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In the last episode, I examined the moral philosophy of perfectionism as formulated by the philosopher Thomas Hurka. I recommend listening to that episode before this one, as this essay is a continuation and will build on the foundation that I established in that one. But to sum up, perfectionism posits the development and exercise of our characteristic human capacities—those things which are unique and essential to humans—as being intrinsically good and the foundation for right action.
Humans have fundamental moral intuitions. The origin, nature, and implications of these intuitions are the subject of much philosophical and psychological investigation, but for the time being, what’s important is simply that humans in general have such intuitions. Reading moral philosophy, I often find that the authors evaluate various theories in terms of these intuitions. This is entirely sensible; whatever the ontological status of moral facts, there is something that we mean by statements such as “Eating babies is wrong,” and if we developed a moral theory that told us that it is not, in any sense, wrong to eat babies, or that it is right to eat babies, we would be rightfully inclined to reject that theory on the basis of its going against what we know, or believe we know, to be true. Similarly, if a scientific theory concluded that gravity does not exist, we would reject it on the basis of conflicting with our knowledge of the world. We may be wrong about the nature of gravity or the reasons why the phenomenon of gravity works the way it does, but it clearly exists. This is not to say that theories, either moral or scientific, always need to correspond exactly to what we already believe to be true, but when our theories conflict with what seem to be bare facts such as the existence of gravity or the wrongness of eating babies, we should, at the least, reevaluate our reasoning to see if we’ve made an error.
Often in science we’re seeking not only to uncover new truths but to justify and explain what we already know to be true based on our experience of the world. It’s a bare fact that light refracts in water; it’s something that we see happen every time we see light interacting with water. We don’t need our scientific theories to tell us whether light refracts in water but how and why. Although moral ontology is a much more abstract matter than physical ontology, as I discussed last episode, moral philosophy still works in a parallel fashion, explaining not so much what is right and wrong as how and why things are right or wrong. If we developed a physical theory that told us that light doesn’t refract in water, we would want some explanation as to why we perceive that it does. As I discussed in the last episode, there may not be an objective fact of the matter as to whether it’s wrong to eat babies; if there isn’t, our moral theories need to provide an explanation for why that claim seems so self-evident.
That said, as we discovered in the last episode, we have greater reason to be skeptical with regards to morality than we have to be skeptical with regards to physics.
While I’d have a difficult time proving this, I have a strong suspicion that, almost universally, Satanists have what might be called a healthy skepticism with regards to conventional morality. After all, much of conventional morality comes from religion, and Satanists certainly have a healthy skepticism with regards to that. So, while perfectionism seems, on its face, very appealing for a number of reasons, much of Hurka’s formulation of the theory relies on moral intuitions and assumptions that are widely accepted but which Satanists might rightly consider suspect.
The “wrong-properties objection” to perfectionism implies that the theory may be unacceptable because it values, or has the potential to value, human characteristics which are normally considered morally trivial or even morally bad or evil. Hurka formulates his account of perfectionism to circumvent this, stating that only those characteristic human capacities “that seem in their own right worth developing” (1993, p. 10) are included in the theory. He concedes that a theory absent this qualification would be “hard to accept because it flouts our particular judgements about value” (1993, p. 9). We are thus faced with two alternatives: either the moral theory of perfectionism accounts for the wrong-properties objection by including only those characteristic human capacities that are, in themselves, plausibly worth developing, or the theory fails. I think Hurka may have overlooked a third possibility: perfectionism is a valid moral theory while accepting the wrong-properties objection (or with some other version of it in place), and it is our moral intuitions which are mistaken in at least some respects.
Part of my motivation for engaging in moral philosophy is to find justifications for my disdain of fascism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the like, which I’ll group under the heading of “bigotry” for the purposes of this essay. I want to be able to reject and repudiate such philosophies in the most forceful language possible, and I want to know exactly what I’m talking about when I do so. At the same time, I’m skeptical of the moral foundations offered by traditional religion and don’t believe that they are adequate to the task. How does Christianity defend against racism, for example? Historically, it’s done very poorly on that front, and often throughout history we see Christianity used to justify racism rather than repudiate it. And as I discussed in the last essay, moral facts may not exist, and if they do, they are clearly toothless, unable to affect the world in any substantive way. So, in the absence of moral truth, I seek to ground myself against bigotry. To me, it is a bare fact—as much a bare fact as the existence of gravity—that bigotry is, in some sense of the word, wrong, whether that wrongness be a matter of objective fact or something more subjective and expressive. I seek foundations, justifications, and explanations for that understanding.
So my objective here will be to start with the basic premise of perfectionism and rebuild it from the ground up, allowing it to conflict with our moral intuitions where it must while simultaneously seeking a foundation on which I can build a more robust defense against bigotry.
Perfectionism being based on our essential human nature, it requires the best account of what our essential human nature actually is (Hurka, 1993, p. 9). Hurka offers us two methods by which we can evaluate potential essential properties. One is the intuitive method of philosopher Saul Kripke: perform a thought experiment in which the thing in question is given all of its properties except for the property in question, and then ask whether that thing intuitively remains a member of its class. For example, the fountain pen I used to write my notes for this essay has a reservoir for holding ink. Is the capacity to hold ink essential to a fountain pen? If I imagine a pen that has all the characteristics of that pen but which does not hold ink, is it still a fountain pen? Intuitively, it is not. It might be another kind of pen—dip pens, for example, meet that description—but it is not a fountain pen, so the capacity to hold ink is an essential property for fountain pens.
The other method described by Hurka is the scientific method of philosopher Hilary Putnam: essential properties are those which play a central role in good scientific theories. Hurka offers the example of considering the atomic structure of gold as a possible essential property:
That gold has a certain atomic structure explains its colour, weight, and other phenomenal properties, but is not in turn explained by them. Gold’s atomic structure is thus explanatorily prior to these properties, and this shows, on the second view, that it is essential. For the explanatory view, properties central to scientific explanations are essential, and in gold these cluster around its inner constitution.
1993, p. 34
There are problems with both of these methods, but Hurka believes that these problems are not catastrophic. I’ll skip his analysis and jump to his conclusion: one can determine the essential properties of a given class of thing by using both of them together.
Hurka offers three essential human characteristics in his account of perfectionism, which I covered last episode: our physical essence, our theoretically rational essence, and our practically rational essence. By way of summing up, our physical essence is our possession of human bodies, our theoretically rational essence is our ability to form beliefs based on evidence, and our practically rational essence is our ability to act towards our goals based on our beliefs. As I also noted last episode, there is a non-rational component to human existence which Hurka denies as an essential human characteristic. On Hurka’s account, the non-rational experience of our emotions reduces to our theoretically and practically rational essences: our emotions, in other words, are fundamentally rational and can be evaluated rationally. I denied that this was the case. Let’s use that as a starting point and evaluate it using the Kripke and Putnam methods.
First, by way of clarifying what it is exactly that I’m talking about: whenever it rains, I feel a particular warm and pleasant sadness. According to Hurka, my beliefs and aims are present in this emotional experience, but upon introspection, I am unable to locate any such beliefs or aims. I can imagine the lives of my distant ancestors who might have had much more rudamentary shelter. Cold means wet, wet means sickness, sickness means death, and so we huddled together and felt good, warm, and cozy. But my experience of sadness when it rains cannot be reduced to that. If the emotion is connected to a threat, why would it be sadness rather than fear? If the emotion is more connected to me being inside where it’s warm and dry, why is it sadness rather than happiness? Psychoanalysis might reveal underlying reasons, but I’m not convinced that those reasons would be sufficient to characterize the experience overall as being fundamentally rational.
I can generalize this experience as non-rational emotional reaction to the natural world and then apply Kripke’s and Putnam’s methods. Would a race of beings like ourselves in every way but lacking non-rational emotional reaction to the natural world be human? My intuitive sense is that they would, at the least, be less human. Now, it may be that there are individual humans who have no experiences of this sort, and this does not imply in any way that such people are less human. That would just be part of the spectra of human diversity, about which more later. What I’m saying is that beings who do not even have the potential capacity for such experience would be less human. And by way of asking the same question using the Putnam approach, let’s take a look at the 6th symphony of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven, known as the Pastoral Symphony. Composing a symphony is a uniquely human thing to do, and while this particular symphony is purely instrumental, with no lyrical content, the titles of its movements (such as “Scene by the Brook” for the second movement) give it the explicit context of depicting the natural world. I think that those hearing the symphony without knowing about the movement titles would still have a sense that it’s depicting the natural world. For me, being aware of the music’s program, I find that it resonates with my non-rational emotional reactions to the natural world. On Hurka’s account, we might imagine Beethoven writing the symphony, saying to himself, “This is how I feel during a thunderstorm, these are the underlying rational causes for those feelings, and this particular arrangement of notes is the rational way to depict those feelings.” That this scene strikes us as comical and dubious is telling. Generalizing, our non-rational emotional reaction to the natural world is explanatory with regards to the phenomena of particular human art objects. This is not to say that there are not rational elements to Beethoven’s composition. The opening of the fourth movement, which depicts a thunderstorm, uses the strings in a way that is evocative of falling rain, and, given that Beethoven wanted to depict falling rain in the first place, staccato notes on the high strings are more rational than, say, legato notes in the low brass. However, the causes and effects of the symphony cannot be reduced to such explanations. It’s not that Hurka is wrong when he says that there are rational aspects to our emotional lives; it’s just that his account is incomplete.
Conventional religion often suggests that our humanity is in some way broken and offers a way to repair it or escape from it via non-human means. In Christianity, for example, humanity is fallen due to the original sin of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden, but we can be saved by accepting God’s sacrifice of himself to himself. In doing so, we become “new beings in Christ.” There are certainly some very problematic aspects to human nature, but I suggest that, for Satanists at least, the way out is through. For Satanists, our human existence as vital and independent beings rather than as God’s pets in the Garden of Eden is a gift from Satan. Even if we’re not looking at the biblical creation narrative as being literal—and we shouldn’t, as the presence of Satan in the Garden of Eden is a Christian retcon of the ancient Jewish narrative—it remains symbolic of the value we place on our existence qua humans, our existence in terms of our being human. I don’t believe that we become better humans by becoming less human. I believe, rather, that we become better humans by becoming more human, embracing what we are and leveraging the best parts of ourselves in order to live our best lives and to mitigate the problematic aspects of our nature.
This means, in part, embracing the non-rational part of ourselves, developing and exercising it through such avenues as art and religion. But we run into an interesting conundrum here because our non-rational essence does not invalidate our rational essences and there are obvious conflicts and contradictions between the two. However, I propose that this conflict is itself an essential human characteristic. Intuitively, beings who do not struggle to reconcile these conflicting aspects of their nature seem to me to be lacking something intrinsically and essentially human, and this struggle is also explanatory of much human behavior—how much of our art concerns the struggle of individuals between their heart and their head? I argue that it is good and right that we engage in this struggle and wrestle with these contradictions, and that we become better humans by doing so. This is not, however, an invitation or a suggestion to do or believe irrational things. If our reasons for believing something or doing something are non-rational, then we have attempted to make the non-rational into the rational, which can only end in failure. For me, the leap of faith into the Satanic theological circle by which I acknowledge Principium Luciferi—the principle of Satan as Lightbringer—is an example of the non-rational aspect of my existence. I discussed this a few episodes back, in the essay “Entering the Circle: Towards a Satanic Theology.” My attempts in writing that essay to rationalize Principium Luciferi met with repeated failure; I ultimately had to take the leap of faith that Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich said that I would. My Satanic faith is distinct from the faith of some Christians who believe, despite the absence of evidence, that God exists as an ontological being and that the resurrection of Jesus is a historical fact. Rather, following Paul Tillich, I would describe my faith as a modality of relationship to what is of ultimate concern.
I’ll move from here to a broader question: what does perfectionism have to say about human society as a whole, and how does that relate to our relationships with society as Satanists?
It is clear that our existence as individuals within the collective of humanity is an essential human characteristic: if we imagine otherwise human-like beings who lived more like tigers, living isolated, individual lives and only coming together to mate, we would intuitively say that there was something inhuman about them, and participation in humanity plays a central, explanatory role in human behavior. At the same time, we’re not ants—we give weight and meaning to our lives as individuals in ways that don’t relate directly to the societies in which we exist, however much our individual lives may be ultimately shaped and enculturated by society. As with our rational and non-rational essences, a tension exists between our existence as individuals and our existence as part of societies.
Hurka’s account of perfectionism is agent-neutral: the development and exercise of my own characteristic human capacities is no more or less valuable than that of anyone else (1993, p. 62-64). There remains an asymmetry within perfectionism between our self-regarding duties and our other-regarding duties, an asymmetry which Hurka acknowledges and analyzes (1993, p. 64-68), and which I mentioned in my last essay. This asymmetry exists because I alone can develop and exercise my characteristic human capacities for myself alone; it’s not something that anyone can do for me, nor is it something that I can do for anyone else. I am also the one who knows how best to fulfill my own nature: while it would be good of me to give better regard to my physical essence, I have neither the physique nor the disposition of an athlete. Knowing this about myself, I know that my time, on the balance, is better spent reading and writing than running and jumping. The most I can do for others is to permit and encourage others to develop and exercise their own human nature based on their own self-knowledge.
Christianity admonishes us to disregard our own welfare in favor of others’, as we read in such Bible verses as Phillipians 2:3-4: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (NRSV). Such advice is contrary to human nature and contrary to reason. Rather, it seems that we are best served by a morality in which we each primarily pursue our own self-interest, acting as we will towards others so long as we do not interfere with their capacity to do the same. This might be viewed as a version of the harm principle of John Stuart Mill, which states that the only justified use of power over others, against their will, is to prevent harm. As our will is one of our characteristic human capacities (Bradford, 2013), we should not interfere in the will of others unless doing so would prevent some greater interference. Additionally, we are obligated to do what we can to promote, encourage, and protect the human development of others, although this is something about which we must be very cautious, keeping the agent-asymmetry of perfectionism foremost in our minds. We are rarely in a position to say with any confidence how others should be living their lives and developing and exercising their own human nature.
While not a property of individuals, humans in general display a remarkable diversity—physical, intellectual, and cultural, each of those encompassing hundreds of spectra, from height to hair color to gender identity to all of our different ways of thinking and conceptualizing about the world—and this seems as well to be an aspect of our essential human nature. There are about seven and a half billion humans presently inhabiting this planet and it’s estimated that about 108 billion have lived since the emergence of modern Homo sapiens about 50,000 years ago (How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?, n.d.), and each has had their own unique way of being human and manifesting human nature. Perfectionism obligates us to respect that diversity.
I think that those last couple paragraphs may have left me sounding generally optimistic about humans and human nature, when in fact the opposite is true. I’ve been speaking of our essential human nature, but there is human nature beyond that, and much of it gives cause for the more pessimistic view that I hold. Laziness, brutishness, arrogance, stupidity, destructiveness, senseless violence, bigotry, dogmatism… these characteristics may not be essential—I can imagine humans absent these qualities (at least some of them) who remain possessed of the complexities, contradictions, and flaws which are essential to us—but they remain part of our nature regardless. And even our essences may not be Aristotelian ideals across the board. We are, after all, animals, and I do not think that we would be humans if there was no animal side to our nature, a side which fights and competes, which seeks strength and power, which hates its enemies in the particular way that only humans can hate.
Early in the classic science fiction book Dune, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, a kind of religious figure in the world of the book, administers a test to the protagonist, Paul Atreides, to see whether he is a human or an animal. The test involves intense pain, which Paul can either endure, allowing him to pass the test and survive, or escape from, which will result in his immediate death. The Reverend Mother explains to him:
You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.
Herbert, 2010, p. 13
This more negative or pessimistic side to perfectionism, explored in the context of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, will be the subject of my next essay, but first some preliminary thoughts on Nietzsche and Hurka’s perfectionism.
I make no secret of my admiration of Friedrich Nietzsche and my having been heavily influenced by his works. In Hurka’s 1993 book on perfectionism and in an essay included in the book Nietzsche and Morality from 2007, he argues that Nietzsche is indeed a kind of perfectionist, though not one that matches Hurka’s Aristotelian account. The philosopher Donald Rutherford takes Hurka to task for this characterization in his article “Nietzsche as Perfectionist,” published in 2017 in the journal Inquiry. “…[T]here is a sense in which it is meaningful to think of Nietzsche as a perfectionist,” Rutherford says, “though it is a very different sense from the one proposed by Hurka” (p. 2).
Hurka attributes to Nietzsche what he calls the maximax principle: the universal, anti-egalitarian human goal of maximizing the characteristic human capacities present in the best humans. This would be to say that everyone should have the goal of figuring out who the best humans are and helping them to maximize their human nature. In Rutherford’s analysis, this is a flawed reading of Nietzsche:
Where Nietzsche speaks of value perspectives, which may differ sharply based on the interests and social position of the valuer, Hurka seeks on his behalf a true moral theory that describes the standard according to which every human being should judge value.
Rutherford, 2017, p. 7
Rutherford points out that Nietzsche is an antirealist regarding value—Nietzsche does not believe there are objective value facts—and distinguishes between two different modes of valuation, with Rutherford calls the common and the noble. The noble, Rutherford says, is Nietzsche’s own mode of valuation, and possesses three characteristics: spontaneity and self-affirmation (producing values out of oneself instead of reacting negatively to the world), pathos of distance (a sense of this modality of value conferring personal superiority over others), and normative independence and the commanding of value (independence from the moral valuations of the common type and an assertion of one’s own values over others’ values). “In sum,” Rutherford says, “the noble type assigns the highest value to itself and little or no value to others, and claims the right to command others on how they should judge value in general” (2017, p. 10). And Rutherford interprets this as being a plausible perfectionism:
While preserving the affirmative stance of the noble mode of valuation, the perfectionist perspective is premised on an individual’s heightened awareness of the distance between what is common in her and the individual she might become; and she conceives of the realization of the latter in terms of her meeting the demands of specific virtues, including intellectual conscience, honesty, courage, and a capacity for solitude.
Key to this reading of Nietzsche is the thought that a new version of the noble type might guide her actions in a way that is recognizably ethical. She projects an ideal of an intrinsically desirable form of life that involves the perfection of powers she values in herself (‘ever new widening of distances within the soul’ [quoting from Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §257]); and through psychological structures taken over from Christian morality (internalized patterns of command and obedience), this ideal may acquire normative authority for her. It supplies a perspective from which she can assess whether her desires are ones she should try to satisfy.
2017, p. 13
This remains a rather anti-egalitarian perfectionism, but I don’t believe it’s one that directly conflicts with the principles that I’ve already established except, to a certain degree, in terms of what Rutherford calls the “commanding of value.” As I said, while I assert the intrinsic value of our essential human nature, I am not in a position to determine for others how they should be developing and exercising that nature. That said, I do indeed believe that I am a better person who is living a better life than, for example, the American neo-Nazi or the evangelical Christian Trump-voter. I don’t know whether everyone is intrinsically capable of living the best life, and actually don’t much care. Whether everyone has that capability or only a few, it remains something which must be deliberately chosen and consciously sought, and so I focus on that choice. What I am certain about is that any distinction between those who are capable of living the best life and those who are not cannot be drawn along the lines of any other human division. What I mean is this: we can divide humanity up in several ways according to various natural and cultural traits and traits that combine nature and culture—nationality, religion, sex, gender… a comprehensive list would be extensive, and the division between those with the greatest human capacity and those with the least does not map on to or even correlate with any of those divisions. This is not to say that there are not conditions which make it more difficult for certain demographics to live the perfectionist lives to which they are entitled, but if I’m correct about what I’ve just said then these conditions are fundamentally unjust. A proper respect for our essential human nature entails a need to substantially restructure society.
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Works Cited or Referenced
Bradford, G. (2013). The Value of Achievements: The Value of Achievements. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94(2), 204–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0114.2012.01452.x
Herbert, F. (2010). Dune (Ace premium edition). Ace.
How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? (n.d.). Retrieved September 12, 2020, from https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/
Hurka, T. (1993). Perfectionism. Oxford University Press.
Leiter, B., & Sinhababu, N. (Eds.). (2007). Nietzsche and morality. Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche, F. W. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (W. A. Kaufmann, Trans.; 1st ed.). Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. W. (2000). Basic writings of Nietzsche (W. A. Kaufmann, Trans.; Modern Library ed). Modern Library.
Rutherford, D. (2018). Nietzsche as perfectionist. Inquiry, 61(1), 42–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2017.1371835