Why I Don’t Swear: An Argument for Decent Language

Let me begin by saying “I don’t swear.” That is to say, I am not accustomed to using the common vulgarities that serve to punctuate modern social discourse. This might seem to be a morally pretentious statement, but I would argue that it is grounded on a fundamental philosophical insight given by Aristotle in a passage from his Politics. The passage is worth quoting in its entirety:

Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal who has the gift of speech. And where as voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state (Aristotle, Politics, Book I, 1253a.1-19 – Emphasis mine.)

Aristotle made a distinction between voice and language. A voice is merely sound indicating pleasure or pain, but language has political and ethical dimensions. Language is a means by which human beings make distinctions between good and evil, just and unjust. “Language”, as my professor Dr. Robert E. Wood likes to say, “is reason laying down its tracks in a system of signs.” Reason cannot fully articulate itself in the sound of a voice. It needs the more refined mode of signs, in the form of letters that form words which can be strung together in meaningful patterns or sentences, which can be multiplied endlessly to create discourse.

The problem with swearing is that it is more voice than language, more animal than human. Swear words are not chosen for the meaning they convey, but rather for their impact. Swearing is used to punctuate and emphasize discourse in the same way that exclamation marks function. Swearing is a base form of communication that indicates “perception of pleasure and pain.” It is akin to the barking of a dog, the howling of a wolf, or the crowing of a rooster. Swearing isn’t meant to mean anything. It is simply meant to make an impression. The swearing that passes for language in modern social discourse is essentially a counterfeit language that heralds a de-volution of the human subject to a more animal state. After all, as Aristotle points out, human beings have language but animals have only voice. The reliance on swear words to punctuate and emphasize discourse reveals an undeveloped vocabulary and the failure of human reason and this failure has political and ethical ramifications.

Later in the Politics, Aristotle connects indecent speech to indecent action and gives his most virulent opposition to its practice:

Indeed, there is nothing which the legislator should be more careful to drive away than indecency of speech; for the light of utterance of shameful words leads soon to shameful actions. The young especially should never be allowed to repeat or hear anything of the sort. A freemen who is found saying or doing what is forbidden, if he be too young as yet to have the privilege of reclining at he public tables, should be disgraced and beaten, and an elder person degraded as his slavish conduct deserves (Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1336b.14-11 Emphasis mine.)

While Aristotle’s suggestion of penalties for those uttering “shameful words” is hardly defensible in a modern context, his point is clear and instructive: the language we use creates an ethical framework for action. Isn’t it clear, that thought takes form in language and language becomes an environment in which human activity takes place? One example of this might be the way “hate speech” functions to create unsafe environments for “outsiders” and cultivates animosity towards them in those who employ this type of speech. Swearing is similar. Using swear words to communicate in sound what cannot be articulated in language can lead to behavior that is fueled by passion rather than reason. One need only consider how often unethical behavior is preceded by “F- it!”, or something similar, which serves to cut-off the psychic disturbances of fear, anxiety or guilt.

Now, I anticipate that some of my readers will argue that placing limitations on language is tantamount to censorship and cultural tyranny, and I sympathize with the underlying sentiment in this objection. However, I am also persuaded with Slavoj Zizek, that “Our freedom of choice effectively often functions as a mere formal gesture of consent to our own oppression and exploitation (Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 147.)” The descent of the human subject from language to voice in the act of swearing is a consent to limitations, not a freedom from them. To shout obscenities in public, or season regular discourse with generous “f-bombs”, reveals one’s limitations, not one’s freedom. To have a command of language and to choose among the many words and patterns available to the rational being, is an exercise in freedom. To bark expletives rather than searching for the most appropriate word to express what one is thinking is an exercise in intellectual laziness that is the first symptom of the fall of man.

The Shame of Homo Sacer

Contrary to Aristotle’s claim that shame is not properly a characteristic of a good person, except perhaps conditionally (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.9), Baruch Spinoza argued in his Ethics that shame was good:

… shame, like compassion, though, not a virtue, is yet good, insofar as it shows, that the  feeler of shame is really imbued with the desire to live honourably… therefore, though a man who feels shame is sorrowful, he is yet more perfect than he, who is shameless, and has no desire to live honourably(Spinoza, Baruch, Ethics, Part Four, Prop. LVIII.)

The person who feels shame is “more perfect” than the person who is shameless, because the feeling of shame indicates a desire to “live honorably”. To feel shame is to recognize the distance between one’s actions and what is honorable; and consequently, shame is already a kind of ethics, or at the very least, an ethical orientation.

The difference between Aristotle’s view of shame and Spinoza’s is no mere philosophical subtlety. It is the result of dramatic shift in the human subject as it emerged from Antiquity to Modernity. Foucault referred to this shift at the end of his introduction to The History of Sexuality where he wrote, “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question (Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, 143.)” The life of the modern subject, according Foucault, has become politicized in what Foucault called bio-power, which brings “life and mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life (Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, 143.)” The modern human being finds their life called into question by the very apparatus that sustains it.

Giorgio Agamben has located the paradigm of the modern subject in the ancient Roman juridical figure of homo sacer, who having been judged for a crime was rendered sacred (removed from the normal order and yet remaining in it). As such, homo sacer was prohibited from being sacrificed but could be killed with impunity (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 71.)” Agamben suggests the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany as an example of the life of homo sacer. The Jew in Nazi Germany was judged sacred, removed from the normal order and yet remaining in it. In the concentration camps, these homines sacri were reduced to bare life (zoe) until they became what were referred to as Muselmann, a being in whom all animal instincts and human reason is cancelled and yet lives. However, Agamben rejects that the extermination of the Jews in the concentration camps was a “Holocaust.” This term is an unfortunate misnomer, that indicates a sacrifice was made. The extermination of the Jewish people in the concentration camps was not a sacrifice. It was simply killing with impunity. Agamben writes:

The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of the new biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of a homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing therefore constitutes, as we will see, neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but simply the actualization of a mere “capacity to be killed” inherent in the condition of the Jew as such (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114.)”

Curiously, those who survived the camps wrestled with deep feelings of shame for having survived. Why? They had not committed any crime for which they should feel guilty. Surely no one would accuse a survivor of such horrific circumstances of having saved their lives at the expense of someone else’s. Agamben suggests that shame is the bedrock sentiment of homo sacer, not because they have committed an offense for which they should feel guilty but simply because of their status as sacred within the biopolitical sphere. Agamben defines shame as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject.” For Agamben, shame represents the locus of a new ethical material in the human being that lives in a post-Auschwitz world. “The lesson of Auschwitz,” writes Agamben, is that “the human being is the one who can survive the human being (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 133.)” This human being is “always beyond or before the human, the central threshold through which pass currents of the human and inhuman, subjectification and desubjectification, the living being’s becoming speaking and the logos’ becoming living (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 135.)”

Drawing on Marx’s claim that shame is the beginning of a revolution, Agamben argues that the modern subject feels a “silent shame of being human” that leads to a severing of the link between themselves and the political power in which they live. This is “the shame of the camps” which recognizes that the unimaginable has occurred; “that what should not have happened did happen (Agamben, Means Without End, 131). This kind of shame cannot be mastered through accepting it, as Nietzsche would have it in the myth of the eternal return, or declaring one’s innocence, as Nazi authorities attempted to do at Nuremberg by arguing that they were compelled to follow orders and therefore could not be held responsible for war crimes. Instead, this kind of shame becomes the fundamental structure of the human subject.

Shame is the “hidden structure of all subjectivity and consciousness” and means simply, “being consigned to something that cannot be assumed (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 128.)” What Agamben is suggesting in his definition of shame is that shame is the product of an ontological bipolarity intrinsic to the modern human subject that is simultaneously embedded in the bio-political sphere and extricating itself from it. As such, shame involves a paradoxical movement of “subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty (Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz, 107.)” What remains to be seen is where this shame will take us. For Agamben, it will move us toward a community that resists bio-political sovereignty that reduces life and makes homines sacri of us all. One can only hope that Spinoza was right, and that shame is the beginning of a more honourable life.

Do We Have Too Many Friends?: Aristotle, Friendship and Social Networks

 

With the dawn of social networks like MySpace and Facebook, a new social problem has arisen: the possibility of having so many friends that you are incapable of being a friend to any of them. In the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle asked “how many friends should we have?” (Books 9, 10). The answer requires an understanding of what he means by friendship. Aristotle used the Greek word philia for friendship. Philia is a common bond, or affection, held between people. Notice, friendship is a bond between people and not a person to a thing. We are friends with people, not things. For Aristotle, the most perfect kind of friendship is between people who are alike in goodness and virtue. Good people inspire and encourage goodness in others and seek the good of the other person. We become like those with whom we spend our time with. So friendship is a virtuous activity that requires proximity and consistent engagement. Long-distance relationships where people are rarely engaged in their friendship are not friendships for Aristotle.

Aristotle says that having too many friends is an obstacle to the good life. His reasoning is easy to see: if we are influenced by those whom we spend our time with, the smaller the group the more focused the influence.The right number of friends should be the number that a person could live with and divide oneself up among. His reasoning for this advice is that one’s friends should be friends of one another if they are all going to spend their days in each others company but he says this would be an arduous task to accomplish with a large number of people. Aristotle could not have for seen the accumulation of over a thousand friends connected to a larger network of more than three million people and accessible on a single web page. But is accessing a persons profile engaging in friendship. Have social networks given us friendship or are they an obstacle to the good life?

Aristotle points out that there is a difference between casual friendship and intimate friendship. Casual friendships are acquaintances that are characterized by familiarity. These are necessary in a society but when a person engages in this kind of friendship exclusively they become obsequious. People who are friends with everyone are friends with no one because they are incapable of cultivating intimacy with everyone they meet. Intimate friendship is a form of love that is characterized by sharing the joys and sorrows of life. Human beings are emotionally incapable of having this kind of friendship with more than a few people. However, it is through these intimate friendships that our character is shaped and the good life becomes attainable. It should be clear that the quality and quantity of friends are important factors in the moral life.

So, do we have too many friends? Are social networks an obstacle to the good life or are they widening the sphere of virtuous influence and expanding our capacity for intimacy? I invite your comments on this issue.

Monkey See Monkey Do: Aristotle and Mirror Neurons

Aristotle observes in On the Soul that the “the activity of the sensible object and that of the sense is one and the same activity, and yet the distinction between their being remains (III.425b.25).” This observation has interesting social implications. If the sensible objects we encounter manifest themselves in the action of sensing them, then the phenomena of the other is co-constituted by the sensible in act and the sense in act. This is implies that that the other is in us as a result of our being an embodied consciousness able to be sensed and capable of sensing. The sensory experience of the other activates our sensory awareness which then acts upon the sensible object producing a presentation of the other. This presentation is an abstraction of the form of the other from the individual percept. The intellect is then capable of abstracting the form from the conditions of matter and applying universals for the purpose of making a judgment. What is interesting is that Aristotle claims that our senses never err when they perceive objects appropriate to the particular sense. For example, our eyes never err in seeing what is visible. The eyes do not see sound or the ears hear the visible. The senses do err however, in making judgments.

I am drawn back again and again to Aristotle’s statement “the soul is in a way all existing things (III.431b.22).” Aquinas clarifies what Aristotle means by this by distinguishing between Empedocles claim of simple identification between soul and object and Aristotle’s formal resemblance which understands the form of the object without matter (Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, 789-790.) What is so striking about this claim is Aristotle’s description of the mechanism that makes it possible to have an intellection of form without matter. Aristotle says that the imagination produces images “that are like sensuous contents except in that they contain no matter (III.431b.9).” In fact, cognition is impossible without these images. But, images are the products of movement initiated by sensation or reproductions from memory during reflection. In each case images are the immaterial form of the object without matter and yet retain the conditions of matter.
This imaginative capacity is a mechanism for mirroring objects of sensation which has striking similarities with the recent discovery of mirror neurons and their implied shared manifold of inter-subjectivity (cf. Gallese, Vittorio, “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity). Studies have shown infants as young as18 hours old are able to mimic mouth and facial movements of the adults facing them. This is how infants learn about themselves and consequently about others. This capacity is the result of an inter-subjectivity that is rooted neurologically in what are called mirror neurons which are basic organizational features of the brain which allow for action stimulation. What is even more striking is that these neurons require sensory stimulation by an agent and its object: self or other. When monkeys were monitored these neurons were activated during actions executed by the agent and in actions observed. The monkey was able to create an internal copy of what was observed but in reference to its own body.

This seems very similar to Aristotle’s theory of imagination and his claim that the mind is in a way all things. The mind is capable of cognizing all things through sensation and the imagination. One major problem with this connection may be the extent to which a monkey brain and a human brain can imagine. Aristotle does say animals have imagination but he does not grant that their minds are all things because they are not oriented towards universals, which is the orientation of the human intellect, but merely to individuals which is the orientation of sensation.

Both Edith Stein and Merleau-Ponty have addressed inter-subjectivity and their work is referenced in the secondary literature on mirror neurons. I still need to explicate the details on this connection but Aristotle seems to have the basic insight that neuroscience and neuropsychology are now confirming.