman -structured world one ideological block would impose an intolerant hegemony.
Bh ich an i omo hic ideological ee called Roman ? Wha abo i i
specifically Roman? After all, there have been many empires in history, and the historical
Roman Empire consisted of a complex, locally diversified governance landscape, not a regimeuniformized plane. In the Chinese political theoretical literature, many auteurs are vague about
ha make We e n ni e ali m Roman , a a f om ome nde ecified cha ac e i a ion ,ch a i enchan fo domina ion .
In what follows, I will attempt to reconstruct the meaning of the term in this mainland
Chinese discourse critical of Western ideological pressure. I discern four reasons for the
Roman f aming. Fi , Rome ca ie common a ocia ion . The o d im e iali m de i ef om he La in im e i m . In E o ean hi o , man
le d eam of e i ing Rome. And
over two centuries, non-We e n c i ic of he We
libe al and libe a ioni ideali m ha erepeatedly associated this idealism with imperialism and the Roman Empire. 40 For example,
Ottoman political activist Ali Suavi (1839 1878) o e: J look ho ho e F enchmen alk
pretentiously about freedom and equality, all the while seeking world domination likeCae a . 41 Since the Second World War, with the rise of the United States to the status of aworld power, the Rome-America analogy took precedence. The image of a Pax Americana fits
nicel o Wa hing on
oli ical a chi ec e, hich i neo-classical, with the American
Founding Fathers drawing extensively on Roman political conceptions.
A second, more specific reason for the mainland theorists to associate America with
Rome might be their Marxist-Leninist training. In 1917, Lenin theorized that the last stage ofcapitalism takes the form of imperialism. 42 This theoretical framework, which closely
associates capitalism and imperialism, makes it tempting to conceive of the capitalist US as anempire.
Thi d, Zhao men ion in a ing he infl ence of Ha d and Neg io k Empire.43 The
book indeed a g e ha he e en o ld o de , hich i call Em i e , l ima el de i e

40

Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian
Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
41
Ali S a i, Democ ac : Go e nmen b he Peo le, E ali , in Cha le K man (ed.), Modernist Islam,1840 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1870]), p. 142.
42
Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, (London: Penguin Classics, 2010).
43
Zhao Ting ang, All-Under-Hea en and Me hodological Rela ioni m: An Old S o and Ne Wo ld Peace,Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives, in Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang (eds.)(Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), p. 133.

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from a Roman legacy. And very indicatively, hi legac
ni e al no ion of igh i een
44
he e a fo m[ing] he co e of he Em i e.
Fo h, he e i Romeeligio conno a ion. Zhao a g e ha he ne Roman
imperialism is informed, not just by ancient Roman and modern European imperialism, but also
by he Ch i ian ideolog of c l al ni e ali m. The la e c ea [e ] he a ado oflaunching wars in the name of making peace and destroying liberty in the name of defending
h man igh . 45 Indeed, Christianity, like its Islamic brother, has strong universalistice en ion . The fai h i fo e e one, fo a Sain Pa l oclaim in Gala ian (3:28): The e
is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all
one in Ch i Je . Thi fi he Rome image of he Ca holic Ch ch, hich indeed meanni e al ch ch and ha i head a e in Rome. Th , Rome can mboli e bo h he ha do e and he ideali ic dimen ion of he We e n oli ical ni e ali m.
If one were to adopt thi image , one o ld b me Na oleonic ideali m nde heb oade and olde Roman i i belonging o and a ocia ed i h We e n ci ili a ion in
general. However, this perspective has various shortcomings, one of which is that it could leadto essentialized and reified conceptions of the Western and Chinese civilizations. Zhao andJiang employ a dualistic scheme in which, crudely put, the Roman stands for a dominating
West, whereas Tianxia is seen as the global application of the supposed Chinese appreciation
fo ha mon . Zhao i e : While bo h en i ion a ni e al o ld o de , he im e ial
emseeks to conquer and achieve a dominating rule, while the Tianxia system, on the other hand,ie o con c a ha able
em. 46 C i ic a g e ha Zhao n Tian ia in o ao ian
47o ld o dethat corresponds neither to something that exists in present-day China, nor tosome Chinese golden age in ancient history. This essay lacks the space to delve into that
discussion.48 But if Tianxia cannot signify the essence of a historical Chinese-civilizational
approach to universalism and diversity, then its pair concept of the essentially Roman Westmight be untenable too.
I i a g abl a eng h of he (neo-)Na oleonic f aming hat it does not imply any
civilizational dualism. Instead of positing a divide between two age-old civilizations, each withini e adi ion of ni e ali ic ho gh , he Na oleonic f aming i mo e o en-ended.
Though undoubtedly deriving historically from Christian and Roman-legal traditions ofuniversalism, Napoleonic liberationist universalism has influenced and perhaps has becomea permanent component of Chinese political thought. Admittedly, the Chinese and Westernpolitical-philosophical landscapes do differ fundamentally. Comparative philosopher Thomas
Metzger argues that the Neo-Confucian epistemological and ontological assumptions that
44

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 198.
Zhao Ting ang, All-Under-Hea en and Me hodological Rela ioni m, . 133.
46
Zhao Tingyang, Redefining a Philosophy for World Governance, translated from Mandarin by Liqing Tao(Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2019), p. 3.
47
Chishen Chang and Kuan-H ing Chen, T acking Tian ia: On In ellec al Self-Po i ioning, in Ban Wang (ed.),Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2017), p. 274.
48
On the topic, see Ban Wang (ed.), Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics(D ham, NC: D ke Uni e i P e , 2017); a ell a Zhi ing Liang, Xi ng i ng i n i : D ngd i h ngg
de h ng i ji ng , Sixiang, Vol. 36 (Dec. 2018), pp. 71 177.
45

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dominate contemporary Chinese political thought cause its utopian idealism to diverge fromthe (liberal) American political-philosophical mainstream. 49 This divergence falls outside thescope of this essay. But even if it implies that present-day Chinese political thought lacks astrong universalistic-liberationist strand, branding the latter as entirely non-Chinese and putting
i in ome di j nc i e Roman ca ego
o ld i a k a dl i h he CCP hi o . Af e all,the CCP itself stands in the modern revolutionary tradition. Through its foundational Maoist
ideology and Leninist party-state apparatus, the party is connected to a long, global, andhistorically traceable chain of revolutions and liberationist imaginings that find their ultimate
source in the French Revolution.
In conclusion, despite the Revolution global legacy, currently there is still no single
libe al o libe a ioni ideolog hale he ni e e . In ead, he co-existence ofsignificantly different regime forms persists, in part because the revolutionary tradition
branched out into competing avant-garde ideologies, creating a liberal-democratic and acommunist block. Neo-Napoleonic hawks like Pompeo style themselves as the avant-garde of
libe
global ma ch, b he eali of global egime-pluralism is not likely to give in any
time soon. Therefore, any realistic diplomacy or activist engagement must acknowledge thatthe regime pluralism is here to stay for the foreseeable future and that declaring he o he idepolitical system fundamentally illegitimate does not benefit constructive international
communication.

49

Thomas Metzger, A Cloud Across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash Between Chinese and Western Political
Theories Today (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005), pp. 1 184.

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Identifying the Politics of Trust and Belonging in Nowadays’ Democracies: A Study of the Public Consensus infour European countries
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 50-62

IDENTIFYING THE POLITICS OF TRUST AND BELONGING IN
NO ADA
DEMOCRACIE : A
D OF HE P BLICCONSENSUS IN FOUR EUROPEAN COUNTRIESDavide Orsitto
Abstract
Recent voices among the communitarian thinkers led by Adam Seligman and David
Montgomery have formulated a new version of the communitarian critique,highlighting the downsides of Western political systems centered on human rights.
The communitarian critique in all its facets never seems to extinguish its emotional
appeal, but it would remain to a large extent inchoate if it is not backed up by
empirical evidence showing popular support for its arguments in a significant
number of countries. In its theoretical part, the paper reviews literature concerning
the communitarian critiques of liberalism. In its empirical part, the paper discusses
the fluctuation between liberal and communitarian policy-making in the agendasof the most important political parties in France, Italy, Germany, and the United
Kingdom. In the process, it presents indicators that reflect the values embedded inindividualism and communitarianism upon analyzing data from the Manifesto
Project database. It then weighs the scores of these indicators in the voting patternsof the main political parties in these four countries within the past half-century. The
empirical results show an overall downward trajectory towards morecommunitarian policy-making, which has also opened a debate on the role of thewelfare state in the framework of the communitarian argument.

In the post-cold war world of the 21 st century, the liberal democracy has become the mostadvertised frame of political systems to such an extent that Francis Fukuyama was able to easily
argue that the political history of the humankind was at the zenith of its path and that henceforth
the world order would find an asymptotic long-term equilibrium.1 The expected convergence
towards liberal democracy in the Western hemisphere also meant that individualism wasbelieved to attain the status of an unquestionable and prevailing value all over the world in theform of human rights. The latter rights are claim-rights that protect the individual human beings

1

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 3-7.

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as such from the state and demand from the latter the positive obligation to fulfill the integral
needs of each member of the society.
Recently, voices among the communitarian thinkers spearheaded by Adam Seligman
and David Montgomery rebut the aura of optimism surrounding the liberal order and argue thatpolitical systems centering on human rights may end up in a tragedy. 2 On their view, half acentury of human rights advocacy has seemingly promulgated an unstable democratic systemthat is prone to degenerate into autocracies, populism, and demagogy. Individual rights haveproliferated at the expense of any sense of shared belonging, which can be seen as a primary
ontological necessity of the human beings as social animals, as opposed to the liberalphilosophical conception of an unencumbered self. 3
The communitarian critique in all its facets seems to never exhaust its emotional appeal,
but it would remain largely inchoate if no empirical checks are operated to indicate whether its
arguments concur with a shared discomfort found in the democratic societies. The specificquestion that interests me here is To what extent is the communitarian critique a view sharedby a significant majority of European Union citizens? In the first part of the paper, I address
this quandary by reviewing the literature concerning the communitarian critique ofindividualism, giving special emphasis on Seligman and Moncarights. In the second part, I analyze empirical evidence of the voting patterns of citizens of theEuropean Union, particularly in France, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom, using datafrom the Manifesto Project database. 4 Although the United Kingdom recently left the European
Union, it remains a very important country to study, especially in terms of understanding thevoting metrics relating to the Brexit watershed event. To respond to policy demands, in thepaper I will also try to set up reliable and comparable measures for all the analyzed states, which
will open perspectives for further studies on the role of the welfare state in the framework of
the communitarian argument.
1.
The Nuanced Conception of Liberty
Liberalism, rather than a one-sided, unambiguous political doctrine, is an array of discoursesthat prioritize the concept of liberty over other theorized values. It is a corpus of multi-facetedarguments, classical and contemporary, with a manifest proclivity towards freedom as the main
normative societal pillar.5 This definition does not encompass the essence of liberalism, whichlies in the axiomatic premise of what the value of liberty is. In this regard, Benjamin Constantargued that from the dawn of humanity up to the French Revolution, freedom existed as a2

Adam B. Seligman and David W. Montgomery, T T a
H a R
:Lb a
a
Loss ofB, Society, Vol. 56 (2019), pp. 1-2.
3Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 70.
4Andrea Volkens et al., The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR), Version 2020a(Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, 2020).
5
G a Gaa ., Liberalism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N.Zalta, 2020), retrieved
from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/

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concept ascribed to the whole, or to the community. 6 He calls the liberty attached to collectivity
the liberty of the ancients, consisting in the right to collectively decide the functions of thegovernment, brought together in the public space, in order to make decisions regarding foreign
policy, home affairs, voting legislation, and deliberation. This kind of liberty implies a total
subjection of the individual to the whole, and has been very indicatively defined as holistic. 7
After the French Revolution in 1789, there was a significant paradigm shift in theWestern understanding of liberty. It was a result of a re-focusing from the aggregate entity thatwas free to the individual-monads that composed it: the liberty of the moderns was in its essencea liberty of the individual human beings. The individuals were henceforth free to speak up theirminds without censorship, could not be exiled, and were not only free from government
interference in private life but were also protected from the violation of that right by otherindividuals.8 Luis Dumont would refine and nuance the concepts of holistic and individual
liberty arguing that each of them can apply to different social classes within the same societies.
He would also trace the birth of the individualism that underlies our liberal values today backto the first Christian traditions which would gradually build up to overthrow the old, hierarchybased, tribalist values of collectivity. 9 Constant and Dumont, who were inspired by John Locke,
John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and the classical liberal tradition, helped develop the various
a
b a
a
ba
a c c
b
.T c
a
individualist conception of liberty was further shaped by Isaiah Berlin (in his Two Concepts ofLiberty) and John Rawls (in his Political Liberalism). For us, of particular importance here willbe the powerful distinction that Berlin draws between negative liberty,abe free of constraint imposed by other people or institutions, and positive liberty – the state
which emancipates the individual, empowers her action, and enables her to achieve her willedgoals.10
The review of the prominent thinkers who laid down the basics of the modern-day
political sense of liberty is necessary for understanding the contemporary American liberalism,
which I will refer to in this paper to elaborate on my claims. As Michael Walzer has it,liberalism is enacted in a society through the theoretical acceptance of four mobilities:
geographic free movement, social mobility, material mobility, and political mobility. 11 The
conception of the individual as free to move geographically, reach a desired place across thesocio-economic ladder, achieve or break institutional and personal relationship, choose a
ca a
a
a a
a
ba
a
a
.A b asociety thus upholds the four freedoms as claim-rights of the individuals; moreover, as Rawls

6

B a
C
a , T Lb
A c
C
a
a
M
, Political Writings(London: Cambridge University press, 1819), pp. 1-2.
7
Ibid., p. 2.
8Ibid., p. 4.
9Luis Dumont, Essays on Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 23-26.
10
J
aC
a H
Ha , I a a B, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta,2020).
11
M c a Wa
, The Communitarian Critique of Ca a
, Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1990), pp. 623.

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argues, it grounds democracy and pluralism in the toleration of difference of opinions as a
c a c
c
b
.12
1.1
The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism
Communitarianism is not a school of thought or an alternative political paradigm to liberalism
per se, unlike communism, state socialism, or fascism. It is an approach that emphasizes the
a c
a
ca
a
a
ac
a c eate a collectivity. At the13same time, it offers a powerful critique of liberalism. Collectivities, according to this stance,sometimes need to be prioritized over the individual in policy making, especially in stewarding
ba c
a ac
ba
a .F
,c
a a cabwhat appears to be the universal imposition of political individualism in the form of humanrights, which on their view is neither morally nor politically correct, as the forms of life andtraditions of particular collectivities vary considerably from context to context. 14
There are three main communitarian critiques of liberalism that are particularly
ca . TKa Ma
German Ideology and holds that the liberalpolitical theory is a product of particular liberal social practice and that it universalizes its
discourse to obscure all other possibilities. In this way, Western societies have created a civil
context, in which the individual citizen believes to be absolutely free and unencumbered fromobligations to community but is actually deprived of his or her belonging to a group and its
traditions.15 By implementing their liberal freedoms, Western societies have deprived their
human members of their communities of reference, common heritage, and stories, and havethus reduced them to fragments, such that each of them is a stranger to the others. 16 Arguingthat liberalism puts forward the ideal of the Promethean humanity the dogmatic and relentlesstrust in science, progress, and individuality communitarians contend that the liberal view ofhistorical process is an illusion. The blind faith in reason has brought about a disenchantment
and irreversible losses of the sense of community and of a shared social universe. 17
The second communitarian critique of liberalism is famously known as the critique ofthe unencumbered self. It highlights the point that the liberal political philosophy tacitly
assumes an impoverished concept of the human self. To make its own case, neoliberalism
claims that a common standard respect of freedoms ought to be applied to every human being,
regardless of traditions and mores. It hails the act of dismissing thousands of years ofaccumulated knowledge and common heritage as an act of liberation of the unencumbered

12

Ibid., p. 16.
Da
B , C
a a
, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta, 2020); Seyla
Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, p. 71; Danièle
Hervieu-Léger, Ia,
Va a
Fa , and the Social Nature of Religion in Modernity, in
Richard K. Fenn (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion (London: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 161175.
14
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, pp. 23
38.
15
M c a Wa , T C
a a C
Ca a
, pp. 6-23.
16
Ibid, p. 9.
17Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, p. 69.
13

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individual, who is now ready to evolve. In this way, the liberal theory thoroughly misrepresents
the real life and the phenomenology of human existence, 18 as it rests on a version of the
Hobbesian assumption that views human connections as mere market friendships based on an
expected reciprocity and hinging on a narrowly defined self-interest.19 Conversely, against the
self-perpetuating hypnotic discourse of liberalism, communitarians argue that being engaged insocial interaction and communities of reference is in the very nature of the human enterprise.
The unencumbered human being, cut loose from nearly all social bonds, is only a mythical,
lonely figure completely disengaged with reality, as much as the Promethean ideal cherished in
the liberal narrative. Finally, according to this critique, the remarkable divide between theeveryday need for communal experience and the liberal ideology engenders in the individual a
deep psychological problem which is a direct consequence of isolation and hinders
innovation.20
1.2

The Tragedy of the Human Rights: Communities of Trust against Societies ofConfidence
A third, recently released communitarian critique of liberalism is formulated by Seligman andMontgomery, who argue that the liberal moral institution of human rights as prioritized overnatural or constitutional rights has played a silent role in the current rise of authoritarian andantiliberal leaders.21 Ever since the bipolar system of the cold war collapsed along with the
Berlin Wall, liberalism has been getting a ground on the international arena, but while
universalizing the Western values as undeniable virtues, it has also neglected other meaningful
human necessities and moral worldviews, which anchor the dimension of belonging into thesense of human identity.22 The argument thus points to the socio-cultural processes involved in
the formation of the human identities: communities play a pivotal role in framing the sense of
b
,
c
bac b
c
ac
,a
a
a ab
to engage with the world and others.
Echoing Nietzsche, Seligman and Montgomery claim that the conception of humanrights has (1) institutionalized a situation in which the notion of God, the archetypical common
good, is abolished via secularism; (2) fostered the idea of the morally autonomous individual;and (3) pushed towards the protection of different sets of individual rights, rather than of acollective idea of the common good. Consequently, the tendency to safeguard the conceptionof human rights has given a rise to a community of strangers with no common moral values,
which is held together by the judicial system, with justice conceived as the highest virtue. Thus,
the peculiar deficit ensuing from the existential alienation of the individual from her kindred
has brought about a latent, sublimated longing for community, which finds an expression in agreater sense of national, regional, or religious belonging. It is to be noted here that as human18

Ibid., p. 72.
Ibid., p. 73.
20
M c a Wa , T C
a a C
Ca a
21
Adam B. Seligman and David W. Montgomery, T T a
B, pp. 203-204.
22
Ibid., p. 205.
19

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rights by themselves provide no sense of belonging, no sentiment of a shared community or
special bonds, they can be enacted uniformly only by bureaucratic organizations and welfare
agencies. This however has brought up an unfortunate effect the remarkable rift between an
ab ac
ca
a
a S
a a M
ca a cty of
23
a ca aab.
From this viewpoint, the proposed concept of belonging appears as the very antithesisof human alienation. Communities of trust feature shared dispositions and morality, feelings ofsolidarity and common experience, familiarity and peace, as well as a sense of security spurringfrom the idea of sameness. For their part, human-rights-centered societies cannot be further
from the idea of trust or belonging: they foster multicultural values and diverse moral beliefs
that are upheld via bureaucratic legal institutions, thus tacitly equating the idea of the other asa danger, which in turn requires security. The rise of right-wing populist movements seems aninevitable corollary of this analysis: xenophobia, identity politics, and group supremacy are
instruments that can easily canalize a degenerate and disoriented longing for trust andbelonging. The challenge here then is how to virtuously cultivate the claims to belonging to acommunity without building walls and exercising violence during the assimilation of refugees
and migrants, without promoting racist and ethnocentric policies of segregation, which entail
authoritarianism and apartheid. 24
Seligman and Montgomery end their case by urging us to take belonging seriously inpolicies such as development projects, awareness campaigns, and political undertakings
towards seeing difference as a resource, rather than a trigger for security. 25 These authors
however do not go in-depth with a policy advise or a slightest indication over which institution
should be tasked with making belonging the central societal framework. Now, having set thebackground of the individualism-communitarianism debate, I will proceed with a discussion of
the extent to which the broad issues raised by the communitarian critiques are reflected in thevoting pattern of three European Founding Member States with the addition of the United
Kingdom.
II.
Methodology and Data Analysis
For a good sense of whether the communitarian critique matches the wishes, the desires, andthe visions of a significant portion of the contemporary democratic societies, I shall searchthrough the data of the comparative manifesto project. 26 The Manifesto covers the mostinsightful and updated resources used in the mainstream research literature, which synthesize
the ideological stances of more than a thousand political parties on a number of policy areas, as
published in their manifestos in more than 50 countries between 1945 and 2020. Morespecifically, the manifesto project indicates the share of the manifestos of the political parties
in a specific policy area in terms of the number of sentences devoted to it. Thus, a value of x in

23

Ibid., pp. 206-207.
Ibid., pp. 207-208.
25
Ibid., p. 208.
26
Andrea Volkens et al, The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR), Version
2020a.
24

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one of the variables indicates that x percentcaa27
in that row were assigned to a policy category by an expert coder. The data in the Manifesto
are indicative for the stances of the various parties in terms of key policy areas, examples ofwhich may be welfare extension and retrenchment, tendency towards military spending or
peacefulness, preference for traditional or progressive values et cetera. 28 The indicated policy
areas are listed in numbers and coded in terms of variables, which cover the key positions of
the political parties on the most important issues.29
I a
a
a
c
a
a
c
a a
c
across the chosen countries for the period from 1990 to 2020 by composing the indicators of
Individualism and Holism Demand for each election in the countries of France, Germany, Italy,
and the United Kingdom. The two metrics are meant to complement the Rile Index of the
Manifesto Project, which assembles various policy demands into a measure for the right-leftdivide on an ideological level. I have thus defined individualism as a set of liberal values setting
forth the predominance of the interest of the individuals and non-state organizations(supranational, sub-national) over the nation state, corporations, religious institutions and tradeunions, herewith understood as the archetypal collective institutions. The metric Individualism
Demand is composed by the sum of the frequencies of words in party manifestos that coded
: (a)
E
a U
,
ab
c a
U
competences and erosion of state sovereignty; (b) favorable mentions of federalism ordecentralization of political and economic power; (c) necessity for administrative efficiency,such as cutting down on civil service; (d) the importance of the modernization of industry,technology, and science; (e) limiting state expenditure on education; (f) unfavorable mentionsof patriotism and nationalism; (g) opposition to traditional or religious moral values, withsupport for divorce, abortion, separation for church and state; (h) freedom and human rights,featuring favorable mentions of importance of personal freedoms, the idea of individualism; (i)mentions fostering multiculturalism and ethnic heterogeneity; (j) negative stance towards tradeunions and labor groups. Upon summing up the frequencies of the listed policy areas, I havemultiplied the score of the share of the votes that each party won in parliament to obtain aweighed score accounting for the public demand for individualist policy areas.
As an antithesis to individualism, I have created the Holism Demand index, which isformed by the sum total of frequencies of policy areas that imply a preference for a collective
welfare over that of the individual. The collectivity reference may vary according to the politicalnarrative, including over policy areas such as the environment and the preservation of global
commons, the safeguarding state sovereignty, as well as the protection of vulnerable groups
and religious institutions. The variables chosen for this index are: (a) negative references tointernational cooperation and/or ones favoring national independence and autarky; (b)

27

T

a K
a ., E
a
Pa P
Ac
C
a T
A Dynamic Latent VariableM
Ma
Da a, Political Analysis (2013), pp. 468 491.
28
Will Lowe, Kenneth Benoit, Slava Mikhaylov, an M c a La , Sca
P c P
c
C
P
ca T
, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2011), pp. 123 155.
29
Andrea Volkens et al, The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR), Version
2020a.

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Euroscepticism; (c) positive attitude towards corporations and government; (d) positive stancefor Keynesian demand management, such as increase in aggregate demand and investment inpublic infrastructures; (e) support for anti-growth policies, such as ones in line withenvironmentalist claims against productive growth; (f) favorable mentions of environmental
protection, including on the preservation of natural resources, the protection of animal and plantrights; (g) favorable mentions of traditional morality, that includes censorship for immoral
behavior, maintenance of the traditional family, and support for religious institutions; (h)support for equality, special protection for vulnerable groups, and fair redistribution of
resources; (i) negative references to multiculturalism, appeals to cultural homogeneity insociety; (j) support for the agricultural sector and farming communities. 30 The Holism Demandindex is aggregated as a mirror image of the Individualism Demand index, featuring an equal
number of control variables, which are summed up into one score for each political party overtime, then multiplied by the share of the vote that the party received in each election. To
calculate a comparative score, I have summed up the two scores of all the parties weighed by
the vote share for each election, so as to obtain the overall preference towards individualism
and holism. I have finally drawn the difference between the obtained scores of Individualism
Demand and Holism Demand that a specific country featured in parliament at each election
point. In this way, a graph is created whereby scores above zero reflect the relative propensity
towards individualism that the majority of a population has voted for in a country, whereas
scores below zero show the relative preference towards communitarian policies. The graphs
containing the findings are displayed in the Appendix at the end of the article.
III.
Analyzing Comparative Voter Preferences for Individualism and Holism
As Figure 1 shows, the four countries examined in the period 1970-2020 display an overall shift
in the trend of public consensus towards communitarian policy making the parties that havea greater voter share over time show a tendency toward supporting the communitarianarguments that compose the Holism Demand Index. Italy is an interesting example of change
in the ideological resource of its political parties, scoring highly individualist with both peaks
and troughs (in fact the absolute maximum of the function) between 1972 and 2008; thendropping more than thirty-five percentage points of its support for individualism from 2008 to
2013. Figure 2 offers a specific picture of how the Italian parties range in terms of bothindividualism and holism on the different elections, as well as an explanation on the shift fromindividualism to holism. After 2008, the preference for holism emerges with an increase in thevoter share of the Five-Star Movement (coded in yellow under the label special party) and Lega
Nord (coded in brown as nationalist party). For the same period, the main democratic parties(the left leaning Partito Democratico and Liberi e Uguali, as well as the conservative Forza
Italia) also converge to lower scores for individualism, hypothetically attempting to competewith the populist parties as the voters turn to the latter.
For its part, France features as the most holist-scoring country over time, starting froma total of 4% in holism in the 1972 elections, reaching a relative maximum of 1% individualistin 1986, and then an absolute minimum of 13 points in holism in 1997, before going back to
30

Ibid.

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lower holist values along the lines of its present-day communitarianism. The graph in Figure 4
also shows a lasting tendency toward holism in almost all of the key French parties, of which
the highest-scoring are the nationalists of Front National, the socialists of France Insoumise,and the French Communist Party. The absolute minimum of 13 points in holism is due to thestrong performance of Front National reaching 14% of the voter share, the strong ideologicalscore of France Insoumise, and the overall holist attitudes of the other parties in the country.
After a brief interval of positive individualism under the Fillon cabinet in 2007, the score goesback to the holist mean trend values towards the present.
Next, Figures 1 and 3 indicate, as intuitively expected, that the United Kingdom has on
average a preference for individualist political stances, reaching a positive peak of 13 points inthis regard in 1983 under the continuing Thatcher government. After 1992, the country embarks
on a negative-sloping trajectory towards milder levels of individualism, reaching a local troughin 2001 and 2005 under the Blair leadership. A higher score of individualism characterizes thefirst Cameron government in 2010, and as Brexit is discussed and becomes closer within his
second cabinet, the country turns holist, scoring two percentage points in holism for the firsttime. Interestingly, as Theresa May assumes office with a mandate for government in theaftermath of the Brexit referendum, the parliament assumes an individualist score of 8 points,
whereas as Boris Johnson is elected in office in 2019 to replace May, the United Kingdom turns
holist once again. The ideological change that generates the negative sloping trend towards
holistic features is mainly produced by the Conservatives, which adopted less individualistic
stances in 2015 and 2019, as well as by UKIP, whose high score in the communitarianarguments significantly affects the curve.
F a ,F
1a 5
G
aa c y prove interesting to read. In theGerman case, the aggregated data from 1970 to 1990 belong to the Federal Republic of
Germany, which after that incorporated under international law the German Democratic
Republic within its continuous legal identity. In the examined timespan, the Federal Republicof Germany shows a sinusoidal trend, reaching the highest individualist score of 17 under the
Helmut Schmidt chancellorship in 1976. Then, the trend embarks on a negative slope in thereunification period, reaching the highest score in holism under chancellor Helmut Kohl in
1990. After that, the country climbs up along individualist preferences, reaching a local
maximum under the first Angela Merkel cabinet in 2002. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial
crisis, and throughout the European sovereign debt crisis of 2012, the Merkel cabinets turnedmore holist as a consequence of the deep change in the public preferences induced by the
economic depression. These changes are detectable in Figure 4, which sheds light on how themost important German parties advanced their ideological stance over time. The CDU and theFree Democratic Party have always maintained an individualist stance, whereas the more leftleaning parties of Die Linke, the Greens, and SPD have proven more versatile.
Overall, the findings show over time a long-term tendency of the public attitudes
towards communitarian policies, namely Eurosceptic, national corporatist, and protectionist
stances. This might be explained by the intense period of stagnation and depression following
to the financial crisis and the later period of Brexit. Sensing a change in public preferences, themajor political parties in Europe have adopted an inward-looking re-orientation, which

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currently appears to be deepening. Italy shows a greater volatility in the scores, turning fromone of the most proactive European Union and globalization supporter to being moreEurosceptic and less multiculturalist. Further studies can be conducted to extend the analysisof these composed scores to all EU member states, or to an in-depth analysis of theindustrialized countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation andD(OECD). A
c
a b
c
a c
c
political ideologies in terms of their right/left narratives and create
along with theindividualism-holism a four-dimensional axis to achieve a better picture of the trends in the
public attitudes. It is finally interesting to note that, prima facie, the countries that are wellknown for their high score in the democracy indexes (such as those of Freedom House) show asteady orientation of their public attitudes towards a return to the community. Seligman and
M
b a
b a
a mpirical analysis, although thesmall sample can only have a statistical value of limited significance.
IV.
Conclusion
This paper first offers a review of the key points and the various nuances of liberalism, including
the policies of individualism, which are a substantial part of it. It then outlines the three main
c
a a c
b a
, a
S
a a M
a
the perceived lack of trust and belonging in societies where individual differences arehighlighted and upheld by law while the need of security is paramount. The paper further gives
a
a a
c
a
b
S
a a M
intuition and the empirical voting patterns of the electorate of the three largest EU founding
states and the United Kingdom. The findings from the four countries, which can be expanded
further on by statistically significant studies concerning a larger pool of countries, show that,over time, a remarkable public sentiment has taken a shape towards communitarian policies
and at the expense of liberalism. This tendency has given a rise to Euroscepticism, corporatism,a growing urgency to act on the climate change, and a push towards Keynesian economic
policy, all of which can be detected even in countries with great individualist traditions, suchas Germany and UK. The findings reflect the growing share of positive public attitudes towards
the politics of trust and belonging to a community, which the preceding liberal policy making
may have precipitated. As a shift towards higher levels of communitarianism is detected, further
econometric studies could determine what would be the main watershed events that engender
this change. It would be also interesting to find out whether the politics of belonging describedby Seligman and Montgomery can be channeled through the institutionalization of a stronger
welfare state. It is indeed clear that what Albena Azmanova 31 defines as a broad societal
agreement on social rights under the ticket of welfare state is, so far, the only componential
entity of the contemporary democratic societies that is capable of catering to the politics ofbelonging as advanced by the communitarians.

31

Albena Azmanova, Capitalism on Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

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APPENDIX
Figure 1: Individualism-Holism Policy Demand Score

Country Overview Ideology Map
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
1960
-5%

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

2030

-10%
-15%
Italy

FranceGermany

United Kingdom

Figure 2: Ideological Map of Most Popular Italian Political Parties
30%
25%

ITALY

20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
1960
-5%

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

-10%
-15%

CHR Centrists

Forza Italia and CONS

Democrats

Lega and Nationalists

Special (m5s)

TOTAL

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Figure 3: Ideological Map of the Most Popular British Political Parties
16%
14%
12%
10%
8%
6%

4%
2%
0%
1960
-2%

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

2030

-4%
Conservatives

Labor

UKIP

TOTAL

Figure 4: Ideology Map of the Most Popular French Political Parties
6%
4%
2%
0%
1970
-2%

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

-4%
-6%
-8%
-10%
-12%
-14%
Conservatives

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61

Front National

Total

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Figure 5: Ideology Map of the Most Important German Political PartiesGERMANY
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

-5%
-10%
CDU
Free Democratic Party
Grune

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Afd NAT62

LINKE and PS
Total

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J. JEREMY WISNEWSKI
Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditation
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 63-80

Logos, Non-Conceptual Experience, and Philosophy
LOGOS AND NON-CONCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE:
OR, WHY PHILOSOPHERS SHOULD CARE ABOUT MEDITATION
J. Jeremy Wisnewski
Abstract
Philosophy in the West, by and large, has been an attempt to show that the languageof reason (logos) is adequate to realitythat it can accomplish
what experience alone cannot. Indeed, this is the central presupposition ofphilosophical analysis as it is usually carried out. The question I would like toaddress is this one: By what rights do we maintain this presupposition? What would
it mean to take experience itself seriously, without allowing logos to colonize it?
The philosophical traditions of the West have not in general taken this question asseriously as it deserves. For when we set aside the demands of logos, we likewise
set aside the assumption that reality itself must be unified, static, and immediately
answerable to conceptual description. The question thus becomes: What ways
might we investigate reality without assuming the immediate legitimacy of reason,
language, and conceptual distinctions? In what follows, I will defend the relevanceof meditation (and meditative states) to exploring these philosophical questions.
Key Words: Samadhi, Phenomenology of Meditation, Non-dual Consciousness,
non-conceptual experience§1. Introduction
It is an astonishing fact that most people claim not to believe their experience. When one asks
the standard questions about what is real, the stock answers are returned: matter is real, or subatomic particles, or energy. When one presses for more, the list of laws may well be roundedout: natural selection, diminishing marginal utility, confirmation bias, supply and demand.
When one turns away from the scientifically-minded metaphysicians, toward the more devout,answers are surprisingly similar: God is real, or God s love, or sin. In both cases, we see a rather
strange tendency: definitions of the real turn away from immediate experience and toward some
explanation of immediate experience that shows wh it cannot be basic. God made the world,which enabled m experience is not all that structurall different from the claim that atoms

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Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditation

create the world, which enabled m experience . 1 Both claims involve, fundamentally, the ideathat ordinary experience is not itself adequate to the phenomena of reality there must be somedeeper or more profound thing in virtue of which we can make sense of what is, after all,immediately before our eyes.
Of course, an irony pervades the turn away from experience. For any account of what
is fundamentally real, one will inevitably appeal to a certain kind of experience in order tojustify the thing being discussed: the physicist and chemist will focus on the set of experiences
surrounding repeatable experimentation and scientific method. The theist will appeal to theimmediacy of religious experience, or the experience of faith, or encountering the world in themode of wonder; the philosopher might appeal to the normativity felt in the reach ofargumentation. The irony is not subtle: one must appeal to something to show that regularexperience is not to be regarded as fundamental and appeals to anything will, of necessity,
involve some mode of experience.
And so the philosophical dog must chase its tail. One requires a reason for claiming that
one mode of experience is better more veridical than another. Already, however, the appeal
to reason runs against the appeal to experience: reasoning is never concerned with theimmediacy of an experience. Its very modus operandi is to move beyond itself to hypothesize
things that are not present to explain things that are, or to deduce things that are not present
from those things that are. Reason is, like language, essentially ek-static2: to infer somethingfrom another thing is by definition to move from what is immediate to what is not. In thisrespect, neither reason nor language more generally can be true to the immediacy of experience
to utilize reason is to declare that a particular experience is not adequately intelligible on its
own merits.
Philosophy in the West, by and large, has been an attempt to show that the language ofreason (logos) is adequate to reality that it can accomplish what experience alone cannot.
Indeed, this is the central presupposition of philosophical analysis as it is usually carried out.
The question I would like to address is this one: by what rights do we maintain thispresupposition? What would it mean to take experience itself seriously, without allowing logos
to colonize it? The philosophical traditions of the West have not in general taken this question
as seriously as it deserves. For when we set aside the demands of logos, we likewise set aside
the assumption that reality itself must be unified, static, and immediately answerable toconceptual description. The question thus becomes: In what ways might we investigate reality
without assuming the immediate legitimacy of reason, language, and conceptual distinctions?
The argument I will make in reply to these questions is this:
1. We should take experience seriously. Experience is the only possible foundation for our
understanding of the world, as it is only through experience that the world is disclosed
to us.

1

Of course, there are non-structural differences between the claims.
That is, it is essentially outside of itself. I borrow the term from Division II of Martin Heidegger s, Being andTime, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962).
2

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2. There are distinct modes of experience, some conceptual and others not. There is,however, no a priori ground for privileging conceptual modes of experience over nonconceptual ones.3 To put this otherwise: logos is not more primordial than unmediatedexperience.
3. One form of non-conceptual (unmediated) experience is found in the state of Sa dhi(concentration), a well-documented mode of experience discussed and analyzed invarious Indic philosophical traditions, often in association with forms of meditationsuch as samatha and vipassana bhavana and their various descendants.
------------------------------------4. Therefore, we should take Sa dhi seriously as a mode of investigation into experience
as it is given.
There are undoubtedly a set of initial objections that present themselves. First, one mightclaim that we should not take experience seriously, at least until we have sorted out its
relationship to the world. This roughly Cartesian objection, of course, is a confused one: itsuggests we can both pose and answer such questions in a way that does not take experience
seriously to begin with. Second, one might claim that there are a priori reasons for privileging
certain modes of experience particularly those that have been structured by logos. As we willsee (§2, below), a defense of this view faces significant perhaps insurmountable challenges.
Third, one might deny that there is such a thing as unmediated experience. Moreover, even if
there is such a thing, one might deny that it has any relevance to our metaphysical questions. I
regard the existence of non-conceptual experience as an essentially empirical question. Whether
or not such states are relevant to metaphysical questions is itself a metaphysical question. I see
no benefit in deciding the issue by fiat. I would offer essentially the same response to one whodenied the relevance of Sa dhi (or the meditative practices that cultivate it) more generally. 4
In what follows, I will defend the relevance of Sa dhi (and meditation 5 ) tophilosophical questions against these (and other) objections. I will utilize thinkers whereappropriate William James and Nishida Kitaro loom large in what follows, as will thephenomenologists, albeit mostly implicitly but I do not intend what follows to be a scholarly
inquir into an one thinker s particular view (or views) of an issue. I refer to such
3

Though there is an explanation for the privileging of logos an explanation that has to do with the very natureof conceptual argumentation: it favors what can be articulated precisely.
4
This objection might take several forms: one might set meditation aside as a merely religious practice, andthereby claim it to be inappropriate to proper philosophical reflection. One might claim that there is simply nomeans by which to approach meditative states in a properly scientific way, and hence what is disclosed withinsuch states is in a fundamental way closed off from those who do not experience them. As will become clear, I
think such objections ultimately presuppose the superiority of logos, and hence beg the question against othermodes of experience.
5
There is no single Sanskrit word that gets translated as meditation. The terms yoga, bhavana, and dhyana can
all be so translated. There are likewise a diversity of practices captured by each of these terms. When I refer tomeditation generall , I have in mind samatha bhavana and vipassana bhavana. Samatha bhavana is sometimes
described as the practice that develops sa dhi, eventually allowing the practice of vipassana (insight). In othercases, however, sa dhi is said to develop with vipassana. For an accessible discussion of the controversies
surrounding the Pali sources, see Richard Shankman, The Experience of Sam dhi (Boston: Shambhala
Publications, 2008).

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philosophers views onl as a means to activel address the question at stake. M aim is not toestablish that all philosophers ought to be cultivating Sa dhi. My aim, rather, is to provide anargument that such modes of experience cannot simply be ignored by those interested in thecore questions of metaphysics.
§2 Logos
The core question of philosophy, in some ways, is whether or not one can articulate the structureof things in a way that makes them intelligible that reveals or uncovers a latent structure
already present. In certain respects, the debates between rationalists and empiricists from the17th-century onwards have been debates about what tools would best be suited to uncovering
this structure.6 On the one hand, appeals to things like clear and distinct ideas, combined withthe laws of thought they allegedly justify, were offered up as a means to reconcile the world ofexperience with the world of thought. In brief, the world of thought was to be made master ofthe world of experience deciding in advance what elements of experience could be groundedin the categories of rational activity. The world of experience was made handmaiden to theworld of thought.7
On the other hand, appeals to immediate experience, supplemented by a reasoning thatwould be used to make the most general sense of this experience, emerged to counter the claimthat thought ought to have any proprietary say over experience. Thus Berkeley was willing to
defend the idea that matter was in effect a simple abstraction forced on experience b thought.
If thought is to play second-fiddle to experience, however, such abstractions can be simply
jettisoned.8
Both approaches, strangely enough, presuppose the same thing: namely, that there is a
structure to be captured by the relative rankings of reason and experience. The issue is notwhether the world has a structure, but rather how to get at that structure what might be thesurest guide. In this respect, the importance of experience was still in some ways subordinatedto reason, even in empiricism. As everyone knows, the sense-data theory of perception says
almost nothing about what experience is like. Instead, it explains experience in terms oflogically-derived sensor atoms. In this respect, even the empiricist theor gives pride of place
to rationality: rationality is what will determine how to understand experience, and thus thelaws of thought, now a tool to organize and explain experience, still wind up trumping it. The
rationalists and the empiricists, for whatever their differences, still share a basic orientation

6

One might also read the debates over the primacy of either the universal or particular in just these terms: as adebate about how best to fulfill the demands of logos a debate that of necessity presupposes the legitimacy oflogos demands. The textbook disagreement between Plato and Aristotle (i.e. is the particular or the universal more
real ?) is fundamentall a disagreement about how best to express the logos of things. The relation of the particular
to logos in Aristotle is obviously very complicated (as is the relation of the universal to logos in Plato) and the
textbook reading certainly misses much.
7
Again, this is in no way unique to the philosophical efforts of the 17th-centur . In some wa s, Aristotle s problem
with Plato is precisely this one: Plato makes the thought more basic than the thing. In some ways, Aristotle wants
to reverse this, but the notion of thing that Aristotle ultimatel defends in his treatment of the particular (what
Aristotle calls primar substance ) still seems to be ultimatel a function of our capacit to discriminate things inaccordance with logos.
8
Moreover, this mirrors the Aristotelian reply to Plato: a form apart from a thing is simply an abstraction.

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towards logos. Methodologically, reason still gives all marching orders. In the empiricist camp,
however, reason is constrained to organize what is given in experience but it may do so by
whatever means necessary including, crucially, explaining experience in terms foreign toexperience itself. 9
In certain respects, then, run-of-the-mill empiricism is just not empirical enough toactually take experience seriously. In its modern form, such empiricism is essentially an
apology for the scientific method and it is only the scientific method that really counts.
Standard empiricism presupposes, above all else, that the world has an intelligible structure,and that this structure can be limned with language. But this is, after all, really a presupposition.
Must the world have a structure? Our urge is to sa
es , and then to appeal to the standard
panopl of philosophical positions: Plato s forms, Hume s impressions, Kant s pure intuitions
and the categories. Might it not be the case that the structure we find in the world is but thestructure of the language we think and speak? What if, rather than simply assuming that theworld must have some pre-defined structure that we access through experience, we were toallow experience to speak for itself? What if we did not immediately assume that experience
was in fact translatable into expository and assertoric language?
The Greek term logos captures one form of world-disclosure. It is the kind of disclosurethat occurs when we read a compelling description of a thing something that makes a thing
stand out as intelligible in a system of concepts that enable us to navigate the world. Logos
has the sense both of reason and of language in general and this is precisely the way I shouldlike to understand it. It is a kind of conceptual order that we are capable of bringing to bear on
our experience and which, it must be admitted, can come to constitute our natural attitude
about the events around us. To explain an experience is precisely to articulate that experiencein conceptual terms terms that both collect the event and display it to those with whom weshare a language.10
Implicit in logos is a sense of order that things stand a particular way, that they areorganized and conceptually available to us. 11 Logos, as I am using the term here, discloses the9

Aristotle is an interesting case here and he may in fact be an exception. In Categories, the ultimacy of theparticular is best expressed demonstrativel : that. Is a demonstrative pronoun foreign to experience ? It seems
like a stretch to sa so. Aristotle s view comes closer to one that would allow experience to speak for itself, at an
rate, than Plato s written view does. Of course, an claims about Plato s thought must be tempered with arecognition of Plato s views on the inabilit of written language to adequatel express truth. See, in particular,
Phaedrus and the 7th letter.
10
On Gadamer s view, this is also what s required to understand an experience. In this respect, logos andunderstanding are intimately linked. To give up on logos altogether would be to give up on understanding. For myown part, I am inclined to distinguish kinds of understanding the conceptual and the non-conceptual. I am open
to the idea that the conceptual can elucidate the non-conceptual, but this is a rather weaker claim than saying thatconceptualization is required for understanding. Unfortunately, I do not currently have the space to consider
Gadamer s view with the thoroughness it deserves. In brief, I contend that Gadamer thinks logos is a prerequisite
for any understanding rather than an element within an instance of understanding. I think this is compatible withthe existence of non-conceptual experiences that can be understood. To put this another way: it is impossible torealize the cessation of subject/object duality without first experiencing subject/object duality. See Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd Revised Edition (NewYork: Continuum Press, 2004).
11
In many ways, the history of philosophy is a history of excavating the structure of logos (and, occasionally, its
limitations).

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Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditationworld as a set of discrete entities, having or failing to have particular properties. 12 The a priori
structure of logos is crucial to understanding what it is that is actually disclosed within logos.
Every language every logos consists in a set of distinctions along with rules for arranging,hierarchically even, these sets of distinctions.13
The logic of logos was, in many respects, first systematically treated by Aristotle in theCategories. The categories, at bottom, present a taxonomy of kinds of being of the ways inwhich things can be said to be. Something can be an animal, but it can also be red, or sad, or
here, or tomorrow, and so on. The arrangement of possible predications into types organizes
the implicit structure of logos into the ways in which it can gather and display the world.
Implicit within this set of distinctions, however, are rules for how such distinctions can beorganized. Four rules are worth mentioning explicitly: identity, non-contradiction, excluded
middle, and the principle of sufficient reason.14 These are not empirical rules derived from longterm work with concepts in a language. They are, rather, the very condition for the possibilityof an expository and explanatory language at all. If non-contradiction does not hold, forexample, then no predication actually manages to assert an thing. To sa that s is p in theabsence of non-contradiction is not to sa that s is not p. In other words, sa ing that s is pdoesn t exclude any other possibilities. But the function of predication just is to preclude otherpossibilities if s is p, then it s impossible for it also to be p. Excluded middle follows directl
from non-contradiction b DeMorgan s Law, and something like the Principle of Sufficient
Reason can be derived from this in a few short steps.15
Logos, then, has a structure. It consists in making exclusive distinctions between things,
and then mapping the relations between such things in possible predicates, according to basic
logical principles. Some of these principles (Identity, Sufficient Reason, Excluded Middle, and
Non-Contradiction) are more basic than others.
§3 Why Logos Can Not Be Automatically Privileged
The ground of knowledge has, in one way or another, always been claimed to be experience.
The rationalists, as Husserl so skillfully shows in the Crisis, ultimately took for granted thelegitimacy of the experiences made possible by the mathematization of nature namely, the12

As I am using the term, logos is thus intimately connected to excavating the structure of what Heidegger calls
presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) in Being and Time.
13
On this view, a concept is just such a set of distinctions this, not that or that.
14
Aristotle identifies non-contradiction as the fundamental principle of human thought in his Metaphysics, where
he formulates the principle several times: It is impossible for an one to believe the same thing to be and not be.
(Aristotle, Metaphysics, 2nd Revised Edition, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924),
IV.3.1005b23-24). The same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in thesame respect. (Ibid., IV.3.1005b19-20.) The most indisputable of all beliefs is that contradictory statements are
not at the same time true. (Ibid., IV.6.1011b13-14.)
15
Excluded middle follows because ~(p & ~p) is logically equivalent to (p v ~p) [DeMorgan]. One can derive aform of the principle of sufficient reason as follows: if p is given, p v ~q follows (rule of addition). If (p v ~q), wethen have, via commutativity, double negation, and material implication, q Æ p. This entails that, for any p, there
is some q that, if it obtains, will guarantee p. (Of course, the derivation of the principle of sufficient reason fromexcluded middle is a logic trick. On the ground, we accept these principles well before we have ever shown thatthey can be derived.)

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experience of structural-mathematical precision when modeling nature. 16 The empiricists, as
the name obviously suggests, took the very same experience of logical precision as a model fortrying to provide the logic of empirical perception. As is well known, this resulted in an accountof experience that had relatively little to do with experience ideas, sense-data, secondary
qualities were presented as a means of modeling experience only to come, via the power ofconceptual thinking, to replace the very thing they aimed to describe. In an astonishingturnabout in modern philosophy, the primacy of experience, in both empiricist and rationalist
camps, gives way to its unavailability: each model for experience blinds us to experience itself.
If we take seriously the claim, implicit in the history of philosophy, that knowledge
must be grounded in experience, we find ourselves yet again needing to return to that basic
ground: to what is encountered in living experience. To do this, of course, it is not sufficient tosimply grab hold of our favorite models and then apply them, for in a very real sense theexperience we aim to conceptualize is at least sometimes not in itself conceptual (a point I hope
to demonstrate below).
In fact, the dialectic of rationalism and empiricism, as well as its alleged overcoming in
Kant s logical reconstruction of experience, displa s the wa in which logos undermines ourcapacity to see experience for what it is. The move to analysis is always a move away from theobject of experience: any account of x must involve terms other than x. Indeed, reason,
explanation, logos, analysis this entire family of concepts is essentially ek-statical andmediated: To reason about x, or to explain x, or to analyze x, requires abandoning x as selfsufficient. This is evidenced by the obvious fact that all explanations need to appeal tosomething other than the thing being explained, all arguments move away from what is
immediate to what is inferred if they bother with the immediate at all, and all analysis appeals
to more than is present in an immediate experience. 17
The idea that logos is inadequate to experience has been championed in divergent
philosophical schools, 18 but it is an idea that remains at the periphery of mainstream
philosophical work as it is routinely carried out today. Indeed, on the face of it both philosophy
and the sciences more generally are necessarily hostile to the notion that logos is insufficient towhat it describes. All of the discursive sciences (logoi) seem rather to require that the adequacyof logos and logos itself, as I am using the term involve a move from the unmediated to themediated.19

16

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated by David
Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
17This move is what James calls the Ps chologist s Fallac . See William James, Principles of Psychology, Two
Volumes (New York: Dover Publications 1950). It is also what Wittgenstein refers to as a grammatical illusion.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). For an
illuminating discussion of the connection between these two ideas, see Russell Goodman s impressive
Wittgenstein and Willian James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
18
This view can be found in Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), in William
James, Writings, 1902-1910, (New Work: The Library of America, 1988), in Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry Into theGood, translated by Masao Abe and C. Ives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and in the later work ofMartin Heidegger, see for example, Martin Heidegger, The Event [Ereignis], translated by Richard Rojcewicz(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
19
This is true even when logos is concerned with itself.

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In disputing the exclusive authority of logos, I do not intend thereby to say that every
experience is as good as every other. I only intend to dispute that logos is the only way toinvestigate philosophical questions. As nearly everyone concedes, not all experiences are
identical. There are hallucinations, religious visions, contemplations, scenic vistas,
disappointments, frustrations, movie-goings, proof-completions, and so much more. The major
objection to taking experience as such seriously follows directly from these considerations. One
might well insist that only veridical experience should count, and then note that it is reason thatenables us to distinguish the veridical from the non-veridical. In this respect, then, logos musttake precedence over experience (or, more precisely, those experiences structured by logos
should trump those not structured by logos).
Implicit in this objection, of course, is the presumed legitimacy of logos: the objection
does not establish that logos can distinguish between the veridical and the non-veridical; it
simply asserts it. If we knew that reason was sufficient to make such distinctions, no one could
possibly disagree with the claim that logos ought to trump other forms of experience, given thatthese were known to be non-veridical. But the entire issue at stake is precisely whether or not
the distinction between logos-experience and non-logos experience tracks the difference
between the veridical and the non-veridical. To establish that these distinctions are in fact thesame would require demonstrating that logos itself was justifiably regarded as truth-tracking
and not just truth-tracking, but exclusively truth-tracking. If other forms of experience could
also be shown to be truth-tracking, in other words, we would have no basis for our exclusive
reliance on logos. If logos itself cannot be shown to be truth-tracking if it inevitably involves
the presupposition of its own legitimacy we likewise have no convincing reason to limit ourtrust in experience to a trust in the discriminations of conceptual thinking.
Is an exclusive focus on logos justified? The question is perhaps more vexing than it
initially appears. The question itself, in one respect, presupposes the legitimacy of the very
thing it asks after. For whatever the faults of positivism, this much seems right: questions are
only legitimate if they are (in principle at least) answerable. To ask about the legitimacy of ourpresupposition that reason and language are adequate to the description of reality be it
physical, metaphysical, or moral reality is already to speak in the language of reasons. To
demonstrate the legitimacy of reason would be, presumably, to offer reasons for thepresuppositions that could perform a legitimating function. But this is precisely what is at issue:
we want to know if reason can be legitimate, and addressing this question seems to require that
we use the very thing we are trying to assess.
The point can be made with a simple illustration of the circular thinking required:imagine an argument designed to show that arguments are legitimate. Any such argument itreall doesn t matter the form will necessarily rely on the presupposition that arguments havenormative force. If it did not rely on this presupposition, one could never take a conclusion tohave been warranted by the premises leading to it. If we do make the presupposition, then theargument cannot be said to have established the legitimacy of reasons so much as illustrated it.
But this entails that an argument aimed to justify reason will be no better at achieving its task
than any argument: for us to take the argument seriously, we must already be committed to thelegitimacy of argument. And this entails something rather serious for philosophers: reason is

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reason.20
This is not a problem that has been lost on philosophers, of course. From Kant s projectof using reason to discover reason s limitations to the Habermasian attempt to ground reason
in the structure of language-use, philosophers have attempted to show that, although reason
cannot justify itself, we can nevertheless rest easy reason must be taken for granted, for its
foundation is built into our linguistic endeavors. Alternatively, some argue that we are justified
in accepting reason s legitimac given what we have accomplished through its use.
As I hope is obvious, none of these three attempts are ultimately successful:
1. Kant s claim that we can discover the limitations of reason with reason itself has been
criticized from a number of different perspectives. Kant himself saw, in the antinomies,
that reason necessarily tried to exceed itself. 21 Later, Tanabe Hajime, with some help
from Hegel, more powerfully argued that if reason was inadequate, it could not possibly
be trusted to determine its own limits. 22 The very admission that reason has limits
suggests that we should not trust it to discover and demarcate those limitations. (Indeed,
Tanabe saw Kant s critical philosoph as et more subject-centered hubris requiring
metanoesis (Japanese: zange)).23
2. Habermas s claim that reason was grounded in those discursive rules implicit in all of
language-use faces similar self-referential difficulties: by offering the attempt todiscursivel redeem reason b an anal sis of the legitimac conditions of assertoric
speech-acts, Habermas essentially tries to evade the question of the legitimacy ofreason.24 An assertoric speech act, by definition, is one that is capable of being judged
true or false in terms of the evidence available. One might well concede that Habermas
has got the structure of assertoric language right without thereby conceding that reason
is sufficient for determining the structure of the world, or of experience. Habermas
theory of communicative action essentially restates the claim that reason is selflegitimating. For those who worry that reason is not adequate to experience, claimingthat language legitimates reason is rather similar to claiming that the existence ofbachelors legitimates the existence of unmarried men. Language itself (at least20

Compare the character Eli abeth Costello in J.M. Coet ee s work: For, seen from the outside, from a being
alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology. Of course reason will validate reason as the first principle of theuniverse what else should it do? Dethrone itself? Reasoning systems, as systems of totality, do not have thatpower. If there were a position from which reason could attack and dethrone itself, reason would already haveoccupied that position; otherwise it would not be total. (J. M. Coet ee, The Lives of Animals, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), p. 25).
21
See, of course, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
22
See Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, translated by Tekeuchi Yoshinori (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1990).
23This is a dominant theme in Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, where Tanabe laments his earlier
infatuation with Kant s critical philosoph in light of his own actions on behalf of imperial Japan during WorldWar II.
24
See, for example, Jürgen Habermas The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, translated by Thomas
McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).

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assertoric language) presupposes the structure of reason, and hence cannot be used tojustify that structure.
3. The instrumentalist defense of reason fares no better. If the legitimacy of reason can beinferred from what we are able to accomplish with reason, two points of response canbe made: first, even the astonishing success of reason would only justify the claim thatreason is instrumentally true, not that it actually captured the structure of experience orof the world.25 Second, reason in fact seems ill-equipped in multiple domains. For any
experience that is non-conceptual, reason will be unable to capture the phenomena inquestion.
In my view, these quick arguments provide at the very least some antecedent plausibility forthe claim that, if there are non-conceptual modes of experience, then these experiences havejust as much prima facie legitimacy as do those experiences structured by logos. While I think
the claim that we should take all experience seriously even what logos demands we callunrealcan be plausibly defended, 26 I will limit myself to those experiences that we cancharacterize as non-conceptual. In particular, I am interested in the experience of sa dhi.
Before discussing this one-pointedness of mind, however, it will be useful to get clearer on
the notion of the non-conceptual I am employing.
§4 The non-conceptual
What is the notion of experience that escapes the net of logos? The sort of thing in question
here can be found in several places. The beginnings of this idea are clearly articulated, forexample, in William James Principles, as well as some later papers on radical empiricism. 27 It
is also present in Nishida Kitaro, of the K oto School, who first came across the idea of pureexperience , treated conceptuall , in James work. 28 (Nishida undoubtedly came across thisexperientially in his study of Zen). 29
As early as The Principles of Psychology, William James was already calling into
question the idea that consciousness was best captured in terms of a knowing ego intentionallydirected toward the world. The evidence for this egological view, according to James, wassimply not present within experience. Or, to put the point more precisely, the idea of a knowing
ego grasping experiential content could only capture certain kinds of consciousness:

25

This form of argument parallels Arthur Fine s arguments against scientific realism: Fine notes that the successof science is only evidence for the claim that it is instrumentally true, not that it is true tout court. See Arthur Fine,
The Natural Ontological Attitude Noûs 18 (1984), pp. 51-65.
For a comparison of Fine s views on the realism/antirealism debate with Heidegger s similar views, see m
Heidegger, Arthur Fine, and the Natural Ontological Attitude, Prolegomena 12 (2013).
26
This claim has been defended, in different ways, by numerous philosophers, as we will see.
27
See Does Consciousness Exist? and A World of Pure Experience, both in William James, Writings, 19021910.
28
See his An Inquiry into the Good. Carter makes the plausible claim that the notion of pure experience is present
throughout Nishida s writing, even when he later turns his attention to the core idea of topos. See Robert Carter,
The Kyoto School (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013).
29
See Michiko Yusa, Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitaro (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 2002).

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But this condition of the experience is not one of the things experienced at the moment; this knowing
is not immediately known. It is only known in subsequent reflection. Instead, then, of the stream ofthought being one of con-sciousness it might be better called a stream of Sciouness pure andsimple, thinking objects of some of which it makes what it calls a Me, and onl aware of its pure
Self in an abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way.30

On James view in Principles, the root of our core idea of the self comes, ultimately,
from motor intentionality from the fact that we move in the world. The idea of a centrally
located agent is one that we feel, and that forces itself upon us when we reflect on things likethe nature of conscious experience. What is fascinating about this account, then, is that the very
idea of a self is an idea found in reflection upon experience rather than in experience itself. Thismeans that any account of experience that invokes a model of a knowing ego set over against acontent of awareness will necessarily depart from experience as it is immediately given, andwill do so precisely because of the demands placed upon us by the structure of thought itself(logos).
As James was well aware, when we come to the idea of a self in our reflections, theidea that we consider is necessarily different from the activity of consideration itself. While itis true that a thought-content has no reality apart from the act of thinking that produces it, andthat thinking has no reality apart from the particular thought-content it thinks, it is still the casethat one cannot simply identify the thought-content with the activity of thinking. This is so for
relatively familiar reasons: the activity of consciousness despite always being tied to an
intentional object acts as a condition for being aware of the thought-content in question.
What kind of condition is this? If James is right, it is a logical condition a condition of logos.
If we are to account for consciousness in terms of the categories of logic, we will need topostulate, as a transcendental condition of experience, a subject of experience. What I findinnovative about James treatment here, however, is his flat-out refusal to assume that logicalconditions are also metaphysical conditions. Accepting that, in the realm of logos, we must
postulate a subject as a condition for the possibility of experience does not entail that there aresuch subjects. Moreover, granting that logos demands a subject does not entail that we must
accept this demand in our account of experience.
In this respect, perhaps strangely, James is far more radical than Kant. As is well known,
Kant too thought of the subject as a necessary theoretical postulate, but recognized that only
the empirical ego was accessible to any acting agent. Thus, in Kant, the subject becomes atranscendental requirement for experience, but one that we can never really know. For James,a recognition that something is a necessary postulate of thought is sufficient to show that weneed not necessarily postulate it. To put this less cryptically: as soon as we recognize acompulsion to postulate something in addition to what is immediately given in experience, thatcompulsion can be seen for what it is: an urge rather than a necessity. For someone like Kant,
responding to the urge is required to bring a systematic philosophy to fruition; for James, seeing
the urge is enough to give up on the prospect of a systematic philosophy all together.
In later writings, the initial notion of sciousness comes to pla a much more central
role in James thinking:30

Willian James, The Princiles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), Vol. I, p. 304.

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the stream of thinking...is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist
chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all
my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them...breath, which was ever theoriginal of spirit, breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded,
the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them asconsciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts inthe concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.31

The idea of consciousness emerges out of reflection on experience, not out of experience. In
the act of experience, there is no thing called consciousness that is experienced: consciousness
is exhausted by its object. In this respect, Sartre is right: consciousness is what it is not, and it
is not what it is.32 The thought being thought is real enough present but there is not a thing
to which it is present. Consciousness, in other words, is nothing other than the simply-beingpresent-of-the-intentional. 33 Indeed, this is the fundamental truth of intentionality itself:
consciousness without an object simply does not exist.34 Consciousness without directedness is
unintelligible. It follows that consciousness is, well, nothing at least when we construe it assomething other than an event, or a relation, or an occurrence.
To take experience seriously, then, we must take this mode of experience seriously. We
have chased out one conception of the world by developing scientific thinking and powerfulconceptual maps. We have been hounded b what Husserl calls, at one point, the ghosts oflogic. 35 What happens when we turn our attention to this nothing , rather than simpl allowing
the rules of logos to determine what we must say about the logical structure of experience?
And how can we turn our attention to such experience how can we deliberately access the
non-conceptual experiential bedrock?
5 Wh medi a ion ho ld be aken e io l : Sam dhi
In Indic and other Asian philosophical traditions, it is widely recognized that one can develop
certain perceptual and experiential capacities in such a way that they are more disclosive thanthey would otherwise be. 36 This is the essential role played by vipassana meditation and its
descendants. Within these meditative traditions, various modes of conscious awareness are
distinguished. A central experiential state involves intense levels of concentration (sa dhi).
This mode provides us with one access point to the notion of non-conceptual experience. 37 In
states of sa dhi, many of the standard assumptions we utilize to organize our experience are

31

William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 37.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes (New York: Harper Collins Press, 1993).
33
For an interesting take on how this relates to some forms of meditation, see Wolfgang Fasching, Consciousness,
Self-consciousness, and Meditation, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008), pp. 462-483.
34
We are misled to the extent that we take talk of an object here one set over against a subject
to bereferential. It is simply convenient. As T.S. Eliot once remarked: I have to use language to talk.
35
See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated by David
Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
36This notion is likewise at the core of Aristotle s account of phronesis as a form of perception. See in particular
Nicomachean Ethics, Book 4, collected in J.L. Ackrill, ed., A New Aristotle Reader (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987).
37
Or what is called, in some literatures, non-conceptual content .
32

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Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditationin fact called into question. The most significant of these are subject/object duality, on the one
hand, and the very idea of structure, on the other.
Saying these things are called into question, however, is a bit misleading. It is not thecase that while one is in a state of sa dhi, one therein raises a question about what one isexperiencing. In a certain respect, the instant one raises a question, one is no longer in theabsorptive states of sa dhi. Questions themselves take one out of the immediate experiential
present they indicate an absence in the field of the present something that is sought. 38 In
sa dhi, there is nothing that is sought after. There is not even an experiential self that could
raise a question about itself, let alone about what was being experienced. In this respect, raisingsuch questions is always retrospective: one thinks back on the state of experience one was
immersed in, and then attempts to characterize it utilizing the very concepts that were, within
said experience, set aside. The issue of how to characterize sa dhi is thus a complicated one.
In one respect, any characterization must be inadequate, as it will be couched within a set ofconcepts that are foreign to the experience itself; sa dhi is essentially non-conceptual. 39
Nevertheless, given that we are navigating discursive waters, some sort of characterizations
must be used. The trick, as the old Zen proverb has it, is not to mistake the finger pointing at
the moon for the moon itself.
Sa dhi, it should be noted, does not really pick out a single state of awareness. It is
commonly distinguished into several different levels. 40 For our purposes, it will be sufficient topick out the basic features of sa dhi without reference to its various modes or levels. The aimof doing this is to articulate a mode of experience that is non-conceptual, and that can becultivated.
The most general rendering of the term sa dhi is concentration or unification. A
common metaphor used to describe sa dhi is one-pointedness of mind [Sanskrit: ci aekaggata], or unification of mind. 41 As Shankman characteri es it: sa dhi entails theunif ing of the mind in a stead , undistracted awareness (4).42 This is accomplished throughpractice, and can be developed well beyond what someone is initially capable of:
Fixed concentration is cultivated, concentration on a fixed object so intense that awareness of noother experience can arise, resulting in one-pointed focus and states of tranquility and peace where
all experience of changing physical and mental activity ceases. Subtle states of steady, undistracted

38

See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Section 2.
This is the case because concepts inherently imply subject/object duality. To utilize a concept, at least in regularassertoric language, is to specify a thing other than oneself even when the concept is self. This is a point thathas been made by numerous philosophers, not the least of whom are Nishida Kitaro and Nishitani Keiji. Gadamer
also makes the point when he claims, in Truth and Method, that intelligible assertion depends on a distance between
what is said and who is saying it (See, e.g., 442).
40
For an account of the treatment of sa dhi in the Pali texts, see Richard Shankman, The Experience of Samadhi(Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2008).
41
The et molog of the term is derived from the Pali prefix sam, meaning together, and the root dha, meaning
to to put or place (Shankman, 3). The sense of the term thus involves something like unification, or a placing
together.
42
Richard Shankman, The Experience of Samadhi (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2008).
39

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awareness can ultimately be achieved, but awareness of changing phenomena is lost as the mind isfixed or absorbed into its meditation object and mental activity becomes still.43

In sa dhi, then, we see something like the disappearance of subject/object duality: the objectof awareness and the act of awareness are no longer experientially distinguished. No judgments
are made. The self that we pre-reflectively regard as a necessary partner in the perceptual act
recedes into oblivion. There is no naming of the object of our awareness there is simply
awareness. The state picked out by the term sa dhi is thus an instance of what Nishida Kitaro,
following William James, calls pure experience : When one directl experiences one s own
state of consciousness, there is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and object arecompletel unified. 44 This is not the same as the cool contemplation of some object in thought.
The present of pure experience is not the present in thought, for once one thinks about thepresent, it is no longer present. 45 In other words, the addition of an conceptual labels to one s
immediate experience essentiall moves one s attention awa from that experience and toward
the labels one is utili ing: when one makes judgments about it, it ceases to be pureexperience. 46 This is so because pure experience coincides with the sphere of attention. 47
Both the general notion of sa dhi and Nishida s notion of pure experience (which I read asencompassing sa dhi) provide us with examples of one type of non-conceptual experience. 48
There are those who would claim that all experience is conceptual. I deny this claim,
but regard the matter as essentially an empirical one. It is true that experience is informed byconcepts in many ways concepts organize both the perception of the workaday world as wellas our descriptions of it. Nevertheless, there are states of consciousness ways of relating tointentional objects that essentially break down the distinction between the intentional object
and the consciousness that is aware of it. To put this another way: there are states ofconsciousness in which an awareness of I is completel recessed in which the content andthe act of consciousness are identical.
The Zen tradition sometimes characteri es this in terms of just sitting. The practice of
vipassana bhavana anchors itself in breathing just breathing. In the state of sa dhi, there is
not an object of consciousness (the act of breathing) set over against a subject engaged in that
activity (the ego, or self, or atman). Instead, there is pure activity: just breathing.
It should be admitted immediately that our descriptions of such experience seem to insist
on attributing the activity to an agent if there is pain, it must belong to someone; if there isbreathing, there must be an organism doing it; if there are thoughts, there must be a thinker.
Such descriptions may, in the end, be true. What is important for our purposes here, however,is to see that these claims are the results of inference. They are not immediately present in theexperience itself. We infer that there is a self that experiences the pain, or does the breathing,
43

Ibid, p. 55.
Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, pp. 3-4.
45
Ibid., p. 5.
46
Ibid., p. 4.
47
Ibid., p. 6.
48
There are of course other forms of non-conceptual experience. Indeed, much absorptive experience strikes me
as non-conceptual in ways similar to the sense articulated above. The difference between Sa dhi and other nonconceptual experiences is an important issue, but not one I have time to explore here.
44

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Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditationor thinks the thought. If we stick to what is present in experience, we find no such thing or,
perhaps better, we find no such thing that is permanent.
Can there be pain without someone experiencing it? If pain is intrinsically
phenomenological, one will be tempted to sa no here. But, again, it reall depends on how
we parse the question. Let us grant that pain is intrinsically phenomenological: whenever thereis pain, there is awareness of pain. This is not the equivalent, however, of saying that there must
be someone who is being aware of pain whenever there is pain.
There is no reason to deny that we think about pain in terms of subjects and intentional
objects. That much is certainly true. But to say that we think of x in a certain way is not yet todemonstrate that x is in fact really captured in this way of thinking about it, nor is it todemonstrate any kind of metaphysical necessity.
In sa dhi, pain is just pain. It is not my pain.49 Awareness fuses with its object in sucha way that there is really no experiential distinction to be made. Interestingly, this changes thevery way pain is encountered within experience: it is no longer something to be avoided. It isjust pain.
The example of pain is a telling one for the larger point I want to make here. It is very
easy completely natural, in fact, to think that any pain I feel must be my pain. And yet theexperience of sa dhi calls this into question in a fundamental way: pain is simply pain, there
is no me apart from the awareness of pain: what I call me is exhausted when we simply
describe the experience: there is being aware of pain now. 50 Nothing else is required by theexperience, though thinking longs to build up a conceptual structure around this experience
to note subjects and objects, to engage in the language of substance.
If sa dhi involves the fusion of subject and object the unity of consciousness and its
object then there is at least one experience that suggests that the entire edifice upon which wehave built science, philosophy, and the discursive sciences (logoi) more generally is inherently
problematic. It suggests that the discursive sciences (logoi) will only ever be able to gesture
toward certain modes of experience. This also suggests an explanation for the routine rejectionof some modes of experience by the sciences: the assertoric, propositional nature of scientificdiscovery (as currently conceived) fundamentally limits what science itself can legitimately
investigate (namely, only those things with propositional or conceptual structure). The instantsomething can be put into words only inexactly (or metaphorically), it ceases to be regarded as
falling within the domain of science. 51
When I say that the discursive sciences (logoi) are problematic, I mean that we should
not assume that the experiences corresponding to (and issuing in) science, philosophy, andsubject/object thinking are self-justifying. I do not mean that these things are false. Taking
experience seriously requires us to take seriously even common sense experience and it isobviously true that sometimes we do experience things like the idea of a self, or of cause andeffect, or of straightforward distinctions among objects. This must be taken seriously, but it
49

For a wonderfully written account of how one comes to realize, in meditative states, that pain is not personal,
see Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still (New York: Rodale Press, 2010).
50
Or even: It s like this right now.
51
I think a plausible case can be made that all language is metaphorical. I do not mean to suggest otherwise withmy remarks. My above point should be read in terms of what we self-consciously regard as metaphor.

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cannot be the final word. It cannot be the final word precisely because there are other modes ofexperience that reveal things in a fundamentally different way. 52
If we compare these modes of experience in the realm of logos, the results are given
before we even get them: logos demands structure and this structure is usually given in termsof subjects and objects, substances and their predicates. It is in the nature of logos to accountfor things in these terms. It is precisely for this reason, however, that logos is not a sure guideto the organization of every possible experience logos gathers the world in one way: by sorting
it into categories, by making distinctions. It is true that many different distinctions can be madeand that there are many ways of organizing things conceptually but this is itself further
evidence of the point: logos thrives on distinctions. Indeed, reasoning and language-use moregenerally exist precisely as sets of distinctions and the relations between them. To demand thatexperience conform to logos is thus to rule out the possibility that the world is itself
unstructured. More specifically, it is to rule out the possibility that subject/object duality isinadequate to certain kinds of experience.
§6 Some implications for philosophical problems
Nothing I have argued so far in any way indicates that non-conceptual experience should be
privileged over conceptual experience. Indeed, the view I have been articulating is at least
compatible with the claim that, after investigation, we will decide that the structure of logos is
the one worth pursuing. My primary contention here has only been that we ought not dismiss
non-conceptual experience prior to its investigation that we ought not presume the superiorityof logos simply by fiat.
I have tried to make the case that a commitment to experience is in general a hallmark
of inquiry, that this commitment has too regularly been read as simply a commitment toconceptual experience, and that there is no compelling a priori reason to privilege such
experience. Indeed, a focus on non-conceptual experience seems to support a particular type ofanswer to the traditional questions of metaphysics in much the same way that a focus onconceptual experience does. The obvious relevance of things like sa dhi for those interested
in the questions of metaphysics, broadly construed, is that such experiences seem to challenge
standard assumptions in an immediate and direct way. If experiential states like sa dhi aretaken seriously, then, as a source of experiential evidence something that seems to be
demanded even by logos we might well expect a different set of responses to some standard
philosophical questions. B wa of conclusion, I d like to suggest some of the possible
implications of regarding sa dhi and similar experiential states as fundamental ones that is,
as states that disclose things in a primordial way. While there is much that might be said toelaborate the claims I will make, my current intention is only to highlight the general shape ofsuch responses.
1. Privileging sa dhi suggests that language is essentially metaphorical, despite the factthat in the workaday world it may be perfectly adequate to its task. If the unification ofmind present in sa dhi is regarded as reality-disclosing, then any description of that
52

Hence, openness to the non-conceptual seems to involve a kind of ontological pluralism, as William Jamescertainly knew.

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

reality will rely on distinctions that either function well or do not function well for thetasks at hand. Language, then, will enable us to articulate particular conventional truths,
but it will only ever be able to indicate the metaphysical structure of things through setsof metaphors metaphors that will mark distinctions that must ultimately be real only
conventionally.53
Sa dhi likewise suggests the priority of the particular over the universal. After all, inthe state of sa dhi one is completely absorbed in the particular. The instant theuniversal intervenes, we are functioning at the level of logos at the level of conceptual
thinking, attaching predicates to subjects. Given that this is mediated experience, it is incertain respects metaphysically derivative (at least from a point of view that privileges
non-dual experience). This means that universals are likely best construed as
abstractions, and particulars are best regarded as metaphysically fundamental.
Sa dhi likewise seems to suggest the superiority of an event ontology as opposed to a
substance ontology. The very notion of a substance is, for reasons just given, connectedto the idea of enduring things to which particular predicates attach. This language isinescapably fraught with subject/object duality, and tied, perhaps inextricably, to thenotion that universals will best capture the reality of a thing. In sa dhi, however,experience cannot adequately be described in these terms: it is always immediate, fluid,
and particular.
Our standard philosophical positions in metaphysics are structured in a way that ignores
the reality of non-dual experience. To recognize such experience will involve therecognition that positions like realism and antirealism are in some ways both false andin some ways both true (if language is metaphorical, and we can distinguish between
conventional truth and ultimate truth, then both realism and antirealism fail tocapture the nature of things at one level of analysis, while managing to capture it atanother).
Our attitude toward the law of non-contradiction may be forced to change. Such laws
do not actually describe some aspects of reality i.e. non-dual experience. This meansthat the limits of language may not be the limits of the world. It also means that we mayneed to take deviant logics more seriously, both traditional dialectical logic, as found infolks like Hegel, Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani, and more formal logics that denycertain axioms of traditional logic (specifically: the law of non-contradiction).
An ability to stop doing philosophy when we want to, to show the fly the way out of the
fly bottle, etc. also seems to follow from the recognition of sa dhi (or other nonconceptual experiences) as potentially reality-disclosing. After all, if our philosophicaldebates all occur at the level of the conceptual
at the level of logos and theconventional reality we share simply in virtue of sharing a common language we will
always have recourse to the non-conceptual when we want to step away from suchdisputes.

53

The phrase conventionall real should not be read to mean less real. Things routinel regarded as merel
conventionally real (marriage, the rules of games, etc) are not therefore less real, despite having an ontologicalstatus we regard as different from what we conventionall call non-conventional realit .

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7. Sa dhi, given what has so far been said, will also allow us to see many disputes inphilosophy (and perhaps all of them) precisely as disputes about metaphors about what
set of metaphors will most fruitfully allow us to describe the world given the interests
we have. This seems to indicate that a pragmatic conception of belief-acceptance will
likely by the best epistemological stance at the level of logos.
§8 Concluding Remarks
Perhaps the days of systematic philosophy are over. They are certainly on the wane. If we everhope to return to fundamental questions, however, it seems to me that the logos-driven
traditions of Greco-European philosophy must address the presumptive privileging of Logos
that has characterized its multi-faceted history. I have tried to provide an argument that this isa question worth examining, and that the answers we get will depend in part on the openness
with which we approach the question of experience.

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Philosophy as Competence and Art of Self-creation: Bringing Habermas and Foucault Together
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 81-95

HILO O H A COM E ENCE AND A
OF ELF-C EA ION:B INGING HABE MA AND FO CA L OGE HE
Rossen I. Ro sse
Abstract
In the perspective of the notion of modernity advanced by Jürgen Habermas, thedynamics of our contemporary world can be identified along the terms of expert
knowledge, critical thought, and practical application. While a high-quality
expertise is necessary for the solution of any challenging particular problem, an
additional type of knowledge associated with critical thinking is indispensable for
its adequate application in practice. In line with Habermas view of the role ofphilosophy in modernity as a mediator between the spheres of theory andpractice, we can identify this additional knowledge as being in its naturephilosophical. Furthermore, in distinction from the knowledge of the specialized
expertise, this philosophical knowledge can be described as having the characterof competence. In this sense, I maintain that thinking critically consists in utilizing
philosophical competence, alongside expert knowledge, in solving particular
problems. I link this notion of modernity with Michel Foucault s investigations onwhat he calls technologies of the self. Foucault has traced various forms of selfcare and self-knowledge, and has indicated their importance in the art of living"(tekhne tou biou) from Antiquity onwards. He has emphasized their productive
relationship in self-cultivation and social life adding a voice to Nietzsche s concernthat the modern Westerners have neglected the great and rare art of self-creation
for the sake of self-knowledge. In my view, this Foucauldian sense of the art ofliving as self-creation can supplement the Habermasean notion of the mediatingrole of philosophy in modernity, as they can be both seen as forming distinctive
aspects of what was termed philosophical competence. I maintain that in thegeneral case one s philosophical competence is essentially self-knowledge poweredby one s background of humanistic knowledge and that – in a line with a long
tradition of thought – it is a subject of cultivation and active self-creation.
The present paper 1 is an attempt to put into perspective the role and place of philosophy in the
dynamics of our contemporary world. Today it passes for a cliché that this dynamics is startling1

The idea of this article was first discussed at the international academic seminar Modern Philosophy and Politics
in Continental Europe at the China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics in Beijing, PR China, on
December 15, 2009. It was then presented in a more developed form at the international conference The Affect of

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by its breadth, pace, and complexity of relations along which it unfolds. What seems to beoverlooked, though, is that despite the fact that the contemporary scientific-technologicalculture has greatly facilitated the bulk of activities associated with the human condition, ourtime has not relented in posing challenges to our both socio-cultural and individual existence
and in various ways. In this sense, the question of the art of living attains a distincti econtemporary flavor of both existential unavoidability and epistemic insufficiency. It demands
time and again to be addressed in its most general and basic form: How can we cope with thechallenges of our time in the best and most promising ways?
Being at once philosophical and trivial, this question may at first seem to be the unlikely
candidate to guide us in situating philosophy in our contemporary world. However, its
philosophical triviality allows it to be asked and actualized equally well on both socio-culturaland individual level. In this way, our investigative perspective will seek to make compatible
and incorporate the modern and postmodern perspectives, by transposing its subject-matterwithin both of them inclusively; that is, with view to the whole in terms of universalistic
metanarrativity, as much as with view to the plurality of unique singularities. 2 Thus, being
metaphilosophical in focus, our investigation will aim at specifying the socio-cultural presenceof philosophy, as well as its presence in the life of the single individual.
With regard to the question we asked, a most preliminary answer would be that if wehave a sufficient knowledge of the challenges of our time and if we know how to use thatknowledge, we would be able to cope with them optimally well. Such an answer, however,remains very general and in need of elaboration in more specific terms. Here I shall endeavor
to secure them by drawing primarily on the thought of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault,
two thinkers whose investigators most commonly see in opposition to one another 3 but
sometimes also as compatible and complementary. 4 For the purpose of this paper, I shallthe Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia,
December 3-5, 2010.
2
On the differentiation modern-postmodern in this sense, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University Of
Minnesota Press, 1984), especially pp. xxiii-xxvff, 27-37ff, 46ff, 59ff, 79ff; cf. La condition postmoderne: rapport
sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979), pp. 7-9ff, 49-63ff, 75ff, 97ff.
3
Samantha Ashenden and David Owen, Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy
and Critical Theory (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1999); David Ingram, Foucault
and Habermas, in Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005); Bent Fl bjerg, Habermas and Foucault: Thinkers for Ci il Societ ?, The
British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49, No. 2 (June 1998), pp. 210-233; Stephen Kemmis, Foucault, Habermas
and E aluation, Curriculum Studies, Volume 1, No. 1 (1993), pp. 35-54; John Brocklesby and Stephen
Cummings, Foucault Plays Habermas: An Alternative Philosophical Underpinning for Critical Systems
Thinking, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Volume 47 (1996), pp. 741-754; Annemiek Richters,
Modernit -Postmodernit Contro ersies: Habermas and Foucault, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 5 (1988), pp.
611-643; Thomas L. Dumm, The Politics of Post-Modern Aesthetics: Habermas Contra Foucault, Political
Theory, Vol. 16, No. 2 (May 1988), pp. 209-228; Thomas Biebricher, Selbstkritik der Moderne: Foucault und
Habermas im Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag GmbH, 2005).
4
Jessica J. Kul n ch, Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation, Polity, Vol. 30,
No. 2 (Winter 1997), pp. 315-346; Am Allen, Discourse, Power, and Subjectivation: The Foucault/Habermas
Debate Reconsidered, Philosophical Forum, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2009), pp. 1-28; Nanc S. Lo e, Foucault &Habermas on Discourse and Democrac , Polity, Vol. 22, No.2 (Winter 1989), 269-293; Ehrhard Bahr, In

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position myself into the latter group and shall seek to identify in the philosophical outlooks ofthese two thinkers connecting points of compatibility and complementarity. I shall thus sideline
the so-called Habermas-Foucault debate on issues such as modernity, rationality, knowledge,
and power.
I shall elaborate on the first part of our preliminary answer, which concerns theknowledge of the dynamics of our time and of the challenges it poses, using Habermas
discussion of modernity, in whose perspective this dynamics can be apprehended in the termsof expert knowledge, critical thought, and practical application. While I shall address its second
part, which concerns the human capacity to use that kno ledge, dra ing mainl on Foucault s
in estigations on hat he calls technologies of the self, in which the art of li ing can beapperceived in the terms of self-knowledge, self-care, and self-creation.
Thus, the exposition of this paper will move along two main steps: the first will be todelineate a working specification of the meaning of the term modernity and to situate the roleand place of philosophy within its structure; the second will be to lay down the indispensability
and pertinence of the art of living to the single individual in the postmodern human condition.
1. Situating Philosophy in Modernity: Philosophy as Competence
In the contemporary philosophy and socio-cultural theory, the term modernity is used verybroadly, most typically in reference to the socio-cultural world and its most generalcharacteristics as identifiable within the eponymous period in the history of the West. The
beginning and the putative end of that period have been a subject of debate, but the term
standing for it has been involved in setting the general frame, horizon, or context ofunderstanding for a good many discussions in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory,
including the one of its delimiting sister term postmodernit . Here, I shall not del e into thedifferentiation of these two terms, which has been very convincingly conveyed by JeanFrançois Lyotard amongst others.5 I shall instead speak of our contemporarorld ith its
most general characteristics in the broadest sense, as spreading over and encompassing thesenses of both of them, e en if to a aried e tent, ith our here understood as including bothsocio-cultural and indi idual. I ackno ledge that the concept of modernit as understood
Defense of Enlightenment: Foucault and Habermas, German Studies Review, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Feb., 1988), pp. 97109; Matthe King, Clarif ing the Foucault
Habermas Debate: Moralit , Ethics, and Normati eFoundations , Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 287-314; Christian Lavagno, Rekonstruktion
der Moderne: eine Studie zu Habermas und Foucault (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2003).
5
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick
Lawrence (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996), especially pp. 3ff, 83ff; cf. Der Philosophische Diskurs derModerne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), SS. 11ff, 104ff; Maurizio Passerind'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (eds.), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997); Anthon Giddens, Modernism
and Post-Modernism, New German Critique, No. 22, Special Issue on Modernism (Winter, 1981), pp. 15-18;
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), especially pp. 110, 45-53; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change(Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), especially pp. 10ff, 327ff; Agnes Heller, A Theory of Modernity(Malden, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), especially pp. 1-18; Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee,
Terry Smith (eds.), Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, (Durham,
London: Duke University Press, 2009).

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in the last centur alread included the sense of our contemporar orld ith its most generalcharacteristics,
hich as consequentl passed b e tension to that of post-modernit .
Thus, hile our orld has certainl changed o ertime, much of hat characteri es modernit
has in all actuality come to characterize post-modernity as well, including such socio-culturalfeatures as: division of labor; politically democratic (even if also some totalitarian) societies;
predominantly market economies; interdependence between theory and practice (knowledgeeconomy); national, ethnic, cultural, and spiritual plurality; intensive cultural and intercultural
exchange; global integrations and polarizations; concerns for human rights, social justice, andenvironmental safety, among still others. In this sense, the term modernit appears so generalthat any attempt at making it more specific risks ending up with an arbitrary characterizationthat may falter when related to particular contexts of its usage, more often than we wish. Thissurely poses a challenge to our metaphilosophical task of situating philosophy in ourcontemporary world as a peculiar blend of features of both modernity and post-modernity.
Ne ertheless, some of the features of modernit identifiable in Habermas perspecti e on it can
specify its meaning to an extent that will serve the purpose of this paper sufficiently.
Habermas has paid a great deal of attention to the notion of modernity throughout his
works, including in his magnus opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, 6 and has
contributed to and inspired the debates on it, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. It will not be
an exaggeration to call that notion substantive for his socio-cultural and metaphilosophicalperspectives, as they appear to be elaborated on and specified by way of its critical analysis andreconstruction. He sees the beginning of modernity in the Enlightenment and in the work of
Kant in particular,7 whereas his reconstructi e anal sis of Ma Weber s view of rationalizationand disenchantment of the Western religious consciousness8 forms the basis of his own concept
of it.
According to Habermas, modernit is characteri ed b di ision of labor, markedb an increasing compartmentali ation along the lines of professional speciali ation ofvarious domains, subfields, vocations, and activities.9 He identifies two distinctive levels of6

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, translated by Thomas McCarthy, Vol. 1, Reason andthe Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); Vol. 2. Lifeworld and System: A Critique ofFunctionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). Cf. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: Band I:
Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung; Band II: Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1981). J rgen Habermas, Philosoph as Stand-In and Interpreter, Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990); cf. Jürgen Habermas, Die
Philosophie als Plat halter und Interpret, Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983); Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge MA;
London, England: MIT Press, 1992); cf. Jürgen Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988).
7
J rgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, p. 260; cf. Der Philosophische
Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen, S. 306.
8Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, pp.
148ff, and especially 230-242; Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: Band I: Handlungsrationalität undgesellschaftliche Rationalisierung, SS. 225ff, 317-331.
9Jürgen Habermas, Philosoph as Stand-In and Interpreter,. 13-14, 17-8; cf. Die Philosophie als Plat halter
und Interpret, SS. 20-21, 25.

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modernity the level of e pert cultures and the one of e er da communication. 10 The
former, hich includes science, technolog , la and moralit , 11 is the level of theory andproduces what he calls expert knowledge; the latter is that of practical application of theexpertise produced on the level of culture. Thus, every area of knowledge on the level of culture
works in its own specialized compartment to produces the expertise that serves certain
specialized practices on the level of everyday communication.
In this grand stage of exchange of expertise between and along the levels of theoreticalculture and everyday practice of modernity, the main actors are the humans in their specificroles of problem-solvers. Armed with expert knowledge produced on the level of culture theysolve problems on the level of everyday communication by way of its practical application.
Every problem solver, working in a particular compartment of modernity, needs to acquire theexpertise associated with specific problems arising in his or her specialized occupation in order
to be able to solve such problems in practice. In this sense, the acquisition of expert knowledge
and its practical application are two necessary conditions for successful problem solving, withwhich no problem solver can dispense. The question that arises now is Is there anything elsethat one needs to know in order to be successful in solving problems in practice? Or, to put itotherwise, Does an adequate transfer of expertise from the level of culture to that of everyday
communication require any additional knowledge? Or What else, if anything, a problem solverneeds to know in order to successfully complete the transition of expert knowledge from theory
to practice?
We can find an ans er to this question in some of Habermas further anal ses of thestructure of modernity. According to him, there are certain problems of mediation that arisein the exchange of expertise in modernity, both among the different fields on the level of culture,and between the levels of culture and everyday communication, for which these fields do nothave sufficient expertise. 12 Because these problems arise despite the fact that the expert fields
have already divided and appropriated all issues that can be reasonably addressed in particularareas of investigation, Habermas maintains that they are to remain in the scope of philosophy
as their most legitimate interpreter, one that throughout its long tradition has acquired ane e trained on the topic of rationalit . 13 Thus, for Habermas, although philosophy in thecourse of its history has given up its traditional metaphysical aspirations and its claim to aprincipal status among the other areas of knowledge, it still has a role to play in addressing the
problems of mediation arising in the exchange of expertise in modernity the role of mediatinginterpreter. With regard to philosoph s relation to the scientific areas of kno ledge, he rites,
Once it renounces its claim to be a first science or an encyclopedia, philosophy can maintain its
status within the scientific system neither by assimilating itself to particular exemplary sciences nor
by exclusively distancing itself from science in general. Philosophy has to implicate itself in the10

Ibid., . 17-8; cf. SS. 25.
Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. p. 39; Nachmetaphysisches Denken:
Philosophische Aufsätze, S. 46.
12J rgen Habermas, Philosoph as Stand-In and Interpreter, pp.17-18; cf. Die Philosophie als Plat halter undInterpret, S. 25.
13
Ibid., pp.17-18; cf. S. 25.See also Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, pp. 3839; cf. Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze, S. 45-46.
11

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fallibilistic self-understanding and procedural rationality of the empirical sciences; it may not lay
claim to a privileged access to truth, or to a method, an object realm, or even just a style of intuition
that is specifically its own. Only thus can philosophy contribute its best to a nonexclusive divisionof labor, namely, its persistent tenacity in posing questions universalistically, and its procedure ofrationally reconstructing the intuitive pretheoretical knowledge of competently speaking, acting, andjudging subjects yet in such a way that Platonic anamnesis sheds its nondiscursive character. This
dowry recommends philosophy as an indispensable partner in the collaboration of those who areconcerned with a theory of rationality. 14

In this its role, philosophy has given up its claims to be a first science and to have a privileged
access to truth, or to a method , but this does not mean that it has to assimilate itself to aparticular science , or to distance itself from science in general . It means only that philosophy
needs to adopt a fallibilistic self-understanding and the procedural rationality of the empiricalsciences , in terms of which it can help reaching understanding by posing questions
universalistically and rationally reconstructing the intuitive pretheoretical knowledge ofcompetently speaking, acting, and judging subjects . And as it appears, it is onl its dowry ,gathered in its long history, that entitles philosophy to this mediating role, which makes of it
an indispensable partner in the exchange of expert knowledge in the structure of modernity.
Yet, for Habermas, not only does philosophy have a role to play with regard the expert
areas of knowledge on the level of culture. Its mediating role extends also to the lifeworld andeveryday communication:
In everyday communication, cognitive interpretations, moral expectations, expressions, andevaluations cannot help overlapping and interpenetrating. Reaching understanding in the lifeworld
requires a cultural tradition that ranges across the whole spectrum, not just the fruits of science andtechnology. As far as philosophy is concerned, it might do well to refurbish its link with the totality
by taking on the role of interpreter on behalf of the lifeworld. It might then be able to help set inmotion the interplay between the cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive
dimensions that has come to a standstill today like a tangled mobile.15

On the level of everyday communication, philosoph s focus is on the intermixture ofcognitive interpretations, moral expectations, expressions, and evaluations . Here too, its goalis that of reaching understanding , but again the e pertise of science and technolog will not
suffice for its achieving. What is needed is a broader all-encompassing knowledge a cultural
tradition that ranges across the whole spectrum which can serve as a common ground for andthus ensure an adequate cross-communication. For Habermas, philosophy s capacit is wellversed in this regard because of its traditional focus on and link with the totality . Thus,
philosophy is well-qualified and could enter the role of interpreter on behalf of the lifeworld
in order to mediate, interpret, and thus ensure a smooth exchange between its cognitiveinstrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive dimensions .

14

Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, pp. 38-39; cf. Nachmetaphysisches
Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze, S. 45-46.
15 J rgen Habermas,

Philosoph as Stand-In and Interpreter, pp.18-19; cf. Die Philosophie als Plat halter undInterpret, SS. 25-26.

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In this way, Habermas situates philosophy in the structure of modernity by assigning to
it a role that the expert cultures (science and technology, ethics and law, aesthetics and art)cannot play on their own. This is the role of mediating interpreter which facilitates the exchangeof expertise within and between modernity s compartmentali ed le els of culture and everyday
communication. What falls into the scope of philosophy in particular are the so-called
problems of mediation , which arise in the due transfer of expert knowledge between thespecialized compartments in the grand division of labor of modernity, where this transfer isessentially the practical application of that knowledge.
Here I shall elaborate a bit further on the character of the role of philosophy assigned
by Habermas, by drawing attention to one of its aspects, which is attestable and identifiable intackling the problems of mediation and is closely related to their status. What I have in mind
is that, whereas within the grand picture of exchange of expertise in modernity these problems
can be seen as problems of communication, in the sense in which we think of them as remaining
in the scope of philosophy, we can also think of them as philosophical problems which the
problem solvers face in their various applications of expert knowledge in practice. 16
Traditionally, the philosophical problems have been characterized as being of epistemic or
cognitive nature, as they concern the acquisition, retention, actualization, and application ofknowledge. Such problems have already been signaled in various areas of theoretical andpractical endeavor, including education 17 and social policy,18 and it seems indeed legitimate tothink that one can search for knowledge on them in the philosophical tradition. But if
philosophy is to have the capacity to tackle such problems, as Habermas suggests, it will haveto supplement the expertise of science with a knowledge that is of a different kind. To
distinguish the character of this knowledge from that of the scientific expertise, here we
designate it with the term competence.
The term pla ed a ke role in Habermas earlier work in which he develops his theoryof communicative competence basically his own socio-cultural perspective on language andcommunication, 19 developed in relation to Noam Chomsk s concept of linguistic
16

Rossen Roussev, Philosoph and the Transition from Theor to Practice: A Response to Recent Concerns for
Critical Thinking, Telos, No. 148 (Fall 2009), pp. 91-92.
17
Martin V. Co ington, Strategic Thinking and the Fear of Failure, in Thinking and Learning Skills, Judith W.
Segal, Susan F. Chipman, and Robert Glaser (eds.) (Hillside NJ: L. Erlbaum, 1985); Jack Lochhead, Teaching
Anal tic Reasoning Skills Through Pair Problem Sol ing , Thinking and Learning Skills, Judith W. Segal, Susan
F. Chipman, and Robert Glaser (eds.) (Hillside NJ: L. Erlbaum, 1985); Richard Paul, Critical Thinking: What
Every Person Needs to Survive in a Rapidly Changing World, (Rohner Park, CA: Sonoma State University, 1990);
Mathe Lipman, Thinking Skills Fostered b Philosoph for Children, in Thinking and Learning Skills, E Judith
W. Segal, Susan F. Chipman, and Robert Glaser (eds.) (Hillside NJ: L. Erlbaum, 1985); Matlin, M.W., Cognition,(Geneseo NY: Harcourt Brace Publishers, 1994).
18
W. T. Jones, The Sciences and the Humanities: Conflict and Reconciliation (Berkeley, Los Angeles: Universityof California Press, 1967), p. 5ff.
19
Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse. Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968); To ards
Theor of Communicati e Competence and On systematically distorted communication, both in Inquiry: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 1-4 (1970), respectively pp. 360-375 and pp. 205-218; Der
Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik, in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik: Theorie-Diskussion, mit Beiträgen
von Karl-Otto Apel, Claus v. Bormann, Rüdiger Bubner, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans-Joachim Giegel, Jürgen
Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971); Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, Theorie derGesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie. Was leistet die Systemforschung? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971).

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competence,20 the speech act theory developed by John Austin and John Searle,21 and the latterwork of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Summing up the view he advances there, Thomas McCarthy
writes,Habermas argues that our ability to communicate has a universal core-basic structures andfundamental rules that all subjects master in learning to speak a language. Communicativecompetence is not just a matter of being able to produce grammatical sentences. In speaking we
relate to the world about us, to other subjects, to our own intentions, feelings, and desires.22

We can note here that this Habermas sense of competence with regard to speaking language
includes an access to a universalistic, common-to-all-speakers basis, which ensures thepossibility for reaching understanding. This basis, however, is not merely grammatical, as it
also involves a sense of relation of the speaker to oneself, other speakers, and the world.
This sense of competence is also retained in his later work, notably in his theory ofcommunicative action, where he uses the term quite extensively in various statements andexpressions, which more or less convey implicitly the aspect of philosophy I designatedabove.23 Here I will draw particular attention to a few of his usages which most directly point
to that aspect. On one occasion, hen he rites that the social scientist has to draw on acompetence and a knowledge that he has intuitively at his disposal as a layman, 24 Habermas
associates competence ith kno ledge and abilit available to every person. In anotherstatement here he defines personalit he says that competences ... make a subject capableof speaking and acting, [and] put him in a position to take part in processes of reachingunderstanding and thereby to assert his own identity. 25 Elsewhere he speaks of the generalcompetences of knowing, speaking, and acting and of a preponderance of competence (of20

Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, I965).
John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University
in 1955, edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I962); John R. Searle, Speech Acts:
An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, I969).
22
Thomas McCarthy, Translator s Introduction, in Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.
I, p. x.
23
For instance, in The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I, he uses e pressions as reflective competence (p.
2), competent speaker(s) (pp. 25, 138, 286)//15, 30, 135 competence to speak and act (p. 112), interpreti ecompetence (pp. 118, 130), judgmental competence (pp. 119, 135), action through competences and moti es(p. 174), general competency (p. 261), theory of competence (p. 328), competence to represent (p. 366),
cognitive competence (p. 384); in The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II, e pressions as again competent
speakers (pp. 15, 30, 135), competence to follow a rule (pp. 17, 18, 19, 22), competence to judge/decide (pp.
18, 19/269), competence for rule-governed behavior (p. 18), competence for role behavior (pp. 31, 32),
interactive competence (p. 40), competences for speech and interaction (p. 43), competences forcommunicative action (p. 91), competentl acting reference persons (p. 137), generalized competences foraction (p. 141), formal competences (p. 146), competence to act (p. 171), competence to carry out decisions(p. 180), competence for purposi e-rational choice (p. 212), acquired competences (p. 225), competencesde eloped through sociali ation (p. 255), competence of "initiates;' of e perts in matters of kno ledge or of
moralit 276, sovereign exercise of competence (p. 308), legal competence (p. 309), professional competence(p. 363), social competence (p. 399).
24
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I, p. 112.
25
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II, p. 138.
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knowledge, moral-practical insight, persuasive power, or autonomy). 26 Whereas
characterizing his own theory of communicative action, Habermas says that it describes
structures of action and structures of mutual understanding that are found in the intuitive
knowledge of competent members of modem societies. 27
If we are to sum up the sense-associations made in these examples, competence relates
to knowledge, ability, scientist, layman, capacity for speech and action, personality, identity,
intuition, moral-practical insight, persuasive power, or autonomy, membership in society. In
other Habermas usages we find it as reflective, interpretative, cognitive, formal, interactive,
judgmental, generalized. Within this broad semantic range of its usage, the sense ofcompetence is most aptl delimited as knowledge and ability. As knowledge it is a very
general sense of one s relation to oneself and to the world, which thus has the transcending
universalistic character of a common basis for understanding, but which also remains
indeterminate and thus very different from expertise. As an ability, it involves the capacity foror the power to utilize that knowledge in terms of reflection, cognition, speech, and action,
which is at the disposal for every human person from scientist to layman.
Here I shall use this sense of competence to further specif Habermas notion ofphilosophy as mediating interpreter. I would like to link the knowledge-aspect of competence
to the knowledge of philosophy, different as it is from that of expertise, and its ability-aspect tothe role which Habermas envisions for philosophy in modernity. Understood in this way,philosophy becomes a competence having the aspects of a general universalistic knowledge andthe ability to utilize that knowledge, which constitute its capacity to play its mediating role in
the grand division of labor of modernity. Philosophical competence is thus an indispensable
aspect of any thinking that applies expertise to solve problems, whereas every problem solver,in addition to their being a certain expert, needs to be also a philosopher.
In this sense, we can identify the philosophical competence as the third condition
necessary for the successful transfer of expertise from the level of culture to that of everyday
communication. Along with expert knowledge and its practical application, it makes thistransfer possible; whereas its actual utilization in problem solving aiming to ensure that transfer
is exercised as a reflective critical thought. Thus, we can complete the picture of situating
philosophy in modernity within our perspective here: in the grand division of labor of thedifferent areas of knowledge and practice, the role of philosophy now reappears as competence;
whereas the philosophical competence ultimately manifests itself as critical thinking whichbrings expert knowledge from the level of theoretical culture to that of practical application.
2. The Self and the Art of Living: Philosophy as Self-creation
Habermas notion of the mediating role of philosophy in modernity
a role whose
manifestation we specified as critical thought and competence can be linked ith Foucault s
in estigations on hat he calls technologies of the self. 28 Although Habermas has voiced his
26

Ibid., pp. 250, 276.
Ibid., p. 383.
28
Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.
1, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997); cf. Les techniques de soi, Dits et Ecrits (19541988), tome IV (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), pp. 783-813.
27

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critical objections to postmodernism, including to the philosophical perspective of Foucault as
strongly associated with it,29 for our purpose here it will suffice to find a point of compatibility
that would allow for an alignment of the perspectives of the two thinkers in complementarity.
At the same time, even as we sideline the modernity-postmodernity debate in situating
philosophy in our contemporary world, our re-focusing on the status of the self will very muchresemble what Lyotard has characterized as key shift of attention between modernity andpostmodernity
from legitimating holistic metanarratives to incommensurable unique30
singularities. This is precisely what we want to emphasize here by associating the perspectivesof Habermas and Foucault together that judging about the philosoph s role in the life of theindividual from the viewpoint of metanarrative is different from one from a vantage point thatis recognizably unique and incommensurable. Elsewhere we have indicated the need of abroader background of humanistic knowledge, which is in an important sense self-knowledge,
as a prerequisite for critical philosophical thinking on individual level. 31 Now we will endeavor
to apperceive that need with view to the unique singularity of the individual, in which it
manifests itself as indi idual s o n concern with self-knowledge and self-creation.
Foucault has traced various forms of self-care and self-knowledge, and has indicatedtheir importance in the art of li ing (tekhne tou biou) from Antiquity onwards. His researchhas been very much anthropological what he calls hermeneutics of the selfand hasfocused on practices of late Antiquity and early Christianity, which have been indicative ofself s basic motivation for self-knowledge. While he found that self-knowledge was largely
associated with self-cultivation and socialization, a key observation that he makes is that formuch of the Antiquity these practices place self-knowledge as part of a more fundamental
concern that of the care of the self. In the Greco-Roman culture, the motto of the Delphic
temple, gnothi seauton or Kno
ourself , was the principle of self-knowledge, and was
subordinated to epimeleisthai sautou, to be concerned, to take care of yourself, which was
the principle of self-care.32 Foucault regards the relationship between these two principles as
underlaying the Ancient art of li ing, but he also emphasizes the changes in their statuses inthat art throughout the history of Western culture.
He finds the first indicative discussions of the relation of the two principles in Plato s
Apology and Alcibiades I. In the Apology, Socrates advices his co-citizens to concern
yourselves with yourselves, hich for him meant to be concerned ith isdom, truth, andthe perfection of the soul, pointing also that it is his mission and service to the city to remind

29

Jürgen Habermas, Modernit : An Unfinished Project, in Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib(eds.), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse ofModernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), p. 53; cf. Die Moderne- ein un ollendetes Projekt, Kleine
Politische Schriften, I-IV (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), S. 460; J rgen Habermas, The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, pp. 53, 97, 239ff; cf. Der Philosophische Diskurs derModerne: Zwölf Vorlesungen, SS. 67, 129, 280ff.
30
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, pp. xxiii-xxvff, 27-37ff, 46ff, 59ff,
79ff; cf. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, pp. 7-9ff, 49-63ff, 75ff, 97ff.
31
Rossen Rousse , Philosoph and the Transition from Theor to Practice: A Response to Recent Concerns for
Critical Thinking, especially pp. 93-96, 104ff.
32
Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.
1, p. 226; cf. Les techniques de soi, Dits et Ecrits (1954-1988), tome IV, pp. 786-787.

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them about that. 33 In Alcibiades, the discussion of the two principles is more detailed, spreadingover the relations of the care of oneself with political and erotic life, with self-cultivation andpedagogy, with the knowledge of oneself, and with the love of isdom in relation to one s
master. As Foucault sees it, the care of the self is the driving force in all these relations but its
relation with the knowledge of oneself is pivotal. An important observation that he makes inthis regard is that, unlike most of the thinkers of the Hellenistic and imperial periods, Plato
gives priority to the second principle, a priority which found its way through modernity firmly
binding the care of the self to the knowledge of oneself.34 Either way, we can note here that thetwo principle form a productive relationship which regardless of how it has been construed
in the cultural traditions functions as a formative power in the art of living and manifests
itself as art of self-creation.
In the Ancient and early Christian cultures, the care of oneself remained a principle forsocial and personal conduct and for the art of life, and thus most fundamentally motivated theuse of hat Foucault calls technologies of the self. 35 These technologies , each a matrix ofpractical reason, are different kinds and permit individuals to effect by their own means, orwith the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state ofhappiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. 36 To clarify the sense of this term andits relation to the art of living as self-creation, we need to draw attention to a common elementthat all technologies of the self share, which is designated with the Greek word askesis. As
Foucault writes,
No technique, no professional skill can be acquired without exercise; nor can the art of living, thetekhne tou biou, be learned without an askesis that should be understood as a training of the self by
oneself. This was one of the traditional principles to which the Pythagoreans, the Socratics, theCynics had long attached a great importance.37

Meaning e ercise , practice , and ork , askesis was an important aspect of the life andculture of the ancient Greeks ultimately amounting to a value system. It played a part inindi idual s culti ation and sociali ation likely in not such a drastic but more routine way thanits modern-day image of anachronistic self-denial suggests. What is important for Foucault andfor us here is that its key sense of a training of the self by oneself bears on the relevance ofself-knowledge for the art of li ing . More particularly, as it broadly applies to various of theciti ens daily activities, askesis, the training of the self b oneself , provides for individual s
self-cultivation and self-creation by use of truth and knowledge, including self-knowledge.
Askesis in this sense applies to a number of cultural practices of Antiquity and early
Christianity that address the concern and relationship of the self ith oneself and thus function
as technologies of the self . Foucault finds notable examples of it in the Stoic ascetic practices,33

Ibid., pp. 226-227; cf. p. 787.
Ibid., pp. 228-231; cf. 789-792.
35
Ibid., pp. 225-226; cf. pp. 785-786.
36
Ibid., p. 225; cf. p. 785.
37
Michel Foucault, Self Writing, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 1, p. 208;
cf. L'écriture de soi, Dits et Ecrits (1954-1988), tome IV, pp. 417.
34

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which include self-training and self-deprivation in the anticipation of difficult life
circumstances, 38 as well as in the Christian monastic confessional practices, which include
e amination of the purit of one s o n thoughts in the end of e er da , or public confession(exomologesis) of sins and sinful thoughts.39 As cases in point on the role of askesis in the artof living, here I shall draw attention to two practices of purposive writing and reading that
Foucault discusses in this regard those of maintaining diary notebooks hupomnemata andepistolary correspondence. They are specific technologies of the self that are indicative of a
special discursi el mediated concern and relationship of the self ith oneself and thus of amore immediately identifiable use of self-knowledge in the art of living as self-creation.
Hupomnemata, hich could refer to account books, public registers, or individual
notebooks serving as memory aids,
ere used to record quotes, ... extracts from books,
examples, and actions that one had witnessed or read about, reflections or reasonings that one
had heard or that had come to mind that later on ser ed as a food for rereading andmeditation. 40 As Foucault writes,
Inside a culture strongly stamped by traditionality, by the recognized value of the already-said, by
the recurrence of discourse, by citational practice under the seal of antiquity and authority, there
developed an ethic quite explicitly oriented by concern for the self toward objectives defined as:withdrawing into oneself, getting in touch with oneself, living with oneself, relying on oneself,
benefiting from and enjoying oneself. Such is the aim of the hupomnemata: to make one s
recollection of the fragmentary logos, transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading, a meansof establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself, a relationship as adequate and accomplishedas possible.41

Hupomnemata in this sense stand for a form of writing which is very much constitutive of theperson in one s own life. It involves discourse and knowledge to fuel one s thinking in one s
day to day activities. It helps one get in touch ith oneself and make what one does bear on
oneself. It is a form of self- riting e pressi e of one s concern ith oneself and knowledge of
oneself. It is a means of establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself , which is utilized
in one s care of oneself.
The practice of reading is involved in the use of hupomnemata but it also plays a roleof a technology of self on its own in general. Like hupomnemata, it invokes the resource of thecultural tradition to bear on one s life but it can go further and be practiced for its own sake.
Foucault s reference to a Seneca ad ice is particularl indicati e in this regard: while readingis necessar to arm oneself by oneself with the principles of reason that are indispensable forself-conduct, hen o erdone one is liable to spread oneself across different thoughts, and toforget oneself ; it is thus better to ha e alternate recourse of reading and writing, and to
blend one ith the other. 42 Apparently, what Seneca s ad ice aims is to preserve the relationof the self to oneself in one s life; in excessive reading that relation could be lost, and then what
one does no longer bear on oneself one no longer knows oneself, one forgets oneself . Hence,
38

Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, pp. 238ff; pp. 799ff.
Ibid., pp. 242ff; 804ff.
40
Michel Foucault, Self Writing, p. 209; cf. p. 418.
41
Ibid., p. 211; cf. pp. 419-420.
42
Ibid., p. 211; cf. p. 420.
39

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one needs to balance and blend reading with writing. In this sense, for Foucault, the alternate
reading-writing technology produces an embodied appropriation of the truth that preserves
one s concern ith oneself in one s life intact; it can thus serve as a principle of rational action
for the individual, which helps constitute one s own soul and form an identity. 43
A technology of the self that is exemplary for an alternate reading and writing iscorrespondence. For Foucault, correspondence is not just a training of oneself by means ofwriting, nor simply aiming at counsel and aid ; it is also a certain way of manifesting oneself
to oneself and to others, or an objectification of the soul. 44 It allows for a certain examinationof one s self, which can be done by writer and reader alike, as well as by other potential
observers. It re-assures oneself that one maintains one s inner dispositions; that is, one s relation
to oneself, which is thus attested as if b an inner god :Through the missive, one opens oneself to the gaze of others and puts the correspondent in the placeof the inner god. It is a way of giving ourselves to that gaze about which we must tell ourselves that
it is plunging into the depths of our heart (in pectis intimum introspicere) at the moment we arethinking. 45

In this way, correspondence assumes the role of a self-formative technique for the individual,
be they in the position of writer or reader. It deploys discourse, knowledge, and truth in a way
similar to the one hupomnemata does to uphold the concern of the self with oneself throughout
one s life. The difference with hupomnemata is that correspondence is additionallycharacterized by an anticipated concordance with other individuals. The letters by Seneca andMarcus Aurelius, which Foucault gives as examples, convey descriptions and discussions, oftenvery detailed, of various events of higher and lesser significance taking place in the life of thesingle individual. They point to the manner and considerations by which these events areappropriated in one s life; that is, within the concern of the self with oneself, and constitute atonce training, cultivating, and examining oneself. Correspondence thus reappears as atechnique of one s continuous self-discovery, self-affirmation, and self-creation along thelasting concern of the self with oneself.
While both hupomnemata and correspondence may utilize mundane, advisory,
moralistic, consoling or other content, the present us ith the specific manner in hich one sa of thinking mediates one s actions within one s concern ith oneself throughout one s life.
Foucault s discussion of the technologies of the self shows that the manner of thinking inquestion utilizes self-knowledge and is rooted in self-care. These two principles, which weinherit from Antiquity, come along in a relationship that has been frequently revised throughout
the history of culture, (as in the above-mentioned Stoic ascetic and Christian confessional
practices). However, regardless of the manner of its construction, the relationship in questionis indispensable for the art of living and needs to be maintained continuously. It is thus the core
and the moving force of the art of self-creation as the condition for self s relation to an everchanging world.

43

Ibid., pp. 213-214; cf. pp. 422-423.
Ibid., pp. 216-217; cf. pp. 425-426.
45
Ibid., p. 217; cf. p. 426.
44

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Foucault s in estigations on the art of li ing fit easily within the perspective of ourinvestigation on the role of philosophy in our contemporary world. In the concern of the selfwith oneself in re-focusing on oneself the self withdraws from the world to make oneself aunique object of knowledge. This knowledge, which is essentially self-knowledge and uniqueon its o n, is utili ed in one s relation to the orld b way of thinking. For its part, this thinking
is essentially a philosophical thinking, and at once critical and creative thinking. It is thethinking of a concernful self-knowing self, which only thus relates to the world in a mannermost fitting. Overall, Foucault s in estigations ha e focused more on practices than one pertise and have indicated that what is important for the single individual in bridging thelevels of their world are the principles of self-knowledge and self-care in the unity of selfcreation.
In conclusion
In this paper we endeavored to situate the role and place of philosophy in our contemporary
world with the help of the work of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault. Issuing from
Habermas notion of modernit we apprehended the dynamics of our contemporary world in
the terms expert knowledge, critical thought, and practical application. In Habermas view, therole of philosophy in modernity is one of a mediating interpreter, which facilitates the transferof expert knowledge from the level of theoretical culture to its practical application on the levelof everyday communication. We elaborated further on this philosoph s role to identify thepeculiar character of philosophy as competence an additional kind of knowledge-capacity
which supplements the expertise to make its exchange between the levels of theoretical culture
and everyday practice possible. In this sense, we affirmed the philosophical competence as an
indispensable asset for all problem solvers in the grand division of labor of our contemporary
world pointing that its utilization is exercised as critical thought.
Whereas Habermas notion of modernit helped us situate philosophy in an sociocultural perspective, we used some of Foucault s in estigations to focus attention on its role in
the life of the particular individual. Foucault s analyses of various technologies of the self
practiced primarily in Western Antiquity and early Middle Ages uncovered self-knowledge andself-care as fundamental principles of what back then was considered the art of li ing.
Identifying self-care as the more fundamental principle dri en b one s concern ith oneself,
Foucault emphasizes its inseparability form that of self-knowledge for purposes of selfcultivation and socialization. In this sense, the unity of the two principles, as maintained within
the art of li ing, can be seen as powering one s continuous self-creation which utilizing
self-knowledge within self-care by way of reflective thinking affirms one s relation withoneself and with the world. And similarly, the thinking of self-creation, at once critical andcreative, can be seen as being in its essence philosophical and as effectively mediating one s
knowledge in practice.
Drawing on Habermas and Foucault, our investigation identifies the role and place ofphilosophy in our contemporary world at once as competence and self-creation. Thoughinitially associated with different philosophical perspectives, these two senses of philosophy
are complimentary and convergent, and ultimately overlap, as each of them is an inevitableaspect of the other. The philosophical competence, as critical thought, always utilizes self-

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knowledge in self-care, which is effectively self-creation at the very least as a successful
problem solver. Self-creation, as drawing on self-knowledge in self-care, is always reflectively
mediated by critical and creative thinking, which is essentially a philosophical competence
utili ing a general sense of one s relation to oneself and to the orld.
Elsewhere we have indicated that in the general case one s philosophical competence
cannot be separated from one s background of humanistic knowledge, which is a knowledge ofhumanity, of humanities, as well as self-knowledge.46 In this sense, one s utili ation of thatcompetence; that is, one s self-creation, or otherwise put, one s critical and creati e thinking,is ultimately dependent on knowledge of the self as human person. Philosophers may not be
surprised by this assertion, for they know that the human self in its capacity of knowing subject
has been the central motif of the philosophy of modernity, as much as in its capacity of aparticular living subject it has become a focal point for the postmodern philosophy. Either way;that is, in the perspective of our contemporary world, the guiding maxim of the human self
remains the same: it needs to know itself to be able to manage itself, apply itself, care of itself,
or otherwise put create itself, both theoretically and practically.
In relevance to it, we sum up, Habermas has pointed to the rationalistic training ofphilosophy; whereas Foucault has signaled its capacity for creativity within the art of living.
On a final note, as Foucault has pointed that the modern time has given precedence to selfknowledge over self-care to the detriment of the art of self-creation, he has also added his voice
to that of Niet sche s ho calls for integration of art and reason in the creation of one s o n
person:
One thing is needful. To "give style" to one's character a great and rare art! It is practiced bythose who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic
plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. . . In
the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governedand formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than
one might suppose, if only it was a single taste! 47

46

Rossen Rousse , Philosoph and the Transition from Theor to Practice: A Response to Recent Concerns for
Critical Thinking, pp. 93ff.
47
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, translated by Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §290, p. 232; cf. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. La gaya scienza
Berlin: Edition Holzinger, 2016), §290, S. 161.

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Notes on Contributors

Dr. Catherine MacMillan is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language andLiterature at Yeditepe University, Istanbul. Her first degree is from the University of Bath, UK
and she completed her M.A. and Ph.D. at the European Studies Institute at Marmara
University. Her research interests are interdisciplinary: she is particularly interested inliterary genres in political discourse, including the carnivalesque, gothic and dystopia, andon political themes in literature, including, among others, questions related topostcolonialism, gender and national identity. She has published two books, comprising one
monograph and one edited volume, and has published articles in journals including, among
others, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Journal of Common Market Studies,
Gender Studies and Metaphor.
Stefan Stefanov is Lecturer in Specialized Translation, CAT Tools, and Translation
Management Systems at St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria.
He is currently working on his doctorate in Remix culture and 21st century authorship. He
has published both in the field of his doctoral studies and in translation technology. He is
al o a ran la or orking for ome of he orld leading ran la ion agencie , a hor of
poetry and short prose, as well as an amateur DJ. Email: s.d.stefanov@ts.uni-vt.bg.
Dr. Eric C. Hendriks-Kim is a sociologist, currently a Thyssen postdoctoral fellow at theUni er i of Bonn. He die China place in he globali ed order and in heorie of orldsociety. Previously he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Sociology Department of Peking
University. Hendriks-Kim has studied at University College Utrecht, UC Berkeley, Göttingen,and the University of Chicago, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Mannheim. His book
Life Advice from Below (Brill) maps the globalization of American-style self-help culture. Asa public intellectual writing in English, Dutch, and German, Hendriks-Kim has published overseventy essays and op-eds in newspapers and magazines such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, NRC, and Times Higher Education.
Davide Orsitto is a Ph.D. candidate in Human Rights and Global Politics at the DIRPOLIS
in i e of Sc ola S periore San Anna, Pi a, I al . He ob ained hi ma er degree inInternational Security Studies from a joint program between the University of Trento andSc ola S periore San Anna. He pre io l orked a a marke anal a General Elec ric.
His research areas include Welfare Studies, Political Theory, Political Science, and Social
Policy, focusing on authors such as Esping-Andersen, Peter Hall, and David Soskice. Email:davide.orsitto@santannapisa.it
Dr. J. Jeremy Wisnewski is a Professor of Philosophy at Hartwick College, in Oneonta, NY.
He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Riverside in 2002,
where he studied with the late Bernd Magnus. He has written widely on issues in moral

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philosophy, applied ethics, and phenomenology. His books include Wittgenstein and EthicalInquiry (Continuum, 2007), The Politics of Agency (Routledge/Ashgate, 2008), Understanding
Torture (EUP, 2010), and Heidegger: An Introduction (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). He isco-editor, with Mark Sanders, of Ethics and Phenomenology (Lexington, 2012). He has alsoedited six books in Blackwell's Philosophy and Pop Culture series.
Dr. Rossen Roussev i A ocia e Profe or in Con emporar Philo oph a S . C ril and S .
Me hodiUni er i of Veliko Tarno o. He ha been a Visiting Professor at the Kazakh
British Technical University, Almaty, Kazakhstan, Assistant Professor at Kyungpook National
University, Daegu, S. Korea, and at St. John s University in New York. He also taught at the
University of Aktobe, the City University of New York, and Mercy College in New York. He
obtained his doctorate in philosophy from The New School for Social Research in New York(2005). His publications and interests are in phenomenology, philosophy of language, criticaltheory, and philosophy of culture. Email: r.roussev@ts.uni-vt.bg

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