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Educating Democratic Reason

Helene Landemore’s Democratic Reason, an important recent work of democratic theory, manages to merge an ancient intuition about the wisdom of crowds with modern mathematics in order to make the case that democracy, as a political decision making procedure, is as at least smart as, and probably smarter than, any other procedure. To deem a political regime “smart,” on Landemore’s terms, is to make a judgment of its ability to align its decisions with a standard of political truth that is independent of the decision making procedure itself. In other words, what makes democracy the smartest of regimes is that it has a higher probability than other regimes of getting the correct answers about what the polity should do. Landemore thinks that democracy’s superior intelligence (an intelligence that both intuition and mathematics support), proves itself in the long run, over a series of decisions sometimes spanning generations. Error, then, is a natural element of the democratic process, but it is not a defining element. Democracy is wise in the long run because it learns from its past errors and successes. The mark of democratic reason is that it does not begin anew every time a consequential decision has to be made. Once emergent, the collective mind of the polity begins to store its cumulative wisdom in its institutions, public discourses, and societal mores, conserving them intergenerationally so that they can be drawn upon in the future as needed.

Landemore stresses the distinctive epistemic properties of democracy as a decision making procedure. Being purportedly good at involving a diverse range of citizens and pooling information from all corners of the polity, “rule by the many,” is superior to “rule by a few,” including rule by experts, at processing the reasons that support different possible courses of political action. Properly conducted, democratic deliberation weeds out the bad from the good reasons for certain courses, and, because it is a majority-rule procedure, exploits the mathematical likelihood that a large group of people pooling its cognitive resources will at least equal if not outperform a small subset of intelligent people with a restricted domain of expertise. Furthermore, citing the findings of Lu Hong and Scott Page that cognitively diverse groups of problem solvers outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers, Landemore argues that democratic deliberation is the political decision making procedure most likely to capitalize on the emergent intelligence of diverse groups. She qualifies, however, that Hong and Page’s “diversity trumps ability” findings have yet to be verified in the real-world context of mass democratic politics, and so as of now hold the status of a mathematical theorem in need of empirical testing. That is to say, the Hong-Page findings only support an argument for democracy’s probable superior intelligence to other regimes, and do not yet provide a knockdown case that “democracy trumps ability” when it comes to making correct choices (although Landemore is optimistic that they could).

Landemore designs her epistemic case for democracy to address a specific problem in contemporary political philosophy, namely, what she calls the modern democratic paradox. According to Landemore, there is presently a widespread, largely intuitive trust that democracy, as self-government by the many, is a better source of legitimacy for political authority than rule by the few. At the same time, however, there is a deep and increasing skepticism that the many are intelligent enough to rule themselves effectively. What makes the paradox poignant now is that the many often say this about themselves. The paradox thus brings out a crucial, though oft-ignored, tension between the value of decision making procedures and the value of their outcomes. Skeptics of democracy think that decisional outcomes figure into our evaluations of the comparative justice of political regimes; they think that both proceduralist and consequentialist considerations have to be weighed against each other. While procedural justice is an attractive feature of democratic government, democracy needs to do more than just include everyone in its decisions in order to make a case for its preferability to other regimes. The people, in other words, have to perform better (more intelligently) than a monarch or a panel of experts, or at least not so poorly that their epistemic failures override their procedural virtues. Landemore believes that her model of epistemic democracy, bolstered by mathematical theorems, resolves the modern democratic paradox by making a strong case for democracy’s superior reason.

Now, it might seem that recent events have made Landemore’s argument less persuasive than when she first published the book in 2013. In less than five years’ time, the democracies of the Western world have seen sharp rises in vulgar populism and right-wing nationalism, mostly in response to geopolitical crises that have increased global migration, and stagnated middle- and working-class incomes, in many Western countries. Britain voted to “Brexit” the European Union. The US elected Donald Trump. Many European Union nations, meanwhile, have had right-wing parties scoop up parliamentary seats at rates unseen since the inchoate days of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Democracies are acting brutally and stupidly lately, and with long-term political consequences that will be onerous to reverse, even if the world’s democracies start learning from their mistakes soon.

I remember how, in the later months of 2016, as Trump’s ascendance became an undeniable reality, I would daily read arguments in respected mainstream publications about the incapacity of the “people” to decide on matters as consequential as who will steer US economic policy and geopolitical strategy. Plato’s cautionary words about democratic demagoguery in the Republic circulated as much through popular media, I suspect, as they have since ancient times, or at least since the English and French aristocracies tried to encourage the insurgent middle classes of their countries to step down from their egalitarian soapboxes. All of this is to say, the modern democratic paradox is looking less like a paradox as the widespread intuition that democracy is a source of legitimate government gets weaker. And it is not just elites that are losing their democratic intuitions at a rapid rate: the choices that democratic peoples themselves are making suggest that more than a few among the many would prefer the rule of an authoritarian strongman to legitimate self-governance.

I can hardly claim here that Landemore’s book offers much reassurance about the ominous direction American and European democracy have taken in recent years. The present crisis has been decades in the making, in which case, it is fair to assume that Landemore must have felt something of our current panic during the years she was preparing her book. Far from reassuring my worries, then, I worry that what Landemore has given us in her valuable book is a portrait of Minerva’s owl flying at dusk: an account of democratic reason as it passes out of this epoch of human history. But on days when I am not assailed by such thoughts, and can see some promise of a democratic future in the rising discontent with our casino capitalist system, I reconsider the insight, borrowed from John Dewey, about democracy’s capacity for learning from its past. These past few years of democratic despair have shown us which elements of our democracy are strong and which weak in terms of storing past insights. Curiously, the element on which Landemore’s book primarily focuses, the legislative-deliberative element, is where American democracy, over the past decade, has proven itself most corruptible. The permeability of our public policy by narrow corporate interests is unparalleled in the democratic world, and the myopia of the purportedly progressive political party is a continual disappointment to younger voters, many of whom are ready to reintegrate democracy with a socialist economic vision. Our executive branch, meanwhile, specifically with regard to the unequal enforcement of the law across racial and economic lines, runs a close second (if it is not tied for first) with our legislative branch in order of corruption. The unelected ranks of our judiciary, ironically enough, specifically the appointed judges that sit in federal circuit and appeals courts, have held up strongest against the ongoing decay of our formal democratic institutions. But even they have erred incredibly at times, and the window of opportunity for a judiciary-led democratic conservation movement is quickly closing.

The antidemocratic regression we are currently experiencing in our government is so deep as to make us question whether Landemore’s thesis that formal democracy, i.e., democracy as a political decision procedure, really learns the hard lessons of its past. A strong case could be made, I think, that American democracy is most learned and most educated, not in its formal-institutional sphere, but in its informal-social sphere–the sphere of mass movements, the sphere of informally organized political dissent. This most learned sphere of democracy gets very little treatment in Landemore’s book on democratic reason, yet it is the one, in times like our own, that is most active, most visionary, and most democratic, even if its energies do not receive formal expression.

Still, I think Landemore’s book inspires those who share her intuitions about democratic reason to commit to two worthwhile projects, the first being to conserve the democratic intuition in an era of democratic decline; the second being to reconsider the political meaning of education in a democratic polity. “If collective intelligence is real,” she writes in the closing lines of her book, “then we should worry less about the failure of education to improve individual cognition, and more about its ability to enhance the intelligence of the system as a whole.” This bolsters the intuition that democracy is intelligent with an equally important intuition that democracy requires education to thrive. Perhaps we should following Landemore in thinking about how to pursue that education in a new way.

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Three Mediations of Reading Heraclitus

1. The first is hermeneutical. How are his hundred odd fragments to be interpreted at the basic level of sense? Often I will pass over a fragment of indeterminate yet cryptic meaning and feel the need to copy it down in my notebook. Take this one, for example: (B90) All things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods. What is it about this statement (which, to the twenty-first century reader trained to metabolize tweet-sized thoughts, should be nothing) that resonates long after I read it? No doubt some of the effect comes from having read it as part of a series of other statements structured just like it. Probably its initial hold on me has less to do with the singularity of its meaning than with its relation of dependency to these other, equally suggestive statements. Repeating it several times aloud after copying it in my notebook, I start to feel that it is the strife between the sense of this statement and its form that gives it its particular resonance. The chiasmic structure of the statement does not read like an attempt to repackage a pseudo-profundity that is really without meaning. Rather, the chiasmus is itself the meaning; the shape the thought takes is to some extent its content. The transaction being spoken of, among things and fire, fire and things, is modeled in the very grammar of the chiasmus. And the relation between the chiasmus of the first clause and that of the second produces an analogy that helps me to extrapolate a bit of sense from the fragment: The cosmos is an everlasting transaction between becoming and unbecoming; fire is the currency of this transaction.

2. The second is philosophical. Many of Heraclitus’ fragments exploit both the abundant ambiguities of classical Greek grammar and the relative poverty — at the time of his writing — of classical Greek’s conceptual lexicon. What Heraclitus appears to be trying to work out in his philosophical fragments, then, is not the kind of systematic cosmology or epistemological treatise that we would expect to find in a medieval or modern philosopher, but a proverbial form of thinking that initiates — without fully completing — the translation of grammatical-poetical figures into the logical medium of concepts. Fragment B48: The name of the bow is life, but its work is death. As one translator notes, this fragment exploits the identical spelling of the classical Greek words for bow and life (bios). In speech, the two words would have received different accents, bow stressing the second syllable (biós), life stressing the first syllable (bíos). In writing, however, there were no diacritical marks to distinguish the two meanings. The reader would thus have had to perceive the play on words in order to begin interpreting the riddle. Such riddles are the medium of Heraclitus’ thinking: translations-in-progress of figures into concepts, or what the author in other places calls “right thinking.”

(Note: Heraclitus is generally critical of those who do not think in riddles with him. He believes that ordinary people are capable of it but are too lazy or poorly educated or otherwise indisposed to do it. He likewise believes that the educated elites of his time are not made wise by their vast learning. Their facts do not approach the level of understanding carried in the form of the riddle. For Heraclitus, then, the riddle is neither the property of the undereducated nor the overeducated, but belongs to any thinker who grasps the affinity between poetic figures and logical concepts — an affinity that, following him, seems to be buried in the deep grammar of language. Fragment B116: It belongs to all people to know themselves and to think rightly.)

3. The third is philological. What we know of Heraclitus we do not know from him directly. The compiled fragments we have today are sourced from spliced quotations and paraphrasings from other authors’ texts. History has transformed Heraclitus from the fiercely independent thinker he is reported to have been in life into a total dependent on the intellectual projects of others. To be sure, many of those who quoted him did so out of admiration or agreement with what he wrote. But others no doubt exploited his name to validate claims that would have been weaker without an appeal to his authority. There is thus no “true” Heraclitus except the philological Heraclitus. Part of the task of reading him, beyond the hermeneutical and philosophical considerations I’ve mentioned, is to consult the source texts from which his sayings are compiled.

Fragment B93: The god whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign. As a floating fragment decontextualized from its source text, I take this to be a provisional definition of the riddle-medium in which Heraclitus’ fragments are written. His riddle “signifies” like the Delphi oracle’s sayings, neither disclosing meaning transparently nor withholding meaning opaquely. Just as when Apollo sends his cryptic messages through his Pythian oracle, the human supplicant is supposed to interpret the statement as best she is able, so the reader of Heraclitus is expected to mull over the words on the page without arriving at a fully determinate or fully indeterminate reading. In short, I read fragment B93 as an invitation into the world of Heraclitus’ thinking, a riddle that helps to unravel his other riddles.

The source text of fragment B93 is Plutarch’s On the Pythian Oracles, a dialogue written more than five centuries after Heraclitus’ death, in which a man named Theon explains to his friends why the oracles at Delphi have ceased to speak in riddle-like verses in favor of a more immediately intelligible prose. Here is how the fragment appears in Plutarch’s dialogue:

For nothing seems better to reproduce the type, no instrument more obediently to use its own nature, than the moon. Yet taking from the sun his bright and fiery rays, she does not transmit them so to us: mingled with herself they change colour and also take on a different power; the heat wholly disappeared, and the light fails from weakness before it reaches us. I think you know the saying found in Heraclitus, that ‘the sovereign whose seat is at Delphi, speaks not, nor conceals, but signifies.’ Take and add then to what is here so well said, the conception that the God of this place employs the Pythia for the hearing as the sun employs the moon for the seeing. He shows and reveals his own thoughts, but shows them mingled in their passage through a mortal body, and a soul which cannot remain at rest or present itself to the exciting power unexcited and inwardly composed, but which boils and surges and is involved in the stirrings and troublesome passions from within.

The quotation is introduced to make the point that the god Apollo, when delivering his messages to the supplicants at Delphi, has always used the Pythian oracle in accordance with her faculties. At the time of Heraclitus’ writing, the Pythian oracle was typically a woman of aristocratic breeding and education who would have know something of poetic composition and meter and would thus have been better prepared to deliver divine messages in high verse. The oracles of Plutarch’s time, however, were typically peasant women without education, and were thus better suited to deliver Apollo’s prophecies in plainer, more prosaic speech. But there was an additional reason for switching from poetic to prosaic prophecy beyond the social origin and education of the oracles: the supplications of the pilgrims at Delphi had fundamentally changed. In earlier times, according to Theon, pilgrims came to Apollo’s temple at Delphi with dangerous and even daring inquiries, ones whose answers sometimes needed hiding from one’s political enemies. The poetical obscurity of the prophecy hid its meaning from unwelcome eavesdroppers and spoke to the specific concerns of the supplicants, who, after applying their whole minds to the interpretation, were able to work the meaning out. In the present “settled condition” of the world, however (which, according to the speaker in the dialogue, is one in which “war has been made to cease” and peace and tranquility prevail), people come to the oracle with altogether different concerns. They worry about marriages, commercial transactions, and other quotidian concerns, asking fewer questions that might endanger their well being in the state. As Theon explains to his friends:

Then there was a change in human life, affecting men both in fortune and in genius. Expediency banished what was superfluous, top-knots of gold were dropped, rich robes discarded; probably too clustering curls were shorn off, and the buskin discontinued. It was not a bad training, to set the beauty of frugality against that of profusion, to account what was plain and simple, a better ornament than the pompous and elaborate. So it was with language: it changed with the times, and shared the general break-up. History got down from its coach, and dropped metre. Truth was best sifted out from Myth in prose; Philosophy welcomed clearness, and found it better to instruct than to astonish, so she pursued her inquiry in plain language. The God made the Pythia leave off calling her own fellow townsmen ‘fire-burners’, the Spartans ‘serpent-eaters’, men ‘mountaineers’, rivers ‘mountain-drainers’. He cleared the oracle of epic verses, unusual words, circumlocutions, and vagueness, and so prepared the way to converse with his consultants just as law converses with states, as kings address subjects, as disciples hear their masters speak, so framing language as to be intelligible and convincing.

This shift from poetry to prose in oracular sayings appears to be a distinctly human achievement. The riddle-likeness of the earlier sayings of the oracle has been rendered unnecessary by a sea change in human beings’ political relations to each other. Less imperiled in their political lives, they seek more banal guidance for their personal lives. Plutarch’s citation of Heraclitus, assuming it is authentic, is likely a departure from the fragment’s original meaning, and yet it provides the only context in which we can interpret that meaning. Once placed in a series with other Heraclitean fragments, it takes on another valence altogether.

(Final thought: the three mediations that must be attended to in Heraclitus’s writings — the hermeneutical, the philosophical, the philological — are just magnifications of the demands that every text makes upon its reader.)

(Originally published on January 15, 2017 at medium.com/kelly.m.s.swope.)

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Archaic Democracy

For the past few years I have been trying to work out, in my thoughts and notebooks, a conclusive critical appraisal of the significance of democratic idealism in American writing. I admit that I have come to feel internally divided by the effort: one part of me seeks to continue drawing nourishment from writers who have been the most formative in my education, while another part of me seeks to put to rest a tradition that no longer responds to (even if it directly addresses) the political and cultural moment I inhabit. But before I go on, I should define my terms:

By democratic idealism I refer to a defunct tradition of political and cultural thinking that regarded American democracy as an essentially imaginativestruggle unfolding alongside the political project of building egalitarian institutions by electoral consent. Among the deepest worries of the democratic idealist writers was the right of equally empowered minds to make consequential representations and judgments in the name of the entire demos. How could the individual literary genius work out the much-needed aesthetic synthesis of the sprawling, pluralistic mass? Who would be the common reader that could hold the literary genius accountable for her synthesis of the American manifold?

A beautiful symmetry binds this tradition, and its recurring questions, together. Idealism begins in the first half of the nineteenth century with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s address to the young graduates of Harvard, “The American Scholar,” and concludes, rather self-referentially, with Ralph Waldo Ellison’s “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” an essay that appeared in 1978 in a magazine named for Emerson’s Harvard address. Ellison’s astonishing intimation of the symmetry between himself and his namesake, between the national culture of the twentieth century and that of the nineteenth, and finally, between the Little Man and the American Scholar (two sides–audience and artist–of the same democratic coin), was, wittingly or not, a intimation that the idealist literary tradition, as well as the historical conditions that engendered it, were dying out with him.

Ellison was the last of the great idealists, and in the time since his most important writings, a host of non-idealist critical tendencies have taken the place of his stubborn faith in American democracy. This is not to say that certain vestiges of democratic idealism did not remain with a younger generation of writers who chose to carry Ellison’s snuffed-out torch into a new age of democratic skepticism. Robert Pinsky, who was Poet Laureate of the United States (the highest honor for a so-called “civic poet”) in the 1990s, is one such figure whose work arrests something important in the democratic idealist vision at the moment of its vanishing. Pinsky’s An Explanation of America, a book-length poem published the year after Ellison’s “Little Man,” shows a familiar propensity to represent American democracy as a sublime literary object while also cataloging the symptoms of a national culture aging out its aspiration to give ever-new accounts of itself.

The recent memory of Vietnam casts a shadow over Pinsky’s entire work; for the author, the war that nakedly exhibited America’s ulterior interests in global affairs remolded the ambitious, inward-looking republic into the ages-old template of an empire become corrupt. “I think [Vietnam] made our country older, forever,” he writes in a section of the poem called “Serpent Knowledge.” “I don’t mean better or not better, but merely/As though a person should come to a certain place/And have his hair turn gray, that very night.” And a few lines later: “I think/That I may always feel as if I lived/In a time when the country aged itself:/More lonely together in our common strangeness…/As if we were a family, and some members/Had done an awful thing on a road at night…”

Pinsky’s representation of the United States as aged and corrupted occurs alongside allusions to famous Roman battles and venerable Roman statesmen. A long section in An Explanation of America, for example, is written as if it were a letter from Horace to a friend concerning the duties of a citizen to his republic. References to ancient Greek literature crop up throughout the poem as well. In one section, “Bad Dreams,” Homer’s Odysseus comes to replace Walt Whitman as the ur-figure of the American poet-traveler taking account of the national landscape:

That quiet leads me to a stranger’s dread/Of the place frightened settlers might invent:/The customs of the people there, the tongues/They speak, and what they have to drink, the things/That they imagine, might falter in such a place,/Or be too few; and men would live like Cyclopes,/“With neither assemblies nor any settled customs”-/Or Laestrygonians who consume their kind/And see a stranger as his meat and marrow,/And have no cities or cultivated farms.

Pinsky’s frequent substitution of classical tropes for “American” ones extinguishes the sense of the United States as a country forever coming of age. In his poetry, democracy loses its open-ended, unhistorical freedom and becomes a historical prison for the incompletely emancipated. He writes of America’s “mellowing to another country/Of different people living in different places,” as if to suggest that, finally, enough past has accumulated behind the United States that it can now give a sober account of itself. “The accumulating prison of the past/Pulls us toward a body and a place,” he writes, “a plural headed Empire, manifold/Beyond my outrage or admiration.” The sobering accumulations of the past work together with the numerous classical allusions in the poem. Reading Pinsky, one gets the impression that ahead of the United States lie more inimitable achievements, both political and cultural, but also, like the great civilizations of the ancient world, more senseless wars, the inevitable entropy of empire, and a universalized “suffering that could [not] make us wiser,/or nobler, but only older, and more ourselves…”

The backward-looking classicism of An Explanation of America finds its corollary in the archaic psychologism of an important later essay by Pinsky called Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. First given as a lecture in 2001, the essay defines the current crisis of democratic culture in terms of primitive-seeming anxieties that are actually symptoms of democracy’s maturation: in one direction, democracy fears being unjustifiably dominated or coerced into a universal conformism that effaces difference; in the other direction, it fears over-differentiation, a diversification so diffuse that it cannot be gathered under a single proper name. “Historical memory,” Pinksy suggests, “tempers both of the[se] imagined extremes of culture”:

Memory resists uniformity because it registers fine gradations; memory resists the factional because it registers the impure, recombining, fluent nature of culture. It is memory that eventually undermines the apparently total successes of both the colonizing Conquistador and the leveling Visigoth. The fantastic element in democratic memory exaggerates the anxieties of uniformity and fragmentation. Accustomed to practicing an ancient, singular art amid a dazzling mass culture, the American poet is a kind of veteran of these anxieties.

Archaic anxieties and the ancient art of poetry find a common home in Pinsky’s backward-looking, memorialist outlook. For him, poetry discloses the evolving historical tensions between universalism and particularism, individual and mass, within the “mellowing” American psyche. The poet’s vocal medium is her chief asset in fulfilling this social task. “In a poem,” writes Pinksy, “the social realm is invoked with a special intimacy at the barely voluntary level of voice itself. Communal life, whether explicitly included or not, is present implicitly in the cadences and syntax of language: a somatic ghost.” This duality of solitary voice and ghostlike community — a duality that Pinsky repeatedly analogizes to the experience of democracy itself— has been with humanity since the first intentional sounds rolled off the human tongue. For, just like every poet before her, today’s American poet is nothing more than a solitary voice trying to overhear herself — trying, out of freedom and loneliness, to simulate a third-person’s empathy for her solitude — with rare affirmations of success.

It seems that, for Pinsky, poetry alone teaches the aging democratic citizen that the historical apotheosis of self-representation is in fact a reversion to an archaic struggle between voice and community, solitude and communal belonging. In its national poetry, American democracy magnifies tensions inherited from the most ancient human civilizations and creates a repository of mythical memory that attends far less to the empirical events of history than to the structuring dualities of the imagination. In the conceptual refinement of Pinksy’s arguments, one can sense his break with the more impressionistically minded democratic idealists that came before him. Having inherited their questions as something historically other than his own, he can now speak with a measured retrospection, as someone older, more jaded, than they. It is in this way that his reflections on the classical, even archaic, strains within American life expose the basically adolescent conception of democracy that belonged to the idealists. His poetry summarizes better than the critic can why his predecessors began to disappear with the first confirmations of the country’s irreversible aging.

(Originally published on January 8, 2017 on medium.com/@kelly.m.s.swope)

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Democratic Prudence

Among Walt Whitman’s achievements was to bring consideration of the soul into modern democratic thought. For him, democracy was to be as much an elaboration of the soul’s character as it was a direct electoral procedure.

The soul has that measureless pride which revolts from                         every lesson but its own.

Now I breathe the word of the prudence that walks                                   abreast with time, space, reality, That answers the pride which refuses every lesson but its                         own.

What is prudence is indivisible, Declines to separate one part of life from every other part, Divides not the righteous from the unrighteous or the living                         from the dead, Matches every thought or act by its correlative, Knows no possible forgiveness or deputed atonement, Knows that the young man who composedly peril’d his life                         and lost it has done exceedingly well for                         himself without doubt, That he who never peril’d his life, but retains it to old age         in riches and ease, has probably achiev’d                       nothing for himself worth mentioning, Knows that only that person has really learn’d who has                         learn'd to prefer results, Who favors body and soul the same, Who perceives the indirect assuredly, following the direct, Who in his spirit in any emergency whatever neither                                  hurries nor avoids death.

Excerpt borrowed from 'Song of Prudence,' in Leaves of Grass.

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On Love of Political Objects

Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

If what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms, true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these “beings for another.” The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor – when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is only found in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis.

For Freire, true political solidarity demands an act of love through which the category of the oppressed moves out of its abstractness into real existential personhood. In other words, those among the oppressors who choose to be in solidarity with the oppressed must transform their notion of the oppressed into a realer “object” of love who, while comprised of "beings for another," is a loving subject in its own right. From these acts, a shared freedom is produced.

In the political context described by Freire, love recognizes human beings as being perpetually engaged in a process of self-completion. Love views the humanity of persons as a creative process rather than a rank assigned according to a hierarchical status quo. But what is love in an “ontological” sense?[1] While it makes philosophical sense in a dialectical system that aims for the uplift of the oppressed and the elimination of oppression, what is the actual experience of love like? What are its roots in real human desires?

What the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes about love and desire in Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus advances our investigation of this question. In the first Duino elegy, Rilke says:

Shouldn’t this most ancient of sufferings finally grow more fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved, and, quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension, so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself. For there is no place where we can remain.

This passage is about a “soaring, objectless love” that cannot be satisfied by fixating on a single beloved. In fact, it insists on letting go of the beloved object (who is also a human subject equally capable of acts of love) so that, like an arrow “gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself.” Only in being lovingly released does the beloved’s real potential get actualized. For love to flourish, the characteristics associated with the beloved must perish in time, become a “nothing” that is paradoxically more than it was as "something."

Here is Rilke again in the third sonnet to Orpheus:

…Young man,[2] it is not your loving, even if your mouth was forced wide open by your own voice – learn

to forget that passionate music. It will end. True singing is a different breath, about Nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind. 

We might relate what Rilke calls “true singing” to solidary articulation of Freire's “act of love.”  It is not the young man’s loving (in the sense of loving the beloved) that produces the song, but true singing, “a different breath, about nothing” (in other words, not about specific beloved objects). So, if we let Rilke’s poetic concept of desire color our impressions of Freire, we now confront the question as to whether the experience of desire permits the kind of political love encouraged by Freire. How is it possible to desire “nothing” yet hold on to a concrete political aim – the liberation of all human beings, initiated by the oppressed?  

It isn’t possible, so long as our political vision of freedom remains fixed. The task of those in solidarity with the oppressed, as Freire notes, is to learn about and create a more complete condition of freedom through acts of love. This means allowing the subjective element of the “beloved” object (its creative, spontaneous capacity for conscious action that all human beings share) to transcend the objective element over time. When the oppressed subject starts receiving love as a subject, by which I mean, when it is desired for its human capacity for present and future action and not as a fixed, abstract object, then the oppressed subject is receiving love “objectlessly,” in solidarity with its lover.

Rilke gives one a sense of how love extends beyond human beings' fixation on beloved objects into a freer, objectless realm that is nearer to our actual experience of desire. Rilke's poetic conception of desire supplements Freire’s political “act of love” in that it forces us to consider how to guide desire in a political context of love that sets up liberation as the perennial goal. If one purports to “love” and be in solidarity with the oppressed, then it requires more than being conscious of the oppressed as a political object. It involves desiring with them, as subjects overcoming objectification, toward a love that, because it is constantly being extended beyond its object, is ontologically “about nothing.”

[1] This question is not being pulled out of the blue. Freire stresses the ontological question alongside the historical-political question as part of the process of reconstructing social consciousness.

[2] That the poet addresses a young man gives us cause to raise at least one gender-conscious eyebrow, since Rilke in other poems allows for subtle differences between male and female desire to manifest. 

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Werktag/Tagwerk

In a fragment of an uncompleted elegy, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke elaborates two elements that comprise a concept of "work." The first element is the formal, given conditions under which work takes place, while the second is the specific, everyday task of actually doing work. When these two elements are unified, work follows. In Stephen Mitchell’s English translation, we read Rilke as saying:

“I pulsate in [life]; she bears me, she gives me the spaciousness of this day, the primeval workday for me to make use of…”

In the original German, “primeval workday” is given as “uralten Werktag,” a phrase that strides pretty literally into English. In choosing these words, Rilke implies that work is conditioned by something eternally present, a life-pulse that would be the same to the worker no matter the age in which he was born.

Later in the same elegy fragment, Mitchell translates Rilke as saying:

…Why shouldn’t more youthful nations rush past the graveyard of cultures long ago rotten? How pitiful it would be if greatness needed the slightest indulgence. Let him whose soul is no longer startled and transformed by palaces, by gardens’ boldness, by the      rising and falling of ancient fountains, by everything held back in paintings or by the infinite thereness of statues – let such a person go out to his daily work, where greatness is lying in ambush and someday, at some turn, will leap upon him and force him to fight for his life.

In Rilke’s German, “daily work” is rendered as “Tagwerk,” the exact inverse of “Werktag.” A literal translation would render Tagwerk as “daywork,” a word that does not exist in English. Mitchell’s translation (necessarily) alters Rilke’s play on words, and in doing so, hides the conceptual interplay between Werktag and Tagwerk. Werktag is the eternal, primeval workday; for Rilke, it indexes life’s gift of the workday for man’s use. Tagwerk, however, is work itself, undertaken by man in a specific lived context. Man “goes out” to his daily work, and in doing so, breaks from the “infinite thereness” of his inherited past. In other words, daily work varies depending on the kinds of tasks man must undertake in response to his present conditions. Conversely, his Werktag is not the task of work itself, but the "primeval" ontological conditions under which that work takes place. Werktag is given to him regardless of his assigned tasks. So, while man’s daily work changes with history, the conditions for that work, his Werktag, remain relatively unaltered. It is still possible to read the poem this way in English. What I am trying to suggest is that the intimacy between these two words, their deliberate placement as two elements of the same concept - "Werk" - might be missed in translation.

All this conceptual hairsplitting becomes insightful if we think of these two elements of work in relation to man’s achievement of greatness, which is the ostensible culmination of Rilke's fragment. Life gives the workday; man goes out to his work and gets ambushed by “greatness.” Specifically, greatness “leap[s]” upon him and force[s] him to fight for his life.” Following Rilke’s wording, greatness does not appear to be a positive thing that man achieves; in fact, man appears to stand in a passive relation to it. Thus it must be a struggle against a past that “no longer startles” man. A person contends against the artifacts inherited from his past in order to accomplish his own iteration of greatness.

Man’s daily work involves him fighting for his own life within the confines of his workday. He does not engage with greatness by trying to recover the primeval conditions for work, which, according to Rilke, are always already with him, but by working against the contemporary reality that surrounds him, resisting the difficulties it imposes. Rilke's fragment suggests that no daily work can take place apart from present reality. Thus, the primeval workday does not offer a pure set of conditions for man to do his work, but holds within its concept man's ever-changing, everyday struggles with his passive relation to greatness.