Big Thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844—1900) is one of the most controversial figures in contemporary philosophy.
A German philosopher and cultural critic who is well known for his proclamations on God, truth, morality, power, aesthetics, the self and the meaning of existence, Nietzsche has had an enduring influence on Western philosophy.
Making use of a creative writing style, such as aphorisms and emotive essays, Nietzsche’s doctrines have been famously misappropriated by those seeking to further their own political ends (for example, Hitler and the alt-right). He was seen as an early existentialist because of his insistence on existence preceding essence, and the importance of looking to yourself – rather than God, society, family or friends – to identify what values you choose to live by.
Live your life like an artist
In Nietzsche’s first major work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the idea of living life creatively is embodied in his idea of living life as an artist. This involves combining two energies: the rational Apollonian and the passionate Dionysian. (In Greek mythology, Apollo is the god of logic and rational thinking, and Dionysus the god of instinct and emotion.)
Nietzsche worried the society of his time and classical thinkers like Socrates and Descartes– both Rationalists – only emphasised the Apollonian, neglecting the role of the Dionysian. Nietzsche thought it was important to balance our rationality with our sensual and passionate experience of life, and he saw this balance best depicted in ancient Greek tragedies.
Nietzsche insisted Greek tragedy achieves greatness through the inclusion of both Apollonian creative energy which is responsible for the dialogue, and Dionysian energy which inspires the music or chorus. In the plays, the two work together as the meaning of the words are enhanced by the accompanying melody. Using Greek dramatic artworks as an example, we can learn from great art to see the beauty in life.
“Without music, life would be a mistake.” – Nietzsche
The tragic spectator is united with others in the shared experience of being human. For Nietzsche, life without emotion, art and the creative energy of the Dionysian is bleak. A balance between Dionysus and Apollo allows for pluralistic and authentic modes of expression that are rational as well as creative. Aesthetic ideals also appear in his later writings, such as The Will to Power (1901), where Nietzsche writes, “Art as the redemptionof the man of action… Art as the redemption of the sufferer”.
Nietzsche advocated for a series of values or virtues we should adopt – namely, active, life affirming values, as opposed to the life denying or passive and ‘slave like’ values he detested. The latter he saw exemplified in the institutionalisation of Christianity, which, he believed, served to reinforce the power of the few at the expense of the many.
Believing the idea of a punitive God promoted by the church of his time to be a human invention, he famously declared:
“God is dead … And we have killed him.”
The Superman or Nietzsche’s Übermensch
Nietzsche emphasises an individualistic development and construction of self, summed up in the notion of the will to power. Claiming we ought to seek control over ourselves, Nietzsche holds up the Superman (yes, Nietzsche was misogynistic, but for our purposes we can extend this concept to include women), or Übermensch, as the pinnacle of human potentiality in terms of power and integrity in a broad sense of the word.
Nietzsche’s Übermensch is imagined as Zarathustra, a Christ-like figure who delivers an anti-sermon on the mount, a character with whom Nietzsche identifies. In The Gay Science (1882), it is the Superman who creates strengths out of his weaknesses and thus styles his character – a “great and rare art!”
This existentialist ideal – that each individual creates one’s self in a manner pleasing to them – threatens to collapse into extreme relativism or subjectivism. Yet, despite the fact the Superman goes “beyond good and evil”, Nietzsche is a moralist with definite views on what is condemnable.
“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.” – Nietzsche
One way we are invited to test whether or not our chosen action is the right one is given to us in Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. “The Greatest Weight” in The Gay Science tells of a demon who confronts us, suggesting we must relive every single moment of our life, every choice and its consequences, eternally.
We are asked whether we would celebrate this as a gift or curse the unending misery it presents. The Superman would embrace the opportunity due to their authenticity and the fact they made each choice consciously, willing to accept full responsibility for their life.
Such a thought experiment offers an overly ambitious understanding of freedom and free will as a positive force. Yet it provides the reader with an interesting challenge when making decisions. Knowledge of an eternal recurrence would fundamentally change the way we lead our lives and inform the choices we make. If taken seriously, one could not help but try to act authentically – or, alternatively, not act at all.
Ever the rebellious teenager of philosophy, Nietzsche continues to give us pause for much thought, challenging us to live authentically and take unflinching responsibility for our lives.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY Dr Laura D’Olimpio
Dr Laura D’Olimpio is senior lecturer in philosophy of education at the University of Birmingham, UK, and co-edits the Journal of Philosophy in Schools.
Big Thinker: René Descartes
René Descartes (1596—1650) is famous for the phrase, “I think, therefore I am”. He was a Frenchman writing in the early 17th century and was preoccupied with the question: What can we know for certain?
Descartes details a method of doubt in his key text Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641. It becomes crucial for rationalists that seek infallible knowledge. Rationalists rest their epistemological claims on pure reason, without recourse to the senses or experience (unlike the empiricists). Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge.
At a time when scholars were writing in Latin, Descartes wrote in French so anyone who was literate in the common language of his place could read his work. His writing style is friendly and approachable, so it feels as though you are having a conversation with him. His sceptical inquiry into what we can know commences with the question:
Can my senses be trusted?
Descartes describes himself sitting in front of a log fire in his wood cabin, smoking a pipe and questioning whether or not he can be sure that he is awake and alert as opposed to asleep and dreaming. How can we know the difference, he asks, when sometimes, in our dream state, we feel as though we’re awake even though we’re not?
Using the first person point of view, Descartes ponders on the fact that he tends to use his senses to be sure he exists and that the world around him is real, but the senses can sometimes be deceived. Our eyes often play tricks on us – as proven by any optical illusion – so how can we trust something that tricks us even once?
Cartesian scepticism (Cartesian being the adjective to describe the school of Decartes’ thought) concludes ultimately all I can be truly sure of is that I am a thinking thing. Descartes’ famously declared:
“Cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am.”
Descartes posits the only thing I can be sure of is that I exist because even when I doubt that, there is an “I” doing the doubting. The “I” that thinks or doubts, must surely exist, he claims.
For Descartes the mind is more knowable than the body, and he equates the human Soul with the mind. For him, the mind is the essence of a person.
As a mathematician and a ‘natural scientist’ Descartes sought to prove that truths of the world were as immutable as rational, logical mathematic proofs. After he has proven that “I think, therefore I am” is as secure a foundation for knowledge as “1 + 1 = 2” Descartes goes on to use a thought experiment in order to consider whether we can be sure God exists.
The Evil Genius thought experiment
Descartes’ thought experiment of the evil genius asks us to imagine there exists, instead of an entirely good and powerful God, an entirely powerful, all-knowing Malevolent Demon. The idea here is that this Demon could make us think we are experiencing the world as it truly is, but we aren’t really. We could be tricked by this Evil Genius, and we may not be able to trust any knowledge we receive about the world from our senses. Ultimately Descartes relies upon an Ontological or Rational Argument to prove that God exists and if God exists, then we can trust our senses as God would not fool us in such a way as the Evil Demon might.
The incredibly powerful questions Descartes asks still inform many of our science fiction fears as we wonder whether or not the world truly is as it appears to us. We can still see the power of doubting and if we take this worry too seriously, we can imagine being paralysed with fear, unable to do anything! Many of us accept that our senses can be tricked but we know that we just have to go on trusting them anyway and hope for the best.
This sceptical method Descartes outlines whereby we check what we believe to be true and question what we assume to be real is useful if we think of it in terms of seeking evidence for the beliefs we are taught and the assumptions we hold. Considered in this way, Descartes offers us a great tool for self-reflection. However, if we take this thought experiment seriously we may never be sure that even we ourselves exist!
In the 18th century, David Hume suggested that even the assumption of an ‘I’ that doubts is an illusion. Hume says all we have to go on is a string of conscious experiences. Whether we are truly awake or dreaming right now is something we may not be able to answer with absolute accuracy, a doubt played out in famous films like The Matrix and Inception.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY Dr Laura D’Olimpio
Dr Laura D’Olimpio is senior lecturer in philosophy of education at the University of Birmingham, UK, and co-edits the Journal of Philosophy in Schools.
Big Thinker: bell hooks
An outspoken professor, author, activist and cultural critic, bell hooks (1952-2021) drew attention to how feminism privileges white women’s struggles, while advocating for a more holistic way of understanding oppression.
Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks was a child who spoke back. Growing up in a segregated community of the south-central US state Kentucky, she fought against the ways in which her family and society sought to relegate her into a docile, black female identity. This refusal to be complicit in perpetuating her own oppression would define her life and career as a leader in black feminist thought.
It was when she first spoke back in public that she initially identified with her self-claimed moniker. An adult had dismissed her with a comparison to Bell Hooks, her maternal grandmother, in whose bold tongue and defiant attitude she found inspiration. She decapitalised the initials in order for others to focus on the substance of her ideas, rather than herself as a person.
hooks would become a prolific author and commentator. With notable titles including Talking Back, Ain’t I a Woman? and From Margin to Centre, her work scrutinises and challenges the ways in which media, culture and society uphold dominant oppressive structures.
Interlocking oppressions
A popular version of second wave feminism posited that all systems of oppression stemmed from patriarchy. This, hooks rejected. Instead, she introduced the idea that different types of oppression are interlocking and power is relational depending upon where you’re located on the matrix of class, sex, race and gender – which is not unlike the ideas underpinning the currently popular intersectional feminism.
hooks invented the term ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ to emphasise the multidimensionality of these power relations. She continues to use it today.
At the time, hooks’ paradigm was considered radical in that it undermined the notion there was a fundamentally common female experience. Many assumed this was vital for feminist solidarity to be forged and political unity maintained. Sisterhood was more complicated than that, hooks said – and to deny the uniqueness of each woman’s status and circumstance was another form of oppression.
Bold and to the point
While coming from academia, hooks strives to make her ideas easily accessible to a broad audience. Her writing style is free of jargon and often humorous, and she regularly appears in documentaries, open venues and television talk shows.
hooks is also renowned for focusing a sharp critical lens on popular culture, showing a strong opposition to political correctness. She’s criticised Spike Lee’s films, media coverage of the OJ Simpson trial and the lauded basketball documentary Hoop Dreams.
She also hasn’t held back her thoughts on prominent feminists.
hooks criticised Madonna for repudiating feminist principles by chasing stardom, and fetishising black culture in her film clips and live shows while reinforcing stereotypes of black men as violent primitives in a 1996 interview.
Twenty years later, she called the pop queen of lady power Beyoncé an ‘anti-feminist terrorist’, citing concern over the influence sexualised images of her have on young girls.
hooks also expressed disappointment Michelle Obama positioned herself as the nation’s ‘chief mum’, saying that by effacing her identity as an Ivy League educated lawyer, she was appeasing white hatred.
Oppositional gaze
Laura Mulvey introduced the theory of the ‘male gaze’ in the ’70s. It explains how images – particularly Hollywood mainstream images – are created to reproduce dominant male heteronormative ways of looking. hooks, who was fascinated with film as the most ‘efficient’ ideological propaganda tool, coined an associated term on black spectatorship: the ‘oppositional gaze’.
Looking has always been a political act, hooks argued. For subordinates in relations of power, looks can be “confrontational, gestures of resistance” which challenge authority. Had a black slave looked directly at a white person of status, they risked severe punishment – even death. Yet “attempts to repress our/black people’s right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze,” writes hooks.
“By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: ‘Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.’”
Black spectatorship of early Hollywood cinema was processed through this oppositional gaze. It was abundantly clear to these viewers, hooks writes, that film reproduced white supremacy. They saw nothing of themselves reflected in this white-washed fantasy realm. Black independent cinema emerged as an expression of resistance.
At the same time, hooks saw television and film as a site where black viewers were able to subject white representations to an interrogative gaze. Carried out in the privacy of the home or in a darkened cinema, this action also carried no risk of reprisal. That black men could look at white female bodies without fear was hugely significant – it was only 1955 when 14-year-old African American Emmett Till was lynched after being accused of offending a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store.
But while black male spectators “could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power,” the experience of the black female spectator was vastly different, hooks writes. In both white and black productions, the male gaze still overdetermined screen images of women, and frequently idolised white female stars as the supreme objects of desire.
This continued the “violent erasure of black womanhood” in screen culture, making identification with any of the depicted subjects disenabling. While this denied black women the typical joys of watching, the fact that they “looked from a location that disrupted” meant that they could become “enlightened witnesses” through critical spectatorship.
Modern feminism in crisis
Despite the advances of women in the workplace, hooks nonetheless sees today’s feminism in a state of crisis. Firstly, she believes that we still haven’t addressed egalitarianism in the home, leaving women belittled and frustrated in heteronormative relationships.
She also believes that feminism today has lost its radical potential, in that it has converged too closely with radical individualism. Feminism does not mean that as a woman “you can do whatever you want, that you can have it all”, she says. Instead, if you’re to live inside a feminist framework, you need to undertake specific everyday actions. For this reason, hooks believes there are very few true living feminists.
Still, she remains a firm advocate of feminist politics, saying “My militant commitment to feminism remains strong…”
…and the main reason is that feminism has been the contemporary social movement that has most embraced self-interrogation. When we, women of color, began to tell white women that females were not a homogenous group, that we had to face the reality of racial difference, many white women stepped up to the plate. I’m a feminist in solidarity with white women today for that reason, because I saw these women grow in their willingness to open their minds and change the whole direction of feminist thought, writing and action.
This continues to be one of the most remarkable, awesome aspects of the contemporary feminist movement. The left has not done this, radical black men have not done this, where someone comes in and says, “Look, what you’re pushing, the ideology, is all messed up. You’ve got to shift your perspective.” Feminism made that paradigm shift, though not without hostility, not without some women feeling we were forcing race on them. This change still amazes me.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY Kate Prendergast
Kate Prendergast is a writer, reviewer and artist based in Sydney. She's worked at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Broad Encounters and Giramondo Publishing. She's not terrible at marketing, but it makes her think of a famous bit by standup legend Bill Hicks.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Big Thinker: Henry Thoreau
A tax evader, rebel philosopher and the grandfather of environmentalism, Henry Thoreau (1817—1862) practiced a back-to-nature experience of the natural world while opposing authority.
Though enjoying no great acclaim in his lifetime, today the name Henry David Thoreau resonates across philosophy, literature, political history, natural history and environmental science. His spirit of non-conformity, his rugged individualism and his ‘essentialist’ approach to living, have seen him mythologised as an American hero – and an ancestor of various ‘return to nature’ movements, too.
The son of a pencil maker, Thoreau was born in 1817 in Massachusetts, US. He demonstrated free minded dissent for institutions early in life. While at Harvard, he allegedly refused to pay for his diploma certificate. In his subsequent role as teacher, he rejected a recommendation for corporal punishment – by thrashing a random group of students to make a point, then resigning. Later, he would refuse to pay six years’ taxes. He saw it as surrendering his money to fund slavery and the government’s war in Mexico, both of which he vigorously opposed. For this, he was thrown in jail.
Civil Disobedience
Thoreau’s spirit of resistance coalesced in the libertarian manifesto Civil Disobedience. Unjust governments have no right bending citizens to their arbitrary laws and corrupt systems, he argued in the book. A free, enlightened state was only possible once that state “recognised the individual as a higher and independent power”, and enabled them to be “men first, and subject after”.
Rather than meekly obey, Thoreau said he was obliged “to do at any time what I think right” – even if that meant breaking the law. This idea of self-governance by individual conscience would later inspire Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others who took a principled stance against unjust rule.
It has also been widely critiqued. Violent and bigoted acts can, after all, easily be committed under the banner of self-righteousness. And what if two people divided on a matter by ideology or faith can’t settle their differences?
Lines in Civil Disobedience like, “That government is best which governs not at all” also make some question whether Thoreau’s libertarian politics tended towards anarchism.
Simple living, transcendentalism and the Walden experiment
A fellow resident of his home town, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a pivotal influence on Thoreau. He introduced Thoreau to transcendentalism – a movement which reacted against religious and intellectual trends, and enjoined each individual to forge their own “original relation to the universe”. Thoreau became a key figure in the movement. For him, solitude, simplicity, awareness and harmonious engagement with the wild were concrete ways to forge this relation. His philosophy as well as his science, insisted upon embodied understanding, rather than just a contemplative or discursive one.
In a forest cabin lent to him by Emerson, Thoreau conducted an experiment in simple living which would last two years and two months. His methods and reflections during this time became the classic work Walden – named after a pond which abutted the property. In it, with poetic eloquence, didacticism and free wheeling style, he lays out his view of a resigned, frivolous and wretched humanity, and how one is to instead rise above and “live deliberately”.
To achieve an existence which is pure and meaningful, Thoreau argued a life must be cultivated free from illusion and excess. He practiced a style of subsistence living through radical self-denial. Only essential needs were identified and met. A plausible misanthrope, he forswore conversation, sensuality, coffee, meat and alcohol, advising just one meal a day. To relinquish to the slightest temptation was to open the gates to moral disrepair. He even eschewed a doormat, “preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door.”
According to the American author John Updike, “Waldenhas become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible”.
Kathryn Schulz reads Thoreau’s hermitage as rather a renunciation of responsibility, and categorises it as “original cabin porn”.
“Being forever on the alert”
Shorn of distractions, purged of indulgences, Thoreau believed a greater awareness of the universe can bloom. But more vital to his philosophy was an “ethics of perception” – requiring rigorous attentiveness to the outside world as it was uniquely registered on the senses. This could be observing a sunset’s reflection on glass, or the miniaturised battle of ants. Through this expanded and intensified focus, man was empowered to elevate his life, in “infinite expectation of the dawn”.
A surveyor by trade, Thoreau said we must consciously endeavour to practice “the discipline of looking […] at what is to be seen”.He was suspicious of orthodox forms of knowledge and believed the “essential facts of life” come to us through “the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us”. Truth, then, was deeply individualised communion between self and world, and the product of intuition and revelation, rather than logic or reason.
Natural as intrinsically valuable
Thoreau’s ideas around nature’s intrinsic value have had significant bearing on modern conservationism. The sublime beauty and order that could be perceived in natural phenomena were not, he thought, qualities projected onto it by humans. They were immanent. What’s more, “Whatever we have perceived to be in the slightest degree beautiful is of infinitely more value to us than what we have only as yet discovered to be useful and to serve our purpose”.
In other words, nature cannot be commodified. Priceless, it must be viewed on its own terms, rather than as a resource to serve human agendas and needs. His view was diametrically opposed to the anthropocentricism that characterised the industrial revolution’s frenzied assault upon lands and oceans, which would culminate in the raft of ecological crises facing us today.
Thoreau also drew attention to the hidden benefits and invisible services of plant and animal species. In one example, he considered the squirrel. To the average American, they were a pest. But if we recognised squirrels in a broader ecosystem context, we could honour them as “planters of forests”, noble little workers whose free labour humans couldn’t do without.
Thoreau recognised, too, that our ignorance of these hidden benefits makes us careless. Trampling over nature’s bounty, upending its fragile balance, we are liable to do untold damage – for which we may ourselves pay a dear cost. In this sense, he was prescient.
“I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state,” he wrote, “if that were the consequence of men’s beginning to redeem themselves.”
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY Kate Prendergast
Kate Prendergast is a writer, reviewer and artist based in Sydney. She's worked at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Broad Encounters and Giramondo Publishing. She's not terrible at marketing, but it makes her think of a famous bit by standup legend Bill Hicks.
Big Thinker: Temple Grandin
Turning a perceived disability into a new way of solving problems, Temple Grandin (1947—present) has revolutionised the meat-processing industry and changed the way the world views autism.
Temple Grandin is an autism advocate and animal scientist who works to improve animal treatment in the livestock industry. Grandin has also changed public perceptions of autism, helping educators to maximise the strengths of those with autism, rather than focusing only on deficiencies.
An animal lover and meat eater, Grandin has used her autistic trait of “thinking in pictures” to design livestock facilities and educate meat produces on how to minimise animal suffering. As a result, she says there’s been ‘light years of improvement’ in an industry where half of all cattle in the United States are handled in facilities she designed.
This isn’t enough for some animal rights activists though, who accuse her of trying to soften the image of a ‘violent’ sector.
Thinking like a cow
Temple Grandin did not talk until she was three and a half years old. She struggled to communicate throughout her childhood, and other students bullied her at school.But there was one high school teacher, Mr Carlock, who saw something special in her. He mentored the troubled girl and encouraged her to study science.
Shocked by the cruelty she saw in abattoirs, Grandin combined her love for science and animals by fixating on designs to improve animal welfare in these facilities. Grandin knew she learned better by visualising, rather than reading and hearing long strings of words. In this respect, her thinking pattern was similar to animals, who don’t ‘speak’ a language.
She observed cattle in slaughterhouses, seeing how they responded to fear, senses, smells and visual memories. When cows can see they’re about to be killed, they panic, fall and injure themselves. To combat this, Grandin invented the curved loading chutes, which block their vision of what’s ahead, keeping them calm.
This not only improves animal welfare, it saves producers the cost of cattle death, injury and bruising – which also reduces the quality of meat. Grandin has spent her career designing livestock facilities to improve the way animals are treated.
In 1997, she worked with McDonalds after activists exposed animal torture on their production plants. She helped the fast food chain clean up cruel practices and restore its public image.
In 2010, Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world for her work in animal welfare.
We need autistic minds
Grandin has also changed public perceptions of autism, a condition relatively unknown when she grew up. She argues people on the autism spectrum – who tend to struggle with verbal communication but think in pictures – can provide more insight in certain fields than those who think in a more conventional mathematical way.
“Visual thinking is an asset for an equipment designer. I am able to ‘see’ how all parts of a project will fit together and see potential problems.”
Grandin encourages teachers to develop the strengths of autistic children, and has devised clever ways to combat perceived flaws.Like many on the spectrum, she is oversensitive to touch. “I always hated to be hugged”, she says.
So at age 18, she built a ‘squeeze machine’ – two hinged wooden boards lined with foam rubber, which allows users to control the amount and duration of pressure applied. Therapy programs across the United States continue to utilise squeeze machines, with research showing they help relieve stress in users.
Hero or villain?
While considered a hero in the autism community, Grandin’s work divides animal welfare activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world’s largest animal rights group, appreciate and publish her work. Others, like biologist Marc Bekoff, hold that no animal in captivity can enjoy a pleasant life. Bekoff would rather see Grandin encourage people not to consume factory farmed animals; to him, “‘slightly better’ isn’t good enough”.
“No animal who winds up in the factory farm production line has a good or even moderately good life.” – Marc Bekoff
Grandin’s retort is that without meat eaters, farm animals would have no life at all. She argues if animals are going to die anyway, it’s important to minimise their suffering.
Does this apply to humans too?
The New York Times once asked her if she’d consider helping to make capital punishment more humane. Her response was blunt.
“I have read things about the malfunctions of the electric chair… I know how to fix it, but I will not use my knowledge to have any involvement in that. I will not cross the species barrier to help kill people. Period.”
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Big Thinker: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Threatened by Muslim extremists, boycotted by Western activists, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969—present) has literally put her life on the line to promote her ideals of rational thinking over religious dogma.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali born Dutch American writer best known for her fierce criticism of Islam – the religion of her birth.
She sprung to international notoriety in 2004, when a Muslim extremist killed her Dutch filmmaker colleague Theo Van Gogh, knifing a hand written letter into his chest which called for Hirsi Ali to die next. The extremist targeted the pair for making a film mocking Islam’s treatment of women.
This brush with death only strengthened Hirsi Ali’s resolve to champion her ideals of enlightenment values over religious intolerance. She went on to author four books condemning Islamic teaching and practice.
Fluent in six languages, Hirsi Ali regularly travels the globe on speaking tours, skewering Islam and its local defenders in her articulate, charming style.
She doesn’t appeal to everyone though. The controversial writer has drawn the ire of Muslims and left wing groups who accuse her of anti-Islamic bigotry. Loathed by fundamentalists, she is forced to travel with armed security.
From believer to infidel
Hirsi Ali’s 2006 autobiography Infidel chronicled her extraordinary life journey from devout Somali child to Dutch politician to celebrity atheist intellectual.
Born to a Muslim family, Hirsi Ali says she was five years old when her grandmother ordered a man to undertake a female genital mutilation procedure on her. As a child, she was a believer who read the Qu’ran, wore a hijab and attended an Islamic school.
Looking back, the writer could see all that was wrong with her upbringing – violent beatings, unquestioning faith and rigid enforcement of gender roles.
Hirsi Ali says she sought asylum in the Netherlands in 1992 to flee her father’s attempt to arrange her marriage.
In her new home, the avid reader devoured the writing of enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Mill and Locke. These authors taught her to question blind faith and instead embrace science and rational thought.
After working as a translator and researcher, Hirsi Ali was elected to Dutch Parliament in 2002. She used her platform to criticise Islam and Muslim immigration.
Islam ‘is the problem’
Hirsi Ali holds the view that the problem with Islam is not simply a minority of extremists who give the religion a bad name:
“The assumption is that, in Islam, there are a few rotten apples, not the entire basket. I’m saying it’s the entire basket” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali
She argues violence is inherent in the core Islamic text and this is something most Muslims fail to recognise.
According to Hirsi Ali, Muslims can be categorised into three groups.
First, there are “Medina Muslims”, who seek to force extreme sharia law out of their religious duty.
Second, “Mecca Muslims”, are a majority of the faith who are devout but don’t practice violence. The problem with this group, says Hirsi Ali, is they fail to acknowledge or reject the violence in their own religious text.
The third group, “Muslim reformers”, explicitly reject terrorism and promote the separation of religion and politics.
Hirsi Ali argues this third reformer group must overcome the extremists to win the hearts and minds of a majority of Muslims.
Feminist hero or anti-Muslim bigot?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was initially seen as a feminist activist who championed the cause of oppressed Muslim women. After moving to the US in 2006, she’s associated herself more with right wing groups than women rights’ activists. She became a fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute and a regular interviewee on Fox News.
Married to historian Niall Ferguson, the couple have been described as “the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of the intellectual right”.
She has also tweeted her support for Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed to the US Supreme Court despite allegations of past sexual assault.
Hirsi Ali’s right wing views and harsh criticism of Islam has seen Western activists target her alongside Muslim fundamentalists.
In 2014, Brandeis University in the US reversed its decision to award her with an honorary degree following objections from students.
In 2017, she cancelled a planned visit to Australia amid security concerns and a petition protesting her speaking appearance.
The Southern Poverty Law Center – a US advocacy group famous for defending civil rights – once categorised her as an anti-Muslim extremist.
Hirsi Ali says she can’t understand why she’s become the enemy:
“It has always struck me as odd that so many supposed liberals in the West take their side rather than mine … I am a black woman, a feminist and a former Muslim who has consistently opposed political violence”.
But if terrorists don’t deter her, activists have no chance. Hirsi Ali will continue to tread her dangerous path to promote what she believes are true liberal values.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Big Thinker: Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky (1928—present) is one of the foremost scholars and activists of our time.
With over a hundred books, thirty honorary degrees, and a generation of aspiring leftists behind him, Chomsky’s life puts a practical lens on the motto ‘protest is patriotic’.
The human tendency towards freedom
Chomsky earned a PhD in linguistics for his theory of “universal grammar”, a theory where all people are “born knowing” shared properties that underpin all human language. These properties, which create what he calls a “language acquisition device”, are what helps babies pick complex languages up instinctively.
According to Chomsky, while language’s laws and principles are fixed, the manner in which they are generated are free and infinitely varied. This view of human nature is one that runs through Chomsky’s attitudes to linguistics or politics: we must protect the innate human tendency towards freedom.
Pessimist of intellect
Chomsky’s opposition to war and totalitarianism started early. He wrote his first paper on the threat of fascism at ten. He opposed the Vietnam War while working at MIT, a military-funded university. He called Gaza the world’s “largest open-air prison” and said the US bears full responsibility for Israel’s war crimes.
Chomsky’s public denunciations of US foreign policy in Central America and East Timor, its interference in Middle Eastern elections and the shoot-first-ask-later’ type of diplomacy have drawn widespread ire and admiration. At the height of his fame in the 70s, it was discovered the CIA was keeping tabs on him and publicly lying about doing so.
Noam Chomsky’s consistent and vocal criticism of the US government comes from the belief that he, as a member of that country, holds a moral responsibility to stop it from committing crimes. That, and it’s far more effective than criticising a government that isn’t responsible for him.
“States are not moral agents; people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.”
Manufacturing consent
In what is arguably Chomsky’s most famous work, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, he outlined mainstream media’s complicity with government and business interests. He traced the capitalist formula of selling a product at a profit to the highest bidder in relation to the media. Here, people are the product and advertisers are bidding for our attention. Compare this with the monopoly social media has over our time and the ensuing competition for available ad space, and you’ll notice this line of argument growing in prescience.
Chomsky argued the advertising market is shaped by the external conditions of the state. It’s in their best interests to placate their ‘product’ and water down anything that would spur them to act against it. Any dissenting opinion is either ignored or presented as an anomaly. This is anti-democratic, said Chomsky, for a nation is only democratic insofar as government policy accurately reflects informed public opinion.
“If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
Speak truth to power
Fred Halliday, an Irish academic, has criticised Chomsky for overestimating the power and influence of the US. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, Oxford historian Stephen Howe, and linguist Neil Smith, have called him a fierce and aggressive moral crusader, who dismisses critics as unqualified, mistaken, or even “charlatans“.
Today, Chomsky is outspoken on what he considers the two greatest threats to humanity: nuclear war and climate change. But with NEG scrapped, the Doomsday Clock inching to midnight, and Congress split, it looks unlikely that decisive action against either of these threats will be carried out anytime soon.
Follow The Ethics Centre on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Big Thinker: Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884—1962) was an American diplomat and longest serving First Lady of the United States, best known for her work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
She was affectionately dubbed “The First Lady of the World”. The thread running through her massive body of work is the single idea: fear threatens our lives and our democracies.
To live well means to live free from fear
Roosevelt lived in a world reeling from fascism. Though the Second World War had ended, the horrors of Nazism, the Holocaust and Stalinism revealed the depths people would succumb to out of fear and insecurity.
It wasn’t your garden variety type of fear she was concerned with. It was the type of widespread fear that debilitates courage, rewards conformity and stifles “the spirit of dissent”. By succumbing to this immobilising fear, Roosevelt said, we waste our lives.
“Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.”
Roosevelt wanted all people to know their values. As an influential public figure and patriotic American, she especially wanted this for her country.
This wasn’t without reason. The growing fear of political others (McCarthyism) and racial others (the push for segregation) mobilised Roosevelt and emboldened her stance. She didn’t want conformity to win.
“When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your own surrender, less of a human being.”
Find a teacher in every person you meet
Roosevelt felt the danger of fear and conformity went beyond the trauma of war. It could quash “a spirit of adventure”, a way of viewing and experiencing everyday life that made you a better person.
She wasn’t talking about a thrill seeking, you-only-live-once, way of navigating the world. She meant close mindedness – denying your life experiences the opportunity to change your mind and mould your actions.
“Learning and living are really the same thing, aren’t they? There is no experience from which you can’t learn something. When you stop learning you stop living in any vital or meaningful sense. And the purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
Roosevelt believed that everyone has something to teach you, and you are the ultimate beneficiary. Your character, your actions and your democratic polity.
And some might find being motivated by self-betterment alone to be selfish. After all, shouldn’t we do good simply because it is good? Isn’t it more noble to be motivated by what Kant called “good will”, or a moral duty?
Even if it’s possible that realizing motivation from a place of moral obligation is a higher ideal, Roosevelt was grounded in the everyday. She wasn’t concerned with principles the vast majority of a traumatised, distrustful nation would find out of reach, so she focused on the individual.
A principled life
The most remarkable thing about Roosevelt aren’t necessarily her ideals. It was her moral gumption to act on them even if they were unorthodox for the times or grossly unpopular.
She lobbied for greater intakes of World War II refugees when immigration was not supported by many Americans still reeling from the hardships of the Great Depression. She criticised her husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, for a policy intended to address the post-Depression housing market crash that segregated black and white citizens.
She broke with tradition by inviting African American guests to the White House. She spoke out against the internment of Japanese soldiers to the very population grieving the 2403 Americans they killed at Pearl Harbour (in comparison, it’s reported 55 Japanese lives were lost).
Roosevelt’s reputation for loving all has not gone unchallenged. She has been accused of taking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that contravenes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights she worked on. While famous for wanting to protect displaced post WWII refugees, who were often Jewish, she felt the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict was to resettle indigenous Palestinians in Iraq – the suggestion being she had a Zionist bias.
Roosevelt nevertheless maintains her name as a pioneer in humanitarian efforts who walked her talk. Fast forward to today’s polarised political spectrum, and her story reminds us the tools to make it through are there.
Follow The Ethics Centre on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Big Thinker: Adam Smith
It’s no exaggeration to say the ideas of Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723—1790) have shaped the world we live in.
By providing the core intellectual framework in defence of free markets, he positioned human liberty and dignity at the centre of trade and money – all for the common good.
Adam Smith, the pioneer
In the 18thcentury, the race to colonise as many resource rich places as possible meant powerful countries were often at war. Companies which added to the wealth of empires were protected by grateful governments, creating trade monopolies that seemed impossible to dismantle. This was the heyday of mercantilism.
Smith noticed how these actions created concentrations of wealth, benefiting the wealthy while the labour class struggled to survive. His first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, argued that the virtues of sympathy and reciprocity could tame greed.
His second, The Wealth of Nations, was about promoting a new way of approaching wealth that was as lucrative as it was just. The approach Smith adopted was multifaceted: economic, defensive, legal, and moral.
Smith argued that countries were competing for the wrong thing. Wealth wasn’t to be found in commodities like gold and silver. It resided in human labour and ingenuity. Smith encouraged countries that would normally look externally for wealth, suppressing the labour class and enslaving others, to look internally instead.
If the labour class could have the freedom to pick their job, all the while knowing the government would leave the money they made well alone, why wouldn’t they work hard at it? They would produce goods and services of even higher quality, and the government could buy these and trade them with each other. Everyone wins.
Collaboration would mean countries wouldn’t need to waste money on defence and war. They could save and accumulate capital, and invest that into better machinery, freeing people to work more productively. The labour class would grow richer, and so would the nation.
Smith stressed that in order for a free market to ensure fair pay for fair work, contracts had to be honoured, people had to keep their word, and governments mustn’t get into debt or take people’s property. Theft, negligence, mistakes, or irresponsible government spending must to be managed by the rule of law. And in the case of foreign powers, defence.
Thus, for Smith – a free market must rest on a sound ethical foundation. Given this, he argued for moral education of a kind that would lead people to be honourable and behave justly. This included the rich. Smith thought that an appeal to ‘enlightened’ self-interest might lead them to act honourably. By lavishing praise, accolades, and rewards on those who spend their wealth in charity, the rich gain the status and rank they really desire.
Adam Smith, the legacy
Claims of plagiarism, usury, inconsistency, racism, and all else aside, the major complaint directed towards Smith is his concept of the “invisible hand”. His observation that self-interested individuals end up benefiting the common good – that they are “led by an invisible hand to promote an end that was no part of his intention.” – has prompted some critics to label him naïve, idealistic, or even immoral.
The following quotation (misattributed to John Maynard Keynes) sums it up: “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone”. But that plays into the Smith = laissez-faire trap, and ignores the safeguards he proposed against human corruption.
Smith did not think greed was good, saying this removed “the distinction between vice and virtue”, nor did he believe business interests and the public interest necessarily coincide. Instead, his perspective was that market competition forced people to act in ways that benefited others, regardless of their intention. And when it failed to do that, an overarching authority should step in. For Smith, markets have no intrinsic value – they are merely tools for the betterment of life for all.
No doubt the world we live in now is vastly different to pre-Industrial Scotland. Mass media, the Internet, the textile industry, factory farms, surveillance, housing prices, offshore tax havens…much would have seemed strange and unfamiliar to Smith. But his work and legacy leave a lesson in economics, ethics, and politics – all the more prescient in a world where the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Follow The Ethics Centre on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Big Thinker: Germaine Greer
Feminist firebrand or second wave scourge? When The Female Eunuch was published to international success, it was obvious Germaine Greer (1939—present) had hit a nerve – something she continues to do.
This article contains language and content that may be offensive to some readers.
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual who rose to international influence with her book published in 1970, The Female Eunuch. It was a watershed text in second wave feminism, a bestseller around the world, and it made Greer a household name.
Greer’s infamously bold voice and sense of humour permeates throughout the book. Her strong character and take no prisoners approach to public debate saw her regularly contribute to panels and broadcast media. Greer was launched into the public eye as a young, bolshie feminist star.
Since then, Greer has written many books spanning literature, feminism and the environment. She has become one of Australia’s most ‘no-platformed’ thinkers. Almost five decades on, we take a look at her contributions to feminist philosophy.
Human freedom is intrinsically tied to sexual freedom
Greer is a liberation, rather than equality feminist. She believed achieving true freedom for women meant asserting their uniquely female difference and “insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination”.
Greer wanted to be certain about this female difference, and for her, this certainty started with the body.
You can think of Greer’s claims like this:
- Women are sexually repressed.
- Men are not sexually repressed.
- The difference between men and women is their biological sex.
- Biological sex determines if you’re sexually repressed or not.
The second part of her argument is as follows:
- Women are expected to be ‘feminine’.
- Women are sexually repressed.
- The expectation to be ‘feminine’ is sexually repressive.
Greer is scathing in her portrayal of ‘femininity’. She claimed it kept women docile, repressed, and weak. It stifled women’s sexual agency, hence the ‘eunuch’, which was intrinsically tied to their humanity.
Only by liberating women sexually could they remove this imposed submissiveness and embrace the freedom to live the way they wanted.
“The freedom I pleaded for twenty years ago was freedom to be a person, with dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, talk loudly and sit with your knees apart.” – Germaine Greer (1993)
A feminist utopia is an anarchist utopia first
In the London Review of Books 1999, Linda Colley wrote, “Properly and historically understood, Greer is not primarily a feminist. More than anything else, she should be viewed as a utopian.”
For Greer, the greatest danger of the widespread female eunuch is not an unfulfilling sex life. It is in her being so concerned with femininity that she is incapable of political action. Greer believed this social conditioning was dire and its enforcers so embedded that revolution rather than reform was required.
Greer called for this revolution to start in the home. She spoke openly about topics that at the time were taboo: menstruation, hormonal changes, pregnancy, menopause, sexual arousal and orgasm. She decried the agents of femininity that she felt kept women trapped: makeup, constricting clothing, feminine hygiene products, stifling marriages, misogynistic literature and female sexual competitiveness. She reserved her greatest fury for widespread consumerism, which she believed kept women dependent on the systems that forged their own oppression.
Like Mary Wollstonecraft before her, Greer argued neither men nor women benefited from this. She called upon women to rebel again these “dogmatists” and create a world of their own. But the solution she presents is exploratory instead of pragmatic. Perhaps women could live and raise their children together, making their own goods and growing their own food. It would be somewhere pleasant like the rolling landscapes of Italy, with local people to tend house and garden. (It’s unclear whether these local people would be liberated too.)
Intellectual criticisms
Greer’s celebration of non-monogamous sex in The Female Eunuch and her derision of Western society’s obsession with sex in Sex and Destiny led critics to label her ideas slipshod and too inconsistent for a public intellectual.
The root of most criticisms and controversies surrounding Greer, tend to stem from her view of the sexes. Like other second wave feminists, she suggested biological sex determined women’s oppression. This stands in stark contrast to the perspectives of third wave feminists and queer theorists, such as Judith Butler, for whom gender’s learned behaviours play the crucial role.
Greer and her contemporaries are often criticised by third and fourth wave feminists for predicating their philosophies on a male/female binary. A binary that does not account for the broad chromosomal spectrums found among intersex people or the many ways in which individuals feel and express their gender.
Infamous commentary
Greer is not the docile feminine woman she warned of in The Female Eunuch. She has long been celebrated for bucking trends and being refreshingly bold and frank. She is also heavily criticised for being rude, offensive and out of touch. She has been described as having “the self-awareness of a sweet potato”, a “misogynist”, and “a clever fool”.
After she extolled the work of Australia’s first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard on an episode of ABC’s Q&A, she was slammed for criticising Gillard’s body and clothing:
“What I want her to do is get rid of those bloody jackets … They don’t fit. Every time she turns around you’ve got that strange horizontal crease which means they cut too narrow in the hips. You’ve got a big arse Julia…”
Social media lit up with calls for Greer to “shut up” after she linked rape and bad sex in the age of #MeToo:
“Instead of thinking of rape as a spectacularly violent crime – and some rapes are – think about it as non-consensual, that is, bad sex. Sex where there is no communication, no tenderness, no mention of love. We used to talk about lovemaking.”
It is probably Greer’s public statements around transgender women that have attracted the most protest. In an interview after an intense no-platforming campaign to cancel a lecture Greer was scheduled to give at Cardiff University on women and power in the 20th century, she said, “Just because you lop off your penis and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a fucking woman”.
This sentiment probably links with Greer’s ideas on sexed bodies. A sympathetic reading of the comment might see it as one about being born into oppression – a rather second wave feminist sentiment that echoes the racial and queer politics of the same era. An idea that’s sometimes cited as analogous to Greer’s controversial comment is that you cannot understand what it is to be black, unless you were born black and experienced discriminations since the day of your birth. Perhaps she was suggesting we cannot understand the oppression experienced by women and girls unless we are born into a female body. Perhaps not. Either way, the comment was received as incredibly offensive and naive to transgender women’s experiences.
“People are hurtful to me all the time. Try being an old woman. I mean for goodness sake! People get hurt all the time. I’m not about to walk on eggshells.” – Germaine Greer, 2015
Greer and second wave feminists generally are at odds with intersectional feminism which is prominent today. Intersectional feminism holds that many factors beyond sex marginalise people – age, race, nationality, disability, class, faith, sexual orientation, gender identity… Different women will be oppressed to varying degrees.
Whether Greer is a trailblazer or tactless provocateur, it is doubtless her ideas have influenced the political and personal and landscapes of gender relations and feminist thinking.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
BY Kym Middleton
Former Head of Editorial & Events at TEC, Kym Middleton is a freelance writer, artistic producer, and multi award winning journalist with a background in long form TV, breaking news and digital documentary. Twitter @kymmidd
