five top things i've been reading (thirteenth edition)
the latest in a regular 'top 5' series
TLDR:
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
Sense and Sensibilia, J.L. Austin
The Hawk in the Rain, Ted Hughes
Harbour boat tour, Rotterdam
This is the thirteenth in a regular Sunday series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.
1. I wrote about Rawls a few weeks ago, so I thought I’d begin today’s list with his long-time colleague and comparand, Robert Nozick. This week, I returned to Nozick’s best-known book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Following its title, this book has three parts. And in each part, Nozick advances a separate overarching argument. In Part 1, he argues against anarchism and in favour of the “minimal state”, the most comprehensive societal arrangement he believes individuals can “back into” without rights-violation. In Part 2, he argues that no state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified. In Part 3, he argues that the minimal state is not only justified, but appealing. Together, these three arguments underpin a treatise on the relation between the individual and the state, focused on the limits of authority.
Along the way, Nozick discusses everything from rationality to love. The most influential of the book’s inner focuses is probably the argument Nozick advances for grounding the justification for private property in historical entitlement. I’ve thought a lot about this argument, and I’ll return to it here some other time. This week, however, I reread the section on the morality of eating animals.
Most of this section, as Nozick admits, isn’t really about the morality of eating animals. Rather, he uses some arguments that often arise in discussion of the topic to try to elucidate his ‘side constraint’ concept, and to attack utilitarianism. (There are multiple levels of irony to be enjoyed regarding the instrumentalist nature of this approach!) He does note, however, that one particular argument about animal-eating “deserves mention”. It’s the argument that runs something like this: 1) at least some animals are brought into existence to meet human demand for eating meat; 2) it’s better to exist than not to exist; 3) eating meat is permissible. This is an argument that remains popular today, in both public and philosophical discussion.
Nozick’s central response to this argument is to emphasise that “once they exist, animals [like humans] may have claims to certain treatments”. Or, put in a stronger form, that animals may have moral rights that even those responsible for their existence cannot violate. Nozick uses this idea to test, and ultimately to set aside a “utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people” theory. Now, there are plenty of objections one could raise against Nozick’s approach, not least — as with his historical entitlement argument — its lack both of firm grounding and of substantive clarification. Indeed, he ends the section by admitting that a “tangle of questions arises”. While reading, however, it’s wonderfully easy to forget you’re in the middle of a book about state authority!
2. In the opening chapter of The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan tells us that a woman needs more in life than a husband, some children, and a home.1 She begins by describing two phenomena that she’d noticed taking hold, over the fifteen years prior to writing the book. First, that American women had stopped seeking equality in the form of equal access to the same opportunities as men (hey, let us into the university and the polling booth!), and had settled instead for the idea that “as a housewife and mother”, a woman could be a “full and equal partner to man in his world”. Second, that large numbers of these American women had found themselves suffering a mystery illness.
As Friedan describes it, the physical symptoms of this illness formed a complex bundle, coalescing around desperation, but including both tiredness and sexual voraciousness. On a deeper level, she diagnoses, it represented an identity crisis. “I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker,” one of her interviewees explains. “But who am I?”. Friedan describes contemporary proposals for mitigating this illness — proposals that range from rescinding women’s political and educational rights, to telling them to be grateful for material improvements to their lot, to prescribing them pills to take. Whereas what was really required, Friedan suggests, was recognition that these women were struggling with a problem that’d existed much longer than fifteen years. A problem, I think she’s implying, that has plagued every woman who’s ever been conditioned to find meaning through the medium of the home.
Sixty years on, Friedan’s approach can feel frustrating. Her argument — inasmuch as it is an argument — meanders, and loops back on itself. Most of her claims need better backing up, and sometimes they edge into contradiction. Most of all, however, her repeated punchline offers little punch. That is, any account of societal equality that takes women sufficiently seriously is going to have to extend beyond recognition that female fulfilment requires more than a husband, some children, and a home! And what if a woman doesn’t want those things, anyway? Where do our preferences come into this? And what about the things we have the right to?
The sad truth at the heart of what Friedan tells us, however, surely still holds. That is, it seems undeniable there’s a persistent societal urge — across all of time and place, and felt by a subsection of both sexes — to reduce women to their sexual and reproductive functions. Friedan saw this in people back then, and we see it in others today. This isn’t to deny the joy that women can derive from those functions, of course! Rather, it’s to celebrate the value of people like Friedan who remind us that each individual is greater than the sum of what they represent to other people. And that personal fulfilment is about more than meeting some group ideal, even if that ideal happens to match a person’s own preferences.
3. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the first few chapters of J.L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia (1962), so here are some quick thoughts on Chapter 4.
In this chapter, Austin seeks to distinguish between 'looks', 'appears', and 'seems'. While he begins by accepting that these three terms can often be used interchangeably, he criticises philosophers for often acting as if this is always the case. The rest of the chapter proceeds like a lexicological detective story: example after example of different usages of 'looks', 'appears', and 'seems' is posed, dissected, compared, and categorised. Unlike the other two terms, for instance, Austin concludes that ‘looks’ — whether in the sense of “It looks blue”, or “He looks a sport”, or “It looks as though we shan’t be able to get in” — is typically “restricted to the general sphere of vision”.
Most important for the book’s general purposes, however, is surely a late distinction Austin draws between ‘seems’ and the other two terms. Ending the chapter on a cliff-hanger, he asks, “Is it not that, whereas looks and appearances provide us with facts on which a judgement may be based, to speak of how things seem is already to pass a judgement?”.
4. This week I read the selection of Ted Hughes’ collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), that’s included in the New Selected Poems volume (1982), which Hughes edited himself. For a while, I’ve been appreciating Hughes’ poetry more and more. In particular, I love his descriptions of animal life. He’s yet to become my favourite poet, but The Horses may now be my favourite poem.
5. A few days ago, I went on a boat tour round Rotterdam harbour, and saw many cool things. You start at the excellent Erasmus suspension bridge, then pass between the twin green-roofed Maastunnel ventilation buildings, before heading into the heavy industrial heart of cranes and container ships. Wonderful.
I’m only going to discuss the opening chapter, today. You can also find this chapter published standalone under the title The Problem that Has No Name.