Movies generally incorporate this formula for much entertainment, but who’s going to be on the receiving end of a shield bash and a spear to the face? Oh, countless evil henchmen, how we appreciate thee for thy action-opportunity-creating-and-often-ineffectual-bodies: Hide-clad barbarians; tin-can black knights; stormtroopers and TIE pilots; the endless baddies who get tooled by Superman, Batman, and James Bond; the dudes who get their asses kicked one by one by Bruce Lee. In their stories, those dudes are evil – all of them. I’ll grant at the very least the premise that they either had it coming for working for some nefarious jackass, or were simply caught in the middle of what was their ass-kicker’s right to defend himself, avenge his family, champion his people, protect the rainforest fairies and trees, or defend his right to defend himself.

But what about the red-shirted Ensigns of the moving picture world? The good guys who are slaughtered beyond count? I particularly remember one scene in Excalibur in which Arthur, in his campaign to unite the fiefdoms under his control, joins a siege in progress. Countless troops die on both sides, until Arthur reaches the enemy lord, and the lord surrenders when Arthur’s ready to claim his severed testicles in the name of Camelot. But the lord then proclaims his undying allegiance to the great King Arthur. Meanwhile, obscurely in the backdrop, dead and dying soldiers lie scattered everywhere, now allies in being the “good guys,” probably wondering “well, what the fuck was all that for?” But: “the story? it’s not about them.”

This is exactly what I want to talk about here. Fine, it’s a story, I get it, a pretty good one at that. But when warnography is everywhere in which the lives of the pawns don’t matter as long as we’re “looking at the big picture,” how does this translate into our values? Over 4000 soldiers dead in Iraq; don’t worry, we’ve got 1.1 million more of them. 1 million Iraqi civilian casualties; no problemo, they’ve got 27 million more who are freer than ever! Yes, sometimes losses are inevitable, and trade-offs must be made to protect life. Recognition of this fact, however, does not require ideological indoctrination that “little” trade-offs are always acceptable as long as you look at the big picture, because it essentially puts a utilitarian or otherwise freaky morally mystical spin on things which can lead to all kinds of horrid moral results.

I can imagine a myth-loving, military-masturbating, “individualistic” conservative who likely enjoyed an excellent childhood with love, hugs, and divine command saying now: “What are you some kind of dipshit communist! If everything were up to you there would be no heroes! Every story would be about living in a shit-hole gulag! Everybody would be fucking starving! Get real asshole!!!!”

As interesting as the prospect of getting real asshole is, my position does not imply that stories should be egalitarian, proletarian, collectivist, etc. in their character developments. This is the conclusion fallaciously drawn by leftists, rightists, centrists, and other douchebags inhabiting the discontinuous function of mainstream social and political thought. We live in an era of false dichotomies: you’re either a Democrat, or a Republican. You either want to tax everyone to hell for large welfare programs, or you want to tax everyone to hell to fund large foreign wars. You’re either with our terrifying rampage of violence around the world, or you’re a terrorist who wants to kill Americans. The cliché is at least superficially correct: the world isn’t just black and white. In fact, it’s white, and non-white, but everyone seems to be thinking in terms of red and blue. It’s the false dichotomy with which we’re being constantly presented in mainstream culture, whether it’s in political values, in social dialogue, or in art forms. Much like how not all political systems are not stuck between the imaginary poles of the individual’s success at the expense of society (fascism) and “society’s” success at the expense of the individual (socialism), not all portrayals of individualistic triumph need be subjected to this false dichotomy. On one hand, anything that challenges tales of kings or valiant warriors is a communistic, individual-hating endeavor, and anything that demonstrates proud and successful individuals must be selfish aristocratic capitalism that disregards everyone else’s well-being, alienates the worker, and rapes carebears.

It’s certainly true that there is an expressive utility in focusing on individual characters and their heroic displays of virtue; in great irony, even collectivists will invoke this, because reality forces them to. Talking about how a class triumphed over another class can maybe last them a poem, song, or national anthem, but then they simply run out of actions a gelatinous blob of a concept can possibly do before lapsing into overt absurdity. Classes can, well, triumph, struggle, march, protest, fight, and if you’re feeling particularly loose with your concepts, shout a slogan in unison, carry a banner/flag, etc. They can’t tell a joke, smoke a cigarette, be introspective, walk down empty streets and encounter an old friend, among all the other things that fun characters do in interesting stories. In Soviet Russia, concept define YOU!

However, in good art, individual triumph goes beyond mere artistic instrument to become the theme and essence of the art itself. In the case of Arthurian myth, or the exaggerated tales of Che Guevara, there is individual triumph, but that triumph is geared toward the attainment of some good beyond the individual. They dramatically sacrificed themselves as a bright and shining light from the sky enveloped their body, filling them with erotic love for swords and mankind and what-not. Their actions moved toward the fulfillment of some prophecy set long before their births, whether it was the return of the king’s rule with Excalibur at his side, or the victory of the working class over the evil capitalists. Philosophically, both of these narratives are a heap of garbage, though perhaps entertaining as fiction- in suspension of disbelief. Yet stories like these must certainly affect society’s values, or, rather, reflect society’s values. The easy story this might tell is that people hold different viewpoints. What this tells me is that society is wildly revolving between different versions of what is effectively the same viewpoint: that the individual does not determine goodness, but something up and above him does. I guess this is what’s necessary to make a war film- an interesting one- just like this is what’s necessary to make a war, period.

Excalibur, overall, is a cool movie. A keen eye must be pointed toward it and movies of its kind, however, to distinguish entertainment from pure warnography- those stories and images that get us habituated to and accepting of the use of state violence. Even more importantly, we must not let the “big picture” conception of “the good guys winning” lead anyone to believe that the individual can be, without his consent, forfeited on the behalf of any cause. Beyond that, we must also prevent the “big picture” from leading anyone to believe that the individual should ever feel a moral obligation to forfeit himself to the satisfaction of fictional moral rules. Parental influence, religious parasitism, and mass-media warnography generate moral demands and glorification of sacrifice and violence in children’s minds, perpetuating violence in the world. So next time you’re watching Star Trek, take a moment to lament the Ensign who beamed down and never came back.

Here’s a link to the movie on Amazon, with an excellent price. Hot 80s sex scene for $2.50 + shipping? awesomes!

In a way, said vandal has deployed the concept of the destructive prank put forward in American Graffiti as an argument for taking a particular action. This action, he believes, will be a functional means to his end (a specific kind of destruction of police property with desired aesthetic consequences). Naturally, one would reject this argument, probably retorting “Don’t believe everything you see in movies.” Indeed, on the popular T.V. show MythBusters, this was tested: a police cruiser was put under the circumstances portrayed in the movie, and it was discovered that the axle could not be removed from the chassis after several attempts. Essentially, what the MythBusters team did was test the validity of the argument, “it occurred in the fictional story of American Graffiti; therefore, it will occur when we try it.”

Like the screenplay writer puts a concept in the script and the director’s crew executes it on the screen, the philosopher postulates a concept in his writing. Through visual representation, the movie scene symbolizes the event of a normal police cruiser’s axle being cleanly pulled off as a result of its attachment to a fixed object; the concept is conveyed to us like the words on a page convey to us the concept of “the People” or “goodness.” The “police-car-axle-trick” concept is a more tangible one, but in due course, it is just as well a concept as “the ideal city.”

Looking in reality for referents for these concepts—or their sub-components—is an act of verifying arguments invoking those concepts. Those arguments which fail to provide concepts with referents sufficient to reasonably draw their conclusions can be described as holding concepts as primary. No philosophers who posit these arguments, naturally, would agree that this is unreasonable. In fact, some may even embrace those kinds of arguments as the only kinds of arguments one could possibly make on the subject matter. The suggestion that concepts are primary in a belief system is hence either one of the philosopher’s own implicit metaphysical and epistemological admission, or one of simple description of a belief system’s fundamental nature.

Here, my intention in exploring belief systems from the perspective of the concepts they employ and the manner in which they employ them is not to form a strictly bounded definition of “the primacy of concepts,” though one could perhaps be created; instead, my intention is to create a helpful way of thinking about how many belief systems—whether they are epistemic, religious, political, social, and the like, or comprehensive—predicate their conclusions upon conceptualization over empirical evidence.

Epistemology

A thorough explanation of what is meant by “concept” is necessary for the proceeding discussion, due to the widely varying use of the word across different disciplines and philosophical viewpoints. The phrase “a concept” refers to an abstract idea in the human mind used to organize sensory information, often expressed through language. Concepts serve as a means by which thought is simplified and communication is made possible, via the distillation of immense amounts of mixed sensory information into discrete and meaningful units. The process of abstraction is the means by which such distillation occurs.

Though they are constructed from information gathered from the senses about the external world, concepts only exist within the human mind. Matter and energy are arranged in a particular way out in the world, which lends itself to certain sensual impressions upon a perceiver; commonalities are then sorted out in the perceiver’s brain to create general attributes or sets of attributes. A natural difficulty of speaking in this manner, of course, is that we can not conceive of a universe without our conceptualization; in other words, we can not think of reality without using concepts like “matter” and “energy” in doing so.

To continue the tradition of epistemologists’ uncanny obsession with furniture, we can begin with the concept “chair.” In common understanding, it is something intended for humans to sit on, with a flat surface and some kind of foundation to separate that flat surface from the ground. There are many different kinds of chairs: rocking chairs, swivel chairs, dining room chairs, patio chairs, and so on. The concept “chair” holds the attributes all of those chairs share in common.

There are certainly things in the world that fit the definition of “chair” given above, but what about the imagination? An easy and commonly cited example of a concept in the imagination is the Pegasus: a winged, white, and horse-like creature. Examining the Pegasus, we find that concepts need not have a direct referent in reality, though at some level the concepts that constitute them must. Thus, the first person to conceive of Pegasus never once had to experience a Pegasus but, having seen horses, white things, and winged creatures, combined some of the attributes he saw into one concept. That we can conceive of something does not imply that such a thing exists somewhere, in the spatio-temporal sense; it only implies that some component parts of the Pegasus exist.

While the process of abstraction requires multiple instances of an attribute for abstraction to make sense, a concept itself is not necessarily an abstraction but can be built of abstractions. Those things in the world to which a concept refers can also be unique things. That there is only one Empire State Building does not mean that the Empire State Building, in our minds, is not a concept. It is a concept built of other concepts, or, better said, is a member of multiple and sometimes overlapping classes of objects: things with a name, buildings, edifices taller than 1,000 feet, and so forth. A concept is hence not necessarily a particular abstraction, but can be a combination of abstractions. A concept without a direct referent—like Pegasus—is one composed of abstractions that do not jointly hold with any object in reality. There are things in the world with wings, horns, and horse-ness, but there are no things that are all three.

In a theoretical context, the process of concept deconstruction is, in logical terms, reducible down to the most basic logical unit of reality. If one had knowledge of the most elementary unit of existence (supposing such a thing was real) and all of its properties, he could hypothetically conceptualize anything: all manner of materials, phenomena, organisms, machines, etc. The human mind, however, is limited to what the senses can perceive and what the brain can process.

Those objects in the world which we immediately perceive help accelerate the process of creating concepts, especially useful ones. Birds, for example, provided to human beings the concept that things could move above the ground; their wings inspired the idea that friction between air and a surface can create a force opposite to gravity.

Someone very intelligent could have figured out that he could make a flying object after watching a leaf fall off a tree, or even just by the feeling of wind pushing against him. It is the first-hand experience of aerodynamics, though, that allowed those inventors to create the concept of aerodynamics. Psycho-epistemologically, all conceivable things must have their origins in some minimum level of experience.

In light of this definition, a concept itself can not be invalid by definition, since what makes it a concept is that it can be conceived of in the human mind. Words are then used to signify concepts and their relation to each other. Each concept, with relation to evidence (the referents of its constituents) in reality, has a range of arguments in which it can be validly used. However, a concept can also be used in an invalid manner.

One may argue that accepting certain concepts as reality can generate desirable consequences. Here, we must make an important distinction between accepting concepts as reality and contextually employing concepts as functional metaphors. In mathematics, for example, complex numbers (even roots of negative numbers) can be argued to be lacking a referent or even inconceivable in reality (like a “round square”). Applying mathematical conventions, though, they can be written down and operated upon. It turns out that the use of the complex number system has resulted in several useful implications about the real number system. The idea of validity, as used here, however, relates to the kinds of claims that are made on the basis of a concept itself. The complex number system as described above serves as a functional concept employed in context of another conceptual system—namely, the system of mathematical operators.

Suppose the adoption of the “legal fiction” of a corporation—treating it like an individual in the legal system, among all the other implications as we know them—was argued for with the justification that it would increase the overall economic product of a society by reducing the costs of causing legal disputes at a greater rate than its negative consequences. Such a hypothesis can be empirically tested. However, the concept of the corporation as an autonomous entity in reality, of course, is a strange one: there is no such being that is conscious, self-aware, can take action, etc. that represents the totality of what is involved in legal proceedings involving a corporation as an individual (all of its assets). Individual human minds make decisions and take actions within that corporation.

The corporation as individual serves as a functional concept employed in context of another conceptual system—in this case, the legal system. Thus, there is a distinct difference between a concept’s being a convenient way of thinking about something—not unlike a metaphor—versus its possession of a referent in reality. To clarify (or maybe jumble things some more), the concept of a metaphor being useful or effective is a concept with a referent in reality. The concept of the food pyramid does not imply that the universe intrinsically organizes food in the shape of a pyramid; however, conceptualizing a healthy diet as a pyramid is a useful tool in teaching one how to proportion his diet.

Warranting clarification is what constitutes a valid claim about reality—or, in other words, what truth is. Phenomenologically, all truth is ultimately a matter of human action. We can not look “behind the curtain” of human experience. In light of that, truth as “correspondence with the external world” is an unverifiable hypothesis, formulated on the basis of a god’s-eye view of human experience. The material consequences of human existence and experience can be the only basis upon which a meaningful idea of “truth” is founded. With skeptical arguments pushed to their limits, life and death are the ultimate standards of knowledge: where we fail to act in accordance with our sense-perceptions, we are hurt—that we are having an experience of pain can not be doubted—or we die, after which doubt seems to be unlikely. Empirical methodology is the adherence to the evidence of the senses and the recognition of its validity. From the standpoint of the mind, the senses are a brute fact; all theories which try to deny the evidence of the senses or to construct truth via some non-empirical means have their origins invariably in the senses. One must have knowledge in order to doubt.

The evidence of the senses has produced a methodology—reason, the scientific method, etc.—which has repeatedly led to successful human existence through consistent integration of sense data. Belief systems in which concepts are primary contradict that methodology. Accordingly, devotion to those belief systems bears the consequences of failure to act upon fact, or at the very least, failure to act upon the best possible methodology for forming beliefs about the world.

The Primacy of Concepts

The phrase “primacy of concepts” thus refers to a particular kind of use of concepts in reasoning to a conclusion. We can not define it without, to some degree, pointing to its inherent flaws, for it is a phenomenon which embodies invalid reasoning by its definition. Because all that we, as humans, can conceive of predicates upon experience, any statement someone makes that bears any meaning to us is a concept, and thus has some relation to reality. The mark of the phenomenon of the primacy of concepts, however, is the outright inadmissibility of certain empirical evidence. Note that the view of concepts outlined here and earlier will quite distinctly run up against others—in particular, the classical theory of concepts, especially of the kind that holds that concepts are mind-independent entities. The primacy of concepts as a fallacy only persists if we accept a mind-dependent and empirical theory of concepts and reject the classical and mind-independent theories of concepts.

Thus, unsurprisingly, the first and most prominent examples of the primacy of concepts are belief systems which embody the “classical” theory of concepts: classical concepts possess a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for that concept to apply to something that hold across all worlds. Classical concepts are represented in philosophy by the tradition of conceptual analysis, the first and most prominent example of which being the work of Plato, which has sought to provide an answer to certain questions such as, “What is happiness? Virtue? Beauty? Freedom? Good? Evil? Knowledge? Space? Time?” These kinds of questions—in most cases when they are asked—personify philosophy in which concepts are primary. Certain concepts possess a nature or essence which can come to be known through the proposal of candidate definitions and the seeking of counter-examples (through thought experiments) to invalidate them. In a way, this process the treatment of concepts as static objects of sorts in philosophical discourse; philosophers of this tradition examine concepts like scientists examine physical specimens, as though they were things in plain view to examine.

In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates seeks from his discussion with Euthyphro what the essence of piety is; he asks what in the world makes pious things pious—what they share in common—and not for examples of people who are pious or what the gods are known to think is pious. In the Lysis, he pursues the essence of friendship similarly; in the Phaedrus, love; in the Thaetatus, knowledge; and in the Republic, justice. Behind the character of Socrates in these dialogues is Plato’s theory of the Forms, the most prominent example of a belief system that makes concepts primary. The Forms themselves are a kind of hypostatization of concepts—the forms inhabit a timeless reality outside the human mind. He attempts to provide a direct metaphysical explanation for concepts: they are caused to appear in the human mind as a result of their exact metaphysical counterparts. Hence, it is no surprise that Plato’s approach to concepts is one of classical analysis.

In the case of the scientists, when they ask a question of a physical specimen they capture—such as “of what is this creature made?”—they have agreed upon a referent of the concept signified by “creature,” as applying to the matter in front of them; they have, implicitly and instinctually as a matter of rules of language, agreed that this animate and discrete entity composed of matter is the object of discourse. They can then shock it with electricity, give it food, douse it in chemicals, dissect it, etc. to answer the questions they may have about it.

In contrast to the scientists’ investigations, there is no such obvious referent when it comes to Plato-type questions. They only make sense in context of the theory of the Forms or similar postulations about the external and discrete existence of concepts; so long as we reject such metaphysical claims (and with good reason), the referents that are brought under inspection can only be a product of the amalgamated meanings of the words brought by the parties to the discussion. The explicit reliance of answers to “What is F?” upon intuition is perfectly explainable by the non-existence of concepts as entities in reality and the different definitions brought by different parties to the dialectic. Plato’s exposition of the forms through the character of Socrates in the Republic and other works is very educative in the actual ambiguity of reference, but specimen-like treatment of words.

The above kind of concept primacy is only a subset of a broader definition of concept primacy. One need not formally accept the classical theory of concepts in order to commit a similar fallacy. The idea of concept primacy merely requires that the rational necessity of instance-to-concept reasoning be invalidated, with a concept used to exclude an instance. In this way, belief systems inhabit a continuum of concept primacy: on one end, there are its most egregious cases, in which one conceptualizes something and holds it as reality purely arbitrarily; on the other, there are concepts which have reasonable uses and that are even reasonably used, but are held to a reality above the instances that derived them. The spectrum can be loosely characterized by the placing the examples of mythology, religion, and fantasy on one extreme, and scientism, skepticism, and cynicism on the other.

The Plato-type errors are frequently just unconscious ones; they take the words of language, which are created to describe reality, and turn them into reality itself. At the core of the problems of philosophy—especially those of the Platonic kind—are issues of language. The fallacies of concept-primacy, in general, constitute the removal of concepts from the human context in which they were generated, and the assertion of those concepts as a priori fact. Because those concepts are defined without experience or to the exclusion of some experience, thought experiments can endlessly “refute” one’s conclusions about the world, precisely because they are not based on experience, but upon conceptual construction. Adherence to some system of rules—following religious texts, star-gazing, meditating, utilizing heuristics, and so on—in deriving certain conclusions, when it is to any degree non-empirical, necessarily requires that some empirical evidence can never be cited as both arguments and counter-arguments: the discussion is bound by the domain of the system’s rules.

Descartes’ exploration of knowledge and doubt in his Meditations is subject is another notable—and highly influential—example of concept primacy. Indeed, Cartesian foundationalism and the other deduction-focused metaphysics of several of the Continental Rationalists leave little room in the world for contingency—metaphysically and thus epistemically. They call upon a methodology for verifying beliefs that downplays the senses in favor of “logical truths” and, as Descartes describes them, “clear and distinct” things. Because of the inherent deficiency in providing any truths about the world on the basis of his “hyperbolic doubt” in Meditation I—the hypothesis of the powerful, evil deceiver—it is no surprise that Descartes appealed to the concept of God and argued “logically” for his existence.

The epistemological school following in the tradition of Descartes’ “hyperbolic doubt” is one of skepticism. The claim of skepticism—that knowledge is impossible—is justified on logical grounds: we can not be sure that what we experience as truth about the external world is in fact the external world and not an illusion. As one of skepticism’s most recent representatives, Keith Lehrer put forward a “skeptical hypothesis”:

There are a group of creatures in another galaxy, call them Googols, whose intellectual capacity is 10¹⁰⁰ that of men, and who amuse themselves by sending out a peculiar kind of wave that affects our brain in such a way that our beliefs about the world are mostly incorrect.

The irrefutable logical possibility of this being true, he claims, entails that our beliefs can never be completely justified. Thus, we cannot have knowledge.

The important issue at hand with Lehrer’s skepticism is the prescription accepting his conclusion offers. So we cannot have knowledge of a certain kind; “Now what?” we ask. Not coincidentally, the claim “knowledge is impossible” could itself be a reiteration of the Plato-type language problem—depending on the implications we draw from it. We can be sure here that the skeptical argument defeats the classical conceptions of knowledge (a correspondence theory of truth, for example). The world of the perfectly known and perfectly deductive, from a psychological standpoint, is not a concept with a direct referent found in human experience. Certainty of that kind is either a functional tool of discovery (as in mathematics or logic), or merely a manner of speaking: when I say, “I am certain that I will turn in this paper on Saturday,” I do not mean that in my mind I have discounted the logical possibilities of my severe injury, death, sudden lack of interest in the academic, and so forth. The probability of those occurrences is so low that my statement of certainty is one of cost-benefit analysis: to warn the reader of an alternative outcome is to insure against those outcomes, but such outcomes are so unlikely (and the magnitude of the payoff is so low) that the inconvenience of enumerating the alternative possibilities is a net loss in well-being.

The discussion of skepticism here is not aimed at addressing the flaws of skepticism specifically, but at how the concept-primary world of traditional philosophy’s conceptual analysis is vulnerable to paralyzing criticisms that leave it unable to explain the world with its methodology. However, from the epistemology laid out in this paper, the question “So what?” should immediately follow Lehrer’s argument. Only through fallacy can Lehrer’s argument lead to a significant implication beyond the nonexistence of the classical concept of knowledge—one which this epistemic paradigm holds as an empty fabrication, anyway (to say “I know that x” where there is no possibility of doubt is to be redundant; “x” suffices).

Specifically, the fallacy of equivocation is an exploitation of, or a mistake with, symbols in language that create the illusion that conclusions follow from particular arguments. Take the following silly example:

1) O’Doul’s Non-Alcoholic Beer is better than nothing.

2) Nothing is better than a nice, hearty lager.

3) Therefore, O’Doul’s Beer is better than a nice, hearty lager.

Though the word involved in the relations of quality about the beers is the same one—“Nothing”—it clearly shifts senses from one premise to the next. Only while assuming the word meant the same thing in both premises (“nothing,” as in the absence of all things) would the argument would be a syllogism.

The concluding statement of Lehrer’s argument—“we cannot have knowledge”—certainly does not eliminate the phenomena we associate with our use of the word “knowledge”: the Microsoft tech support knowledge base, the knowledge of the physical sciences, self-knowledge, and so on. There is certainly a distinct difference between my assertion that “I know the earth is round,” versus another’s assertion that “I know the earth is flat.” For one, there are pictures of the world showing its roundness; I can travel off into the horizon, and if I travel long enough, I will return to the place where I started; and when I travel on the land versus how the crow flies, the disparate distances between the two voyages are as geometry would predict with a sphere versus a straight line. I have evidence for my knowledge; while I still may be wrong in some remote sense, the distant possibility is excluded from my speech because it is useless (and wasteful) to enumerate every remote logical possibility of my being wrong. Speech is a means to an end—not a slave to logic. Hence, “knowledge” can be understood by its use: in my case, it is the presence of scientific evidence for my claim.

The classical theory of concepts grants a window for the assertion that there are no referents of a classical concept. Logically, the claim is moot, but it bears psychological implications for those not aware of the linguistic nature of philosophical puzzles. “There is no justice,” as one interpretation of Thrasymachus in Republic would have him say. Someone convinced of Thrasymachus’s assertion would then challenge any person who used the word “justice” with a particular referent in mind, as if to tell him that the “justice” he was looking at did not exist—even if the person who tokened “justice” used it in reference to the legal system, whose norms are often labeled “justice.” That Thrasymachus asserted “There is no justice” changes no reality; it does not alter any rationale for the legal system’s “justice” (that does not depend on the classical concept of justice). Likewise, that Lehrer argues “we cannot have ‘knowledge’” changes no reality; it does not cause me to drop my belief that the world is round, and I am none the worse for it.

How do we ever come to invalidate a primary concept, once accepted? To illustrate, we can begin with an extreme case of a primary concept: belief in a deity as strictly a matter of faith. Acceptance of that premise as true can then explain away any empirical evidence to the contrary. If one believes he has prayed and has not received the desired results, the only explanation is that he was not, in fact, praying correctly, or that he failed to meet some other necessary condition for his prayers to be answered.

Yet this could occur in any variant of concept primacy. Take the example of Marxism: the concepts it employs are founded in historicity of observations about power relations between the powerful and the dominated. In as much as the methodology of historical analysis is applied, though, Marxist concepts must be taken as truth. In turn, when some Marxists are confronted with evidence of countries which have embodied Marxist principles, with their performance measured by amount of violence, material well-being, and other empirical data, they are forced to respond in one of two ways: they must assert that those countries are, in fact, successful in some way according to Marxism, or they must assert that those countries are not, in fact, Marxist.

In either case, there is no way of finding empirical evidence that stands against the theory besides that evidence which can be used to contradict the grounds upon which Marxist concepts are founded. Certain evidence is simply precluded by the acceptance of those concepts themselves. For example, the concept of alienation asserts that it provides objective features of individuals in capitalist society independent of their awareness, so some evidence—such as any assertions made by said persons about their own psychological states—is irrelevant. From a logical and empirical standpoint, a simple way of understanding the inherent irrationality of reasoning from unreasonably chosen concepts is to view doing so through the demands of Occam’s razor. When we cannot distinguish between a world in which the theory is false and the world in which we live, we can not reasonably postulate that theory over another one similarly situated, much less over one which actually has evidence.

The pragmatic problem of the acceptance of any empirically exclusionary belief in practice is quite clear: it creates an infinitely-recurring, invulnerable hope in seeking an outcome that will never be realized. If the reality is that there is no deity who answers prayers, people who pray and accept the argument for this deity will perpetually spend their time praying and depending on this fictional deity, with an argument perpetually compelling them to do so against the empirical evidence they will have (no consistent answering of prayers). If the reality is that the claims of Marxism about human nature, the path of history, and economics are false, societies will continually be founded on Marxist principles and will continually be met with failure, but will continually be compelled to do so when swayed by the arguments of Marxism, against empirical evidence of those failures. Sinners will be created to take the blame.

The philosophically admissible at the level of metaphysics and epistemology (and, ultimately, ethics) translates necessarily to the admissible at the level of the political. The Classical Greek philosophers, as adherents to the classical theory of concepts and their analysis, can be said to be the fathers of formalized political theories in which concepts are primary. Returning to Plato once more, observe the political philosophy he generates from his theory of the forms. To him, justice in the political is to be found in the structure of the city, like justice in the individual is to be found in the structure of the soul. Critical to Plato’s polity is the division of individuals into three classes: producers (farmers, craftsmen, etc.), warriors, and rulers. He bases this tripartite political division on a tripartite division of the individual soul: the appetitive, the spirited, and the rational.

Those assertions about the individual soul can be translated into the modern tongue as assertions about human nature. Like all concepts he expressed must have been, each of the three parts was at some level derived in Plato’s human mind from an empirical experience of human beings as possessing those faculties. However, the broader concept of the human mind as being composed distinctly and exhaustively of these three parts is the concept which he came to use to derive his idea of the just polity. This concept, to a large degree, precluded actual worldly observations about human psychology, and how likely it was in actuality that, for example, a human being like a philosopher king could singly embody rationality.

As a brief aside, it is important to note once more that a formal observance of classical conceptual analysis is not the only way for a series of political implications to be drawn from a concept. Though Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in part modernized political philosophy by founding it on a more fully integrated and empirical view of existence, the thought experiment that underlies his view of the state, the State of Nature, is a concept bearing primacy over experience as well. He puts forward a hypothetical situation in which humans are engaged in a perpetual state of war “of every man against every man”—a state so horrible that men will endeavor to seek peace, the only recourse being an all-powerful state. That this state will occur is based on his own construction of human nature. Quite similarly to Plato, he derives the aspects of that nature from some level of experience with the humans of his time: a restless appetite for power, reputation, glory, riches, and so on. However, it is questionable whether those observations—made in the context of a period of political power, religious dominance, poverty, and despair—hold universally and a-contextually.

One final specific area of interest with regards to conceptualization as truth lies in morality. The idea of an intrinsic kind of goodness brings with it a host of problems, both in its derivation and in the end-state it envisions. The “is-ought gap,” a problem with the idea of goodness brought to the forefront by Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, becomes an issue the moment consistent empirical methodology is brought to bear on moral assertions:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with… I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence.

All systems of morality must overcome this challenge—how can a plain fact about the state of affairs of the world entail a (categorical) ought?

Furthermore, how do we come to observe that goodness occurring in the world? As J.L. Mackie explains, “If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” Is it possible to observe these relations? Can they be pointed to without being circularly defined? In the realm of physical fact, it is easy to go from instance to concept: those instances are ostensible. We can point to objects falling down and the orbits of planets to derive the concept of “gravity”; we can observe the lack of bone structure in creatures and derive the concept “invertebrate.” We can even observe human parents who cause pain inside their children and enjoy it, and call that “sadism”—but that, of course, is a sense of sadism as a matter of descriptive fact (i.e. “sadism” means one who causes pain and enjoys it) and not a matter of moral fact. With goodness in most cases, however, the only means of ascribing moral fact to the world is to proceed from concept to instance.

Usually, the most important effects of any belief system stem from its conception of the good; when the goodness it posits is derived from an approach to knowledge in which concepts are primary, the consequences are quite significant in terms of the measurable aspects of human life. That which possesses goodness is what possesses “to-be-pursuedness”; it is that which an end-in-itself is. It is an argument from morality, which historically is easily seen to be a compelling argument for human beings: millions have martyred themselves and otherwise been exploited for causes they believed were right.

How might one rank priority in achieving those goods, however? Here, we can pick on an often self-described moral approach to politics: constitutional liberalism. In Constitutional Theory, Carl Schmitt argued that governments operating under the principles of the Rechstaat are plagued by an inability to take necessary action to preserve it. Primarily, they are bound inextricably to certain rules and procedures that are unbreakable, even in times of need. Constitutional liberalism indeed is sometimes interpreted as carrying with it a supra-legal set of principles by which it is governed. Often times, that supra-legality is itself written into a nation’s constitution. Thus, even adherence to the procedures outlined in that constitution is more than just an instrumental act: adherence to procedure is directly the fulfillment of the principles of goodness upon which the nation is based, or, at least, non-adherence to those procedures is a violation of those principles.

While in practice there may simply be politically expedient reasons why such action is not taken, at least in the context of philosophical debate there persist irresolvable problems between different positions each taking up the cause of, by the given principles of goodness, a worthy end. The results are frequently win-lose situations—zero-sum or negative-sum games—between opposing camps. The long-standing struggle between the often-mutually-exclusive liberty and security, with its many variants, is one such example of this inherent conflict. Should habeas corpus be suspended, or should the risk of a terrorist attack killing citizens (whose lives and property the government is also morally tasked with protecting) be allowed to increase? Should the rights of electoral participation be extended to those who hold values opposite the constitution—threatening that very constitution—or should suffrage and office holding be regulated, an action which by definition opposes the constitution? Are the lives of those living outside the state worth anything next to a citizen of the state, or can those outside the state be killed or harmed so long as it preserves a citizen? If these questions were not a matter of intrinsic goodness, at the very least they would be questions of pragmatism, utility, or even whim. Still, goodness demands that it be followed in itself, presenting a quandary for all states built upon a moral foundation.

No doubt, too, we have brought a new issue into consideration: what are the principles or moral foundations of a given constitution when that constitution is understood to have a life beyond the organisms that brought it into existence? Who is to determine these? From where did these principles come? In any case, national constitutions are representations of belief systems in which concepts are primary, in as much as those constitutions are not in principle built on the explicit consent of those governed by it (or the forcible imposition upon some by others); they are, instead, built upon a concept above human action.

Conclusion

There are many more examples of the primacy of concepts fitting the loose definition provided here, and many implications to be observed from them. All of them are bound together, perhaps, by the broadest implication of the fallacy: it creates a never-ending battle of refutation and counter-example, by means of its dependence on the realm of infinite conceptualization. Indeed, 2500 years of philosophy “qua philosophy” has failed to answer successfully, to the same degree of consensus as the natural sciences and mathematics answer their own questions, the questions which it is purportedly intended to answer—namely, those of human nature and action: what are we? What ought we to do?

Practitioners of the natural sciences, to a large degree, possess a shared language and methodology. As a result, fields like physics and medicine have seen huge advances. The shared methodology, the scientific method, is a means by which conflicting viewpoints are resolved. At the root of this methodology is the presence of clear and distinct referents of discourse: the observations made from controlled experiments involving the materials and phenomena in question. In light of this, there is no surprise that philosophers have been frequently relegated to a back-seat role in new discoveries about the nature of the world, particularly to scientists. Human nature, or at least the empirical data to be used in determining it, is now in the purview of evolutionary biologists; no longer is it the role of the philosopher to postulate it and other things on the basis of intuition.

The philosopher can still try to do this, obviously, and some still do. Nonetheless, the chief difference between the present in the past is that the work of those philosophers has less predictive power and even has facets which contradict the organized empirical evidence of the sciences. Indeed, empiricism in recent human history has created friction between the realities of the world and theories produced by traditional philosophy and other non-empirical means. As the disciplines of science and statistics have increasingly both discovered phenomena unexplained by the old answers and produced theories explaining old phenomena better. At the foundation of this new approach to knowledge are the epistemic postulates put forward at the beginning of this paper. Applying consistent experiential methods is a necessary condition for analytical robustness: just as we can be certain that our experience was what our experience was, we can be certain that we observed what we observed. The realm of interpretation of that experience lies within the scope of doubt and debate, but even with that caveat, empirics have brought mankind a long way from the days of the classical philosophical approach.

When we see the concepts of God, logic, justice, beauty, science, the state, or The People used to draw a conclusion about the world, we can always think of the concept of the American Graffiti police car gag and how a television show went about looking at it objectively. MythBusters is aptly named for this analogy: these concepts can constitute the “myths” upon which society runs (whether effectively or not). The MythBusters are the “boots on the ground” in investigating the many interesting assertions about reality put forward in popular culture.

Though they may just be entertainment, they wave the banner of empiricism in the boldest way possible: they dive straight into reality, replicate the circumstances, and put claims to the test. They do not dream up extreme action scenes to confuse young people more, and they never use visual trickery; they always recreate, observe, and analyze. To do the same to battle myths of the broader, societal kind, there are a parallel set of prescriptions: do not create new myths by deriving a concept and holding it as real without evidence, and never equivocate; always, work from instance to concept and reason from there.

The difference between Star Wars and religion is their number of followers who hold their realism. Many people believe in the latter, so those of us who disbelieve should take pause at this, especially considering that these beliefs often have political implications. In light of that, what good does studying religion serve?

Mythological Particularities: Not so useful?

As I suggested in a discussion of Plato’s Republic, the study of falsehood is only useful in as much as it leads us to truth. If you know that you’ve either got a muscle cramp or just have to go to the bathroom, and disprove the latter by trying and failing, then you can validly believe that you’ve got stomach cramps. The wider in scope that a given theory is, the more likely it is that any of the propositions entailed by its negation are true.  Thus, the best argument that states, “There is a world of the supernatural where things occur, and this is why,” is useful to us, for if it can be defeated, then we can know that we now must explain everything in the world naturalistically.

In this regard the scholarly pursuit of many different belief systems can yield insight into truth. However, utilizing the insights gleaned from ruling out random possibilities of unicorns and leperchauns does not always work, since we are not logical super-computers that can piece together every known proposition of the universe and make deductions from them, and find the sum total of valid human knowledge all at once. Deduction by negation sharply decreases in value as the scope of a proposition “A” shrinks, its referents become more specific, and the number of possibilities lying inside the region of “not A” vastly grows. OK, maybe that wasn’t so clear. In short, it’s that an overwhelming majority of the propositions considered under religious belief systems are extremely specific, low-scope assertions and thus, if debated, tell us little to nothing relevant about reality.

Point in case: what difference does it make to those of us who are scientifically questioning the validity of basic religious claims if there are in fact FOUR horsemen of the apocalypse as opposed to three? Or seven Imams instead of twelve? Or that there are no billiards tables in heaven? Suppose one side were proven to not be the case. What now? What can we conclude about the universe, besides that it is not the case? If it is a proposition that is used as justification for other beliefs, there are millions of other possibilities that can reconcile any problems caused by the refutation of a single detail, if any such problems arise. If two verses in some holy text are in conflict, I can guarantee that some other verse or interpretation is going to fly out of a professional religious advocate’s mouth to fix everything up.

When arguing with religious propagandists, keep that in mind: they can taunt you into pursuing them into the depths of their twisted and humid jungles and ambush you with an arbitrary verse here, a unicorn there, and maybe a flaming sword somewhere. Yet if fundamental analysis points to the fact that their story about reality is in fact a fantastical human construction, why would any rational person opt to talk about what’s “true” in the endlessly deep human imagination, as opposed to talking about truth in the reality to which everyone has sensory access? Furthermore, think of the other side: if someone were committed to defending a position whose fundamental assumptions were false or unprovable, why would he even go near discussing those assumptions? Clearly, if he’s committed to a position rather than a methodology, he’s interested in passing off what he has arbitrarily chosen as truth; why would he allow questionable premises to come under scrutiny?

To help illustrate how skipping past fundamental claims about reality and instead delving into religious mythology is a huge waste of time for the human condition, let’s revisit Star Wars. If someone asserted, as a matter of fact, that the story detailed in Star Wars movies was actually a historical occurrence, would your objection be that it couldn’t be the case because there was no way that the Rebel fleet could have survived the onslaught of the imperial fleet at the Battle of Endor, which by all calculations, would have laid 350 imperial turbolaser batteries for every rebel one, and 200 TIE Fighters for every rebel starfighter, not including the firepower of the Death Star? Surely, you could, and then spend another few hours, years, or centuries answering the counter-objection that “the force” played a major role, and then question why the force perhaps didn’t decide to intervene earlier in the war, then argue about midichlorians and how the rebels had more of them on their side, etc. Or, you could just ask, “What’s your proof that it is the case and not just some fictional story someone made up? Why is Star Wars history and The Lord of the Rings not?” Surely you can not dare to challenge the Star Wars geek’s vast “knowledge” of a human-constructed universe, but you can adequately point out that it’s human fiction, not reality. The difference in effort is gigantic.

But before we proceed, avast, hardy theoreticians: I do not mean to deny the validity of demonstrating internal inconsistency as evidence against any belief in addition to external criteria. Internal consistency is an excellent starting point, because if it can be defeated easily, it is the simplest route to disproof one can find since it speaks purely in terms of what the defender of a theory already believes. Internal contradiction makes a theory disprove itself.

By the same token, however, it is a home-field advantage for mythology-peddlers: they would much rather prefer to argue you in circles about nit-picky details about how some word actually means something other than something else and the translation screwed it up, instead of defend the fundamental presuppositions upon which their entire belief system rests. Islam, for example, has an uncanny knack for running around inside its secret cave-tunnel network of Arabic linguistic ambiguity and pop out tactically to suit its P.R. needs. If the propositions under consideration were those which played a fundamental role – for example, that there is some world which exists which lies beyond the senses, the supernatural – then proving that they’re false would end the religion debate altogether.

Religious advocates know this, and hence they would prefer to prop up the legitimacy of their belief system by spending a majority of their time and resources on what amounts to a gigantic non-sequitur argument: “we debate and discuss fervently about the content of [insert holy text], we are charitable, we create a community where children play together and do fun and creative things, therefore we are right.” Theologians spend their time trying to prove the existence of God in convoluted and complicated ways, but does the average churchgoer or clergyman ever delve so deeply into the validity of accepting God as a premise?

No, of course not! That would be a direct threat to the illusions upon which they power their lives; for the clergyman, it would be his job at risk. For a parent, it would be the possibility of having to tell his child that he was teaching him something false all along – and that would challenge the illusion that the parent can order the child around because he is right, not just because he is stronger. For that parent and for anyone else who would be religious, it would be this same realization about their own parents, which causes a devastating loss of such a critical fantasy. Erasing that fantasy leads to other questions: what else was I taught arbitrarily? Is the rest of my family like this?… and so forth. It’s not a fun proposition.

Understanding the gravity of the consequences of approaching religion from a truth-seeking angle is key to understanding the ages-old evasion technique of dotting i’s and crossing t’s instead of searching for logic and coherence. Truth seeking methodology – logic and empiricism – have the answers, and these methodologies tell us to justify our premises and adhere to the demands of parsimony. To avoid challenging their fundamental illusions, some people simply prefer the mere facade of methodology in order to pretend to themselves and others that they are truth seekers.

Quite predictably, 99% of religious activity and resources are spent on treating this problematic God-assumption as though it were true. In other words, the vast majority of publicly revealed religious activities are not designed to address fundamental arguments (indeed very few are). They are instead designed to utilize this implicit non-sequitur argument, that “we are so honest and giving and great and happy, there’s no way our religion can be wrong!” These things clearly can exist without god existing or even a belief in god (this is why it is a non-sequitur). It is true that they are nice and good things, community and sharing and loving and solidarity and charity and kumbaya around the fire. When one finds that he can substitute many different mythologies in a particular religion’s place, though, he is forced to acknowledge that those things are not an argument after all- they are predicates of value systems, not justifications thereof.

For anyone who has the patience to sit through some sociopath’s erratic fairy tale in order to successfully defeat falsehood, I have the utmost respect. By no means am I implying that myth does not need to be studied in the context of its social necessity. My conclusion has two main parts: first, that the study of mythology and religion would not be necessary if it were not the case that people hinged their personal lives upon them, particularly with regards to how they treat others; and second, that even in the context of our social necessity, far too much time is spent (at least by non-specialists) delving into the tiny inconsequential details, the turbolaser batteries and TIE fighters, of religion rather than arguing the fundamentals that serve as the basis for its rational acceptance.

If someone related to you their long and convoluted fantasy, emphasizing distinctions among details like some unicorns actually being green instead of white, you typically wouldn’t dive into it as academic study and write your dissertation on it. If everyone believed in this fantasy though, and you were being treated differently on the basis of this fantasy, or even had violence used against you as a product of it, you would have no choice but to figure out what the hell it was all about.

By the same token, if you’re busy making a living and working hard, you don’t have time for a dissertation on unicorns. Lucky for you, you are not totally in the dark or at the mercy of academics. All that is required of you is to analyze the basic foundations of a theory and see if they are sufficient for continuing discussion of the theory, and working from there. Even if you don’t succeed at reaching conclusive evidence, it’s always better than the course of action that never leads to knowledge: to delve into only a limited amount of mythological minutiae as your only thought on the subject, which will only inevitably result in your choosing of the side of the debate with the most effective propaganda apparatus. Searching “bible quotes” is NOT going to give you answers about religion. Posting on forums and arguing about the meaning of a particular line in a religious text is not only not going to give you answers, it’s going to waste your time and perhaps confer upon you the illusion of answers, which is the worst possible outcome.

One last thing to note is that, beyond the religion-bashing on my part, both religious and non-religious persons of the kind who hold that beliefs should be formed by something a bit more consistent than random impulse should take heed. Intellectual honesty on both sides of the debate is an absolute necessity; if one refuses to attain conclusive answers in the realm of a theory’s foundations and instead proceeds to just delve into the internal details, then he’s really doing nothing for truth. Doing this with a theory is like carefully calibrating to perfection a ship’s navigation system while it has a gaping hole in the hull. It is an outright denial of reality – an insane bout of wishful thinking – promoted by many reasons which I shall not address here. Its consequences are quite clear, though: the less we understand reality, the less our interactions with it produce the positive results we need. This behavior can not be good for the person who does it, nor for the people he will interact with.

Any avid debater of religious issues should keep all of that in mind. Don’t just tell me that the answer is on page 33. Tell me why page 33, or any page, has the answer. Don’t make my bunk, stock the fridge, clean the showerheads, feed the cats, or swab the decks. Please, just fix the damn hole in the ship.

Summary (where not specified, statements are written in the voice of Rousseau)

In Book I, Rousseau begins his exploration of politics by pondering the source of the legitimacy of political authority. He rejects that its source is found in nature, because such a position implies the inherent natural superiority of the rulers over the ruled, though the superiority that may exist is only sustained by force. In turn, he argues that force is not the basis for legitimacy either: the idea that “might makes right” is nonsensical because it can not imply that the less strong “ought” to follow the stronger, since who is stronger is always determined by who triumphs. There would be no political authority since those who can do, will do. Instead, legitimate political authority is based on a kind of “social contract” created between society’s members. Unlike the argument of Grotius, which proposed a kind of covenant between king and people based on “a right to slavery,” one’s freedom can never be surrendered in a fair exchange. Furthermore once freedom is surrendered, then all rights are forfeited which eliminate any demand for something in return.

Why should such a contract ever be necessary? In short, there comes a point in the state of nature at which society must be formed in order for mankind to survive. The social contract’s purpose is to resolve the problem of how to bind people to each other without infringing upon their freedom, and it does this by requiring the unconditional surrender of the individual’s freedom to the whole community. The important implications of this definition are that the contract will impose the same conditions for all, creating no interest for one person making the conditions difficult for others; there will be no rights that remain that stand in opposition to the state, because the contract is formed unconditionally; and finally, because each person enters the contract on equal terms, no person loses their natural freedom. The ultimate reduction of the social contract can be described thus: “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”[1] The new entity, the whole, that is formed as a result of this contract comes to be known as the “Republic” or “body politic,” or, depending on the context, the State, the Sovereign, or the Power. Those who formed the contract come to be collectively known as the people; when sharing in the sovereign power, citizens; and in being under the laws of the state, subjects. The contrast between nature and civil society is important here: though in joining the contract we lose the physical freedom to act upon our personal appetites, we gain liberty via the limitations of reason and the general will being placed upon our behaviors.

In book II, Rousseau’s conception of the state begins with the idea that society functions in correspondence to the interests that people hold in common. Hence, the ultimate end of any state is “the common good.” Acting on the general will expressed by the Sovereign is the only way to achieve this common good. Incidentally, the general will can never coincide with a particular will.

The expression of the general will ultimately takes the shape of law. Law must be made by the people as a whole (i.e. made by the sovereign) and applicable to the whole. But how can the people, especially a large number of them, jointly create a set of laws? Rousseau proposes the lawgiver: an intelligent and selfless individual who will create laws in an unbiased fashion, who lies outside the authority of the Sovereign. However, Rousseau himself admits that “Gods would be needed to give men laws.” Furthermore, what will compel people to follow the laws? Besides textbook coercion, such as the death penalty for those who break the law and thus break the social contract, Rousseau suggests that an appeal to the supernatural origins of laws (much as Moses claimed that the Ten Commandments were given by God) is one way of convincing men to follow them.

The end of Book II consists of Rousseau’s exploration of the kinds of circumstances under which law is most effectively made, specifically in reference to the people for whom the law is to be made, and the nature of those laws. For example, he explains that states are ideally small-to-medium-sized: small enough to be effectively manageable, but large enough so as not to be overrun by neighboring states. The creation and implementation of laws must be timed perfectly, as a people may not yet be ready to be guided, or may have become prejudiced and resistant to the positive changes brought about by good laws. Also, the state in which laws are being established must be in a condition of at least relative peace and plenty, because of the temporary vulnerability and instability caused by a period of laws being implemented.

The goal of any system of law is reducible to two ends: liberty and equality. Here (chapter 11), equality is understood to mean not the complete absence of differences in wealth, but the absence of such differences that would damage the balance of citizens in the state: “but that power shall never be great enough for violence, and shall always be exercised by virtue of rank and law; and that, in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.” Overall, the general criteria for how laws ought to be made depend on circumstances that differ from people to people and place to place.

At the beginning of Book III, Rousseau explains the executive powers of government in terms of will and strength:

Every free action is produced by the concurrence of two causes; one moral, i.e., the will which determines the act; the other physical, i.e., the power which executes it… The body politic has the same motive powers; here too force and will are distinguished, will under the name of legislative power and force under that of executive power.[2]

The government is, importantly, to be distinguished from the Sovereign; in fact, confusion of the two is dangerous. The government deals with particulars (decrees) while the sovereign deals with the general (laws). Somewhat similar to the contract in Hobbes, the government itself is not a party to the social contract; somewhat different from Hobbes, this is because the government is an intermediary body that is created by the general will and can be freely disbanded by the general will.

As to possible forms of government, there are three primary kinds: democracy, when all or almost all the citizens are magistrates; aristocracy, where less than half are magistrates; and monarchy, where few or one are magistrates. However, there is not one universally superior form of government. In the previous chapter, Rousseau notes that the larger the population of a state, the fewer magistrates there should be. Hence, large states are best suited to monarchy, medium to aristocracy, and small to democracy. Though he personally preferred democracy, Rousseau expresses ambivalence toward democracy as well as monarchy. While he explains his concerns about monarchy’s dangerous efficiency and potential for corruption, he also claims, “there has never been a true democracy, and there never will be.” Only small states with simple and unambitious citizens could remain stable under democratic rule. Overall, though simpler forms of government are preferable to Rousseau, he suggests that mixing forms of government may dissipate the powers of the government relative to the Sovereign.

The Sovereign can maintain itself by meeting in periodic assemblies. Though an impractical demand on the face of it, ancient cities such as Rome managed to do it to some degree. The assemblies are critical because within them, all citizens are as powerful as the magistrates. Because of this, the government may take actions to dissuade such assemblies, which over time may erode the freedom and authority of the Sovereign. At this juncture, Rousseau makes sure to point out that sovereignty can not be represented: “…The moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free: it no longer exists.”

As part of a set of entailments of the general will, the latter half of Book IV expresses some specific ideas Rousseau has about the state. In some cases, dictatorship is necessary to avert the collapse the state, though the dictator does not represent the people or the laws; the dictator only acts in accordance with the general will so long as the avoiding the collapse of the state is in it. The establishment of a censor’s office is also put forward, as the vanguard of public opinion. Because public opinion is connected to public morality and virtue, and those are connected to law, the censor’s office upholds the laws by influencing public opinion. Finally, Rousseau recommends that people be free to pursue religion as they please so long as it does not conflict with public interest, but also recommends that they be required to adhere to a civil religion with essential qualities: belief in the existence of a just god, belief in the afterlife, faith in the sanctity of the social contract and its laws, and emphasis on tolerance to reduce civil strife.

Critique

The most obvious problem in Rousseau’s argument is the mostly unaddressed question of how the general will is to be determined. In a world with no gods and only men, there is no ultimate and authoritative arbiter of truth and justice. Evidence may stand on one side, but there is no guarantee of an impartial and fair supreme force that binds persons to the correct judgment. This is a phenomenon that applies to all things, even the physically tangible and empirically observable. When it comes to something very abstract and complex like the general will, the problem is amplified further as evidence one could possibly appeal to for his position is necessarily indirect and intuitive at best (see: epistemic critique), lending greater power to those of stronger expressive faculty.[3] Of course, that the determination of physical fact or right and wrong is subject to this uncertainty is not an objection, since this can be leveled against any theory. However, what is questionable is the insistence that every person must be subjected to a violence-backed decision making process that may often not agree with their own judgments. If this poses a problem, there is really no way out: Rousseau makes it clear that The Social Contract is not there merely as a suggestion for those who accept it; it is intended to be a factual and categorical description of human nature and the good society. Thus, even if we accept the general will as real, the question is still left open as to whether the general will is best achieved by organizing society into government as outlined in The Social Contract.

Another development of interest in this particular work is that Rousseau insists on a sharp distinction between nature and civil society, holding that the latter is not part of the former and is instead “artificially” created. This is essentially connected with his notion that “this [the social contract’s] act of association creates a moral and collective body composed of as many members as the assembly contains voters, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life, and its will.” In other words, Rousseau makes the metaphysical claim that the Sovereign forms a whole greater than the sum of its parts, essential to the idea that the state can not only solve problems that individuals could not possibly solve voluntarily amongst themselves, but that there is a goodness which always supersedes the good of the individual. “Artifice” enters the equation here: once society organizes along the lines of the social contract, civil society becomes possible where it was not possible before. This is critical to Rousseau’s argument, because it is the means by which the individual is given an ethical demand to consent to the social contract and all its entailments, or, conversely, the means by which force is ethically justified against the individual.

Problems with the Social Contract as a Moral Obligation

Without this metaphysical and meta-ethical foundation, Rousseau’s argument would be a non-sequitur the moment he leaps to the conclusion that one has a rational obligation to participate in forming the social contract. The social contract’s “resolution” of the problem of binding human beings together is suspect: Rousseau holds that the freedom of individual human beings is maintained by entering them into a contract on equal terms that imposes “equal” conditions on them. However, this is only so because of Rousseau’s definition of freedom, which downplays freedom of action in nature as largely meaningless due to unenforceability, reflecting the somewhat Hobbesian notion that such freedom is trivial compared to civil liberty, which is the guarantee of lesser freedoms always being protected by the community. More importantly, Rousseau places a great deal of significance upon his idea of moral liberty, which is the freedom from one’s appetites attained by obedience to “self-prescribed” laws. Certain questions must be asked: is joining in the social contract a necessity for moral liberty? Are equal terms and conditions in the letter equal for every individual? Does a man who is self-sufficient and who produces a surplus always stand to gain by entering into an obligation which can often require sacrificing a disproportionate amount of his property on behalf of others? What about someone who produces art or otherwise expresses himself in a way that would result in his censoring under the general will? Rousseau seems to presuppose a set of “right” values with relation to virtue, one’s opinions, etc. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, of course, but this certainly presses Rousseau to provide us with a convincing account of these values which holds as objective. The argument here rests on the validity of his answer.

Epistemic Critique

These objections are virtually trivial in comparison to the most critical problem with Rousseau’s work and works of a similar breed. Generally, they envision the existence of things which lie beyond empirical observation and meaningful rational analysis: in the case of Plato, it was the forms; with Hitler, it was the goodness of the Fatherland and the intrinsic deservingness of the Aryan race; in Rousseau’s case, it is the general will. In testing these theories, we can only observe a world in which people act as though those things exist, and another in which they do not, and then compare results. Yet by what standard do we gauge these results? For what are we exactly testing? For The Social Contract, we can not gauge it by pragmatic standards, because doing so would not be in accordance with Rousseau’s true theory, which states that the good is the general will. Yet we can never directly experience a form, magical Aryan goodness, or the general will. Lacking any epistemological reason to accept that such a thing as the general will exists, we have no other reason to accept it except, perhaps, as a “noble myth” which serves some other end (order, respect for tradition, etc.).

The Dangers of Rousseau

Put in a historical context, Rousseau’s ideas can be said to be responsible for much bloodshed. On one hand, it may not seem fair to say that Rousseau himself was directly to blame for the brutality that ensued in the name of his or at least a mockup of his ideas. However, personal blame is not the thrust of the criticism of Rousseau’s ideas – whose ideological cousins often result in death and destruction – nor is it at all important. If not specifically attributable to Rousseau, many ideas similar to his have been at the root of acts of violence around the world, whether in the form of civil war between factions, or the more subtle “civil war” of members of the state against its citizens. When an analytic light is shined upon the work of Rousseau and similar works, that this occurred is not surprising.

When goodness is placed outside the realm of the empirical and the rational – as when the concepts of state, the people, etc. are made primary, ignoring the instances from which they were derived – the currency upon which morality trades becomes spiritual and intrinsic, generating similar phenomena to those of religious beliefs: martyrdom, persecution, atrocity, or otherwise a climate of self-proclaimed just violence. In such a situation, the nature of goodness is not accessible to everyone, but only to the “enlightened”: the philosopher kings, the popes and bishops, or the politicians. There is no scientific reason to believe that these human beings have a sixth sense that gives them greater access to such knowledge, yet they are perceived to have it. What phenomenon is capable of explaining how biologically similar human beings can be elevated to separate moral categories in people’s minds when there is no evidence to believe that it is the case? There is one lying in plain view which has pervaded most instances of human conflict, especially of this kind: the exercise of power. Rousseau’s theory lends itself to such a world; for this assertion we have not only the immediate evidence from the French Revolution and its many succeeding Republics, but the indirect evidence of the millions of lives ended by collectivism.

Instinctively, one may object that Rousseau believed that every person composing the Sovereign must play a role in the determination of the general will. Still, so long as there are both disagreement and forceful commitment of all participants to the decision ultimately rendered, the problem persists. The category of the “enlightened” simply shifts from the popes and politicians to some arbitrary proportion of the people, be it a plurality, a majority, or a supermajority. The point remains quite the same: democracy without unanimity is just as much an exercise of power as is philosopher dictatorship, popery, or decree.

[2] Book II, Chapter I.

[3] Perhaps this objection is a commentary on Rousseau himself.