Footnotes on Things I’ve been Reading: Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest

Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (1999).

This is a book about human “political nature.” Clearly the mature fruit of a long life of anthropological research, the book considers a question that goes back to Hobbes and Rousseau: the origins of inequality (or rather, of equality, in this case) and its relationship to “human nature.” To answer this question, Boehm draws on a wealth of ethnographical and archeological evidence, as well as studies of primate societies (primarily chimpanzees and bonobos, but also baboons and gorillas).

The starting point of the book is the observation that, though human societies range from the extremely egalitarian to the abjectly despotic, and our closest primate relatives create basically despotic groups, human forager bands are always extremely egalitarian (Boehm knows. He obviously read almost all significant ethnographies of forager bands as of the late 1990s). This egalitarianism is of course partly due to basic material causes: in a forager society with little division of labor it is difficult to stockpile durable resources or acquire scarce skills in ways that can be exploited for political advantage, as Rousseau saw, especially when dissatisfied individuals have a relatively cheap (though not costless) exit option (people can move between bands easily). But the material causes are not the whole story, as the despotic forager social groups created by our close primate relatives, who also have little “property,” show. In particular, human forager bands are politically egalitarian (and not just economically egalitarian), recognizing no real, permanent authorities (there are typically no chiefs or “alpha males,” and decisions are made by consensus) and displaying a “democratic” ethos of autonomy where each individual thinks himself the equal of the rest (Whether women are considered equals within the band varies from forager band to forager band, partly depending on environmental factors and patterns of exogamy, but for the most part women in forager bands tend to have higher status than women in other forms of society). Boehm tells some striking stories about the general ineffectiveness of “chiefs” in forager bands: people who try to give orders in them basically get ignored.

This observation about forager societies is important because it seems reasonably well established that foraging societies were our “ancestral societies,” i.e., the environments where any natural dispositions that human beings possess even today evolved. We probably lived for at least 100,000 years in such societies before we came up with different forms of social organization, and so the (controversial, but at least plausible) assumption is that insofar as human beings have a political nature, it would be manifested most clearly in such societies, or at least it would have been shaped in such societies (though it is not clear that the forager societies of today are good proxies for the forager societies of 100,000 years ago): there should be a sense in which we were ecologically adapted to life in such societies (rather than in contemporary complex societies). The question is, then, what explains the egalitarianism of forager bands, both current and historical? And is the explanation for forager egalitarianism something that we can attribute to “human nature”?

Boehm’s main thesis is that forager egalitarianism is sustained by moral communities that enable the rank and file to build coalitions to put down would-be “alphas.” Forager bands, in his view, have “reversed” dominance hierarchies that prevent bullies and aggressors from creating a dominance hierarchy of their own: egalitarianism is sustained by the coordinated dominance of the strong by the weak. Without the ability of the rank and file to form large coalitions to put down would-be dominators, the primate tendency is to establish dominance hierarchies, as we see in chimpanzees and bonobos; but the ability to form large and stable coalitions in turn depends on the development of the capacity for symbolic communication, and, to a lesser degree, of projectile weapons. (Low-ranking chimpanzees can sometimes band together and put down alpha males, as the chimpanzees at Yerkes Primate Research Center are reported to have done, but they do not seem to be able to create stable coalitions that get rid of the entire dominance hierarchy, unlike human beings). This seems right to me: in order for status equality to be resilient against attempts to subvert it, it requires a vigilant community to sanction upstarts and bullies; and the vigilance of the community is primarily made possible by a set of norms that strongly promote values such as generosity, sharing, and the like and proscribe certain forms of arrogance, etc., as Boehm notes.

But Boehm goes further: he argues that the emergence and maintenance of egalitarianism in forager societies supports a view of human “political nature” that he calls “ambivalent:” human beings (especially males) display tendencies towards dominance, just like chimpanzees and bonobos (though within a group the strength of these tendencies will be variable, of course), but they also resent being dominated, and in humans that resentment of domination is able to generate strongly egalitarian societies in the right material circumstances. (Boehm suggests that the same resentment of domination can be observed in chimpanzees and bonobos, though without the ability to form stable coalitions for egalitarian purposes they can’t do much about it, especially since male chimps and bonobos do not have an “exit” option: solitary males who leave the group are liable to be killed on sight by other groups). Hobbes and Rousseau, in other words, are both right: in the “state of nature” it is the case both that “every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate that he sets upon himselfe” (Leviathan XIII) which leads to attempts to dominate others (to “extort a greater value from his contemners, by dommage,; and from the others, by the example,” what Hobbes also calls “glory”), and that this very same tendency, when combined with the ability to form large coalitions, informed by an ethos of equality (and with a general lack of “property,” understood as durable and potentially scarce resources that can be exploited to create personal forms of dependence, as Rousseau noted), results in the sort of fierce independence that Rousseau praised in the Second Discourse, at least under the right material conditions (little division of labor or durable property). By contrast, similar tendencies among chimpanzees or bonobos evolved into more or less stereotyped dominance and submission behaviors (which make sense from an evolutionary perspective, since they seem to obviate the need for actual conflict over resources, with its attendant risk of death) and the development of clear status hierarchies.

The most interesting and controversial part of Boehm’s book is in the last couple of chapters, where he tells a story about how the emergence of egalitarian moral communities in our distant forager past changed the selection pressures operating on human beings to produce some altruistic tendencies. The story is too complicated (and necessarily speculative) to summarize here, but basically it has to do with how egalitarian moral communities neutralize the reproductive advantages of bullies and aggressive individuals and increase the force of “between group” selection pressures (favoring “altruistic” dispositions) against “within group” selection pressures (favoring “selfish” dispositions). For example, Boehm has some fascinating remarks about the “meat sharing” systems that almost all foragers develop. Hunting is an important source of protein in forager societies, but it is also irregular. Since some people are better hunters than others, these people could perhaps exploit their hunting skills to extract various advantages (including political domination and reproductive advantages), and indeed they sometimes try. But in all forager societies the group basically “randomizes” credit for kills (by giving credit to the owner of the arrow, for example, but swapping arrows incessantly!), so that the actual hunter cannot exploit the fact that he made a kill to dominate the group in any way. Such meat-sharing systems thus seem to reduce the “reproductive” advantage of selfish dispositions.

In general, this is an excellent book, despite some occasional repetition and somewhat pedestrian prose. But it is worth wondering whether it implies much of anything for politics in complex societies. Boehm is too good of an anthropologist to suggest that we simply have a “natural” tendency to create egalitarian societies (there are many human societies where the ethos of equality of forager bands does not exist, as he notes) but he does seem to think that democratic societies (including larger, more complex societies with formal checks and balances, from the Iroquois confederacy to modern representative democracies) are in far better accord with “human nature” than other forms of society. It is not entirely clear to me what this means. Partly, I suspect that he means that we are happier in more equal societies, or at least that we have a tendency to view justice through the lens of equality; if indeed in the vast sweep of human history over the past hundred millennia we have mostly lived in egalitarian societies, it should not be surprising that we have some deep preference for such societies (I was thinking of this when reading this interesting proposal for “income and wealth ceilings” through taxation – deciding collectively that no one should have more than, say, $100,000). But we would need a more robust moral psychology (I’m inclined to think that this moral psychology would follow “Rousseauan” lines about the interaction between self love and love of esteem) to think properly about this question; and it seems to me at any rate that Boehm underplays the ways in which our moral ethos interacts with material factors. It seems rather important that truly egalitarian societies only exist in circumstances where the division of labor is minimal and the possibilities for exit from the group relatively large, and that complex societies are all over the place in terms of the despotic/egalitarian continuum; much of what Boehm says suggests to me that egalitarianism is actually quite fragile once material conditions change. And if the story of forager societies for 100,000 years is basically a story of egalitarianism, the story of complex agricultural societies has been one of inegalitarianism for a good 5,000 years, which, though not as impressive, is still a pretty long time and has involved more people than the previous 100,000 years. Whether truly egalitarian complex societies are possible seems like an open question, and one that cannot be answered by simply pointing to modern democracies (which have many inegalitarian spaces and some egalitarian spaces).

Human nature, it seems to me, is best understood as capable of “moral coalition” formation (coalitions that are also moralized by a specific justificatory ethos). Under some conditions, these coalitions can be used to generate egalitarian societies, but in others they generate inegalitarian societies (every dominant dictator in a complex society needs a coalition to support him, and these coalitions tend to be moralized and justified in various ways). This seems consistent with what Boehm says, but is perhaps a more “pessimistic” about the possibilities for egalitarianism in complex societies. Anyway, I did not intend to write this much about the book, but it is really good; heard about it via Robin Hanson (thanks!), who also has many interesting things to say about how we might describe human nature.

Computational Ability as Intelligence

I sometimes come across articles like this, where things like the following are said:

He said that plants used information encrypted in the light to immunise themselves against seasonal pathogens.

"Every day or week of the season has… a characteristic light quality," Professor Karpinski explained.

“So the plants perform a sort of biological light computation, using information contained in the light to immunise themselves against diseases that are prevalent during that season."

Professor Christine Foyer, a plant scientist from the University of Leeds, said the study "took our thinking one step forward".

"Plants have to survive stresses, such as drought or cold, and live through it and keep growing," she told BBC News.

"This requires an appraisal of the situation and an appropriate response - that's a form of intelligence.

The move I want to highlight is in the last line: why insist that this is a form of intelligence? It seems to me that “intelligence” is a “status” term: when we apply it to something, we raise (or lower) the status of that something, without necessarily adding to our comprehension of the phenomenon (the recognition of this problem is very old; see my post below on Plato and the idea of distinguishing animals from humans through the criterion of “reason”). If the experiments described are appropriate, it seems clear enough that the plants are performing some kind of computation; but in saying that they thereby have some kind of intelligence we do not learn something more about the plants. At best, we only learn about an attempt to increase the status of the research – to make it seem “sexier” perhaps? – and of the researchers.

The same point could be applied with respect to discussions of human and artificial intelligence. Human intelligence, in its many varieties, seems to be simply a form of computation, distinguishable in degree from other forms of computation but not necessarily in kind: it is a complex of abilities, more or less integrated, for pattern recognition, actuarial calculation of costs and benefits of action, social relationship tracking, and the like, augmented by social rules and institutions (themselves the planned or unplanned emergent consequences of interaction). Some of these abilities can be more or less functionally replicated in modern computer hardware (e.g., the ability to play chess), whereas others cannot, at least not yet or with current techniques. Yet when we ascribe intelligence to people or things, we do more than express that they are able to engage in particular forms of computation. Rather, we are for the most part raising (or lowering) the status of whatever it is that we say has “intelligence.” A sign of this is the way in which the term is often used in a proprietary manner: people may object to descriptions of human intelligence that reduce it to computation, or to descriptions of artificial forms of computation as intelligence. Or people become hugely exercised about ideas about intelligence differentials – either to stress that such differences exist or to deny that they exist or matter.

The problem with ascribing intelligence to various computational systems seems to be less the idea that intelligence is a form of computation than the reduction in status accompanying this reduction: to say that human intelligence is merely a form of computation seems demeaning in some ways, since it diminishes the “scarcity” of intelligence as a distinctively human possession, or makes it less special. But if intelligence is computation, then it can be found, to different degrees of “intensity” and “specialization,” in all kinds of systems: plants, animals, insect colonies, social institutions, and of course suitably programmed computers. Some forms of computation in these systems might be more powerful, for particular purposes, than the grab-bag of abilities powered by the human brain; and some forms of computation may be more or less exploitable by individual human beings (your own brain power is usually exploitable, but the computational abilities of other systems may not be so easily exploitable by people in your position). Moreover, computation is always relative to problems: some systems are more effective at computing solutions to certain problems than others. And though there is such a thing as universal computation, the abstract notion of the universal Turing machine does not imply anything about the ability of universal computers to successfully solve a particular problem in a limited time frame – that always depends on the particular “program.” If the human brain seems unusual, it is because it seems to be able to solve a very large number of problems, either by itself, or in conjunction with tools and institutions that amplify and distribute the computing power of human society.

It seems to me that if we could banish the term intelligence and substitute for it a more status-neutral term, a lot of discussions about cognition and “reason” could become clearer (at least until the new term acquired a sufficient positive or negative status valence). Indeed, this seems to have been one purpose of Turing’s “imitation game”: to break down the preoccupation with demarcating the “intelligent” from the “non-intelligent,” by substituting computation for intelligence as the more interesting concept from a theoretical perspective. There is a quote that appears as the epigraph to Accelerando, from the AI pioneer Edsger W. Djikstra, that expresses this attitude perfectly: “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” The question of whether X is intelligent is often no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim: what may matter is the kind of computation that it is able to perform, either by itself, or in conjunction with other agents.

Ideal and Non-ideal Theories of Justice

(Warning: 1500 words on a somewhat technical problem in political philosophy).

A couple of days ago I went to a talk about the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory in contemporary political philosophy. The distinction is typically presented as a distinction between a theory that describes a perfectly or completely just society, and a theory that describes what justice requires in imperfect societies with varying levels of injustice in order to improve it (but not necessarily to make it perfect). There are more precise ways of articulating the distinction (see, for example, here), but probably the most common way of making it precise is the one that Rawls follows in his A Theory of Justice (where the terminology originates): namely, as a distinction between a theory that describes what justice requires when we can expect everyone or almost everyone to be well disposed to act justly ("full compliance" conditions, in the jargon) and a theory that describes what justice requires when we cannot expect everyone to do what justice requires, or to the full extent that justice requires ("partial compliance" theory). To use Rousseau's terminology, this would be a distinction between theories that take people "as they should be" (and can be, if the institutions of society were correctly ordered) and theories of justice that take people "as they are" (but try to suggest institutions that could improve them).

Rawls famously (or infamously, depending on whom you ask) presented his own theory as ideal ("full compliance") theory. But he did not think that ideal theory was unrealistic, or that it incorporated false assumptions about human nature. Since the development of the moral powers is dependent on institutions, and just institutions would reinforce the development of the moral powers, there is nothing "impossible" about full compliance: the right institutions would produce the maximal amount of compliance, because people who grow up in such institutions would develop the moral powers as much as possible (dispositions are "endogenous" to institutions, to use a bit of useful economic jargon). Of course, Rawls might be wrong about the effects of well-ordered institutions on human characters and dispositions, but the theory is not ideal because he assumes something false about human beings, but only because he assumes (on the basis of what he takes to be the best available knowledge about human moral development) something that does not obtain now but might obtain in a different institutional environment, namely, full compliance with the demands of justice.

Since we do not live under the best possible institutions, we need something like a theory of just transitions, i.e., a theory that prescribes or describes just changes along the path towards a well-ordered society; hence, according to Rawls, we need not just ideal theory but also non-ideal theory (which he did not propose to develop). Crucially, however, he argued that without ideal theory it would be impossible to properly develop non-ideal theory. Rawls' model of action seems to have been, like that of most philosophers, a model of making (in Arendt's terminology): we need some kind of ultimate blueprint if we are to be sure that we are moving in the right direction. But this assumption has been attacked by a number of people (as it was at the talk) who think that the (academically dominant) preoccupation with ideal theorizing has become a kind of scholasticism. The objection is basically that ideal theory is superfluous: we do not need ideal theory to tell us which injustices are important and need to be addressed immediately (e.g., slavery, which we might all agree is unjust – why would we need Rawls' theory of justice to tell us this?), and at any rate ideal theory is insufficient to tell us what to do in other cases (how does knowing what the ideal society look like help us figure out what to do about, e.g., female genital mutilation, if anything?).

There are a few obvious responses to this criticism. On one view, for example, ideal theory helps us clarify the values that should be guiding our actions in the non-ideal world: we need to be able, for example, to know what a commitment to "equality" or "freedom" really entails before we go around making changes to various existing social arrangements in their name. In this case ideal theory does not serve as a blueprint for (long-term) action, but rather as an exploration of the structure of our values and of the kinds of trade-offs among them that we should find permissible. But it occurred to me that one useful way of understanding the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory is as a relationship between global theories of justice and local theories of justice.

A global theory of justice is a theory about the just arrangements affecting an entire social order (e.g., a country or the entire world): it prescribes changes to the entire structure of institutions that define a social order so as to make such an order just. A local theory of justice, by contrast, prescribes changes to specific institutions or practices on the background of a (e.g., a local theory of justice might be concerned with the rules of war, or with the problem of poverty in some particular context). Typically, global theories of justice will appear to be ideal relative to local theories in that global changes might seem to require many steps, each of which would be more or less likely to happen, which implies a low likelihood of eventual realization, whereas local changes might seem to require fewer steps, so they appear to be feasible. There is often a relatively clear path to implementation for the prescriptions of local theories of justice, whereas there is no such clear path for global theories. Moreover, global theories of justice may incorporate assumptions about human nature, the nature of justice, and about the possibilities of socialization, that are more uncertain than the assumptions that local theories of justice need to make; so, for example, we are less certain about whether any set of institutions can produce dispositions resulting in "full compliance" than we are that some set of institutions might produce the desired behaviour in some particular field of endeavour. From this point of view, we might assign a much lower probability of being true to any global theory of justice than we would to a local theory of justice.

But global theories of justice might still constrain local theories of justice. For example, it would count as evidence against a local theory of justice that it leads us to a situation where certain apparently desirable global changes seem impossible without injustice. Consider a concrete example discussed in the talk. Buchanan and Keohane have argued for a rule enabling some kind of preventive war, so long as it was waged by a suitably defined "reliable moral actor" or coalition thereof. This is a "local" theory of justice, intended to address a specific problem: Buchanan and Keohane think there are circumstances where it would seem to be a good idea to have the "good guys" wage war to prevent the "bad guys" from doing bad things, and they argue that these circumstances would need to be circumscribed through a specific institutional process. But it would also seem that if the rule proposed by Buchanan and Keohane were to become entrenched, it would prevent developments in the international system towards more "ideal" states (e.g., a Kantian cosmopolitan federation), since the rule seems ripe for abuse by militarily hegemonic powers (like the USA). So from the point of view of an "ideal" theory of justice, one would want to say something like "avoid entrenching a rule that is easily exploitable by military hegemons." This would only be evidence against the local theory of justice, not proof against it; given that the global theory is uncertain, no such proof would be given. But presumably a good local theory of justice would be properly informed by a global theory of justice insofar as it tries to avoid a merely "local" maximum of justice (which could not be abandoned for a more global maximum without injustice), or situations where local improvements in justice in one area (e.g., the rules of war) may lead to injustices in some other area (e.g., institutions concerning the distribution of wealth or income). (Note also that there might not be any "universal continuity" of justice: maybe there is no path towards a globally just society that would not involve injustice). To be sure we do not know much about the global maxima of justice (the states of maximal justice), if there are any such, so that for the most part we are reduced to arguing about local improvements in justice; but to the extent that we can constrain arguments about local justice and injustice byviews about what would be globally just, that would seem to be a good thing no? Anyway, the thought seemed more interesting at the time, but here it is. (I had some other thoughts about the "ought implies can" principle as well, but I will leave these to some other post).

Endnotes

Things that caught my eye over the past week or so:

• Automated debt-collection lawsuits. This is like something out of one of my favorite SF novels, Charles Stross' Accelerando (free e-book!), where sentient financial instruments coexist with automated legal systems. I suppose it's only a matter of time before the techniques used to automate debt collection lawsuits are used to automate P2P lawsuits, or some other form of highly routinizable legal work; I know some legal work in the US is now routinely outsourced to India and other low-cost destinations (I'm sure there must exist some research on this).
• I didn't know that the Iroqois confederacy issued its own passports. I suppose it makes perfect sense for sovereign Indian nations to do so, but it certainly makes it difficult for them to travel. I wonder how the world would look if more non-state groups did this - would the need for a passport diminish, or would we see even further differentiation in the value of a passport (with high-value passports, useful for entry to a lot of places, for some groups of people, and low value passports - like my own - for other groups)?
• Some physicists apparently have been trying to argue that gravity is an effect of the second law of thermodynamics, not an independent force in itself. Though I cannot claim to understand this (and the article's author does not even try to explain), I always feel a certain frisson of excitement about this sort of work. I can imagine that it makes sense - that much about the universe is well described as an effect of the laws of probability (which is basically what the 2nd law of thermodynamics ultimately amounts to: the highest probability configurations of the world are those that take place on the macroscale). This sort of mathematical physics fits in with my instinctive platonism about physics and mathematics. (Really, click the link - platonism is alive and well at the highest levels of physics and mathematics: Tegmark argues that the universe, at the most fundamental level, simply is a mathematical object. And the early parts of the paper are not even too difficult to understand).
• We are basically just walking bacterial ecosystems. One of the interesting things about our evolving understanding of our microbiota is that it seems that our "genes" should include the genes of our live-in bacteria. Thus, though we have about 23,000 protein-coding genes (and an unknown number of RNA-only regulatory switches and stuff we don't really understand) there are really something like 3 million protein-coding genes in our "extended genome" (i.e., counting our bacterial symbionts). These genes even get passed from parents to children in some imperfect ways (from the moment of birth, even).

Monday extremophile blogging: Tardigrades ("Water Bears")

Cute, no? These creatures can withstand the vacuum of space and suspend their metabolism for up to ten years. They can also survive being heated to 150deg. C or being frozen to near absolute zero. And they are multicellular organisms! Much tougher than you are.

Reason and Persons in Classical Greece

In a post I wrote three years ago, before I abandoned this blog for the first time (in accordance with its name) I mentioned a passage in Plato’s Statesman (266e, if you must know) where the Eleatic Stranger, the main character in the dialogue, concludes a long discussion of what appears to be the “definition” of human beings with the claim that human beings are “featherless bipeds,” a definition that, if we are to judge by its presentation in Diogenes Laertius VI.40, achieved a certain kind of comic notoriety (see below). Only a few lines earlier the Stranger had suggested that an equally good definition of human being was the “two-legged pig” (266a5-b9; more precisely the two footed animal that is kin to the pig), and in the discussion leading to these odd conclusions the Stranger had explicitly argued that it is not a good idea to treat the human possession of rationality as the defining characteristic of human beings. To claim that human beings are distinct from other beings because of their possession of reason is to ignore the possibility that other animals might also be rational (cf. 263d, on the possibility of “rational cranes” [!]) and indeed to forget that divine beings are also rational (the rational cranes would be inappropriately “making themselves sacred” if they claimed to be special in virtue of their rationality). In sum, there is something much like “pride” in attempting to distinguish human beings from all other animals by the criterion of rationality, as the Stranger suggests in criticizing young Socrates (the main respondent in the dialogue; he is not related to the elder Socrates, who is the main character in most of Plato’s other dialogues) for his excessive haste in trying to separate human beings from all the other animals on that basis (262a; cf. also 263d).

I simplify a bit. The joke about humans and pigs rests on a comparison between the square root of four (likened to the nature of the pig) and the square root of two (likened to the nature of man – see Campbell, ad loc.) which has the effect of suggesting that in reality the natures of human beings and pigs are “incommensurable” even though the Stranger has just made them commensurable by a quirky mathematical “squaring” procedure (and even though, oddly, human nature is the one that turns out to be “irrational”). The claim that human beings are “featherless” uses a rare and poetic word (πτεροφυής, literally “feather-growing”) that points to a passage in the Phaedrus (251c) suggesting that human beings can “grow wings” and hence rise to gaze upon the forms of order – the good and the just, but especially the noble or the beautiful – even if they no longer have such wings. When my book on the Statesman comes out, you will be able to read my interpretation of these passages at excruciating length. Or you can consult my dissertation, if you are the hardy type and prefer the even longer version.

But regardless of these complications, throughout the dialogue human rationality is clearly presented as something deeply problematic, and certainly not as something that unambiguously marks the boundary between humanity and animality. Though the dialogue appears to be explicitly concerned with the question of what is a human being from 261b to 266e, the Eleatic never gives a simple and satisfactory answer to this question, much less asserts that that human beings are “rational animals;” on the contrary, his answer(s) merely emphasizes the physical differences between animals and humans (their featherlessness, lack of horns, etc.) . In the extraordinary myth that the Stranger makes up shortly after that discussion (my favorite in all of Plato, a story about a time when life ran “backwards”) he speaks about talking animals and attributes rationality not only to human beings but to a number of other embodied, animated creatures, including the universe as a whole (269d), which is indeed described as a kind of rational “animal.” To the extent that human beings have reason, the myth implies, it is divided into a multitude of forms of knowledge or arts which serve to make up for physical deficits that most animals do not have, rather than integrated into a genuine wisdom that truly differentiates us from them. Moreover, these arts are likened to the things that came out of Pandora’s box (274d-e; cf. Hesiod Theogony 536ff, Works and Days 42ff), increasing our physical powers (and hence allowing us to defend ourselves from wild animals) but not necessarily our ability to rule ourselves in a wise and reasonable way (but on the contrary creating the possibility of warfare and other political conflicts). Art or knowledge, in other words, is not for the most part presented as what distinguishes us from other animals but as the adaptive mechanism that enables us to survive as animals (just as horns or hooves are some of the adaptive mechanisms that allow animals to survive as animals).

Thus, whatever one may think of Plato’s ultimate views, it is not clear that he was overly concerned with saying that human beings are distinguished from animals on the basis of their rationality, or that he thought that the question of what distinguishes human beings from animals is easily answered by a formula. Moreover, it is not clear that Plato and later Ancient Platonists, in comparing human beings to pigs (or birds, for that matter) simply assumed that pigs were especially risible or low, as Stephen Clark points out in a lovely piece that is unfortunately inaccessible to anyone without access to a good research university library (“Herds of Free Bipeds”, 1995). On the contrary, there is some evidence that they considered that “curious, naked omnivore” (Clark’s words) worthy of respect. (And Plato perhaps followed the Pythagoreans in thinking this, but who knows?) . If the Eleatic points to the continuity between human beings and other animals, he does not necessarily imply that this is a sufficient reason to think that human beings are of little interest or importance, though he does suggest that we should not be too quick to assume our superiority.

To be sure, Aristotle and the Stoics are perhaps more concerned than Plato with distinguishing humans from other animals, and more definite about the essential difference between humans and animals; indeed, for the Stoics, the definition of human being as the “rational animal” would become a sort of commonplace (see, for example, Chrysippus, On Emotions, of which the relevant extant fragment is found in Galen [=SVF 3.462]). But contrary to popular belief, Aristotle himself, working in the shadow of Plato, never did clearly define human being as the rational animal: the passage normally and erroneously quoted to this effect (Metaphysics Z.12, 1037b13-14) actually has him saying that human being is the “two-footed animal” (τὸ ζῷον δίπουν), as if quoting Plato’s Statesman. This is not to say that Aristotle did not believe human beings were rational (he clearly thought that an important feature of human beings was their capacity for rational deliberation), or that they were not “higher” in some sense than other animals (he does say elsewhere that plants and animals exist “for the sake of” human beings, generating a natural hierarchy of beings which is not quite as easy to find in Plato). Yet it does suggest that Aristotle did not think that the question of the definition of human beings vis à vis other animals was the most important question we could ask about the nature of human beings. Indeed, to the extent that Aristotle is preoccupied with the question of human nature, he tends to emphasize that human beings are preeminently political animals (Politics 1253a1-4), a characteristic which they share with cranes, wasps, ants, and bees (History of Animals I.i.11), even if they are more political than these other animals. The important differences between human beings and animals do have something to do with the human capacity for reasoned speech (which only humans truly have, according to Aristotle), but these differences are ultimately best understood as differences of degree rather than of kind, for other animals have a capacity for communicative speech (though not reasoned argument or logos) and social or political life as well as human beings.

The reason for bringing all of this up is that I’ve been recently invited to respond to a paper by a colleague on conceptions of human beings and freedom in both the East (primarily India) and the West (including several conceptions traceable to ancient political thinkers like Plato and Aristotle). The paper claims that most of the “Western” conceptions of human being fail to define human beings properly, since they use criteria that are shared by other animals (like some forms of rationality and language, which are shared with the great apes), something which may in fact be true of some of these conceptions. But it seems to me that at least Plato and Aristotle were not overly concerned with precisely distinguishing human beings from other animals. In particular, I would argue that for Plato the idea that human beings are rational is a kind of hypothesis or aspiration, not a well established fact; the interesting question, for him, is what follows from our being rational (if in fact we are), or from our lack of rationality for our ability to rule ourselves wisely, not the question of whether we are the sole rational animals. Much less hinged on determining whether or not reason is the distinguishing mark of the species than in determining what the possession of reason implies for our ethical, moral, and political lives; and the nature of reason was itself put in question. (And also: the classical thinkers were much weirder than we give them credit for. The fact that they have been absorbed for so long into the history of Western thought should not prevent us from seeing them as just as foreign than the Indian thinkers that my colleague studies; they came, after all, from a world that was very different from ours in every important economic and social respect, and that world was full of gods and demons).

The transformation of this line of thought into a mere formula – that man is the rational animal – closed off some of the avenues for thinking about the nature of human and animal rationality that were still open to Plato and Aristotle. Much later on, however, Kant would turn the idea of man as the rational animal upside down to emphasize that what mattered for moral and political thought was not human being but rational being: the categorical imperative and other moral laws apply to rational beings, not just human beings, and Kant does not assume that there is only one kind of rational being. And similarly, in contemporary times, many ethical thinkers (such as Peter Singer) suggest that whatever characteristic is important for ethical or moral life, it is important across all beings sharing it, whether or not they are human; what matters is not the question of who is a human being, but who is the subject of ethical concern (a feature of Singer’s thought that accounts for its apparent callousness: some human beings lack the requisite characteristic, whereas some animals have it).

These thinkers take, in their different ways, the Eleatic’s critique of Young Socrates seriously: being excessively concerned with distinguishing human beings from animals (as some of the 20^th century existentialists were, by the way) bespeaks a kind of unjustified “pride.” Though humans and other animals are clearly different, it is all too easy to take excessive pride in whatever difference is found (tool use, language, reason, “freedom,” etc.) and hence set ourselves up as “sacred” without justification (as the cranes in the Eleatic’s view). It is too similar to the same processes that lead us to identify with this or that nation (as the Eleatic indicates by using examples of “nationalist” classification in his criticism of young Socrates: 262d-263a), those arbitrary lines that distinguish among human beings on the basis of their ability to “interbreed” (the joke is too complicated to explain here). And perhaps we can go further today, in the shadow of Darwin: most truly significant distinctions between humans and others are ultimately matters of degree. If human beings and other animals are all ultimately related in a web of descent with very fuzzy borders, it may not make sense to try to fix these frontiers and erect imposing border control regimes. That only encourages unclear thinking.

To be sure, there will be differences between “us” and other living beings; but it may make little sense to determine the meaning and moral consequences of these differences a priori. I do not know how we are to relate to elephants, or whales and dolphins, or the great apes, all beings that are political animals in the strict Aristotelian sense of the term, displaying language enough, and family structures, and politics and war enough (I’ve just been reading about hierarchy in the forest); or how we may need to relate to AIs one day perhaps, or indeed to ourselves, in all our multifarious variety of our social forms. But I do suspect that to attempt to find something that strictly distinguishes us from these other beings as if that characteristic were of ultimate importance, is to fall into young Socrates’ error. What distinguishes us from other similar beings may not be the most important thing about us; it may just be our featherlesness.

Footnotes on things I’ve been reading: Epstein and Axtell, “Growing Artificial Societies”

Epstein and Axtell, Growing Artificial Societies
(1996).

I've become very interested in the "artificial societies" approach to social science. The idea is that we attempt to understand the workings of a society not through "discursive" models (as in qualitative social science) or through game theoretical models with extremely simplified assumptions and homogeneous agents (as in more "quantitative" approaches), but by creating a simplified version of the society in silico. So we use software (or pen and paper; Schelling's pioneering models of segregation were studied without the benefit of a computer) to generate an environment and simplified agents that interact with one another, and then we see what happens. The advantages of this approach is that one can add complexity to a model in a controlled manner and study the resulting dynamics (rather than merely static equilibria); so, for example, one might start with agents who move and eat, then see what happens if you add the ability to trade, and so on (besides, it's fun to play around with such models). The disadvantages, however, come from the very flexibility of the approach, which allows for highly complex models: it is sometimes hard to tell whether or not a particularly interesting result is simply an artifact of the simulation or the consequence of some particular simplifying assumption (though it should be noted that the same is often true of traditional models, where striking results, like the pareto-optimality of free markets, are sometimes basically artifacts of the simplifying assumptions made for the sake of creating "tractable" models).

Epstein and Axtell report in this book the results of a pioneering 1994 simulation: "Sugarland". They start with a very simple environment, the "sugarscape", consisting of a two-dimensional surface (technically, a torus) with an unevenly distributed resource ("sugar") and add some very simple agents who can move around the sugarscape according to simple rules and "eat" the sugar. As they add more complex rules, they basically "generate" a number of features of societies – like migration patterns, cultural transmissions, combat, trade, credit relationships, disease transmission, etc. – and study how some simple rule changes affect these patterns. The book does not describe in detail how to do this (they give some information that might help in replicating the simulation, but no code); instead, one can read it as a kind of advertisement for the generative approach to social science. Epstein and Axtell excitedly argue that many phenomena can be understood as "emergent" effects of the interaction of agents following simple rules, and hence that the best way of understanding them is by looking at which simple rules are able to generate them. In general, I am very sympathetic to this idea; it is unlikely that we will ever fully understand polities and economies through models composed of homogeneous, fully rational agents.

But though Epstein and Axtell's results are often suggestive, it is not always clear that they have properly looked at the ways in which minor changes in the parameters of the simulation might disrupt the patterns they find, or sufficiently thought about how to interpret the results of their simulations. As a result, the book is somewhat disappointing: if you are already convinced of the utility of the generative approach, you may not learn much here, and if you are not, then you may think that the authors have not really addressed the important objections to the generative approach. A good example is in the chapter of the book on combat and cultural transmission. Here the assumptions made about how to model cultural transmission and combat between agents seem rather arbitrary (rather than based, for example, on research about human or animal combat), and though they explore a number of alternative specifications, the results seem only lightly grounded theoretically, more an artifact of the simulation than an illuminating model of actual cultural transmission or combat. (By contrast, the chapter on trade and credit is probably the most solid in the book, since they ground the results in economic theory and systematically explore some of the space of alternative rule specifications and parameter values for their agents. Nevertheless, their results there do not go beyond what most sophisticated economists already knew, and do not add much knowledge about the properties of dynamic adjustment in markets – we get no bubbles or other interesting phenomena, for example, and we would need to introduce something like production functions to make the model better reflect actual economies).

Of course, the book is 16 years old right now, and new advances have been made in agent-based simulation. Besides, as I mentioned above, the book is perhaps best read as an advertisement for the virtues of the "artificial societies" approach rather than as a contribution to the study of actual societies; it opens your appetite rather than satisfies it (I wanted to do some programming as I was reading it, to try to see if I could replicate their results). But I think it is fair to say that the book does not quite succeed at showing that the artificial societies approach is actually worth taking seriously (unless you are already convinced of its merits).

I suspect that in order to make the "generative" approach work better, we need to be clearer about how the simple rules that agents follow in the simulated world relate to the kinds of rationality displayed by real political and economic agents than this book is. I also wonder how we could use this approach to model political and not merely economic phenomena. This is something I would like to do: how would you model the emergence of the state, or the choice of political regime? Do you need to incorporate more rationality into the agents, or a way of representing social conventions? Anyway, all in all, I enjoyed reading the book, and people may find it gives them new ideas, if nothing else.

Sunday Extremophile Blogging: Deinococcus Radiodurans

The toughest of them all. Will sustain a radiation dose between 5 and 15 thousand times higher than the dose that would kill a human being, and repair its own radiation-damaged DNA. (Perhaps life travels like this between the stars).

Endnotes

• Chuck Close apparently suffers from face blindness. [! - via marginal revolution]
• DuPont's solution to the problem of securing explosive material: hostages!
• A recent attempt to find symbolic meaning in Plato via stichometry. (From one point of view, it is simply obvious that there is symbolic meaning in Plato, the problem is how to extract it in non-question-begging ways). [Also via marginal revolution].
• An interesting meditation on the moral personhood of elephants: the elephant as doomed guerrilla fighter.
• More forms of moral personhood, whale edition.

Probably will have more to say on moral personhood soon - thinking of featherless chickens...

Footnotes on things I've been reading: Steven Pfaff's "Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany"

Steven Pfaff, Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany (2006).

Despite the unpromising title, this is a superb analytical narrative of the 1989-90 collapse of East Germany. Pfaff draws on oral history, archival evidence (including opinion surveys conducted in the last years of the GDR), statistical analysis, and basic threshold models of collective action to produce a work that is not only insightful but also a good read. (One of my favourite bits: Honecker and other Politburo members apparently tended to discount fairly accurate reports of the situation in the country by the Stasi because they thought they sounded too much like what they could hear on West German television).

The East German revolution was a rare beast: a revolution without revolutionaries (or even, in the final instance, counterrevolutionaries), made by people after work, in a (mostly) peaceful manner (despite some violent confrontations in Dresden and elsewhere), against a regime which, on the face of it, seemed unassailable. The SED (the East German Socialist Unity Party) controlled a huge apparatus of repression (the Stasi, the “sword and Shield” of the Party), was uninterested in concessions, and was apparently quite willing to use overwhelming force against challengers (as they in fact did at first). Dissidents in East Germany were few and far between, most of them were loyal to the idea of Socialist state anyway, even if not to the policies of the party (truly anti-socialist dissidents tended to be expelled to West Germany), and their organizations were wholly infiltrated by the state. The forms of ideological control in the GDR, as in other Leninist regimes, encouraged dissimulation rather than genuine loyalty (“preference falsification”, in Timur Kuran’s useful terminology) and opportunistic compliance, with the result that the population seemed to be passive and retreated from public life to “niches” of tightly linked individuals, as Pfaff convincingly shows. Moreover, despite the stifling political repression, East German citizens were not badly off by the standards of socialist regimes: they had enviable job security (made possible, in part, by the constant possibility of exit, which created a situation of labor scarcity) and many social and welfare benefits, though many of these benefits had started to decay in the last years of communist rule.

In such conditions, there was widespread “pluralistic ignorance” – people who were dissatisfied with the regime were unable to tell how widely their grievances were shared (as their social networks did not include reliable linkages beyond their niches), and hence were mostly unable to use “voice” effectively to press for changes in the regime. So why and how was this regime overthrown so completely in the space of a few short months?

The key theoretical argument of the book concerns the relationship between “exit,” “voice,” and “loyalty” (in Hirschman’s terms). The GDR was different from many other repressive regimes (with the partial exceptions of Cuba and North Korea in the socialist world) in being placed in a situation where citizens could take advantage of an “exit” option (by moving to capitalist West Germany). Exit was, to be sure, made difficult (through the Berlin Wall, among other things), but it was far more available to dissatisfied GDR citizens than other options, and it was more available to them than to citizens of other socialist states, especially since the FRG recognized them as citizens and gave them considerable assistance once they reached Western territory. As others (including Hirshman himself) have argued, the key event that disrupted the GDR’s “repressive equilibrium” was the “exiting crisis” of August-September 1989 (when thousands of GDR citizens took the opportunity to escape to the FRG due to the dismantling of Hungary’s border fence). Where Pfaff’s analysis differs is in arguing that the existing crisis had two contradictory effects. On the one hand it acted as a signal that dissolved pluralistic ignorance and activated voice (both “dissident” voice by people who simply wanted reform, and “insurgent” voice by people who wanted a revolution or unification with Germany), but on the other hand large amounts of “exit” also eroded the social networks necessary to sustain protest.

Pfaff traces the consequences of this dynamic in painstaking detail (at times perhaps too painstaking), and shows how the demoralization of low-level party members and security forces, the ambiguity of instructions from hardliners at the top, and the ability of protestors to police themselves (at least in Leipzig) and remain peaceful all conspired to produce cascades of protest that made the regime crumble. As the protests increased, the dissidents were marginalized in their advocacy for reform of an independent GDR, whereas the majority (but by no means all) of the population in the streets increasingly wanted “exit” from the regime via reunification, and were able to push for this outcome by increasingly exiting (the numbers are staggering – huge numbers of people exited the country before and after the Wall fell). A regime that must imprison its population in order to survive surely has no right to exist.

Pfaff shows how this was a self-organizing revolution, without much in the way of leadership or heroes – though some people played more of a role in it than others, the overall impression one gets is of leaders being pushed aside by the force of anonymous numbers. Among leaders, Kohl comes off perhaps best; though widely criticized at the time, he did what successful revolutionaries do: he seized the moment and rode the wave of protests to an outcome that had seemed all but impossible mere months before, whereas the East German dissidents failed to act as a revolutionary counter-elite. Honecker and the aging leadership of the GDR mainly come out as deluded old men, trapped in dreams they perhaps no longer really believed in, though of course one should not forget that they were responsible for the (sometimes relatively comfortable) incarceration of a country.

Though the book is a good read, there is at times a certain amount of repetition (the book could certainly have been shorter), and the statistical analyses may seem like too much to those looking for a simple history of the fall of the GDR. But for those looking to understand the causes of the fall of the GDR, this book does a much better job than a simple historical narrative.

What’s purple and commutes?

Answer: An Abelian grape.

From here, on the colorful lives of the mathematicians.

(And yes, I'm trying to revive this blog).

Power

It is not often noted (an exception is Hemmenway 1994, p. 265, note 12 [JSTOR]) that the Stranger’s top-most category in his divisions, the “original ancestor” in all his genealogies, is dunamis, power (Sophist 219a4-6). The reason for this neglect is probably that the Stranger does not bring the matter up in his summaries or discuss explicitly the powers that are not forms of knowledge.

Yet in the context of the dialogue, the idea of dunamis as the topmost category in every division makes good sense, since it is also used as an (apparently provisional) definition of being (247d8-e4), and never really retracted; see here Heidegger (1997/1924-25, section 68.b, pp. 328-330) and Dorter (1994, pp. 161-162). All the genealogies or divisions seem meant to begin from the original ancestor of everything, namely being.

A Joke in Diogenes Laertius

From Diogenes Laertius VI.40:

Plato defined man as a featherless biped [Statesman 266e], and was much applauded [for that]. [Diogenes heard this and so] he took a plucked chicken into the school and said, "here is Plato's man." So Plato's definition was changed with the addition "with broad nails."

Get it? I didn't think so. Let's try it one more time in Greek:

Πλάτωνος ὁρισαμένου, Ἄνθρωπός ἐστι ζῷον δίπουν ἄπτερον, καὶ εὐδοκιμοῦντος, τίλας ἀλεκτρυόνα εἰσήνεγκεν αὐτὸν εἰς τὴν σχολὴν καί φησιν, "οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ Πλάτωνος ἄνθρωπος." ὅθεν τῷ ὅρῳ προσετέθη τὸ πλατυώνυχον.

Still don't get it? Well, it's not really a very good joke, but it's a joke. And perhaps it's worth ruining it with an explanation.

The introduction is classic: Diogenes walks into a bar and hears that Plato defined a chicken as a featherless biped. The detail about the applause is evidently intended to amuse us (who could applaud such a ridiculous definition, ridiculous even within the dialogue, as the Stranger notes in the Statesman?), not to report a fact. The punch line of the joke is that τὸ πλατυώνυχον “the quality of having broad nails” sounds in Greek much like τὸ πλατώνικον, “the platonic thing;” the “improved” academic definition is thus “man is a ζῷον δίπουν ἄπτερον πλατυώνυχον/ πλατώνικον,” a “‘platonic’ featherless biped.”

Ok, I said it wasn't a great joke, but I think it's nice to know that people in antiquity took that part of the dialogue with a sense of humor.

Functions and purposes

Among some commentators (e.g. Zuckert 2000, pp. 71-72) it has sometimes been argued that the difference between the Socratic and the Eleatic practice of philosophy lies in Socrates' attention to purposes. Thus, the argument goes, while the Stranger is busy creating purely "analytic" definitions of statesmanship, Socrates asks about the good to which statesmanship aims; and while the Eleatic casts around for "value-neutral" criteria for distinguishing sophist and philosopher, Socrates cuts to the nub of the matter by looking to the different motivations animating the practice of philosophy (the love of truth) and sophistry (a love of money, or reputation). The point is usually construed as a criticism of the Eleatic, and may support a view of the Eleatic dialogues in which the Eleatic is silently subverted: the failure of Platonic Eleatism serves to make Socratic philosophy all the more necessary.

It is true that the Stranger’s genealogies are unlike Socrates’ definitions of the arts in that they do not emphasize the ends to which the arts aim; the Stranger, for instance, in his definition of angling does not say why anybody would practice angling, or even explicitly say what is the end of angling, and in his last definition of sophistry he does not discuss why anybody would practice sophistry (since the references to money which were such an important part of the first four definitions of the sophist drop out in the sixth and seventh).

Nevertheless, these genealogies do incorporate the immediate function of the art (its ergon), a function which is naturally called an “immediate” purpose. What an art does – its ergon - is its end qua art, i.e., its function, though it may not be the ultimate purpose of the person practicing the art. The angler’s function, in this sense, is to hunt fish; and the function of sophistry is to seem wise, and these are things that the Stranger’s genealogies can inform us of. To ask why should anybody hunt fish or want to seem wise is to ask the question of the good of fish and that of wisdom, and this is a question that the Stranger certainly does not openly discuss, unlike Socrates.

That question, however, is implicit in the Stranger's depiction of a web of arts that are all connected in the Statesman. The good of an art can only be understood in reference to the function it plays in society; hence we cannot understand the problem of sophistry well until we come to understand the place it takes (or rather usurps) in the web of arts that constitute the city. In this sense the Stranger's and Socrates' methods seem more complementary than contradictory; we need not see in the Stranger's apparent lack of interest in the question of whether the sophist's motivations are good an actual disinterest in the goodness or badness of sophistry. On the contrary: as we learn (291aff), sophistry is genuinely dangerous to the polis insofar as it attempts to substitute for statesmanship. We might say that Socrates adopts the perspective of the individual, while the Stranger adopts the perspective of the "social system."

One, two, or three?

One of the most interesting moments in the prologue to the Sophist occurs after Socrates asks the Eleatic Stranger whether sophist, statesman, and philosopher are one, two or three (217a). The Stranger answers, without hesitation, that they are three. But his answer sits uncomfortably with what we might call "standard Platonism:" the view that the philosopher is the statesman. Shouldn't the Stranger have said that they are two?

Moreover, the Stranger will go on to suggest that the sophist has a techne, an art (221d), and that it is this possession of an art that makes him "countable:" it seems that it is because sophist, philosopher, and statesman have three distinct technai or three forms of knowledge that they can be said to be three. But in the Gorgias Socrates had not even allowed that the sophist had an art (Gorgias 463a6-b6). Shouldn't the correct answer to Socrates' question then be "one," namely, there is only one art, that of the philosopher, which is identical to the statesman's art, and the sophist has no real techne?

The problematic nature of the Stranger's answer has been noted by scholars in various ways. Notomi (1999, p. 22), for example, claims that the Stranger is not fully committed to the view that sophist, philosopher, and statesman are three distinct beings: the Stranger’s “answer is that they [the Eleatic school] assume (ἡγοῦντο) these three kinds, and he adds that it is nonetheless no easy task to determine what each of them is (217b1-3). The view that these are three kinds is presented as an assumption (not as fact), and remains such throughout the Sophist and Statesman. It really matters whether these three figures constitute independent, real kinds (γένη).” But the Stranger gives us no reason in either the Sophist or the Statesman to think that he eventually revises his answer: the assumption, if it is an assumption, is vindicated in the dialogues.

Most scholars seem to fall into two camps: those who argue that somehow the three must be two, and those who argue that the three are indeed three, but argue that this does not represent a departure from the traditional Platonic doctrine of the philosopher king. Here's a list:

1. Skemp (1952/1987, p. 21) argues that philosopher and statesman are really one, but that the “specific activity” of statesmanship can be isolated from philosophical activity more generally. (It is not clear if this means Skemp thinks that the correct answer to Socrates’ question is two or three).
   
2. Klein (1977, p. 200): the three are really two.
   
3. Strauss (1989, p. 218): three. He thinks this answer is compatible with the Republic: “[t]he fact that the philosopher is not identical with the king was recognized in the central thesis of the Republic, according to which the coincidence of philosophy and kingship is the condition for the salvation of cities and indeed of the human race: identical things do not have to coincide.” Yet he also notes that the difference between statesman and philosopher is not made sufficiently clear in the Statesman.
   
4. Lane (1998, p. 7, note 19): three.
5. Griswold (1989, p. 263, note 13): three.
6. Rowe (1995, note to Statesman 257b3-4) two, though he seems to suggest that statesmanship involves “special skills” that the philosopher by himself does not necessarily have (and so philosophy and statesmanship would really be three).
   
7. Notomi (1999, p. 25, especially note 82): uncertain, but thinks the question is extremely important, and seems to lean towards the “two” answer
8. Samaras (2002, chapter 8, especially p. 146): unambiguously two, though thinks that there are different conceptions of the statesman in the Republic and in the Statesman.
9. Voegelin (1987/1956a, p. 150): unambiguously two
10. Benardete (1984, pp. II.73-74), as usual, has the most interesting analysis, without settling on a specific number, though in his earlier piece (Benardete 1963 pp. 212, 223), he was much more explicit in thinking that philosophy and statesmanship were different.
    

We might also note that the Athenians in general might think that the answer to Socrates’ question is “one” – philosopher, statesman and sophist are all forms of sophistry. Wolff (1991, p. 25) also notes that “one” is the sophistic thesis (not so much that of the Athenian people).

What are the implications of answering the question with "two" or "three"? It would seem that saying that philosopher and statesman are distinct forms of knowledge should indicate that the thesis of the Republic is not really tenable in the form in which it is usually understood (perhaps Plato changed his mind?); and moreover, it would necessitate a ranking of philosopher and statesman (perhaps the philosopher is inferior to the statesman?). More dramatically, perhaps, a separation of philosophy and statesmanship might create a space within Plato's political philosophy for a different sort of relationship between philosophy and politics than the one Plato is usually identified with (i.e., the -prudentially qualified- imposition of philosophical principles on political affairs).

But in order to see whether philosopher and statesman are the same or not, we need to understand what it would mean to say that they are distinct. My idea is that what we have here three distinct relationships to wisdom, each of them associated with a particular form of knowledge: the pretend wisdom of the sophist (associated with an art of pretension, of making images), the search for wisdom of the philosopher (associated with a dialectical science that facilitates this search), and the actual wisdom of the genuine statesman (associated with an art of measure and a real knowledge of forms). Each of these can be understood as "images" of wisdom, but only one of them (statesmanship) really is actual wisdom. So I think that Plato really means to suggest that there are three (not two) different figures here, each distinguished by a particular art and a particular relationship to the possibility of wisdom.

Images I

The question of images is central to the interpretation of the Sophist, as I indicated earlier. Indeed much of the dialogue is concerned with establishing that images and image-making are possible, against the sophistic argument that they are not possible, since the sophist is identified as a kind of imitator or image-maker, and in particular as an imitator of wisdom, i.e., somebody who in his performance gives the misleading impression of being wise (268c). Yet for all this the discussion of images in the dialogue remains marginal and misunderstood in the scholarly literature on the Sophist, in part because the passages on images and imagemaking in the dialogue have appeared rather puzzling to interpreters.

The Stranger discusses images explicitly beginning at 235b8ff. The relevant passages are worth quoting in full (235d-236c). In Fowler's translation, from Perseus:

Stranger
I see the likeness-making art as one part of imitation. This is met with, as a rule, whenever anyone produces the imitation by following the proportions of the original in length, breadth, and depth, and giving, besides, [235e] the appropriate colors to each part.

Theaetetus
Yes, but do not all imitators try to do this?

Stranger
Not those who produce some large work of sculpture or painting. For if they reproduced the true proportions of beautiful forms, the upper parts, you know, would seem smaller [236a] and the lower parts larger than they ought, because we see the former from a distance, the latter from near at hand.

Theaetetus
Certainly.

Stranger
So the artists abandon the truth and give their figures not the actual proportions but those which seem to be beautiful, do they not?

Theaetetus
Certainly.

Stranger
That, then, which is other, but like, we may fairly call a likeness, may we not? [236b] And the part of imitation which is concerned with such things, is to be called, as we called it before, likeness-making?

Theaetetus
It is to be so called.

Stranger
Now then, what shall we call that which appears, because it is seen from an unfavorable position, to be like the beautiful, but which would not even be likely to resemble that which it claims to be like, if a person were able to see such large works adequately? Shall we not call it, since it appears, but is not like, an appearance?

Theaetetus
Certainly.

Stranger
And this is very common in painting [236c] and in all imitation?

Theaetetus
Of course.

Stranger
And to the art which produces appearance, but not likeness, the most correct name we could give would be “fantastic art,” would it not?

Theaetetus
By all means.

Stranger
These, then, are the two forms of the image-making art that I meant, the likeness-making and the fantastic.

Here is part of the Greek:

Ξένος
μίαν μὲν τὴν εἰκαστικὴν ὁρῶν ἐν αὐτῇ τέχνην. ἔστι δ᾽ αὕτη μάλιστα ὁπόταν κατὰ τὰς τοῦ παραδείγματος συμμετρίας τις ἐν μήκει καὶ πλάτει καὶ βάθει, καὶ πρὸς [235ε] τούτοις ἔτι χρώματα ἀποδιδοὺς τὰ προσήκοντα ἑκάστοις, τὴν τοῦ μιμήματος γένεσιν ἀπεργάζηται.

...

Ξένος
οὔκουν ὅσοι γε τῶν μεγάλων πού τι πλάττουσιν ἔργων ἢ γράφουσιν. εἰ γὰρ ἀποδιδοῖεν τὴν τῶν καλῶν ἀληθινὴν συμμετρίαν, οἶσθ᾽ ὅτι σμικρότερα μὲν τοῦ δέοντος [236α] τὰ ἄνω, μείζω δὲ τὰ κάτω φαίνοιτ᾽ ἂν διὰ τὸ τὰ μὲν πόρρωθεν, τὰ δ᾽ ἐγγύθεν ὑφ᾽ ἡμῶν ὁρᾶσθαι.

The distinction the Stranger makes here between likeness-making ("eikastic" imitation) and the making of appearances ("fantastic" imitation) has been the source of endless confusion. Among earlier interpreters, Philip (1961, p. 459, JSTOR), for instance, makes the strange suggestion that “[e]ikastike would appear to be a class without members, serving only a purpose of symmetry.” His argument relies too much on the Cratylus, where the distinction does not appear, though Socrates does discuss images. Cornford (1935, p. 198) makes the equally misguided suggestion, under the influence of arguments in the Republic (where, again, the distinction does not occur) that “[b]oth here and in the Republic the whole of fine art, considered as ‘imitative’, falls under the art of making ‘semblances’, not ‘likenesses’. Plato does not mean that there is a good and honest kind of art which makes ‘likenesses’ reproducing in all three dimensions and the natural colors of the original” – something which in fact he must mean.

More contemporary interpreters do better, though there is still no consensus regarding the meaning of the distinction. Blondell (2002, pp. 365ff.), for example, argues that εἰκόνα are “analytic images,” but she mars her argument by suggesting that only eikastic imitation is pedagogically beneficial. Like her, most interpreters of the distinction (so Notomi 1999, Palumbo in the Proceedings of the III Symposium Platonicum) operate under the assumption that Plato must obviously value eikastic imitation more than fantastic, or clearly identify philosophy with eikastic rather than fantastic imitation (Nightingale 2002 is an exception: she argues that Plato could have used both forms of imitation for pedagogical purposes, though her views are dismissed by Rutherford in the same volume). But the assumption is unwarranted; the Stranger says little about whether we are to consider eikastic imitation the sole province of the philosopher, or to value it always more than fantastic imitation.

What, then, is the Stranger trying to say with this distinction? I draw here on Benardete 's somewhat opaque, but useful interpretation of this passage (1984, pp. II.105-112). I take it that the Stranger is suggesting that there are two ways in which images can represent objects, and that both of them are flawed, though in different ways. Let's take, for example, the image of a straight road:


This is a "fantastic" or distorted image of the original: in order to represent the road so that it looks like a road, the picture had to distort the actual proportions of the road, primarily by making the parallel lines of the road appear to converge. The image's summetria or proportions are thus different from the summetria of the original, or more precisely, the image and the original do not have a common measure (a summetria). This was necessary because the road is "too large," as the Stranger notes, to be eikastically represented and still look like the road looks.

But what would an eikastic image of the road "look like"? Here is one (not, of course, of the same road):


Though this particular image is not eikastic in every respect described by the Stranger, it is eikastic in the sense that the image preserves the proportions of the original: the sides of the road really are parallel to each other, and they are depicted as parallel in the image. But of course, because from our normal point of view the road does not look like that, a fantastic image is required - a perspectivally distorted image - if we want the image of the road to look the way in which a road would normally look to us.

Fantastic images are distorted - and thus flawed as representations of their originals - precisely in order to account for our flawed perspective. Eikastic images are not distorted from the point of view of the original (that is, they preserve the original proportions of the object) but they appear flawed because they are not well adapted to our point of view. The relationship between an eikastic image and its original is like the relationship between the central circles in the Titchener circles illusion:

Both red circles are in fact identical in size, but they look different to us given the limitations of our perceptual apparatus.

In the Greek context it seems likely to me that the Stranger is referring to a form of perspectival painting, where figures have to be systematically distorted in order to look right to us. The point of this distinction, however, is the subject of an upcoming post...