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The phenomenon of something happening to a person’s mental stability when in power has been observed for centuries … Perhaps the most profound, though non-medical, study of this was made in the ancient world. The Greeks developed the notion of hubris to characterise and explore it. The most basic meaning was simply as a description of an act: a hubristic act was one in which a powerful figure, puffed up with overweening pride and self-confidence, treated others with insolence and contempt.

Lord David Owen (1938-), British politician and physician, Foreign Secretary from 1977 to 1979.

An eternal drama

Idomeneo, King of Crete, (Daniel Behle) and his people receiving the applause  after the 
performance of Mozart's opera "Idomeneo" The National Opera, Amsterdam, 15 February 2025

After the Greeks had conquered Troy and had destroyed the city, they could finally return home, after ten years of fighting. However, the gods that had supported the Trojans were still against the Greeks, and for many the journey home became an arduous undertaking. We all know that it took Odysseus ten years to reach his dear wife Persephone in Ithaca. Also Idomeneo, King of Crete, didn’t have a safe passage. Almost got home, Poseidon, the god of the sea, made him get into a severe storm. Idomeneo’s ship foundered and he could save his life only by promising Poseidon to sacrifice him the first person he would meet, if he would safely reach Creta. This first person was his son Idamante.
This is the background of Mozart’s opera Idomeneo, King of Crete, which I have seen two weeks ago in Amsterdam. It is the moment when the opera begins and the story develops. The essence of the drama is the conflict between the love of the father for his son on the one hand and his obligations to the gods, and in general to the forces of the cosmic order, on the other hand. As always in a Greek drama, it is impossible to escape fate and the forces of the cosmic order and certainly not the anger of a god who had been promised a sacrifice he didn’t get. In the original libretto Mozart’s opera was based on, in vain Idomeneo tries to escape his fate to offer his son and he kills him in a fit of madness. Mozart decided to give the opera a happy end: Other gods intervene, and Idomeneo abdicates the throne and is succeeded by Idamante. However, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the director of the present performance in Amsterdam, decided to go back to the original version of the story in which Idomeneo kills Idamante. As a consequence Idomeneo stays the ruler of Crete. Just this change by Cherkaoui makes this opera relevant to what happens in the world today, more than ever.
In order to understand why Cherkaoui decided to return to the original story of the drama, let’s listen to what he says about it. (the figures refer to the sources below) “I’d love to believe in that happy end,” so Cherkaoui “but the real world shows that it’s often not the case. These days, the young are fighting for their future and combating all kinds of oppression, but they are facing a cynical minority who don’t want to relinquish their privileges.” (1) Cherkaoui “sees an almighty king who refuses to give up his throne, even if he runs the risk of having to sacrifice his own son. He recognized our own times of crisis, in which political leaders are increasingly empowered and in which the future of the next generations is threatened by the political decisions of their predecessors.” (2) The gods and the monster in the opera “teach us that there are invisible, unwritten laws and that we expose ourselves – and the generations that come after us – to the risk of disaster, if we break them. The attacks and bombings we see in the world today are no less monstrous. The ancient Greek myths follow the principle of action and reaction, and teach us that what we do always has consequences.” (2) In the opera, Idamante, who represents the younger generation, falls in love with the Trojan princess Ilia, who stays as a prisoner in Crete. But it is a forbidden love. In this way, the past of the Trojan War with its massacres “are pressing on the present in the form of unprocessed trauma. The younger characters are trapped in a history that is not theirs.” (2) Therefore it is not realistic to give the opera a happy end, as Mozart did. By giving the end a dramatic turn, Cherkaoui wants to express his concerns about “the news, where we face revenge, egocentrism, armed conflict and bombings. Idomeneo warns against autocratic power without compassion for the people.” (2)
Indeed, when we see what is happening around us today, it is not difficult to recognize the drama depicted in the opera Idomeneo. Old leaders in the major powers of the world, don’t give up their power, but use it to perform their own actions of revenge. They betray the people who elected them, and block the new generations, that should replace them. The old leaders keep themselves busy with the traumas of the past (the war in Ukraine is a case in point) instead of the problems of the future (by neglecting or denying environmental problems, for instance). They try to strengthen their positions by spreading lies. In doing so they go against the cosmic order that forces us to take care of the problems that are ahead of us and not of those that are behind us. There is a saying that the revolution eats its own children. Here we see something like that, in the sense that the leaders destroy the people who have chosen them.
Interpreted in the way Cherkaoui has done, Idomeneo holds up a mirror to us. It’s a pessimistic interpretation but also a realistic interpretation in view of what is happening in the present world. Nevertheless, I don’t want to completely reject the possibility of Mozart’s interpretation of the drama, for the future is still open.

Sources
(1) Simon Hatab, “In gesprek met Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui”, in Idomeneo. re di Creta. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Nationale Opera & Ballet, Amsterdam; pp. 13-15. https://www.operaballet.nl/en/online-programme/idomeneo
(2) Jasmijn van Wijnen, “Interview. Choreograaf en regisseur Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui over Idomeneo”, in Odeon. Magazine van De Nationale Opera, jaargang 31, nr. 136; pp. 9-10.

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Boredom results from being attentive to the passage of time itself.

William James (1842-1910) 

When are you a philosopher?

Baruch de Spinoza

In his book Es musste etwas besser werden …(It had to get a little better)  – in which Jürgen Habermas is interviewed by Stefan Müller Doohm and Roman Yos – Habermas tells us (p. 14): “I have always suspected myself not to be a ‘real’ philosopher; not one, if you will allow me the cliché, who starts from contemplating one’s own life situation and strives for deep, metaphysically valid insights. I recognized my motives more in Marxism and pragmatism. I consider the desire to make the world a little better or even to help stop the ever-threatening regressions to be an entirely unblemished motive. Therefore, I am quite satisfied with the term ‘philosopher and sociologist’.”
When reading this, I was a bit surprised, for Habermas started his academic career as a philosopher; that is, he wrote his PhD thesis The Absolute and History about the development of the concept of the absolute in Schelling’s work against the background of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Isn’t this a real philosophical theme? Only after having written his thesis, Habermas switched to more sociological themes. Moreover, aren’t Marxism and pragmatism philosophical movements? Or at least, aren’t they also philosophical movements? And thirdly, if you are a philosopher and a sociologist, does the fact that you are also a sociologist make you a less real philosopher? Does it make you an inferior kind of philosopher? Nevertheless, I can understand Habermas’s feeling, since I have a bit the same “problem”, but then the other way round. I studied sociology and later I switched to philosophy and then I wrote my PhD thesis on a philosophical subject (in the field of action theory). Since then, I have written mainly on philosophical subjects (although I must admit that over the years my themes have become more sociological again). So there are reasons to call myself a philosopher. Nevertheless, I hesitate to do so. Why? Actually I am a philosopher and sociologist in the sense explained by Habermas. That’s okay, isn’t it? Then why should I hesitate to apply these designations to myself?
However this may be, I think that Habermas’s words betray a German view on philosophy; a view that he wouldn’t have expressed in this way, if he were an Anglo-Saxon philosopher. In his view, a philosopher – as a philosopher! – should deal with “deeper” ideas; he or she should answer “deeper” questions; so with questions about the Absolute, the Being, the Good, Reason, etc. In this view, questions like what actions are and what makes them different from behaviour (Davidson) are not philosophical; just like questions about the right political system (Spinoza); or what meaningful language is (Dummett); what the distinction of science and non-science is (Carnap); etc.; so, questions that refer to the practice of life, methodological questions, and many more. These are questions especially studied by Anglo-Saxon philosophers. Understand me well, Habermas doesn’t object to them. Also according to him, they make sense. Even more, Habermas studied them, too, and he tried to find answers to these questions. Nevertheless, if I understand well his words quoted above, in his heart Habermas thinks that such questions are not to be studied by a Philosopher as a Philosopher (so a philosopher written with a capital P).
Apart from the question whether Habermas would defend this “German” view on philosophy – and I think that he would not and that, when asked, he would give a much broader view of what philosophy is; but here I am just interpreting the hidden view behind the quotation above – I think that many people have such a “Habermasian” view on philosophy as a vague and woolly activity. As we have seen above, this does not correspond to philosophical practice. But what then does a philosopher do? If you would ask me, I would say: A philosopher studies questions that are not empirical (or theological; but here I want to ignore the question what makes philosophy and theology different). So a philosopher studies all questions that cannot be empirically tested (and that are not theological). Okay, there are also so-called experimental philosophers, but they do not experimentally test philosophical views as such, but they test whether philosophical intuitions and justifications are generally shared. For example, if a philosopher says “This statement is intuitively true”, an experimental philosopher is interested in the question whether this intuition is generally shared and not in the truth of the statement.
Questions like the difference between action and behaviour, or what the right political system is, etc., may not be “deep” questions, but they are relevant for the practice of daily life. For example, whether we interpret a crime as an action or as a piece of behaviour makes whether we send the perpetrator to prison or to a psychiatric hospital. Such an interpretation is, at least for a part, philosophical. In case a practical question cannot be solved by an empirical test, we can try to solve it by thinking it through. And for that we need a philosopher or someone who thinks philosophically.

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Texts offer their resistance to the reader, philosophical texts even more so.

Jürgen Habermas (1929-) 

Poisoning the well

In old times, it was an often-used method to poison the wells of your enemy. Actually, it’s not only a method of the ancient past. In March 1917, during the First World War (1914-1918), the German army decided to shorten their lines on the Western Front in Northern France in order to make them stronger and they left extended areas to the French and the British armies. The Germans devastated these areas with scorched earth tactics and they poisoned the wells there as well. I am convinced that this method is still applied in the present wars in the world, although I have no evidence. This is already bad enough, but when in medieval Europe an epidemic broke out, often the false myth went around that Jews secretly poisoned wells and drinking fountains used by Christians and that this was the cause of the epidemic. Often this created a gulf of antisemitism if not violence and injustice against Jews. Certainly in those days it was difficult for the Jews to refute such false allegations.
Poisoning the well – in reality or confabulated – is not only a method of fighting, it has also become the name of a fallacy, so a mistake in our way of thinking. It belongs to the category of ad hominem fallacies or “playing the man”. The essence of the poisoning the well fallacy (PTW) is this: “PTW occurs when we illegitimately prime our audience with a pre-emptive strike against, or with adverse information about, an argumentative opponent before the latter has had a chance to say anything in her own defense or in defense of her point of view.” This will make the audience – and maybe the speaker as well – prejudiced against the opponent with the effect that the audience will interpret the opponent’s claims “as ‘fulfilling’ and ‘confirming’ the presumptions buried inside this conceptual trap.” (Ruiz, p. 196) In other words, the opponent is already put in a bad light before she has had any possibility to react, with the possible effect that she isn’t taken seriously or that her reaction is seen as a confirmation of what the speaker said about her, anyhow. For example (from “Poisoning the Well”):

“Tim: Boss, you heard my side of the story why I think Bill should be fired and not me. Now, I am sure Bill is going to come to you with some pathetic attempt to weasel out of this lie that he has created.
Explanation: Tim is poisoning the well by priming his boss by attacking Bill’s character, and setting up any defense Bill might present as ‘pathetic’. Tim is using this fallacious tactic here, but if the boss were to accept Tim’s advice about Bill, she would be committing the fallacy.”

As Nelson Todd explains: “The reason [PTW] is a fallacy is that it, like other fallacies, operates on the basis of little or no evidence. As such, it is prone to yield erroneous conclusions because it is not an orderly, objective way to reason through an argument.” The argumentation of the speaker is only based on the defamation of the opponent and then already before she got a chance to speak. It is not based on what the opponent really says. Moreover, besides that the other person is defamed, it is quite possible, even if the defamation generally is true, that it is not true in this case. If you say or think that John is a pathological liar, it is still possible that in this case he speaks the truth.
Poisoning the well can be an intentional tactic to “win” your case. It is often used as a tactic by politicians in order to get the voters on their hand. However, it is also possible that the speaker really believes what she says. Then PTW is not only a kind of false reasoning but also a kind of prejudice in the head of the speaker. If so, PTW is not only a kind of false reasoning that influences what others do but also your own actions. To take an example of Nelson: If “a patient in alcohol or drug rehab … encounters a therapist who has never had any alcohol or drugs themselves[, the] patient might think, ‘There is no way this person will ever truly understand what it is like to be an addict – therefore, I am not going to listen to anything they have to say.’ ” But maybe the therapist has much experience with treating addicts and has become the best expert in this field. The patient is prejudiced against the therapist. Since every person has prejudices, everybody of us should be aware that he or she can fall into the PTW trap. For instance: “I think that he is such and such a person, so therefore he’ll react in X way”. But is he really such and such a person? Isn’t it a bias in your head? Beware, for often we don’t poison the wells of our adversaries but our own wells.

Sources
- Nelson, Todd, “How ‘Poisoning the Well’ Hurts Everyone”, op website https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/us-and-them/202310/how-poisoning-the-well-hurts-everyone
- “Poisoning the Well”, op website https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Poisoning-the-Well
- Roberto Ruiz, “Poisoning the well”, in Robert Arp; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019; pp. 196-200.

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As a single, self-contained person, man can only exist by drawing breath from the space of meanings and reasons shared with other speakers, that is from the linguistic infrastructure of his "world" - but at the same time intersubjectively shared - life.

Jürgen Habermas (1929-)

Culture and clashes

Edward Sapir is especially known for his contributions to linguistics. During his work as a linguist, he studied Native American languages. This made that he became interested in anthropology as well. So, his Culture, Language, and Personality. Selected Essays (see my blog last week) contains besides linguistic studies also anthropological articles. One, “Cultural, genuine and spurious” (pp. 78-119), describes what culture is, and, though written a century ago, I think that Sapir’s classification of types of culture there is still relevant in the present world; a world characterized by migration flows that bring people with different cultural backgrounds into contact with each other on a large scale. Some (notably Samuel P. Huntington) think that this will lead to an increase of conflicts in the world, even to that extent that they speak of a clash of civilizations or cultures. Although I think that the origin of the present conflicts and those that can be expected in the near future is more complicated, this seems to me sufficient reason to go into the question what actually culture is.

According to Sapir there are three wa=ys that the concept of culture is used. Firstly, “culture is technically used by the ethnologist and culture-historian to embody any socially inherited element in the life of man, material and spiritual. Culture so defined is coterminous with man himself…” (p. 79) In this sense, culture is every human material and non-material product, but in a material product not the product as such is important for seeing it as cultural, so not the “hardcore” or “stuff” is important, but the way humans use it and have produced it. For instance, not that we eat cauliflower as such is cultural, for humans need to eat, like all animals. But it is cultural, because we prepare this vegetable in a certain way; because we eat it in a certain way, which is different from culture to culture (if people elsewhere eat cauliflower); because the present cauliflowers are the result of an age-old cultivation process; etc. In this view, culture is what makes a material thing a social product. Since as a child I read already anthropology books, I am very familiar with this use of the concept of culture, but most people don’t see it this way.
“The second application of the term is more widely current”, so Sapir. “It refers to a rather conventional idea of individual refinement, built up on a certain modicum of assimilated knowledge and experience but made up chiefly of a set of typical reactions that have the sanction of a class and of a tradition of long standing.” (80-81) It is the concept that makes that we call something sophisticated, or that we call a person so, because he or she knows how things are or should be done, especially in the intellectual field. We call such a knowledgeable person a “cultured person”, but, so Sapir adds, “only up to a certain point. Far more emphasis is placed upon manner, a certain preciousness of conduct which takes different colors according to the nature of the personality that has assimilated the ‘cultured’ ideal.” A negative expression of this kind of culture is snobbishness. (81)
The third type of culture is most difficult to describe, Sapir says. It is vague but undeniable and all-penetrating. It “shares with our first, technical, conception an emphasis on the spiritual possessions of the group rather than of the individual. With our second conception it shares a stressing of selected factors out of the vast whole of the ethnologist’s stream of culture as intrinsically more valuable, more characteristic, more significant in a spiritual sense than the rest.” This cultural conception “aims to embrace in a single term those general attitudes, views of life, and specific manifestations of civilization that give a particular people its distinctive place in the world. Emphasis is put not so much on what is done and believed by a people as on how what is done and believed functions in the whole life of that people, on what significance it has for them.” (82-83). This type of culture is often ascribed to nations, also to groupings within nations, and sometimes it unites people that are separated by borders. In this way we can talk of the Dutch culture, American culture, Kurdish culture, Scandinavian culture, Catalonian culture, and the like.
To this threefold use of the concept of culture I want to add yet another application. Briefly, it refers to what we could call the works and practices of intellectual, and in particular artistic, activity. Music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film are types of practices of this idea of culture. Especially, it refers to the “higher” versions of these practices. I think that this fourth type of culture is what most people think of, when they think of culture. Many countries have a Ministry of Culture that deals with and tries to stimulate culture in this fourth sense.

This now fourfold use of the concept of culture makes clear that it is a multidimensional concept. When we talk about culture, at first sight it may not be clear what we mean by it. It is a thing that must be clarified, explicitly or implicitly, before we can go on. A certain use or “dimension” of the concept is relevant only in the right context. In the context of a political discussion and practice in which migration, ethnic diversity and integration are important themes, the first and third uses are most important, so the ethnological use of the concept of culture and the use that stresses general attitudes, views of life, and specific manifestations of nations and peoples. For just these cultural dimensions lead to and form the values, norms, customs and habits of peoples that are often mutually not understood and that can lead to large-scale frictions that surpass individual irritations. Just cultural differences created in this way are often misunderstood and belong to the factors that make that some want to kick out the newly arrived.