31 - Idealism part one

Welcome to Reductio Adventures and Ideas. I'm your host, Andrew Lavin. Reductio is a show about philosophy, about ideas, and about understanding ourselves and our world more clearly. Brought to you by Inverted Spectrum Media. I had the pleasure of talking with my good friend Michael Fitzpatrick for this episode. And we ended up talking so long that we're going to split it into two episodes. So a part one and a part two.

enjoy part one, and then you will find later in the feed part two of our discussion of idealism. So enjoy. So I'm talking with Michael Fitzpatrick today. We've heard from Michael Fitzpatrick a couple of times already on Reductio. So we heard from him on the, I think the first time was actually on a monad where.

I think it was the What is Philosophy monad, probably. One of the early little shorts that I produced. And then the longer one that we heard from... michael on was the aristotle's reductio where we talked about aristotle's proof of the existence of an unmoved mover kind of a god a god-like figure in aristotle's metaphysical picture of the world and then most recently in our Rawls episode we heard some some complaints about Rawls from Michael and this is kind of a an offshoot of that

conversation and thinking about Rawls, Rawls being like the kind of clearest example of a political liberal and also of an ideal theorist. in uh the the sort of modern day who's you know uh mid mid late 20th century thinker in the you know roughly the 70s um something like that 70s and 80s And so a lot of political theory has been sort of responding to Rawls and responding to Rawls's conception of how to do political philosophy and things like that.

And Michael and I have been kind of going back and forth for years at this point on these questions of like idealism versus pragmatism or ideal theory and non-ideal theory. So, Michael, just remind us sort of what your profession and vocation is. I am a teacher. That's how I earn money.

I teach at De Anza College, and I'm looking to teach up in Washington as well. But I spend most of my time... researching philosophical problems and thinking about ways we can make a better world okay so just sort of like to to start us off I wanted to just get a sense of kind of what is a what's a like kind of starting point definition for what idealism is like when we say idealism and we're talking about political.

philosophy or political discourse um what are we saying and like what's the the contrast so i think a lot of people when we're talking about idealism have in mind This practice of developing a perfect picture of something. Something where we abstract away all the messy context. And we just give the thing as if there were no problems whatsoever. So, you know, a stock example would be the blueprint to a house. Actual houses, you know, have leaky pipes and bad wiring and, you know, you have to

treat termites. The blueprint of a house never has any of those problems. Nobody writes a blueprint where there's termites and they're going to add in termites. And so... The blueprint is supposed to be this perfect ideal of the house that's abstracted away all of those problems. And in the kind of pejorative understanding of this... The people who create these perfect ideals are privileged aristocrats who have no idea what...

other communities and people are dealing with in terms of problems. And so it's very easy for them to abstract away those problems because it's not their problems. Yeah. Maybe, maybe like. The sort of classic example of that would be like John Locke, who's like a slave owner. doing you know political philosophy about what it means to be free and to create a society based on on liberty and uh things like that right it's like a um

A clear case of someone you might accuse of doing this sort of abstracted ideal theory. And, you know, Thomas Jefferson as another example of someone who's, you know, a slave owner. is also like writing these great tracks about how everyone's equal, all humans are equal and entitled to these basic rights of freedom and pursuit of happiness and things like that.

Right. And so because of these kinds of attitudes, there has been a counter approach developed that sometimes goes by the name of non-ideal theory. which sort of takes itself to be a reverse engineering of idealism, where instead of starting from some perfect picture, we start from the problems themselves.

And just try to figure out like what types of strategies would address those problems. And one way that they like to do this is to say, well, let's listen to all the... the people that the privileged developers of the ideals weren't listening to then we'll know what the problems are and then we can reverse engineer some solutions And maybe a nice example to use here, which is Plato's classic example, is health. So on the stereotype of ideal theory, a healthy person...

is like, you're only healthy if you look exactly like a J.Crew magazine model. And, you know, you have no acne, you're just the right weight. You know, you're not too tall and not too short, these kinds of things, which as soon as you hear that, you're like, wait, what does that have to do with health? That's exactly right. And so the non-ideal theorist says...

no, you know, what is healthy for you might be different for somebody else. And so we should look at like, what health problems do you have? And let's solve those problems and not worry about whether you fit into some. cookie cutter ideal good yeah so that's part partially partially you know what part of the kind of obvious problem with that example is like we're filling out things that no longer have anything to do with health

It just has to do with like a certain picture we have of what, you know, sort of almost maybe like a model or a stereotype of what a healthy person looks like. And, you know, I'm sort of realizing as I'm.

talking that there's like a very clear connection to plato's project of being like don't worship so don't don't worship aphrodite like uh worship beauty itself you know so like aphrodite is this like fully fleshed out figure who's like actually you know in in her own special way like kind of this like um it's almost like a mortal a mortal figure you know

who has all these flaws and a personality and all that kind of stuff that actually has nothing actually to do with beauty. And so Plato is kind of like, no, don't, don't. don't worship that like like let's let's figure out what real beauty is like beauty in itself that that connection occurred to me Well, that's a helpful transition to why I'm on this podcast, which is I actually want to defend idealism, but not in the form of the stereotype that I just outlined.

If idealism is what at least some non-ideal theorists seem to think that it is, then sure, it's not worth defending. But I actually think idealism as... Plato envisioned it, and we're referring to Plato because he might be the OG when it comes to idealism. He was looking for ideals. that were universal in the sense that they were something that was for everybody. They were a common good. And he thought that while an ideal is for everyone,

In every context, its instantiation looks different. So he actually wasn't envisioning a one size fits all, which is what I think lies behind the... criticism of the stereotype of idealism. Rather, he was looking for values that can effectuate a real liberation for all people without exception. So justice as his most famous ideal is a form only if some people are not left out of justice. So there has to be some meaningful sense in which justice is for all.

That doesn't, however, mean that justice is going to concretely look the same in every situation. And so Plato's form of idealism was supposed to be a marriage of both universality and... a context dependency and i think that's uh a version of idealism that sometimes gets lost in the conversation yeah where the It's like the picture you get of Plato as the idealist is let's like abstract everything away. Let's like put.

put people on an island like he does in the republic and um like just take all all history away and all um prior social relations away and um then let's you know figure out how are we going to build an ideal society and then that's supposed to be some kind of guide as to what to do now in our current society like where do we go from here and you can see why that picture isn't

the most attractive if it's like you know let's abstract away lots and lots and lots of stuff and then that's going to tell us what we should do right now um in spite of the fact that we've taken away In our theorizing and in our imagining what the ideal is, we've taken away lots of relevant things about the actual world. That's right. So something that surprises people when I point this out is that Plato doesn't actually abstract away almost anything, even in his most famous work, The Republic.

In the Republic, he has very concrete problems that he's trying to address. One of the most famous, for example, is what we call today the Battle of the Sexes. He was aware that sexual difference was a source of antagonism in society. He gives a really contemporary analysis of the problem. He talks about how the subjugation or exclusion of women is based on a view of the incapacity of their nature.

And then he diagnoses the problem as saying this is totally bogus metaphysics. There's no natural basis on which to say that women are inferior. And then he concludes by saying, therefore, every office of society should be equally open to men and women. That is not the abstracting away of concrete problems. That's actually proposing an ideal.

Namely, that all offices of a society should be open to men and women alike in a manner that is sensitive to the on-the-ground realities that he was experiencing in Athens in his day. And I would say further in all of Plato's writings, he does envision... What Rawls had in mind and unfortunately didn't practice and that we talked about in our previous podcast episode, which is what Rawls calls the reflective equilibrium, which is supposed to be you posit an ideal.

And then you see how it works in the empirical world. Then you revisit the ideal, make some adjustments, and back and forth, back and forth. This is actually how non-ideal theorists... tend to describe non-ideal theory. So, for example, Elizabeth Anderson, who is kind of my main go-to person when I'm trying to think about what a non-ideal theorist is up to.

I'm going to read a quote from her paper Toward a Non-Ideal Relational Methodology for Political Philosophy. And she takes this to be in contrast to idealism. But I actually think she's just describing what someone like Plato thought they were up to. She says non-ideal theory constructs ideals as hypothesized solutions to the problems identified. like any hypothesis ideals may be tested in practice found to generate new unanticipated problems when adopted and thereby require revision

Thus, rather than establishing standards outside of practice, by which practice can be assessed, as an ideal theory, ideals are themselves subject to testing in practice. End quote. And all I would say to that as an idealist is, amen. Right. Yeah, it's almost a little mysterious. Like, how would you come up with the ideals if you were... sort of testing them against cases and real world scenarios and things like that, would you?

is the idea that you're just sort of starting with some axioms and deducing all of the ideals from that and like the way that geometry works you know or like you know it's mysterious how you would actually develop a set of ideas

if not by engaging in something like reflective equilibrium. Yeah, that's nice. I think you alluded to... what is probably one source of the problem here which is there is this history in modern philosophy of rationalist minded philosophers who are trying to do philosophy from these sort of axiomatic starting points that...

It seems like they're not being super sensitive to empirical realities. Whether that's true in fact, it's certainly the impression that was left. And I think another source of... the kind of stereotype that someone like Elizabeth Anderson is working with is the reality that... a lot of so-called ideals that have been offered in practice are chauvinistic in nature. And so if you're...

Looking back on things that have been held up as ideals in the past that today we think are really invidious, that's going to breed a natural suspicion of the practice of ideal theory. But again, this this is the old problem of, you know, do you blame the idea or the practitioners of the idea? Communists are very familiar with this problem. And I think I think.

non-ideal theorists have not always been careful to differentiate between the methodology of idealism and some poor practitioners of the methodology. Yeah. Is there, so... Do you have an example in mind of like an ideal that, you know, is sort of something we might call an ideal that ends up being kind of invidious or chauvinistic or something like that?

So an example of an ideal that I think has rightly come under criticism is John Locke's approach to private property. So he starts with this ideal of a world where people only own themselves. And then there's this like completely quote unquote unowned natural environment around them. And they mix their labor with this.

with the the natural resources of the world and poof property appears okay and the problem with that practice is he's envisioning a world without preformed social relations where there's no hierarchies, there are no slaves, there are no... you know, women without property rights, you know, none of this stuff has happened. And then he's sort of saying, like, once you've mixed your labor with something, it's yours. And if we create a state...

They have an absolute responsibility to defend what is yours no matter what. And the problem with all of this is it creates an ideal for property. that just ignores the actual real-world history of how property gets accumulated and divided, which... is nothing like how property gets distributed in his perfect state of nature scenario. So that's an ideal that I think people have rightly looked back on and said, hey...

If we're going to figure out a just way to distribute property, we don't want to do it by imagining this abstracted world where... We're not actually paying attention to how property has been distributed. We instead want to be more sensitive to the world in which we actually live. Right. Yeah. listeners are familiar with the season one episode on why does stuff cost money, which is our kind of episode on Karl Marx.

The term that Karl Marx uses is primitive accumulation. It's the idea that like before we get into society or before we like... sign the social contract or whatever there's already been a lot of stuff done and a lot of that stuff was just um like naked violence and exploitation right that decided who who starts with what resources before the game even starts. And then you start the game and some people are on third base and some people are still stuck at home plate and all that kind of stuff.

Which is something that Plato was actually sensitive to, which is why... Most of Marx's best insights are just reworkings of Plato. But that allows me to say a little bit, because some listeners might be thinking right now, wait a minute. The thing you just said about John Locke, isn't that what Plato is doing in his most famous book, The Republic? Isn't he imagining this like perfect scenario where everything's abstracted away?

And the answer is no, although the difference can be somewhat subtle. What Plato is doing in the early parts of the Republic is he's not envisioning... some perfect scenario. He's asking, what are political structures for? In other words, he thinks an ideal... Far from being some airy-fairy abstraction that has nothing to do with practical reality, an ideal is just a way of stating the purpose of something.

what is the purpose of property what is the purpose of a military what is the purpose of political offices what is the purpose of justice what are you trying to achieve And he was using a kind of constructive political theory to just make transparent. what things are for. And what he said things are for is to promote the common good, at least what political things are for, to promote the common good.

And so when he's envisioning like, okay, we need to divide labor between tradespeople and guardians and people who are responsible for making... political decisions it's not that he's imagining like a bunch of people who do all this perfectly it's that he's trying to imagine what does it look like when this thing does what it's supposed to do

So one way to think of this is, you know, imagine you're in your house and you have a leaky pipe under your sink. And you're like, gosh, this is a problem. I need to fix this. Plato's going to say... Well, if you don't know what a wrench is for and you don't know what a sink pipe is for, you're not going to be able to solve the problem. So you need to step back for a moment.

And you need to do a constructive project where you imagine like, okay, so how does the sync fit together? You're not even going to be able to recognize that there is a problem in the first place. Exactly. That's exactly how Plato thinks of it. If you're going to diagnose political problems in the first place, you're going to have to have some ideal...

in hand. And this actually gets to kind of my first worry about non-ideal theory. This isn't my final view, but it's one thing that I think at least they should respond to, which is... Are you sure that when you identify problems, you're not just working with tacit ideals in the background? And I worry about philosophy when we stop.

stating all of our assumptions. I think a philosophy is best done when all of our assumptions are in the foreground. And I worry that sometimes non-ideal theory just makes some assumptions more invisible when actually they're just working with... different ideals than the theorists they're criticizing yeah that gives us a good sense of what idealism is and sort of like just at least as a first pass we can kind of keep developing that idea as we as we go forward and what it has been taken to be

an unfair interpretation of what we might think idealism or ideal theory is up to that serves to get at something that some ideal theorists are actually possibly guilty of right and so the the challenge isn't you know was was john locke a good guy um which i think it's pretty fair to say he wasn't a very good guy But the challenge is sort of, is there an ideal theory out there? Or is there like a version of idealism that makes sense? And also like, what's the relationship between that?

approach to political philosophy and the approach that people who call themselves non-ideal theorists um is up to like are those are those really like super distinct things or are they ultimately fairly similar sorts of things and there's something valuable in the critique that non-ideal theorists bring

to ideal theory. And so then the question is, does that mean we reject ideal theory? Or does that mean that we just like change the kind of ideal theory, non-ideal theory, political philosophy that we're engaged in, right? without like throwing out one category altogether or something like that. So I think I think a huge way to or an important way to get started on answering that kind of a question is to.

recognize the most important thing that non-ideal theorists get right, which is that a lot of their stock targets for idealism are... people who have incorporated chauvinistic practices into their ideal. And this is because... A distinction that Plato made, and I want to hold Plato up as a model for how to do idealism right, because I am a political Platonist.

Plato recognized that there is this ancillary problem that has to inform all of our political theorizing, and that is the problem of ideology. Plato gives the most famous metaphor in all of philosophical history, the allegory of the cave, as this brilliant and beautiful instrument to simply say... Things aren't always as they appear. And his use, the reason why it shows up in a work of political philosophy was he understood that...

things look differently depending on your vantage point. And so, for example... If you are a tyrant, it is going to just be obvious to you that everybody else should do what you want and to do things that benefit you. And Plato recognized how intuitive that is from the point of view of the tyrant. He just didn't think that was the only point of view or the right point of view.

And so he told this story of the allegory of the cave to say there's a difference, a fundamental difference between the way things appear... and the actual forms that should guide the values that we live by. So when someone like, for example, Charles Mills critiques ideal theory, I think what he's critiquing is theorists who ignore the problem of ideology. And the consequence of ignoring ideology is you end up just justifying.

say, the practices of the powerful or the practices of the privileged. And that's a good criticism to make. One way that non-ideal theorists try to address this is with something called standpoint theory. This is where you give priority to different points of view that are marginalized or vulnerable or are... sort of central to particular problems because you think they're going to have a better read on the situation than say the person who's not affected by the problem.

Well, Plato anticipated that. He has this famous line in the Republic where he says, a just society is one where we celebrate and suffer with every single part of society. Another way that he develops this is he says, we can't only look at what...

an ideal just person looks like, we also have to look at a bunch of non-ideal people. And so he has this famous declension in the Republic where he says, you know, look at this soul. How does it get corrupted? Look at that soul. How does it get corrupted? This is... Plato doing what non-ideal theorists take themselves to be doing. And he doesn't get very much credit for it, unfortunately. But the point is, in all of these different dimensions...

What Plato is modeling for us is this recognition that when we're trying to figure out what an ideal is, we can't just look at the empirical situation. Because if we just do that, we're going to end up reifying... You know, the victors tell history, as they say, right? Instead, he said, we have to find a transcendental ideal, one that transcends any particular situation.

so that it can be an ideal for every situation and thereby every person. Right. I have to mention that one of my favorite papers, especially in like... moral philosophy is juliannis's wickedness as a psychological breakdown i think and it's it's all about the the declension on the democratic man and the democratic man and all that. And it's, it's really, I mean, that is a wonderful, um, a wonderful bit of the history of philosophy that, so I definitely want to like.

signal boosts that but i think that's like a really wonderful passage in plato and uh honest does really beautiful things with it in that paper so she's a very good plateness too i enjoy her work a lot yeah Okay, good. So here's two kinds of worries that I think kind of motivate a lot of non-ideal theorists. The non-ideal theorist that I'm probably the most familiar with is...

Possibly the guy who came up with the term non-ideal theory, I'm not sure, but Charles Mills recently passed away within a few months before the recording of this episode. And really cool guy. I got to see him talk at UCLA and I've taught him his work. multiple different classes and stuff really uh just just a genuinely good person you can see just just uh being around him and also like a funny and entertaining person but the i i feel like

These two critiques kind of show up in his work. And so I want to kind of... rehearse these and then have you like talk about partially especially how Plato is sort of not guilty of these things or or see see like what do we think about Plato in light of these worries And then also, like, what does that mean for us as contemporary ideal theorists? And so the two worries are the, I'll say both of them, and then we can take them in order, right? So the first one is...

We might worry that idealism or ideal theory, and we're kind of using those interchangeably, even though, you know. Possibly we would want to make a distinction between idealism versus pragmatism or ideal theory versus non-ideal theory. And there's sort of distinctions you might draw. But for the sake of our conversation, we're sort of... running some of these categories together. And hopefully that, you know, still sort of makes sense to even to specialists in this area.

So one is we might worry that idealism or ideal theory is not a good guide as to what to do right now. And I'm fairly sympathetic to that at an intuitive level. So I want to like...

kind of drill down on that throughout the tail end of our conversation. But then the other worry is that we might worry that idealism cannot actually give us... what is in fact ideal which i think is like kind of the worry that we've been more talking about which is um you know it can't actually tell us what's ideal because look at what the idealists have done already they haven't

come up with systems that are really ideal they're sort of obviously non-ideal if you just look at them you know the ideals that we get out of real idealists um are not that good you know because they overlook certain important things. And so you might think that ideal theory is, there's something kind of fundamentally wrong with the methodology if it hasn't produced anything that even close to looks like an ideal. Good.

Let me make a passing comment to address the first concern. And I know that we'll come back to that more in detail later. And then I have substantive thoughts on the second concern, which I agree would, I would say is probably the dominant concern raised by non-ideal theorists. So my passing comment to the first concern, which is that ideals are not a good guide as to what to do right now. And let me flesh that out a tiny bit. So the thought here is...

Well, you know, you're describing like how society should be if, say, most of the people were good, but most people ain't good. And so what does that do for us? So my passing comment regarding Plato is just to say that I think Plato is more of an ally than people realize. Plato was looking at the non-ideal features of his concrete Athenian society and its neighboring city states and offering various practical solutions.

to achieve a city-state that mitigates those problems. And I'll just list some of the problems that he's responding to in his works. Civil war, wealth inequality, corruption in government. the abuse of foreigners abandonment of the elderly subjugation of women enslavement by foreign empire rampant libertinism frivolous lawsuits recurring tyranny These are non-ideal situations. And he was taking himself to be giving direct on the ground responses to how to deal with those.

Again, that is not a complete response to the concern that was raised. But at least I think should build some goodwill for a listener who's skeptical that Plato has anything of value to say to that concern, which we'll come back to. I would also add demagoguery, which is like... very clearly something he addresses and is very clearly something we struggle with. Absolutely.

Okay, so the second concern you raise, which is why I think not just ideal theorists, but any human is in a position to figure out what an ideal is. This is a pretty direct attack on Plato. Plato thought that there actually is a notion of the good that's sort of independent of any particular person or culture or whatever. And if we can't know that, it's not of much use. So the two critics I'm most familiar with on this are Elizabeth Anderson and Sally Hasslinger.

And they both are pretty convinced that humans are just not in a position to discern an ideal of the good. Especially if what that means is some kind of like final picture of how things should be. So for them, you know, why... think that we can perceive the final state of a society you know the ultimate picture of justice or something like that when

we can't even figure out how to manage our national debt or reduce gun violence. Like, if we can't do that, why think we could set our sights even higher, at least from where we are right now? It's just like as a quick off the cuff rejoinder, like it's interesting that any individual person or small group of people likely could solve those problems.

or at least move the needle very significantly. The challenges we face when it comes to national debt and gun control and things like that are that we have... people with extremely different ideologies trying to solve the problem in large numbers and with all sorts of externalities, you know, impinging on the process. So it's just my initial reaction is like, well, Those aren't unsolvable problems. They're unsolvable problems when we are such a deeply divided.

people still trying to make a society together and and to do so with you know hundreds of millions of us and things like that so that's that's my my initial reaction to that So what I kind of want to say in response to critics like Anderson or Hesslinger, and I think you're right, Charles Mills also shares this criticism, is that, first of all, they're assuming a...

static conception of ideals, which yes, Plato does think forms are ultimately eternal, but there's a difference between the forms as they are. in themselves and our knowledge of the forms and he definitely did not think that our knowledge of the forms is static, that that is the kind of thing that we'll grow in over time. And so our knowledge of what the ideals are can change.

But I think there's a deeper problem here that needs to be addressed, which is that for non-ideal theorists, I think in general... there's really only two potential sources for our conceptions of justice. Chauvinist cultural values masquerading as ideals... and the kind of grassroots ideals developed by marginalized communities and their allies.

Okay, so maybe a simpler way of putting this is there's only two sets of ideals, the preferences of the oppressors and the preferences of the oppressed. Okay, and...

If you think, as they do, that ideal theory is just a kind of philosophical rationale for the preferences of the oppressors, then yes, you're going to be very skeptical that we're ever going to be able to access some actual ideal because ideology is always going to get in the way and we're just going to end up justifying some kind of oppression. Right. But I note about this that what they have tacitly abandoned is any conception of a good that transcends human preferences.

Meaning if all you think is it's either what those in power want or those under the thumb want, you've given up on this idea that there's actually a set of values that... human societies as a whole answer to. And I actually think that's critical. Plato's whole project was to oppose the idea that man is the measure of all things.

that justice is ultimately about what we want, and the only question concerns who the we is. Is it the we of the dominant culture or the we of the marginalized? On Plato's conception, The goal is to contemplate a transcendental object that is implied by our social relations themselves. It's not the reification of some particular culture.

It's not the reification of some particular vantage point. It's a metaphysical norm of the relations we find ourselves in. It's the consequence of asking, what is the good? of our relations to each other. And he thinks everybody answers to that norm, including and especially the powerful. And again, I'm sure there are reasons non-ideal theorists are skeptical of such a thing. But I'm just saying...

We miss the real dialectic of the conversation if we don't realize that that's not even an option that's usually on the table for them. Right. And as you're talking, I'm thinking of... I never thought of him this way, but he's kind of like a cynical Plato in a way. Plato is very different from Derek Bell, who's one of the fathers of critical race theory.

father for lack of a better word i guess but so like derek bell maybe one of his most famous ideas is the idea of so he follows um basically a marxist like material deterministic picture and the name that bell uses for this uh sort of material determinism that he goes in for he calls it

interest convergence and the idea is that like basically history doesn't change unless well so i guess History doesn't change for the better for marginalized people unless the interests of marginalized people happen to be aligned with the interests of the oppressors or the powerful, right? And so like sort of the most famous examples, probably slavery was never going to end. unless it became a non-viable economic model for doing labor right and and for managing

labor and controlling labor. And there's arguments. Historians have made fairly surprisingly convincing arguments that slavery was sort of already on the way out. when the Civil War started. And so it's sort of really like the Civil War wasn't the thing that ultimately ended slavery. It was actually this sort of economic...

condition that made slavery just like not a good way of managing and controlling labor anymore. And so the powerful allowed slavery to end because it was actually in their interest to do so. And so that's this kind of, I think of as a deeply cynical picture of human history, right? Not to say it's wrong, but it, you know, it just sort of is. And Plato is doing something different. He's not saying like, you know.

Politics or political philosophy isn't about figuring out what is in the interest of the oppressors and what is in the interest of the oppressed and then trying to decide who's right. Instead, it's about...

Figuring out when do those interests converge. That's not what Plato's doing. Plato's saying there's a standard that everyone is held to, regardless of whether you're oppressed or... or the oppressor regardless of what your personal interests are or what you stand to gain and we might just think of that you know just sort of most colloquially as just morality right you have to be a moral person

No matter what your interests are and where your interests lie. Which doesn't mean your interests don't matter. Right. Because Plato believes that the good is good for everyone. Right. Like, he actually cares about people. But... So I've raised what I think is the fundamental... dialectic between someone like Plato or myself and someone like an Elizabeth Anderson or a Sally Hesslinger. But I haven't fully answered their question, which is, can we really know?

these ideals like you know put the rubber to the road I'd like to do that because I do think that's a fair request. But I want to give a little prolegomena to this to kind of talk about why I care about this topic and why I think it matters if what you're concerned for is an immense. participatory politics. My concern and why I'm so interested in Plato is I believe...

Plato's political project was a project consisting of two things, optimism and imagination. Plato believed that it really is possible To not just build a marginally better world, but a radically better world. And that the way to do it is by expanding our imagination of what is possible. And I actually think non-ideal theorists are at times in danger of committing a kind of epistemic injustice in the sense that it's an injustice to people.

When you use pessimism to limit what they think their political opportunities really are. When you limit the space of political emancipation. emancipation that they think is open to them. And so Plato's project in the Republic, in the Gorgias, in the Statesman, in the laws, was to... dream big and to inspire other people to dream too. And so this gives rise to what I think is the fundamental contrast between idealism and non-ideal.

which is a difference between two types of norms. And I've termed the norms for non-ideal theorists reactive norms. and the norms for ideal theorists, visionary norms. And they're both norms, and they both have an important place in our thinking, but they are different.

Reactive norms arise from reactions to our concrete situation. Not to be confused with reactionary. Yeah, not reactionary. Well, I mean, reactionary in a sense, but not reactionary politics. That's not what we're talking about. Yeah. Reactive norms arise, say, when somebody hits me and I dislike that and I have a reaction where I defend myself or I call for help or something like that, right? So...

There's a clear norm that's being implied there, right? I dislike the situation. I've been harmed. And that leads me to think either I should do certain things or my wider society should do certain things on my behalf. Reactive norms are absolutely important. But I think non-ideal theorists have sort of lost sight of visionary norms, which arise by imagining possibilities that are not tied to

bounded by or limited by our material situation. Visionary norms are when we transcend our present horizon, when we say, surely there's a better world. Plato's Republic was an exercise in visionary norms. It was to create a vision of a world... that is practically accessible and does address practical everyday problems, but it does so by saying...

hey, there's something better to hope for, something that's so beautiful and so good, we should fight for it. We should do the hard thing and not just create a marginally better world, but a radically better world. And we do that through... inspiration. There's a quote that I want to read here. It's a passage from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the third book, Return of the King.

And it's in my mind the greatest literary example of why Plato thought a transcendental norm is what we need. to inspire that kind of radical political change. Here's the quote. Frodo sighed and was asleep almost before the words were spoken.

sam struggled with his own weariness and he took frodo's hand and there he sat silenced till deep night fell then at last to keep himself awake he crawled from the hiding-place and looked out The land of Mordor seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Epheth Duoth, I'm probably saying that wrong, in the west, the night sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud rack above,

a dark tour high up in the mountains. Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart as he looked up. out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. End quote. Now, the purpose of that quote, or the connection that I'm making at least, is...

Sam and Frodo are inspired to continue the arduous journey through Mordor to throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Spoiler alert. If you don't know Lord of the Rings by now, shame on you. But they're inspired to do that because they believe that there is an ideal of a better world. That the shadows of Mordor that are encompassing and suffocating the land can never erase. They can never take that possibility out of reach.

Plato's fear, I think, was that if we become too pragmatic or if we become too focused on the non-ideal, we give up on The idea that there are possibilities within reach that are worth fighting for. And so modern day Platonists, like, for example, Alain Madu, have taken as their maxim, demand the impossible. Namely, demand the thing that the contemporary ideologies, even the emancipatory ones, say are impossible. No, refuse to give up those things as real possibilities.

Yeah, so I really like that picture of the smoke and flames of Mordor as the conditions and the messiness of the real world and how we might think that could make it... entirely unobtainable or like we can't even see the ideal anymore. Almost like this veil of ignorance. I mean, I guess maybe that's a confusing term to use when we've just talked about Rawls and his veil of ignorance. But, you know, it's just this veil that keeps us from even seeing what the ideal is, let alone obtaining it.

and the hopeful project of Plato. And I guess you can kind of see where the Platonism of Christianity comes in here, right? Is that there's a... There's a hope that transcends the current conditions. And part of that is just like daring to imagine what's possible and daring to imagine. a world you know a world where we're free from current conditions of oppression or current conditions that are very much non-ideal so yeah thanks for the the tolkien quote i think that's a really

Wonderful picture. So this gets us to the heart of the response, which is great. We've said these inspiring things about visionary norms, but how can we actually know any? And the response I want to make here is twofold. My first reply is that we have been fortunate in actual history to have prophets and visionaries and philosophers who have in fact seen at least...

parts, facets of the ideals. Plato, I think, is a model of this. We get in the Jewish and Christian tradition, which you just alluded to, we get... Three iterations of this. So the first is the ideal of the promised land, a place of political stability with enough for everyone to eat. The second is the ideal of the restoration to the promised land, which developed in the wake of multiple experiences of destruction and exile at the hands of foreign powers by the Israelite and Jewish peoples.

And there arises this wonderful ambiguity in their prophetic literature over whether this restoration was for all people or only Jewish descendants. Well, in the third wave in the Christian scripture, this ambiguity gets resolved through the vision of the kingdom of heaven, which is a righteous society for people from every tongue, tribe, nation, and identity. So if you think about, say, the prevailing power, even in our secular society, of the Good Samaritan story, it's...

It's powerful because of the universality of its ideal. And I would sort of say to the non-ideal theorists, I'm not really seeing anything in non-ideal theory. That's suggesting we should invalidate the ideal of the Good Samaritan parable. I'm just not seeing the criticisms land to make me think that the parable...

is just chauvinism wrapped up in a nice neat bow. I actually think, no, Jesus really did see an ideal there. And that's why it has persisted for so long. And so to give a modern example, I'd like to... Point to my touchstone, Martin Luther King Jr. His final speech is one of my favorites. And he uses language, actually language drawn from the Jewish scriptures.

that I just think is the perfect metaphor for why we should believe we can actually see the ideals. And that's the metaphor of the mountaintop. So I'm going to read the quote and then I'll kind of explain it and then I'll pause before going into the second response. So this is Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, April 3rd, 1968.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain.

And I've looked over and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So my commentary here is just that not all of us are fortunate enough to be in a position to see ideals directly. I don't think Plato was under any illusions that everybody had the opportunities he had. But he believed that he had a responsibility to say, I've been to the mountaintop and here's what I've seen.

And in that metaphor, what King is getting at is, number one, being on the mountaintop is evidence that the ideal exists. How do you know? I've seen it. And secondly, it's evidence that the ideal is attainable. Because the metaphor here is when Moses was standing on the mountaintop and looking over. And so the idea is like you can see from here to there. You can see, oh, here's how we get there. We go along the river and, you know, over the hill to grandmother.

house we go um and so it's it's a combination of both the hopefulness that the ideal exists and the practice pragmatism that we can get there. And that's why Ken King ends with, I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land because I've seen the road to the promised land.

I would conclude this by just saying that if we look at the sages throughout history, the wise people, the prophetic people, The, you know, the activists, whoever it is that you think would make up this consortium, they are people who have been to the mountaintop and we should let their voices.

give us reason to believe that there is such a thing as an ideal that they're seeing good yeah so i think that that answers what i would call like the epistemic or epistemological concern about ideals that we you know we might never be able to sort of get outside our ideology to see the ideal or we might you know like you know what what's all this talk about transcending

are limited perspectives and things like that. That sounds like a bunch of... gobbledygook right so that's that's one um worry and then there's also like and so i guess i should reiterate something i've said on the podcast before that epistemology or epistemic refers to Things that we can know and things we have like sort of access to in the way to know and understand certain things. So it's about the nature and limits of our knowledge is when we say epistemological. So that's a kind of.

epistemological concern for why we might not be able to find out what's ideal. And then there's a sort of methodological concern. that ideal theory in itself is a bad method for finding out the ideal. And I feel like maybe that was more like Charles Mills is kind of more like... I don't like your methods, you know, where it looks like you've abstracted away too much and now I don't know.

how I'm supposed to you know for Rawls as an example like you've abstracted away all this stuff I know about myself as a human being and now I don't know like on what basis to make judgments you know I've now I'm like I'm not really like a human being i'm just this like uh this abstracted idealized um person you know behind a veil of ignorance and now i don't even know how to make these sorts of judgments about what the basic rules of society should be and things like that. I know that...

I'm not totally sure that Charles Mills has said that sort of thing, but I know that the philosopher at Georgetown, Olufemi Taiwo, who's also been on our program, has said things like that. I don't want to hoist that on him because I don't know. published that and and whether he would stand by that today but I know that you know years ago he said something similar to that which I think is a sort of fair critique of Rawls to consider just as a method you know like

Your method leaves me with very little by which to determine what the ideal actually is. So I suppose everything hinges on what we think the method is. If we think the method... is imagining what social relations would be like, everybody got what they wanted and nobody hated each other, then sure, that doesn't seem like a good method. Because we want to deal with people as we find them, not as we wish them to be. But as I say that, I'm really just paraphrasing Plato.

So in the laws, he writes, The lawgivers of the Age of the Gods, according to the story told nowadays, were descended from gods and legislated for men of similar stock. But we are human beings, legislating in the world today for the children of humankind. And we shall give no offense by our fear that one of our citizens will turn out to be, so to speak, a tough egg whose character will be so hard-boiled as to resist softening.

Powerful as our ideal laws are, they may not be able to tame such people, just as heat has no effect on tough beans. I love those analogies. Especially since we still say bad egg. Bad egg, yeah. So, Plato is in absolute agreement. Like, we can't abstract away to the point that we're dealing with... social situation other than our own. Again, the methodology that I would encourage here is a methodology of asking

what is the good of these particular concrete relations within which we find ourselves? So as an easy example, Plato would say, well, what is the good of money? What is money there for? And if somebody says, well, it's to accumulate money so that the person with the most money has the most power. Plato thinks we can actually tell a good, rational story about why that's not going to be the good for that person or anybody else.

And that's exactly what he sets out to do in his work to talk about the only value of money is. to provide for the material necessities of being able to be at leisure to develop a virtuous soul. And any other use you put money to is going to make your soul bad and the souls of other people around you bad. So I think everything depends here on how we frame that methodology.

If what we're looking for is some pie in the sky perfection, then no. But I believe when Martin Luther King Jr. said, I've been to the mountaintop, what he was talking about was the ideal... of people who are citizens. What is citizenship for? What does it mean to be a good citizen? And I do think that's a good methodology. Yeah, as you were talking, I was thinking it's a bit like, I mean, it just is almost exactly the same as Aristotle.

who I'm far more familiar with. And, you know, I think sort of influenced by someone like Aristotle, I tend to not worry too much about epistemological problems.

personally I like I'm not I think like like you've spelled out I'm I'm not like deeply worried that we're like always in our ideology and we're like never gonna see the mountaintop we're never gonna catch any glimpse of what the ideal might be and things like that i i want i want a sort of epistemological humility um but not you know i i think

like what you're saying, like not an epistemological, like sort of hopelessness or, or like a deep seated skepticism that like causes us to, to give up the, um, the project of trying to figure out what the ideal might be and i think part of that comes out out of this like sort of aristotelian idea that a lot of a lot of things are actually not that difficult because they're sort of just on the face of things right like If you want to know what a heart is for, just like look at what it does.

And it contracts and it pumps blood around the body. It might be sort of difficult to get in there and actually see what's going on and stuff. But especially with modern technology, we can just watch the part do what it does. And if they want to know what it's for, just look at what it does, you know? And then you can, like, especially when you can fit it into the greater organism and the greater system of the organism.

organism and things like that then then your your methodology and your epistemology are sort of tied in together right where my my method for figuring out what what what things are for Sorry, my method for figuring out, I guess, what the ideal is, is to figure out what things are for and to look at what things are for and what they actually do and how they actually function together with others. things that they interact with and in which they're embedded in systems and organizations and things.

And then that's the epistemology too, right? Is how do we know what the ideal is? Well, look at what things are for. And like some of this, like you say, is sort of empirical, right? It's asking what...

what is it actually like to have a billion dollars? You know, what does that do to a human soul? And we might not be able to figure out all that from the armchair, right? We might have to... see what happens as people get obscenely rich and stuff and it seems like we've you know determined at this point that it's not very good for your soul you know it's not a a good way to live but you know being financially comfortable

is potentially good for your soul or or at least not dangerous right for your soul or something like that well or or plato's way of putting it and then i'll make a couple additions to what you said um is that poverty is bad for your soul. Yeah, right. Plato thinks extreme wealth and extreme poverty are two halves of the same evil. Both of them are bad for not just the poor, which is sometimes how we talk today. We totally lost Plato's diagnosis, which is that...

Being rich is bad for the rich. Right. And I think we should recover that. Two quick just additions to what you said. The first is... Plato absolutely thinks we need to be empirical, and that may come as a surprise to people, but it only comes as a surprise because Plato rejected the fact-value distinction. So empirical doesn't just mean doing statistics, because Plato thinks that the world is value-ladent. It's formed by forms, and forms are not neutral.

So once you realize that he rejects the fact-values distinction, then you can understand how actually everything is empirical for Plato. But the second thing I want to add is... Plato, the slight difference between Plato and Aristotle, I think, is that Plato is more of a relationalist. Here, I'm certainly reading Plato through later Platonists like Soren Kierkegaard or Alfred North Whitehead.

But the idea is that what we're looking for is not what a thing is for, but what a relationship is for, namely how a thing is embedded in its environment. So the classic example that Aristotle also uses is friendship. You know, what does it mean to be a good friend? Well, you have to know what friendship is for. And that doesn't mean perfection. And we're not asking, what does it mean to be a perfect friend? It just means when you're trying to be somebody's friend, what are you trying to do?

Well, you're trying to build trust relations and common projects and you're not trying to betray them. That doesn't mean you do that perfectly. It just means that's what you're trying to do. Right. Or even that you know at any given moment how to do it perfectly. Sure, yeah. Some situations it's very difficult to know how to be a good friend in that situation.

Right. But Plato's going to say that doesn't mean that the ideal of being a good friend is no longer relevant. It just means that the task of being a good friend is difficult. Yeah. Being a good person is hard work. Yeah. Good. The second response I would make to Elizabeth Anderson and Sally Haslinger's concern, can we really know an ideal from our present very non-ideal vantage points?

is simply that we've seen ideals realized already. I'm going to read a quote from Plato here. This comes from The Laws, and then I'll give a brief commentary. He writes, Justice and sensible moderation are virtues that are part of the spiritual characteristics of the gods, although one can find them quite clearly residing among us too, albeit on a small scale.

End quote. And all he's saying there is, sure, in the ideal, which for him was, you know, how the gods live, not the gods of his mythology, but his sort of reimagined gods, gods who are actually good. He says, yeah, the gods live perfect goodness. We don't.

But that doesn't mean we don't see goodness realized on a small scale in human life. We do see acts of compassion. We do see acts of humility. We do see... people being generous people being honest people being patient people being courageous so even though we don't do it perfectly we do see it done And that gives us hope to know both that there are ideals and that they are attainable because we've already done it to some degree.

That's it for part one of my discussion with Michael Fitzpatrick on idealism. Look in the Reductio feed in your podcast app. for part two of our conversation, which will be about the same length. In part two, we get into some more criticisms of idealism and perhaps more practical matters about how do we actually carry out political deliberation if we are committed to idealism.

Welcome to Reductio Adventures and Ideas. I'm your host, Andrew Lavin. Reductio is a show about philosophy, about ideas, and about understanding ourselves and our world more clearly. Brought to you by Inverted Spectrum Media. Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Michael Fitzpatrick about idealism. So the...

First part, we kind of laid out a common conception of what idealism is. And then we started to address a couple of concerns and idealism or ideal theory versus non-ideal theory and tried to... make sense of what are non-ideal theorists picking up on when they distinguish themselves from ideal theorists and what sort of critiques of idealism or ideal theory are fair and what sort of... critiques are not fair, or maybe are fair only of certain practitioners of idealism or ideal theory.

And in this next episode, we'll sort of talk about maybe a little bit more practically about how do you actually... engage with political decision-making and political movements and political deliberation. And I hope you enjoy. Okay, good. So this kind of leads us into this analogy that I think is really, really helpful for thinking through. these issues and the relationship between you know maybe idealism and pragmatism or ideal theory versus non-ideal theory

And I know it's an analogy that we've both kind of taken quite seriously in our own thinking through these issues. We actually mentioned it in our Rawls episode. You mentioned this analogy, and that's the analogy of basically like being on a landscape. right and it's helpful because quite literally right now navigating navigating where to go as a society or a community or a nation or a state is navigating a terrain.

right there are ways to go there's paths you could follow that would lead in one direction and paths you could follow that would lead in another direction and if you're like me then you think There are paths that can lead you in the wrong direction and in a bad direction, and there are paths that could lead you in the or a right direction or a good direction, better and worse directions and things like that.

And I think this is a helpful analogy, partially because it makes relatively clear one kind of worry that I have nagging me in the back of my mind. And it's a kind of... There's a sort of anti-idealism I have, just sort of intuitively. And what that looks like, I think, ends up looking like you're on this terrain. You want to get going uphill, right? And there's a sort of epistemological concern about your immediate environment, right? If we go this direction, then...

We're not totally sure where that's going to lead us. Right. If we introduce rank choice voting, what is that going to do to our society? It's not it's not obvious. Right. It might it might be good. It might be bad. It might empower.

certain people that we didn't expect it to empower like you know it will it will move us one step in the immediate vicinity and it might be the case that actually the way to get to our ideal so i don't think i would reject the idea of ideals but i'm still a little skeptical of exactly what an ideal looks like and all that kind of stuff we'd have to flesh that out but

If we want to move in a direction that is at least more ideal than where we are now, we might have to go downhill before we go uphill. And if we focus just on going uphill... we might end up on what in like, I think what you would call in topology, I'm not like an expert on this, but I think you would call like a local maxima.

maximum or like the plural would be local maxima like where you're on a little foothill right and if you focus on going uphill you're going to end up at the top of the foothill and then anywhere you have to go from there is down right But if you want to get to the mountain top, then you have to go down through valleys and things like that. And so navigating these terrains are difficult and also... The terrain is not well lit. It's dark. It's difficult to know where to go.

And so there's like sort of just as a matter of like how to carry out politics and political moves and political discourse, there's a part of me that really strongly feels like we just have to make a step. And then survey the landscape around us and see what did that do for us? Because we don't know antecedently.

How to get it's like we're never in Moses's position where we're actually at the mountaintop and we're actually seeing the route to the promised land. We're actually in a situation where we're like, OK, I know that we want to get. over there on the other side of the or the the senai desert right

And so I know we got to go in that direction. And I know in the meantime, it's going to be kind of hard. Once we get there, we're going to have to do a whole new survey. We're going to have to like figure out what's going on. And along the way, we're going to have challenges that are going to arise that we didn't. anticipate and all that kind of stuff so that's i i think where some of my

Where I kind of think of myself as a bit of a pragmatist sometimes, as opposed to maybe an idealist, is the idea that we can't know ahead of time where we're headed and what the path is. Oftentimes we just have to make a step. and then survey the local terrain from there because we'll be in a totally different situation then. Well, that's a lovely picture.

And I think the first thing to say is, at least some of the time, that is true. There's... countless examples from human history where we found ourselves in situations where it's just not at all clear what we should do i'm thinking of course of the French insurgency inside of Vichy, France in 1942-43. This is before the Allies got an organized plan to liberate France, and you have just these people on the underground who are carrying out terrorist insurgency.

and are incredibly anxious about what they should be doing because they just have no idea how in the world to oppose this incredible war machine that has dominated their country. So I do think it's important, and I think Plato himself is explicit about this, to say that just because there are ideals doesn't mean we always have access to them. And I think the kind of trial and error methodology you're describing to just do something is probably a perfectly good approach.

to that kind of a situation i think the the question i would ask is even in the situation you described so we're completely lost visibility is bad, we don't even know north, south, east, and west, that kind of a thing, right? Isn't it still the case that there are ideals structuring the background of the example? I mean... It doesn't seem like you're contemplating a suicide as a response. No. And that suggests to me that...

There's still an ideal of maintaining our survival long enough to reconstitute some kind of life, right? And what Plato wants to say is, well, suppose you do your trial and method error and you get to a point to where you all like have your bearings and can go somewhere where you can form a community again. What's the point of that? What's that for? And he wants to say that if the trial and error method itself is to be justified, it has to be because...

You're trying to get to a place where you can form a just society, where you can instantiate the good. If that ideal is not at least somewhere in the background. Then what's the point of the trial and error method? And I'd be curious to know what you would say to that. Yeah, so I think this is sort of where I have started to think my considered opinion has started to be that these things actually just sort of collapse into one another to a certain extent.

Like to be a real political pragmatist is just like, I guess, just to like care about your own political career or something, you know, it's like.

oh, this is a thing I could do and it would get me votes or something. You know, it's like, that's like a real pure pragmatist is like someone who has no ideals at all and just does what seems prudent at the time given some... really empty goals they have in mind of like gaining more political power for its own sake or something like that you know it's just like that's what a pure pragmatist is and then a pure idealist i guess on the other end of the spectrum is someone who has you know written

written works of fiction about their ideal society and never even considers how to get from here to there never even considers whether their ideal like actually addresses all the concerns that all different types of people are going to have and and meets the needs of all different kind of people you know it's like that's a really bad idealist

And there's a really bad pragmatist. And then everyone else is like somewhere in the middle and is actually has ideals of some kind and also cares about what the next step is. Right. And so I think a lot of you and I like went back and forth a lot over like, I was kind of like, I don't know if I buy idealism and I'm like kind of like pragmatism, blah, blah, blah. And I've like come to think most of.

Most of what we were actually arguing about is like concrete things that we actually concretely wanted to do. So the conversation ends up being about, A, maybe different ideals. But I think that's actually less common. I think the most common disagreement ends up just being about how do you get from here to the ideal? Because most of the time we all basically agree on a lot of ideal things.

You know, maybe I can out you as a skeptic of democracy, but I still think you believe in a lot of democratic ideals, right? And so you still, and I should say, I share a lot of your skepticism.

And that's part of why I think, you know, there's a sense in which we're both sort of people who accept democratic ideals. Then there's a question of like, how do we actually flesh it out? How do we actually get from here to there? What's the next step? And those are... far more challenging and stuff like that um but i do think most reasonable people

actually do agree on a lot of the ideals a lot of the time and actually have ideals that they want to uphold. Just like I think a lot of people who detract from liberalism. are angry at the actual versions of liberalism that come about rather than like, you know, it's very clear that things that John Locke say.

And things that Thomas Jefferson say give you a society where there is no slavery, right? Even though they were both slave owners and might have even written some stuff that was kind of... pro-slavery or or at least you know sympathetic to um the status quo when it came to slavery and stuff like that but it's like But we all basically agree on the ideals of basic human equality and what a basically good human life looks like and that it doesn't look like being a slave, you know? Yeah, let me...

So I share that view too. I think as Rawls formulated in a theory of justice, ideal theory and non-ideal theory should be two halves of one whole. I think the problem is Rawls didn't practice that. But I do think that the things that non-ideal... theorists raise as concerns are excellent concerns. They should be incorporated into our ideals. So I'll give a quick example here. I think war is evil.

And that the only ideal we can have is peace. But I'm not a pacifist. I consider myself... an anti-war non-pacifist, which means I do think that sometimes we have to fight war to make peace possible. And so this is what you were describing when you said sometimes we have to go downhill to go uphill. Yeah, it's a great example. But Plato's way of thinking about this is... You have to, if you're going to fight a war, you have to fight a war in a way that makes peace a live possibility afterwards.

Yeah, that that's the I think where pragmatists and idealists have sometimes gotten into a fight is pragmatists will sometimes fall into a by any means necessary trap. Right. Which we might describe as realism. As realists, sure. Absolutely. Yeah, political realists are like that. And again, I think political realists have their uses. But... What Plato wants to enjoin is that our ideals shape our means.

And that, I think, it's not that he was against pragmatism. In fact, I have a quote I hope we can end with that I think shows he was the ultimate pragmatist. But it's that if you believe there is a form of the good that should shape any particular set of relationships, that means you can't go about realizing that ideal just in any particular way. Right. You have to pursue a certain course of action that will make the ideal possible on the other end of the action. Right.

And that's really it. I am open to almost any pragmatic proposal that meets that condition. And I think a lot of my disagreements over the years have been with proposals that I look at them and I think, but wait a minute, is that going to bring us closer to the ideal on the other end? Because if not, then I start to ask again, where are we going? Yeah. So I was thinking that there are sort of two, there are two types of means you could take.

that I can think of in the moment that would make accomplishing better things later on more difficult. And so one of those things is the sort of... to flip the common phrase on its head to let the good become the enemy of the perfect or something like that, right? Where if you're like... This happens all the time in politics. It happens all the time in deciding voting and things like that of just like, let's, you know, we have this very like non-ideal law that's just.

messy and difficult and maybe it's too baroque or maybe it's maybe it's too simplistic and it doesn't accomplish but it's at least doing something right so you can imagine We finally get something to make some moves towards establishing common sense gun control or something like that. But it's just like we know it's not going to work and it's not quite going to work.

the right way. It's not going to accomplish the full thing. And so maybe we should hold out for something different. If we do go ahead and vote for it, we might... have exhausted all the political capital that we have for gun control and then in two years when we go back to try to do more gun control everyone's like we already did that like we we already figured out gun control or whatever let's move on to a different

thing when the people who deeply care about gun control reforms and things like that are going to be left without any options at that point because we've sort of exhausted the political capital. You run the risk in the opposite direction, right? If we vote something like that down, then it's like, well, we put gun control in front of you and you voted no on it.

That's happened in California a number of different times when it came to like certain kinds of, you know, just sort of consumer protection laws and stuff. It's like, well, we put it in front of you and you all voted no when a lot of people voted no because it wasn't. a very good law you know and it wasn't actually a referendum on the issue itself so that's one thing is the the good being the enemy of the perfect and then the other thing that you could do is is where you

I think the war example is one example. Just like the scorched earth thing where you go so far as to exclude certain people from... political discourse or or even from like the goods offered by society so that you've effectively excluded them from society and then they don't go away and they're still there

Right. And, you know, maybe there's a sort of analogy with the Civil War. I don't know. I'd be kind of timid about making that not knowing, not being a historian and not knowing, but, you know, sort of like. Well, let me give you. Let me give you a pithy phrase that we can play with here. Yeah. That's a very sharp way to make the point. Yeah. Genocide is an excellent way to make peace. Yeah.

No non-ideal theorist is going to advocate that. Why? And it's because we don't think peace by the annihilation of those who are causing you antagonism. actually is a realization of the ideal of peace. We think, no, peace means everybody who's here right now forming a healthy set of relations with each other. Mm hmm. Right. Yeah. No, that's a that's a great example of, you know, at the end of the day, you either, you know, you either separate and then form, you know, a sort of.

allyship with a different country that you don't. you're not in the same country with which i have not let go of the the possibility that that's the right thing to do actually but uh right i would say i haven't ruled it out i guess is what i should say or you have to make peace You have to find a way to live together and to make a society together. And it's not obvious what the right move is, but...

But what the wrong move is is to, you know, go to war or, you know, attempt genocide or attempt to just so marginalize one. point of view that those people aren't actually invited into the community they're just shoved aside and made irrelevant as as tempting like i mean every day i have that fantasy right of just shoving people to the side and not just not acknowledging them because they seem to me to be so irrelevant from things that truly matter.

But I also, you know, the angels of my better nature, like, remind me every day also that that's, like, not the way you can actually achieve lasting peace. Yeah, some quick... plato things here as we just wrap this up that i think are again show how practical and relevant plato was um again plato's watchword if is if it's not good for all it's not good I think that radical sense of inclusion is a political vision that we would really benefit from. Another thought is that...

The thing that everybody has missed in Plato is that different contexts are going to manifest the good in different ways. He is not proposing or encouraging a one-size-fits-all solution. He's saying justice in your context, which might look different than justice in my context. is still justice. That's the crucial thing. It's something in common, even though the contextual details are distinct.

And that way I, in my context, can advocate for justice for you. And you, in your context, can advocate for justice for me because it's the same universal form. even though the pragmatic on the ground practice of it is going to require different strategies. He has this great passage where he says, this is at the very beginning of the laws, he says, you know, the real difficulty is to make political systems reflect in practice the trouble-free perfection of theory. So...

He just comes right out and says it. And he says the human body is probably a parallel. One cannot rigidly prescribe a given prescription or medicine. for a given body because any regime will invariably turn out in some respects to injure our bodies at the same times as it helps them and others. So he's acknowledging that like...

you know, these contextual sensitivities are intrinsic to the political situation. And I think we've created this kind of extremism where we say either there's a one size fits all ideal. Or we say, screw the ideal and just do what works. And Plato is saying, no, be somebody who contemplates the form of the good. So that you have the wisdom to know what the good looks like in your situation. Right. Yeah. And I kind of started thinking about this conversation.

I was thinking like, I feel like I'm kind of the Aristotle to your Plato a lot of the time. And I think in exactly the same way that Aristotle and Plato are actually not that far from each other when you like really drill down on what. what their philosophical pictures are and look like there's some key differences and like i'm not

not denying that they're distinct, but they're also in the grand scheme of things, they're quite close to one another in a lot of ways. And I think that's true here where one of my skepticisms comes from... A Aristotle plus Wittgenstein kind of approach to these things where I think ideals almost can't be truly transcendent from. the things for which they're ideal so like ideals arise out of the practices and the and the the concrete realities

for which their ideals. And a certain, I am completely open to this being like an unfair caricature of Plato, but I'll invent this caricature where... It's like Plato thinks that in the same way that like the definition for triangle has nothing to do with actual triangles in the real world, right? It's sort of like the definition for triangle floats out. geometrical heaven completely distinct from real attempts at making triangles in the real world and we can use these

concrete attempts at triangles to try to learn things about geometry. But at the end of the day, we're like using these sort of pale reflections of real geometry or something. And I think politics... doesn't work that way or maybe can't work that way because politics has to arise out of and be sort of embedded in the concrete realities that we are we find ourselves in

And so the idea that one of my professors at UCLA, Gavin Lawrence, used to say was things like, there's no Archimedean point out there. So there's no like, there's no point.

outside of the reality that we're in that's pointing us as like this is the ideal what the ideal is is something that arises directly out of what we're doing and and i think It's kind of the picture you're giving of Plato actually is not, you know, if you want to know what a citizen is, then let's like define in the way that you define a triangle. what a citizen is, completely divorced from the actual behavior of real citizens. No, you actually look at what is a citizen, what is a citizen for?

And then your picture of what the ideal citizen is arises out of looking at real societies and... the the way that real people interact in a society it doesn't arise out of just like the axioms you have that you derive a theorem that is this is what a citizen is or something like that and it's completely

divorced from concrete reality right and and so i think when i think of aristotle versus plato perhaps unfairly sometimes i think of this dialectic between someone who thinks the The ideals and the real world is out there. At an infinitesimal point, like, you know, in geometry, it's like, you know, sort of this point way out there that an Archimedean point that we can use to orient based off of, but has very little.

to do with what we're actually doing here in the here and now. And the Aristotle I have in my mind is one who thinks that functions and ideals and what things are for is embedded in... the reality that we're living in right now and embedded in the systems and the contexts that are actually happening here and like in in the very real human nature that has has evolved over time of course that's not aristotle um but

you know, the sort of Aristotelian idea I have. Yeah, so I'm not sure I've... articulated that the perfect way but that's kind of a vague idea of like where i think of there's like an aristotle and a plato and i think of myself more on the side of the aristotle even though i don't think of these as like these deeply divided positions, you know. Well, I do think you've done something extremely useful, which is I think you've given voice to maybe the other side of the stereotype of Plato.

We started this podcast discussion with... the stereotype of idealism. And I think this is the other side of that coin when it comes to Plato, which is the ideals are off and never, never land. And all we're, all we're. poor pitiful humans are doing here as we're trying in vain to draw the perfect triangle. As is my want, I like to... Take all the standard tropes of contemporary Anglophone philosophy and turn them on their head. I think the real picture when you do the textual work.

is almost the exact reverse. I think Aristotle is the one who has these pictures of natures that are really difficult to justify on empirical reality. The obvious, the easiest one, for example's sake, is the opening of the politics, where Aristotle gives a non-racist defense of slavery. He thinks... Some people, not based on race, but based on other things, are just born to be slaves by nature. Plato doesn't make that mistake. He argues against the idea of slavery being inherent to anybody.

And in my view, my reading of Plato, he sows the seeds for an abolition of slavery. And I think the difference between them was precisely that Plato's methodology... was in all of those dialogues that he writes is to run a bunch of concrete thought experiments of what if we did it this way? What if we did it this way? And he's like doing the trial and error testing that you were talking about earlier. And he doesn't buy into this idea that we're locked down to these, these.

predefined essences. To the contrary, he starts almost every dialogue by throwing out a bunch of definitions and then calling them all into question. And as far as the heaven of forms idea that all these ideals are floating off somewhere and we just got to set our compass to the right thing. I think that has been a misunderstanding of a literary.

trope. Plato was a master literary writer. He comes up with all these wonderful allegories and mythologies and examples that are just so intuitive and so effective, but they all... are just literary devices. And I do not think that an accurate read of Plato is that he thinks there's like this other realm where these forms just float around or something like that. And, you know, no Platonist that I know of who comes after Plato thinks that. Right.

You know, maybe Plotinus. I don't know. Plotinus writes a lot of really weird things that I don't understand. But the vast majority of them don't think that. What they think is that Plato is trying to say... My hope here is to say something that really touches what you were calling your Aristotelian tendency. Plato is trying to say... That when you look at a particular concrete relationship, or in your example, a particular concrete political situation.

If we limit ourselves to saying what is possible is only what is, what is, what is there. then we cut ourselves off from the possibility that the good of that situation is not what is currently happening. Right. And so all he's saying is that every relationship that exists... has a good, not just what it is, but what it could be if it were good. And that has nothing to do with something somewhere else that has to do with something that.

could be instantiated here, but is not yet. So I think the spatial analogy actually misleads us. Yeah. And we would be better to think of Plato's forms as being inherent in every relationship, but not reducible to the material facts of the relationship. Right. That's the right way to state Platonism. And once we see it that way, then we can absolutely say with you, ideals do emerge from the concrete situation.

but they are not bounded or determined by the concrete situation. And I think we want to say that if we want to make sure that the powerful don't get to define what the ideals are. Right. Yeah. Which I think I think is the picture that Aristotle should have arrived at. Right. Which is that. If you look at an organism, I think is my favorite example when you're talking about Aristotle, which is if you look at an organism, it is possible to...

see that, you know, some things are not working, you know, to spec, that some things are not functioning properly. And it's possible to figure out like, okay, what would it be like if things were functioning properly? And to do that isn't to... draw up a blueprint of the organism. It's just to look at what's going on in the organism and look at what might be going wrong.

You end up with a picture that's not totally dissimilar to a blueprint, but it is a sort of picture of, okay, this is what it would look like if everything was functioning well. Aristotle himself, I think, like you point out, ends up with misogynistic and, you know, for his day racist, even though they're not.

Like you point out, it's sort of anachronistic to call them racist, but he does have these sort of like ethnocentrist views and things like that. Like he has bad views and it's partially because he... probably pays too close of attention to the way things are and is bounded in his imagination by the way things are. Whereas Plato...

like you pointed out earlier in our conversation, believes very strongly that our imagination should not be bounded by, it should be informed by, but not bounded by the way things are right now. And so, yeah, I think... It's certainly if you look at their actual views on concrete things that still matter to us today, like it's team Plato all the way, right? He's the feminist and he's the, like you say, maybe sort of proto-abolitionist.

and things like that. He clearly has the right views on that. And Aristotle clearly has the wrong views on some of those things. And possibly because of, you know, maybe it's a lack of... a lack of imagination or an imagination that gets too heavily bound up in the way things are. And what we're imagining is not, gosh, I wish I could live in that perfect city in the clouds. Right.

What we're imagining is, what if this city was closer to the good of this city than it currently is? Right. And with that, let me maybe wrap this up by, I just want to read a few... Plato passages for listeners to give people a sense, just in case I still have a few stragglers who think I've invented Plato, maybe the way Saul Kripke invented a Wittgenstein. Yeah.

I actually want this to be a read of Plato that is faithful to the actual person and the actual text and not just what I want Plato to be. Yeah. Plato has some letters in addition to his dialogues. And in one of his letters, he talks about his own activist work. A lot of people don't know that he wasn't just some airy fairy academic because there really wasn't such.

a thing in his day. He actually engaged in several attempts to instantiate political reforms, both in Athens and in other places. And when he writes a letter where he talks about his... partnership with another politician to try to overthrow the tyranny in Sicily. He says part of why he did it was, lest I appear to myself as a pure theorist unwilling to touch any practical task.

So he's very much has in mind, like it is not okay to just sit around and like come up with clever ideas and not try to bring them about. So he actually walked into Sicily with a copy of the Republic under his hand.

determined to like do the thing um and so that gives us some sense that he really is imagining this as a set of practical proposals And that allows us to then draw our attention to book five of the Republic, where either Glaucon or Adiomantius... you know they've been listening to this kind of construction of what the different aspects of the good society are for and they say

Okay, you know, this all sounds nice, but let's now try to convince ourselves that it is possible. To quote them, you know. we're not going to let you off from telling us how it's possible for this type of a society to actually come into being. And... Socrates' response is really fascinating. This is book 5, 472c to 473b for those nerds who want to check my math here.

He first says, well, just remember, contemplating ideals is good for its own sake. Whether or not we can bring these things about, like being the kinds of people who... train ourselves to gaze upon the ideals is good for us, like for our soul. But then he goes on to say, And now I'm quoting, if we are able to discover how a city could come to be governed in a way that most closely approximates our description of the ideal.

Let's say that we've shown what you've ordered us to show, namely that it's possible for our city to come to be. So he's not saying, and Plato's view is not that we all have to go and instantiate the Republic as written. Rather, we just have to figure out what is possible that we can actually instantiate.

And that is the closest possible approximation to the thing. And then he goes on to say, then next it seems we should try to discover... and point out what's now badly done in cities that keeps them from being governed in that way, and what's the smallest change that would enable our city to reach our sort of constitution. One change, if possible. Or if not one, two. Or if not two, then the fewest a number and the least extensive.

so he's saying like okay yeah we sit down and we figure out what's the closest approximation to the ideal and then we figure out What's the steps that have to be taken to get from our current situation to that closest possible approximation? This is right here in the heart of the Republic.

which is supposed to be Plato at his most ideal. No, it's Plato at his most practical. He's saying, here's the ideal. And now what we're going to spend the rest of the Republic doing is figuring out how we get from there to here. His point here is to say... that we have to differentiate between possibility and difficulty. Plato believes that the good society is possible, and he takes extensive pains throughout.

The Republic, the statesman, the laws to show that it's attainable. But sometimes I think we make impossible what is just hard to do. And what Plato draws somewhat of a hard line on is that sometimes doing the right thing is just hard. And so that's, that's the kind of note I wanted to end on here is saying like Plato is very clearly right here in the Republic, very sensitive to non-ideal conditions, very sensitive to pragmatic concerns, very sensitive to.

not just saying something that's true in theory, but could never be done. But he wants to push back and say, ask yourself, are you worried about the possibility of something? Or are you worried about the difficulty? Because... There are no roads to the good that aren't difficult. And I think that's a really striking thing to realize. Like we think about the civil rights movement from.

the Montgomery bus boycotts all the way until Johnson signs the civil rights act of 1964. Right. Like there's just, there are no roads open. There are no roads open to them that are not difficult. And so if the only roads of the ideal are difficult, we want to make sure that whatever pragmatism we bring in, which I'm all for, whatever non-ideal considerations we bring in, which I'm all for.

They don't have as a condition, well, let's do the things that aren't difficult. Right. Because if we do that, we give up the ideal. And the ideal is worth fighting for. Yeah. Amen to that. So I want to bring up one thing because I think this is going to sort of nag in the minds of some listeners. But maybe we can keep this kind of brief because we've run... We run short on time, but I do think one of the things that gets to me and I think gets to a lot of people is...

So sometimes thinking too much about the ideal and what an ideal society looks like, and even thinking too hard about how to get from here to the ideal. can sometimes get in the way and rob attention from people who are suffering in the here and now. And people... who are being oppressed and murdered and brutalized and killed and assaulted and, you know, like people are suffering right now. And so I think my most resistant moments.

to like sort of idealism or to this sort of picture of how to go about thinking about politics is thinking about like the very real cost of different ways of moving forward. And I don't think this is necessarily like a challenge that you have to answer for, because I do think everyone is going to have this problem to a certain extent. Like it's not.

it's like you say all roads are difficult all roads that lead in a even moderately good direction are difficult like they're not even all roads that lead towards the ideal like all roads are difficult. And also basically whatever we do, people are going to suffer as a result. And so I do think this is a problem that everyone faces.

I don't think it's really unique to the kind of picture that you're painting of Plato or the kind of idealism that you're... you're defending here but I do think it like bears mentioning because this is the thing that keeps me up at night and it's the reason why I'm tempted to keep voting for really disappointing candidates and it's because I just can't bear to see people

And I think, you know, I care so much about the individual people involved, maybe even to a detriment of actually getting us moving towards an ideal. And I think there's a real tension there. So, yeah. Yes, I very much endorse everything you just said. I think... Plato's counsel. Let's put it that way. Plato's counsel is it is possible to be so concerned about suffering and to just want to do something that...

what we do is we end up perpetuating the suffering while mitigating it. So there's a really wonderful book out right now by Matthew Desmond called Poverty by America. in which he argues that the difference between the right and the left in America is just a difference between people who don't care about the poor on the right. and people who care about the poor in a way that just keeps them perpetually poor on the left.

In other words, because they're so concerned about the suffering of the poor, they enact all these programs that keep the poor... Just helped enough to not like die, but not enough to cease to be poor. And what Plato wants to say is absolutely, we should start from the suffering. That's going to be our...

first clue, like where to look for where the good needs to be instantiated. Right. But we need to have wisdom, which is a virtue. We need to have wisdom that says, Here's the thing that's actually going to alleviate suffering rather than just make it not quite as bad. but perpetuates it in the long run. And he was not immune to this. Athens had been sacked by the, I think it was the Persian army.

and just utterly destroyed. The Greek states eventually repelled the invaders, but Athens paid an extremely high price. And that was one of the things he was thinking about. Like, whatever else happens, we've got to prevent foreign empires from just destroying entire city states. Like, this is horrible.

And so he was trying to come up with really practical proposals in the Republic on how to do that. And that shows, I think, a real sensitivity to suffering, but he wanted to make it so that it was a real solution. And not, you know, to use the common metaphor, a cure, not a bandaid.

I'm not saying we don't ever do Band-Aids. So yes, there might be temporary situations where a Band-Aid is the best you can do. Right. But if we are only ever putting Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids and we never get to a solution. Right. That's when Plato wants to say it's time for a more radical politics. Yeah, I'd feel remiss if I didn't say that. I think the left in general, if they had their way, would not create a society where poor people are just taking care of enough.

to not be poor anymore i i think the there is no way to point to actual american policy as an indictment of the left of america the left wing of american politics because they've never gotten their way you know that's fair that's fair the leftmost president we've ever had is joe biden or maybe barack obama you know it's like these are not leftists now come on jimmy carter is jimmy carter yeah much further to the left

yeah yeah i mean i was i was thinking like in the um in the in the uh recent years i guess is what i was thinking recent decades but yeah no it's just like Like these, these are not leftists. And also they, even they haven't had the resources to really enact the things they would want to do. And so that's fair. Yeah. I absolutely think that's fair.

But but I actually think your comments, you know, we got to have a little bit of disagreement here. Exactly. I think your comment shows the depth of Matthew Desmond's point, which is why then? Is the left not getting its way? Because... I don't know anybody who's more virulently in support of, you know, democratic institutions than the left. And I just want to say, like, Plato is not a Democrat, lowercase d, for a reason.

Because he doesn't think it is okay for a minority of the population to prevent the good being shared by all. And that is exactly what contemporary liberal democracies... So I'm not saying you're not right about the intent of the left or even the economic policies of the left. But I think there is a real unwillingness to be so radical as to ask.

Is there a tension between the type of political institutions the left supports and the economic policies the left supports? And if there is a tension there, what should we do about it? Plato has a very... clear set of suggestions i would love to i'd love to sell them some yeah yeah i i uh i'll i'll leave it there i think that's a good spot to leave it um

Michael Fitzpatrick, thank you so much for joining us. That was a super interesting conversation and I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and your deep reading of Plato with us. This was super fun and I hope some... People are inspired to read Plato in a new light. And more practically, I hope people are inspired to dream beyond what they currently think is possible. Amen to that. Thank you to Michael Fitzpatrick. Thank you for listening.

As always, don't forget to like and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a review. Find us on Patreon if you'd like to financially support Reductio. Until next time, I'm Andrew Lavin, and this has been a production of Inverted Spectrum Media.