A Free Left Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the differences between politics and philosophy – and how we confuse the two of them much of the time, treating what are often basic political necessities as matters of theory.     We do that in explaining our own actions, seeking justification after the fact, but also in explaining those of others, criticising them for mistakes in their ‘thinking’ when it is not always evident much thinking has taken place at all. Politics is a domain of decision-making, in the world , not detached from it. It is relentless, continuing day upon day for as long as we interact with others in society. In it, our primary reference point is not detached philosophical reflection and the theories that come out of it, but the immediate world around us, of other people and institutions and the demands they make of us. Of course, theory is embedded in this world. But we do not typically relate to it in a detached, individualised manner – that of the ...

There is often a sort of dishonesty to the accusation that someone or something is ‘irrational’. It presupposes that the person making the accusation knows how the other person or group of people should act in order to be rational. It means taking the place of others and claiming authority over what they should be doing, on grounds of knowledge. I’ve put ‘knows’ and ‘act’ in italics above because the idea of rationality combines these two generally different notions. Knowing something is a passive condition. It generally means knowing facts , so something that has already happened. Action is a different condition. By definition it is active, affecting the world and projecting into the future. The idea of rationality connects the two, projecting knowledge into the future, going beyond the sphere of facts and connecting to ideas of causation: that when I do this something else follows. In football if I kick the ball in the direction of the goal I am more likely to score a g...

“One fact of life I have learned over the years is that it is possible to be very clever and stupid at the same time.” Chris Mullin , the former Labour MP and diarist of the New Labour years, said that in his latest memoir   Hinterland , referring to judges who presided over the notorious miscarriages of justice that unravelled in the 1980s and early 1990s, like the Birmingham Six IRA bombing case which he was involved in. This line has come to mind several times lately reading the outbursts of some of those who are still livid at the EU referendum result. Now I don’t have a problem with people who feel strongly about remaining in the EU, just as long as they respect those on the other side as legitimate political opponents who have worthwhile arguments and in this case won a democratic battle fair and square. The trouble with the arch-Remainers that I am thinking of – the Labour MP David Lammy, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell and the philosopher A.C....

Nietzsche gets blamed for a lot of things, not least nihilism and relativism. This is unfair, but life is unfair. As the philosopher John Gray pointed out in a talk at the London School of Economics on 25th February, a writer has little or no control over how others interpret and appropriate their writings, not least if they are dead. On nihilism and relativism, people often misunderstand Nietzsche for having advocated what amounts to these things. But this wasn’t the case. He was rather describing what he thought had happened as historical development, largely from Christianity’s emphasis on truth which undermined itself, and philosophers like Hume and Kant exposing the insecure foundations of religion (and indeed of much positive philosophy). A portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche Martin Heidegger explained in one of his lecture courses on Nietzsche, ‘The phrase “God is dead” is not an atheistic proclamation: it is a formula for the fundamental experience of an even...

I recently finished reading Michael Lewis’s book ‘Moneyball’ for the third time: a true story about how a bunch of people, mostly outsiders, challenged collective group-think in American baseball using rational, scientific methods, bringing the first team to adopt these methods (the Oakland Athletics, or ‘A’s’) remarkable success despite having less money than its rivals. It’s impossible not to draw lessons from Moneyball and apply them to other institutions and to politics. I couldn’t resist exploring them a little here, though the most tantalising lesson we might take, of attempting a completely rational , scientific approach to politics, is one I think we should resist. The book is largely an exploration of prejudice in institutions and how the Oakland A’s through its General Manager Billy Beane took advantage of this prejudice to play the market in players, picking up valuable underrated ones for little and selling on those who had become overrated for a lot. Billy Bean...

What is society? It isn’t a thing or an object like other things or objects are. In that sense, Margaret Thatcher was broadly right in saying: “There is no such thing as society”. But we do use the word widely to refer to an ‘it’ – society – so though we cannot pin it down in the physical real world, society undoubtedly has a reality in consciousness, for us. We might for example think of it as a ‘subjective object’, albeit something which is not so much thought as felt. The philosopher Martin Heidegger never wrote directly about society as far as I am aware, but his reflections on the nature of ‘being’ – of human beings and other beings, including the inanimate objects of our world – show how we are each connected into the world of other people and objects. As such he sketches out how what we might call the architecture or internal wiring of society works, and thereby provides us with a powerful way of conceiving what it is that makes ‘us’ us. One of the few examples He...