The Philosophical Faculty Journal

Author: Splijtstof

  • The Expiration Date of Human Rights: Rights of the Living and the Dead

    Introduction

    Mexico has been dealing with a forensic crisis for years. The crisis, which allegedly began in 2006 at the beginning of the war against drug trafficking, continues to worsen every year. More than 111,000 persons were registered missing in October 2023 in the interior ministry’s database, not including the many persons who went missing and were later found dead. (Eschenbacher 2023) These numbers continue to rise daily. The United Nations has expressed its concerns about the lack of effort put into the investigation of the disappearances and the identification of deceased persons. Despite the efforts of both the United Nations and the Red Cross to organise programs, thousands of decedents remain unidentified, continuing the heartbreak of many loved ones.

    This crisis raises profound questions about the right to identity and personhood for the deceased. Did these missing persons and unidentified decedents lose their right to be identified the moment they were no longer presumed to be alive? Do human rights have an expiration date?

    This paper seeks to address these questions by first elucidating what human rights entail and why the concept of human dignity is fundamental to these rights. It then explores the notion of legal death, especially the Presumption of Death, and the definition of posthumous rights. Finally, it examines whether human rights expire, arguing that while human rights do indeed have an expiration date, it is not necessarily set at the time of death. This discussion will incorporate the three factors – impossibility, value, and time – related to posthumous rights to provide a comprehensive answer.

    To illustrate these points, the paper delves into the forensic crisis in Mexico as a case study. The disappearance of over 111,000 individuals has left countless families in a state of uncertainty. While volunteer groups and loved ones try their best to fight for the rights of these missing and/or presumed deceased persons, they are unable to fully combat the harm caused by the violence that persists in their country, nor by their government, which has stayed passive in easing it.

    Through this case study, this paper argues that the lack of government action and the persistence of violence significantly shortens the period during which the posthumous rights of the missing and deceased are respected. The systematic silencing and threats faced by those searching for their loved ones further exacerbate the deterioration of these rights, demonstrating an urgent need for more robust legal frameworks and governmental action.

    Human Rights and Dignity

    In order to be able to argue whether human rights only apply to the living or also to the dead, the notion of human rights needs to be clear. The framework of rights is substantial and complex. Wesley Hohfeld famously managed to show that this framework can be organised, and he distinguished rights into four different types and incidents (Hohfeld and Cook 1923, 37). These are: the rights to claim, liberty, power, and immunity. From his framework, we can draw the following definition of human rights: ‘‘First, rights are moral constraints on the actions of agents; they constrain the behaviour of individuals who can understand and act for moral reasons. Second, rights are grounded in the fact that individual right-holders […] have their own aims and interests that are distinct from the aims and interests of others, and distinct from what would be best from some collective point of view’’ (Quong 2012, 623-624).

    The foundation for these human rights is human dignity (Kleinig and Evans 2013, 559). The definition of dignity has been a debate within philosophy for a long time. However, the most used definition of dignity is ‘‘the essential and inviolable core of our humanity’’ (Lanigan 2008, 12), in other words, dignity as the quality of humanity. To better understand the idea of human dignity, it can be distinguished into four ‘‘strands’’ (Beitz 2013, 271). The first refers to dignity as a rank or status (2013, 271). The second refers to dignity as a value or a kind of value (2013, 272). According to Kant, the only thing that possesses this value is the moral law. Therefore, from the second strand follows that human beings have dignity through their capability to follow the moral law (Kant 2012). The third strand is the role of dignity in characterising and commending conduct (Beitz 2013, 272). From which follows that dignity can be understood as a generic human virtue and from which the fourth, and last, strand is suggested. This strand refers to dignity as the worthiness of respectful treatment that fits one’s dignified character (2013, 273).

    From this definition follows that human dignity is not a mere value. The articulation of dignity in numerous international documents shows that dignity possesses a certain foundational significance (Kleinig and Evans 2013, 599). It can be said that the fourth strand, the deservingness of respect, is the most fundamental part of dignity in relation to human rights. The deservingness of respectful treatment is a foundation for both Human Rights as a concept as well as the idea of the right to human rights. The notion of respect as the foundation for human rights refers to the idea that every individual has a deservingness of respect, which grounds human rights. In other words, the idea that every individual is deserving of respect justifies as well as protects someone’s right to human rights. Thus, we can conclude that, as beings with dignity, we possess and should be granted basic human rights (Kleinig and Evans 2013, 559-560).

    Death in Legal Terms

    In the debate about the rights of decedents, the idea that dead bodies still carry some sort of (sentimental) value is of utmost importance. If human bodies are believed to carry some sort of significance, some sort of value, it might be expected and arguably logical for them to have rights.

    Legally speaking, one cannot be believed to be dead without the presence of a dead body to confirm this. (Wicks 2017) The only exception to this is a Presumption of Death. According to the Presumption of Death Act set in 2013 by the English government, one can be presumed dead if they have not been known to be alive for a period of at least seven years (‘Presumption of Death Act 2013’, n.d.). The period of time before one can be declared dead differs per country, in Europe most countries hold that in cases of general disappearances – disappearances unrelated to any life-threatening situation – one, too, must be missing for at least seven years before they can be presumed deceased (Council of Europe 2009). In China, however, this period is four years (China National People’s Congress 2017), and Russia holds that one must be missing for five years before one can be declared dead (Consultant Plus, 2024). In light of the current crisis, Mexico reduced their former legislation and allows the issuance of a Presumption of Death after a mere year (Marquez 2012). Where formerly loved ones had to wait a minimum of two years to request a Declaration of Absence and an additional five years to apply for a Presumption of Death, as of 2012 they only need to wait a year. As a consequence, the number of missing persons in the Mexican Republic has seen rapid growth. Based on the juridical systems surrounding death, one can conclude that whether it is the lack or presence of it, a corpse is of significant value when it comes to determining someone as officially and legally deceased.

    Posthumous Rights

    Important to the discussion of the rights of the dead is that a decedent can either have posthumous rights or can be nothing more than a mere beneficiary. Being a beneficiary of rights entails that the decedent profits from the rights of a living person and is, therefore, merely a third-party beneficiary. A good illustration is that of wrongful deaths for which loved ones claim a certain institution or company to be – one way or another – responsible. These companies are often sued in the interest of the decedent; however, should this lawsuit result in the company having to pay a fine or large sum of money as a form of reparation, the next of kin of the decedent are the recipients. Posthumous rights, on the contrary, imply that the decedent is a rights holder. Posthumous rights are the rights of the dead, or more specifically, the rights that come into being after a person has passed away.

    According to Kirsten Smolensky (2008), there are three factors when it comes to deciding whether posthumous rights are granted. The first factor refers to the inability of the decedent to perform their contract and is known as ‘impossibility’. The impossibility factor can give the decedent the right to, for example, not fulfil a contract as they cannot perform it. However, the impossibility factor does not only give decedents rights, it also takes constitutional rights from them. These rights include the right to vote, marry, or run for office. As it is impossible for a decedent to exercise these rights, they are taken away from them (Smolensky 2008, 775).

    The second factor is the importance of the right itself. The court decides which rights are valued as important, and therefore more closely guarded, and which rights are seen as less important. The second factor holds that this principle is true whether one is living or dead. (Smolensky 2008, 782) Consequently, the law protects some fundamental rights after death as it would if the person were alive. However, the protection of such rights, for example, free speech or reproductive autonomy, seems illogical. Starting with free speech, one could argue that the factor of impossibility would dismiss this right as the decedent does not have the possibility to actively perform it. Some courts, however, have suggested that depending on the importance of the case, the right to free speech should be pursued even after the death of the plaintiff. In her article, Smolensky refers to the McIntyre case in which the court pursued Mrs. McIntyre’s claim – which stated that the (American) First Amendment should have protected her right to free speech – after her death. This case, according to Smolensky shows that Mrs. McIntyre’s right to free speech survived her death in order to protect her right to sue. The idea that the right to free speech goes beyond the death of a person follows from a view called Interest Theory, which holds that the dead have interests that survive death (2008, 766). Therefore, the right to free speech of the dead would entail that these ideas and interests have the right to be pursued after the decedent’s death.

    As for the right to reproductive autonomy in posthumous cases, it becomes clear that one does not lose their autonomy when one dies. Reproductive autonomy, most of the time, is related to cases in which decedents’ sperm or egg cells are desired to be used for posthumous conception. In these cases, the court assumes that the decedent, before their death, had the autonomy to make pre-mortem decisions about what happens to their bodies after death (786). The court then continues this assumption of autonomy and follows the intent of the decedent when making a decision during these cases.

    The third and last factor concerns time. This factor holds that the rights of the death are time-limited: the longer someone has been dead the less likely a court is to extend a certain right to them (Smolensky 2008, 789). The decedent’s interest cannot increase in time, as they are no longer consciously aware of their preferences. In addition, decedents need ties to other living people so that their preferences can be recorded. However, over the years these ties fade and so does the decedent’s influence. In other words, as the decedent’s influence fades, so do their legal rights. Following this, it can be argued that human rights have an expiration date. However, this date is not set at the time of death, but rather years after.

    From these factors, it can be concluded that both autonomy, as well as dignity, are the driving force behind the creation of human rights, including posthumous rights. This is evidenced by the fact that the court and the law go to great lengths to support the wishes of the dead and ensure these wishes are respected. In doing so, they protect the dignity of the deceased.

    Raising and Answering New Questions

    Two questions arise from the given definition of posthumous rights and the factors relating to them. First: Were the factor of time taken to be true for both the dead as well as the living, would living people with little to no influence not also have little to no human rights? And secondly: If the expiration date of human rights is not at the time of death, then when is it set?

    To answer the first question, it needs to be clarified that ‘influence’, as used in the factor of time, does not mean the power or ability to affect something or someone. Rather, influence relates to someone’s consciousness and ability to express their preferences, opinions, and ideas to those with whom they are in contact. Furthermore, these factors were meant to decide whether posthumous rights can be granted, and thus were not intended to be applied to human rights for the living. However, an additional rule could be introduced to prevent any confusion when it comes to enforcing these factors. This rule would state that for posthumous rights to be granted, all three factors must be true. Consequently, we can say that one has lost their rights over time if and only if they were already incapable of performing other rights and if the court has decided that the rights in question were not of much importance (anymore). This rule makes it, at the very least, very difficult to apply the third factor to rights concerning living persons.

    Answering the second question is a bit more difficult. Smolensky’s three factors make clear that while the dead do have rights, these rights do not last forever. So, when do they expire? A possible answer we can take from the third factor is that rights fade as the decedent’s connection to life fades. This would mean that decedents lose their rights when they no longer have ties with living persons, for example, after those with ties to the decedent have also died. This possibility would, however, mean that some decedents have posthumous rights for a longer time than other decedents.

    Case Study

    This latter question can be tied back to the crisis in Mexico. Whether missing persons and those presumed dead inherit the rights of the dead and lose the rights of the living is, reasonably, a debatable question. There is no guarantee of them being deceased, but neither is there any evidence proving the opposite. They exist only in a grey area, an undetermined place. This paper argues that those presumed dead and missing persons, like those in the case of Mexico, should be granted the rights of decedents, based on the fact that even if they are alive, they have no way to express their wishes and preferences other than through the voice of others. Their disappearance has muted them.

    Following the theories discussed previously, multiple points can be made concerning the crisis revolving around the enforced disappearances in the Mexican Republic. First, as this paper has shown, for a decedent to remain in their position as a rights holder, they must have someone voicing their preferences. Simply put, decedents must be remembered. The crisis in Mexico has revealed that these people who continue the voice of the dead are not merely family members, but also strangers. There are over 180 search groups spread all over Mexico that voluntarily look for missing persons, identify the human remains they find all over the country, and, most of all, shed light on the violence Mexicans suffer from and the ability authorities lack to combat it (Eschenbacher and Elipe 2022). One of these groups is Las Rasteadoras del Fuerte, a group of women who have managed to find 423 bodies of which 218 were identified and returned to their families (Eschenbacher and Elipe 2022). These women, who were strangers to over four hundred of the bodies that they found, ensured that these decedents remained their right to be identified and fulfilled the right to a respectful burial of 218 people. With no ties connecting them, these women and their families increased the factor of time that Smolensky describes in her theory.

    However, this deed is not done without its dangers. Volunteers and family members who continue to actively search for missing persons, whether it is remains or a sign of life, not only face the same violence the person they are looking for suffered they also face systematic silencing from their government. Amnesty International reveals that relatives searching for disappeared persons face serious risks, including facing the same fate as their loved ones and going missing themselves (Amnesty International 2023). Enforced disappearances, especially of those looking for others, have become a synonym for death. As Amnesty International reports, these people include Teresa Magueyal, who was murdered while looking for her missing son Griselda Armas, and her husband who was also killed looking for their disappeared son, and many others whose names deserve to be known. This threat is not limited to volunteers and relatives it seems, as the Interdisciplinary Groups of Independent Experts who reported a case of 43 missing students all forcibly disappeared (Amnesty International 2023). The Mexican government continues its efforts to silence the cries of loved ones who stopped asking for help due to a lack of faith, and has worsened their heartbreak by claiming that the number of enforced disappearances published by the United Nations is exaggerated (Eschenbacher and Eschenbacher 2023). Families are denied access to forensic reports and are threatened and attacked by staff of Attorney Offices (Amnesty International 2023). Seemingly, the government and authorities put more effort into shoving this crisis under the rug than resolving the issue at hand.

    All of this leads us to conclude that there are two things posing a threat to the rights of the presumed decedents who have suffered under the Mexican crisis. First, is the violence many (young) Mexicans experience and face in the drug industry and within the republic itself. Second, are the government and law enforcement’s incentives and efforts to conceal rather than resolve the problem of enforced disappearances, thereby refusing loved ones and volunteers the resources and actions needed to find the missing persons. Ultimately, the factor of time is systematically and rapidly decreased as a consequence of the government’s attitude.

    When tying the notion of the rights of decedents to the forensic crisis currently haunting many Mexicans, we can conclude that despite the best efforts of families, friends, and even strangers, missing persons and those presumed dead are often deprived of their rights much sooner than is rightful. Due to the government’s passive attitude towards finding missing persons and the remains of those already believed to be dead, these people are ripped from the rights that, as proven by Smolensky, they had even in death. These people are stripped of their right to an identity and a burial, if not many more, by the same government that allowed this violence to come upon them in the first place.

    Conclusion

    To conclude, the forensic crisis in Mexico, exacerbated by the ongoing war against drug trafficking, has raised profound questions about the human rights of missing persons and unidentified decedents. This paper has explored the theoretical framework surrounding human rights and dignity, the legal implications of death, and the concept of posthumous rights to address whether human rights expire upon death.

    Human rights, grounded in the concept of human dignity, are moral constraints on the actions of agents and are essential to the respect and protection of individual autonomy and worth. Even in death, individuals possess posthumous rights that stem from their inherent dignity. Kirsten Smolensky’s three-factor analysis – impossibility, value, and time – provides a comprehensive framework for understanding these rights. While the impossibility factor removes certain rights due to the decedent’s inability to exercise them, the value and time factors ensure that important rights, such as free speech and reproductive autonomy, may extend beyond death, though they diminish over time.

    The crisis in Mexico starkly illustrates the practical challenges in upholding these posthumous rights. The rapid issuance of Presumption of Death declarations, coupled with systemic violence and government inaction, has led to a significant number of missing persons being prematurely stripped of their rights. Volunteers and families continue to voice the preferences and dignities of these decedents, often at great personal risk, highlighting the critical role of societal memory in sustaining posthumous rights.

    The discussion of posthumous rights in this paper emphasises the need for a broader societal and legal discourse on the rights of decedents. It is essential to recognise that human rights do not expire at death but fade over time as ties to the living weaken. This understanding necessitates a reassessment of governmental and societal responsibilities in addressing the rights of missing persons and unidentified decedents.

    To emphasise, the plight of Mexico’s missing persons underscores the urgent need for robust legal frameworks and active governmental efforts to uphold the rights of the dead. This paper advocates for a continued and expanded dialogue of the rights of decedents, recognising their inherent dignity and the importance of ensuring their rights are respected, even in death. Only through such discussions and action can we hope to address the limitations of current theories and practices, ensuring that human rights are preserved for all individuals, living or dead.

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  • Virtual Presence and Descartes’ Last Stand

    Are we fully ‘present’ in a virtual world when we are playing in VR? Or does a VR headset finally turn us into the detached spectators Descartes always said we were? According to Hubert Dreyfus, the epistemological concerns that were largely abandoned by philosophers in the twentieth century, have become very relevant again in the twenty-first century. The reason for this, is the possibilities of telepresence and virtual presence: the ability to be present in a place where you are not actually, i.e. bodily, present. This type of presence can take the form of, for example: joining a Zoom meeting, controlling a drone in some distant location, or inhabiting a virtual world by means of VR. In this paper, I want to examine the problem Dreyfus notes with virtual presence and see whether it is indeed a real problem when it comes to virtual reality. I will argue that it is not, with the help of Heidegger’s analysis of tools, state-of-mind and care in Being and Time. Similar to how using a hammer plugs us into a significant network of references, so does playing in VR plug us into a network of virtual significance.

    In On the Internet, Dreyfus starts his investigation of telepresence with the following question: “What would be gained and what, if anything, would be lost if we were to take leave of our situated bodies in exchange for telepresence in cyberspace” (Dreyfus 2009, 51). He relates telepresence to Augustine’s emphasis of inner life and Descartes’ “modern distinction between the contents of the mind and the rest of reality” (2009, 52). For Descartes, sensations caused by the ‘outer world’ are first passed to the brain and from there on to the mind. And citing people with phantom limbs as evidence, I can even question the direct experience of my own body. Descartes, as read by Dreyfus, understands our relation to the world and even our own bodies as an indirect relation. Only the contents of our minds are directly given, the rest is given indirectly, representational.

    According to Dreyfus, when using telepresence, our relation to the world is reduced to the narrow, indirect connection Descartes presumed us to have naturally. In order to fully understand Dreyfus’ criticism, we have to distinguish telepresence – being indirectly present in another physical place – from virtual presence – being present in a place that is itself not at all physical, but virtual. In his 2001 article “Telepistemology: Descartes’ Last Stand”, Dreyfus explains his criticism of telepresence by using the example of Telegarden, a digital project where people can log in to a robot in order to tend to a garden in a museum in Austria. Normally when you walk through a garden, you have no reason to doubt its reality. You are bodily present there, which means you can see, smell and feel the garden all around you. In the case of Telegarden, however, you are of course not physically there, so who says that there even is a physical garden that you are walking through with a physical robot?

    Dreyfus expands on this criticism in the second edition of On the Internet. His criticism hinges on the idea that bodily presence brings with it the possibility of optimal grip regarding a specific situation. Our feeling of reality depends on this feeling of optimal grip, which in turn depends on bodily presence. As Dreyfus puts it: “Its [(the body’s)] ability to get a grip on things provides our sense of the reality of what we are doing and are ready to do[.]” (Dreyfus 2009, 72). The answer to the question of what is lost in telepresence, is thus answered by Dreyfus in the following way: “What is lost, then, in telepresence is the possibility of my controlling my body’s movement so as to get a better grip on the world” (Dreyfus 2009, 60).

    However, Dreyfus also expands the scope of his argument here from telepresence to virtual presence. In a new chapter on the game Second Life, he explicitly discusses the notion of being present in a virtual world and submits it to a similar line of criticism. Does virtual embodiment provide a good substitute for actual embodiment? Dreyfus thinks it does not. Again, embodiment plays a crucial role here. Indirect communication of moods through our avatar means that it is impossible to acquire the required grip on social situations. The conclusion: A lack of bodily presence in a virtual world prevents the possibility of ever getting optimal grip on a virtual situation, which would in turn prevent an experience of virtual reality as reality.

    Dreyfus’ claims concerning the presence of virtual presence and the reality of virtual reality stem from a specific reading of phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on the latter in order to argue that a less dismissive view of virtual presence is possible based on a reading of his philosophy.

    Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit

    Dreyfus’ understanding of optimal grip has a basis in a specific reading of Being and Time. In Being and Time, Heidegger famously makes a distinction between Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit. This distinction relates to two different ways of relating to the world around us, that is, theoretical and practical, respectively. In Being and Time, Heidegger prioritizes the practical attitude:

    The kind of dealing which is closest to us is as we have shown, not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge’. (Heidegger 1962, 24)

    This practical attitude is different from the theoretical view, which sees everything it encounters as what Heidegger calls Vorhanden. This attitude will regard any being it encounters as an object, a thing, with certain properties, like heaviness, shaped in a certain way, etc. that we can discover by looking at it. This attitude of merely looking at things is the attitude of the theoretical view: “Theoretical behavior is just looking, without circumspection” (1962, 99). This is, as said, not the way we primarily relate to our environment. And it is close to the way Descartes would describe our natural relation to the world, and if we follow Dreyfus, the way we relate to the world through telepresence.

    In the practical relation that we first and foremost have with the world, we don’t regard the beings we encounter as mere things, but we encounter what Heidegger calls Zeug, or tools. Tools never exist in isolation; any tool refers to a multitude of other beings. The pen refers to paper, to ink, to the grocery list I am writing with it etc. These references are not like features of an object, they are part of the being of the pen, it is what makes us understand the pen as a pen. This totality of referencing equipment, to which the pen belongs, is therefore always already discovered before the individual pen. The tool can always only be understood from the whole to which it belongs. This referring to other beings is not some accidental feature of tools, it is a fundamental characteristic of the being of tools, which Heidegger calls Zuhandenheit. My proper understanding of a tool depends on me knowing my way around in this referencing totality. I do not grasp the being of a pen by looking at it and studying its properties, but by picking it up and writing with it.

    Significance

    So, in his analysis in Being and Time, Heidegger indeed seems to favor what Dreyfus would call embodied optimal grip, over theoretical onlooking. Yet, following Matthew Ratcliffe’s reading of Heidegger, I would argue it is a mistake to think that Heidegger takes this way of coping to be the essence of the way human beings relate to their world. Similar to how Descartes, at least in Dreyfus’ reading, misinterprets the human relation to the world as an all too narrow theoretical relation, I argue Dreyfus’ understanding of it as acquiring and embodied optimal grip is equally narrow. To cite Heidegger himself, looking back at his analysis of Being and Time three years later:

    It never occurred to me, however, to try and claim or prove with this interpretation that the essence of man consists in the fact that he knows how to handle knives and forks or use the tram. (Heidegger 1995, 177)

    So how should we understand the distinctively human way of relating to the world that Heidegger wants to lay bare? Ratcliffe gives the following characterization:

    [W]e find ourselves in a world where things matter to us in a range of different ways and, in the context of that world, we pursue certain concrete possibilities. It is only in virtue of pursuing these possibilities against the backdrop of an already significant world that we are able to make sense of the readiness-to-hand of equipment. (Ratcliffe 2012, 147)

    The basis for Ratcliffe’s characterization can be found in the first page of division 1 of Being and Time: “That Being which is an issue for this entity in its very being, is in each case mine” (Heidegger 1962, 67). This means, crucially, that my existence is not something that is predefined, set in stone, but something that I have to take a stand on, that is an issue for me. I exist as fundamentally open to different possibilities. My relation to the world accordingly to be understood as being delivered over to a context which is significant for me because it shows itself as a world of possibilities. Only from the prior discovery of this world as a significant whole, can beings then show themselves as either ready-to-hand or present-at-hand:

    Dasein, in its familiarity with significance, is the ontical condition for the possibility of discovering entities which are encountered in a world with involvement (readiness-to-hand) as their kind of being[.] (Heidegger 1962, 120)

    The being-in aspect of being-in-the-world should thus be understood as signifying a disclosive relation, in such a way that things are able to matter to us in one way or another. Heidegger uses the term Befindlichkeit or state-of-mind to describe this type of relation:

    Existentially, a state-of-mind implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something that matters to us. Indeed from the ontological point of view we must as a general principle leave the primary discovery of the world to ‘bare mood’. Pure beholding, even if it were to penetrate to the innermost core of the Being of something present-at-hand, could never discover anything like that which is threatening. (1962, 177)

    Hence, being-in-the-world means being in a certain state-of-mind, being attuned to the world in a certain way. The whole fact that things can matter to us, is grounded in this state-of-mind. That this is connected once again to our own being always being an issue for ourselves becomes clear in Heidegger’s analysis of a specific state of mind, namely fearing. He analyzes the phenomenon from three points of view: that in the face of which we fear, fearing and that about which we fear. That in the face of which, the fearsome is always a being within the world that is detrimental and drawing close. Fearing itself is a state-of-mind which discloses the world in a certain way. That about which we fear is always Dasein, either our own or somebody else’s. About this last, important point, Heidegger writes: “Only an entity for which in its being this very being is an issue, can be afraid. Fearing discloses this entity as endangered and abandoned to itself.” (1962, 180).

    All of this is summed up and comes together in Heidegger’s crucial notion of care, the term he uses to denote the Being of Dasein. The notion of care specifies that our relation to the world around us should always be understood in combination with the fact that our own being is always at issue for us. Heidegger explains this, when he says:

    ‘Its own being is the issue for Dasein’: This first presupposes that in this Dasein there is something like a being out for something. Dasein is out for its own being; it is out for its own being in order ‘to be’ this being. (Heidegger 1985, 294)

    What this being out for itself means, is that Dasein has to anticipate itself and its needs in its relation to the world. In that sense, care means always Dasein is always ahead of itself in a world in which it is intimately involved. Therefore, Heidegger formulates the formal structure of care as: “Dasein’s being-ahead-of-itself in its always already being involved in something” (1985, 294). This structure is of course a temporal one. Out for its own being, Dasein is always already involved in the world with a past and certain existing structures, and has to anticipate its needs in the future. This structure is the necessary condition for both our theoretical and practical relations to the world around us. Hence, Heidegger writes: “‘Theory’ and ‘practice’ are possibilities of Being for an entity whose Being must be defined as ‘care’” (Heidegger 1962, 238).

    Resident Evil VII Biohazard

    Now, with all of this in our back pocket, I want to circle back to Dreyfus’ question and slightly rephrase it as: what, if anything, would be lost if we were to take leave of our situated bodies in exchange for telepresence in virtual reality? The way in which we answer this question from a Heideggerian perspective can no longer depend on the possibility or impossibility of smooth bodily coping, for as we have just seen, embodied optimal grip itself is only a possibility of being for an entity whose being is defined as care. Rather, the answer to this question depends on whether or not virtual reality plugs us into a significant whole, in which things matter to us in one way or another.

    A hint to an answer can be provided by a clip from a Dutch video game journalist playing Resident evil VII Biohazard in VR (Power Unlimited 2017). In the clip we see the journalist repeatedly terrified by his encounters with the horrors in the game. At one point, he even throws his hands up in resignation and curls up into a semi-fetal position due to being overwhelmed by fear. Now what this shows is that the virtual world of Resident Evil VII is significant to the journalist playing this game. The relation he has to this virtual world cannot be understood as the narrow, indirect relation Descartes presumed us to have naturally, for such a relation could never have discovered anything threatening in the first place. The world presents the player with a variety of possibilities to pursue – to open the drawer or not open the drawer, to run away or to engage. Attuned to the world and these possibilities in a certain way, specifically the way of fear in the foregoing example, means that the things in the world matter to the player in a specific way. Taken this way, rather than depending solely on bodily presence, optimal grip rather is a question of how well you are attuned to a situation and the possibilities it offers.

    To be clear: I have not been arguing that there is no difference at all between our relation to virtual reality and – for lack of a better word – regular reality. What I have been arguing is that the fact that we are not bodily present in virtual reality does not mean that our relation to the virtual world we are inhabiting while playing with a virtual reality headset, is not therefore necessarily reduced to the narrow, indirect, representational relation Descartes presumed us to have. Importantly, the point that I have been trying to make, is that both in our relation to virtual reality and our regular reality, we are plugged into networks of significance. Qua significance, there is no essential difference between being plugged into a network of equipment in wielding a hammer and building a shed, and being plugged into a network of virtual zombies in playing Resident Evil VII VR.

    Whether Dreyfus’ crucial point that in playing Second Life, our virtual avatars are unable to directly communicate our moods to other players denotes an essential difference, is by his own admission an empirical question. Leaving aside the question of whether or not “an avatar’s gestures can be made similar enough to ours to cause a direct response in the person controlling the avatar,” imagine playing Resident Evil VII VR in co-op and hearing the response from the clip I just played, audio only. Would there be any question concerning the mood the other player is experiencing? Is there any indirectness to this?

    In conclusion, what I hope to have shown today is that Dreyfus’ claim that something fundamental is lacking from our telepresence in virtual reality as compared to our regular, basic relation to the world around us, is based on an all too narrow understanding of this basic relation. Rather than the embodied optimal grip inspired by Heidegger’s analysis of ready-to-hand equipment, the more primordial relation is one of being thrown into a significant whole which presents me with possibilities. Therefore, I have argued that in using a virtual reality headset, we do have a direct connection to the content it offers us. So luckily, Descartes can go back to his slumber; it is not the time (yet) for his last stand.

    Bibliography

    Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2009. On the Internet: Second Edition. Londen and New York: Routledge.

    Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2001. “Telepistemology: Descartes’ Last Stand.” In The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, edited by Ken Goldberg, 48-63. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

    Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press Ltd.

    Heidegger, Martin. 1985. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Translated by Theodor Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, finitude, solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Power Unlimited. 2017. “Tjeerd schrikt zich te pletter in Resident Evil 7 Biohazard VR.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM8TqFUpilI&t=285s&ab_channel=PowerUnlimited.

    Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2012. “There Can Be No Cognitive Science of Dasein.” In Heidegger and Cognitive science. Edited by Julian Kiverstein and Michael Wheeler, 157-175. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  • The Communist and Their Rolex

    Imagine for a moment that you are a communist. One evening you arrive at one of your local communist organisation’s meetings, eager to quote Marx back and forth with your comrades until the sun rises. But then you see something that makes your heart sink; from underneath the cuff of a neatly ironed Brooks Brothers shirt appears what is unmistakably a Rolex watch. You feel your blood pressure rising. Feverishly your mind starts seeking for a quote from Marx, Lenin – hell, even Mao, to put this class traitor you once called comrade in their place for enjoying such bourgeois luxuries. The comrade, seeing you turn red in the face at the sight of their watch, turns to you and asks a simple question: When has Marx ever argued against wearing nice watches?

    If you are a communist, or, in fact, if you are slightly to the left of Margaret Thatcher, you will have undoubtably been accused of hypocrisy for enjoying certain luxuries. Although this argument is often made in relation to owning an iPhone or enjoying a Starbucks latte, one would imagine that a self-proclaimed communist wearing a ten-thousand-euro watch would raise some eyebrows. In fact, even many leftists who are otherwise unimpressed by right-wingers’ vague gesturing at imagined hypocrisy would probably be quite puzzled if you showed them your new Submariner or Yacht Master.

    However, is this a valid critique?

    The first argument levied against someone who wears a Rolex and a hammer and sickle pin at the same time would undoubtedly be that the money they’ve spent on a completely superfluous luxury could have been given to those who had much less money. After all, as a communist one ought to be opposed to the unequal distribution of wealth within the world, so why not share your own wealth? It is simple consistency: if you are for redistribution of wealth, start with redistributing your own. This argument, however, falls flat on its face when communism is critically analysed.

    Firstly, there are different forms of wealth. The wealth which a communist is most concerned with redistributing is the private property of the bourgeoisie, contrasted with the personal property of the individual. Private property refers to the means of production, such as factories or machines, whereas personal property is the things which you or I use in our personal lives. In other words, communists are far more concerned with someone’s watch factory than someone’s watch.

    Secondly, the argument of the communist is not that everyone distributes their goods and services unethically under capitalism; the argument is that the system by which we distribute goods and services is itself unethical. Yes, it is unethical that there are people who eat caviar and lobster whilst others only have bread and water, but this is not due to some inherent quality of the caviar or the lobster. This inequality comes to be because the money these people spend on the caviar and the lobster does not get divided over the workers who actually made that dinner possible. Instead of going to the fisher, chef, and waiter, the vast majority of this money goes to the man on Wall Street who owns the restaurant. Only after this man has been paid his profits are the wages of the workers considered. Because of this systematic inequality in capitalism, it does not matter whether one orders lobster or bread at a restaurant; there is no way an individual can consume their way out of the inequalities within capitalism. I will go as far as to say that the actions of the individual within the system are completely irrelevant. Even if every single person acted as ethically as possible, due to the mechanisms of capitalism inequality would still persist. It is therefore not on the individual, whether communist or not, to redistribute wealth; instead, the system by which we distribute wealth to begin with ought to be changed.

    The second argument for why it would be hypocritical to engage in luxuries as a communist would be that, even if a communist is not primarily interested in redistributing the wealth that individual workers have, it would still be better spent on charity than on luxury. Saving lives must obviously take priority over making one’s life more luxurious if one is to be consistent. I certainly think that any person, regardless of whether they are a communist or not, should weigh the ethics of spending money on their own lives with the reality that money can save or else greatly improve lives of others through charity. This ethical burden is, however, not exclusive to communists. A capitalist would have just as much responsibility in this, but their spending habits are not questioned.

    This moral question is, nonetheless, not the topic I want to discuss here. The point I want to make in this essay, instead, is this: if we are to apply this criterion of abstaining from luxury and do this consistently we would be creating a standard that no person could reasonably be expected to reach. If we state that the only way in which someone can be a communist and not be labelled a hypocrite (and have all their critiques of capitalism rendered moot along with that) is to completely abstain from engaging in whatever one might label ‘luxury’, then this would apply not just to Rolexes or Starbucks lattes, but to everything that isn’t bread, water, and shelter. This is because ‘luxury’ is a completely nebulous term. Ask a hundred people what constitutes luxury and you’ll receive two hundred different answers. One could see luxury as a state of great opulence and comfort, but that only begs the question what we compare this to. If we were to compare the standard of living of the average person in a western country today with the standard of living of that of a typical medieval citizen, we would rightfully have to conclude that we live in a state of great opulence. Even compared to many people alive today in the global south, we undoubtably live among many luxuries. Does an average western home not provide comforts that most people in human history could scarcely dream of? Is a communist a hypocrite for having central heating, electricity, and indoor plumbing? Must we check the contents of one’s fridge when they start talking about unionising, in case it contains more than the bare minimum needed to stay alive?

    Furthermore, communism never argues that people should only have the bare minimum. There have been plenty of communist theorists who have written on the need for luxury in people’s lives. As anarchist Peter Kropotkin states: “Would life, with all its inevitable sorrows, be worth living, if besides daily work man could never obtain a single pleasure according to his individual tastes?” (1906, 134). We find here an often misunderstood, whether willfully or otherwise, component of communist thought. The point of communism is to feed the starving, not take away food from those who have it in the name of equality. A communist is not a hypocrite if they enjoy luxuries that others can’t have under capitalism, even if they oppose this inequality. Their argument, after all, is that everyone should have these luxuries, not that no one should have them.

    Surely though, one cannot reasonably claim that every person can own a Rolex. Did the Marxist revolutionary Thomas Sankara not say: “We must choose either champagne for a few or safe drinking water for all” (Skinner 1988, 444)? How can I say that it is perfectly fine for a communist to be indulging themselves in all manner of bourgeois luxuries when, in the same breath, I would argue that the rich of the world must surrender their wealth for the sake of the rest of the world? This thinking, however, is too individualistic. Yes, we must choose between champagne for a few or safe drinking water for all; and yes, the safe drinking water for all is the only ethical and just choice. This does not mean that it is unethical or even hypocritical for me to drink champagne. As I have stated before, it is not the actions of individuals which communists take issue with, it is the system itself. The world for which I fight will come no closer whether I drink a bottle of champagne or if I were to donate the price of the bottle to charity. What would this standard for being a ‘sincere’ communist even be? That there is some magical threshold of wealth – conveniently placed above our own, of course – which turns an otherwise sincere and devout communist into a hypocritical petit bourgeois traitor of the working class? I do not believe so. What ultimately differentiates the working class from the bourgeoisie is not how much money one has but rather their relationship to the means of production. It is the class interests gained through this relationship that determines one’s place within capitalism. If a worker chooses to spend the money they acquired through their own labour on a nice watch, it would not make them one bit less of a communist than if they had spent it drinking on the weekend with friends, buying a new car, or donating it to charity. What matters is that they are dedicated to a future beyond capitalism.

    Ultimately the allegation of hypocrisy levied against communists is not unique. I imagine most climate activists have, at some point, had it pointed out to them that their existence also produces CO₂. It is easy to see why this argument is so seductive to make; once someone has been identified as a hypocrite, their arguments are no longer that threatening. Whether consciously or not, it is employed as a thought terminating cliché by those who do not want to critically analyse the assumptions they make about the world or those who do not want to have to defend the political positions they hold. That these allegations are not genuine critique becomes all too clear when we recognise the fact that there is no way to be a proper communist to people levying these allegations. If you are rich and a communist, you are called a hypocrite; if you are poor and a communist, you are called jealous. Any argument that can be levied against owning a Rolex can equally be applied to many other commodities which we consider normal for people to own. If we were to apply these arguments consistently, we would be creating a standard to which no person could reasonably be expected to adhere. Furthermore, the allegation of hypocrisy is, in and of itself, invalid considering there is no communist principle against owning any kind of luxury, not even that of a Rolex. What makes someone a communist is not the watch they wear; it is their revolutionary spirit, their hunger for justice, their belief that a better world is possible, their yearning for a life beyond capitalism. All of which can be held just as fervently by a communist wearing a Rolex.

    Bibliography

    Kropotkin, Peter. 1906. The Conquest of Bread. London: Chapman and Hall.

    Skinner, Elliott P. 1988. “Sankara and the Burkinabé Revolution: Charisma and Power, Local and External Dimensions.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 26, no. 3 (September): 437–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/160892.

  • Uses of Philosophy

    Critical and Postcritical Interventions in the Philosophical Canon

    Introduction

    This paper encourages academic philosophers in the Netherlands[1] to consider three questions: What do we study and teach? How do we study and teach? And why do we study and teach? The answer to the first question is no longer self-evident. For the past few decades, the canons operative in the humanities have been under attack for being too male, too white, and too Western. Within the disciplines of literature (Morrissey 2005), history (Grever and Stuurman 2007), and the arts (Brzyski 2007), the self-evidence of what is read, studied and taught is a thing of the past. Philosophy forms no exception in this regard: its canon has come under increasing pressure both inside and outside academia (Dabashi 2015; Van Norden 2017; Tyson 2018). In the Netherlands, the canon debate has been given a recent impetus by the publication of a series of articles about reforming the ‘dead white males’ canon for the history of philosophy (Ierna 2020; 2021; 2022). Responses to such a reform show great division between those who defend the canon as it stands, emphasizing the value of tradition (Molenaar 2020; Drayer 2021; Dros 2022; Doorman 2022), and those who agree the philosophical canon should be more inclusive, stressing the richness of diversity (Verburgt 2021; Booy and Varekamp 2021). Meanwhile, some have drawn attention to the limits of diversification (Dhawan 2017) and have instead challenged the very idea of a canon for philosophy (Bright 2020; Ierna 2022).[2]

    To move this conversation forward, one needs to consider and respect the concerns of each of these parties. We cannot simply do away with Kant, for instance, but we cannot close our eyes to his sexism and racism either. Hence, we have to reconsider how we study and teach particular philosophers. And if we want to move beyond the canon, we also have to reevaluate why we study and teach certain texts in the first place. In the remainder of this paper, I address these two questions. First, how do we study and teach? This paper confronts three approaches that provide an answer to that question. The first is deconstruction: a way of reading initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that focusses on contradictory and marginal aspects of philosophical texts. The second is postcolonial-feminism: a critical movement within the humanities which demonstrates how the androcentric, ethnocentric, and Eurocentric biases of the philosophical tradition have led to the exclusion of various social identities. The Indian scholar Gayatri Spivak has critically adapted deconstruction for these purposes. Although both of these approaches focus on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in canonical philosophical texts, they recognize that one cannot do away with tradition: we still have to read Kant; we just have to read him in a non-traditional way. Hence in the first and second section of the paper, I provide a brief outline of what such a non-traditional way might entail.

    Deconstruction and postcolonial-feminism are confronted with a third approach, which is called ‘postcritique.’ This is both a theory and method of reading and interpretation, coined by literary  scholar Rita Felski, that opposes critical or suspicious forms of reading, and instead seeks to reveal how texts can be seen as actors which create various kinds of attachments in present-day readers.  What if we would translate this theory within the discipline of philosophy? If we would transpose Felski’s project from the uses of literature to the uses of philosophy? That would certainly force us to reconsider why we study and teach certain texts in the first place. In the third and final section of this paper, then, I consider alternatives for the justification criterium of canonicity, such as the capacity of philosophical texts to change how we think and feel, to enchant, shock, or intrigues us, or to assist us in addressing problems we currently care about. I conclude by discussing how these criteria might reconcile the different parties in the canon debate.

    Unity/Multiplicity: Derrida’s Deconstruction

    How do we read, study, and teach? This is the central question of this first section and the next. I have selected the work of Derrida and Spivak to provide an answer to it, as they agree with those who argue for the importance of the philosophical tradition, but problematize a traditional way of reading it. While Derrida and Spivak continue to read and interpret canonical texts, they do so in a non-traditional way, by focusing on multiplicity rather than unity (Derrida), or historical and political context rather than just philosophical arguments (Spivak). Both have worked under the flag of deconstruction.

    In the late 1960s and early 70s, Derrida (1967a) coined the term ‘deconstruction’ for his project of interrogating and problematizing Western metaphysics, insofar as it attempts to master reality by theoretical means. According to Derrida, this desire for control manifests itself in a variety of ways. One of them is to demarcate that which is allegedly ‘proper’ to philosophy, and to exclude everything beyond these self-defined limits (Derrida 1972a). Another is the search for principles and fundamentals which create order and stability (Derrida 1967b). On several occasions, Derrida (1967a; 1972a; 1984a; 2019) has remarked that the traditional way of reading and interpreting Western philosophy is directed at gathering together the unity/essence of a thinking, a single text, or an oeuvre. For him, this is yet another example of a metaphysical desire for theoretical mastery.

    Let us elucidate Derrida’s observation with an example. In each of the texts mentioned, Derrida’s standard case study is Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. Heidegger has two seminal books on Nietzsche, that are definingly called ‘Nietzsche I’ (1996) and ‘Nietzsche II’ (1997), in which he presents Nietzsche as ‘the last metaphysician’, because, arguably, in the end Nietzsche develops a metaphysics of will to power. Derrida argues, in turn, that this interpretation of Nietzsche is guided by a ‘unifying’ tendency: what Heidegger tries to do, is to read Nietzsche in such way that in the end, everything he says can be reduced to one great thought, which is that of the will to power, or that of the eternal return—for Heidegger these are different expressions of the same thought. It is in this move, in this strategy of reading that tries to find the unity of a thought, that Derrida takes Heidegger to exemplify a desire for mastery and control, which he also refers to as logocentrism (1967a; 1984a; 2019).

    It seems to me that this way of reading is still very much present within our current academic milieu. Take, for instance, a standard introductory course to Plato. Usually, this starts with a short biographical sketch of Plato’s life, and then turns to what is considered to be the guiding thread throughout Plato’s work, viz. his theory of ideas. Subsequently, some specific sections of Plato’s dialogues are selected to be studied by students, in which this theory of ideas is particularly well-illustrated (e.g., the allegory of the cave from the Republic, and the passages about the ‘ladder of love’ from the Symposium). Will we find something in these dialogues, then, that might contradict the previously established unity of Plato’s thought? It seems to me that we will likely find this ‘essence’ reflected in the dialogues—from which it was assembled or gathered in the first place. What if we would start from the heterogeneity of the Platonic dialogues instead (e.g., confronting parts of the Republic with parts of the Parmenides, where Plato, by voice of Socrates, undermines his ‘own’ theory of ideas), and then seek to determine Plato’s relationship to the theory of forms?

    In my view, deconstruction can best be understood as a strategy of reading and interpretation that challenges this hermeneutic practice of gathering together the heterogenous elements of a single text or entire oeuvre into a coherent totality. In his seminal reading of Plato, for example, Derrida (1972b) has attempted to demonstrate how Plato’s dialogues structurally undermine ‘Platonism’, understood as a hierarchical system of divisions between ideas and representations, philosophers and sophists, body and soul, etc. Moreover, throughout his career, Derrida (1967a; 1984a; 1984b; 1994; 2019) has continued to contrast his own readings of Nietzsche, that highlight the multiplicity of positions, names and voices inhabiting Nietzsche’s works, with those of Heidegger. In a similar deconstructive spirit, Derrida has shown Freud’s corpus to be replete with contradictions and has drawn attention to the multiplicity of heirs claiming the name and heritage of ‘Marx’ (see Derrida 1993; 1997; 2002). What connects these and other cases is deconstruction’s focus on the written philosophical inheritance, where it discovers tensions, unthoughts, and above all, a multiplicity of voices that resists homogenization. In fact, this heterogeneity at the level of written texts is what animates all debates on questions of interpretation amongst philosophers—which means that as long as a unifying tendency within research and education prevails, the philosophical community structurally undermines its own conditions of possibility.

    Exclusion/Inclusion: Spivak’s Postcolonial-Feminism

    Let us turn to the second approach; a second answer to how we might study and teach. It is only after deconstruction has reoriented our attention towards the internal logic of texts, that particular philosophers may be problematized for the sexist, racist and/or imperialist gestures accompanying their writings, and that othertexts may be read. Now this two-sided project, I would argue, has defined feminist and postcolonial approaches to the philosophical canon. Since both sides of this project can be found in the work of the Indian literary scholar Gayatri Spivak, I would like to dwell on it for a moment. In the wake of deconstruction in the 1980s and 90s, Spivak has exposed dynamics of exclusion and inclusion in the relationship between the European tradition on the one hand and what she calls the ‘subaltern’ on the other. The subaltern is a concept borrowed from the Italian neo-Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci to designate what Gramsci (2014) called ‘social groups in the margins of history’ (Spivak 2021), which can qualified in a variety of ways. From a feminist and postcolonial perspective, Spivak (1988; 1999) has shown how the androcentric, Eurocentric, and ethnocentric biases of the philosophical tradition continue to silence the subaltern. This tradition has systematically denied the Other the position of speaking subject, Spivak argues, and her texts are dedicated to finding ways for the subaltern to speak—and to be heard, for example in contexts of education (Spivak 2009; 2012) and translation (Spivak 2022).

    Actually, Spivak first made a name for herself by a now widely celebrated translation of Derrida’s Grammatology (1967a) into English, to which she added a long and influential preface. In fact, I would say that the profound influence of deconstruction on Spivak’s postcolonial-feminist project can hardly be overestimated. Derrida, for instance, is the only contemporary French intellectual that comes of relatively unscathed in Spivak’s (1988) seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in contrast to Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. Moreover, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Spivak 1999), references to Derrida and deconstruction are paramount, both in the main text and its footnotes. The book also contains an appendix titled ‘The Setting to Work of Deconstruction’, in which Spivak attempts to reconstruct the development of deconstruction throughout Derrida’s works. Now since Spivak is explicitly engaged with canonical philosophical texts in the first part of this book (definingly called ‘Philosophy’), it will be my focus in the remainder of this section.

    Let us return to our guiding question: how do we study and teach? The dominant reading of the history of philosophy is, arguably, one that dismisses signs of sexism, racism, and/or imperialism as somehow unimportant, inessential, or marginal. Usually, we bracket the historical and textual context of certain philosophical ideas, in order to focus instead on certain arguments we deem important to write about or teach students about (Krogh 2022). Some have called this the ‘streamlined version of the history of philosophy’, where the proper name of a philosopher is taken to be a placeholder not for what they actually wrote, but for what are deemed to be their best ideas or arguments (Bernasconi 2003). Spivak (1999) does something very different. Setting deconstruction to work in Kant’s third critique, she demonstrates how Kant’s system claims to be universal, but is actually founded on the exclusion of specific indigenous peoples. What Spivak’s reading attempts to show, are precisely the historical and political conditions of possibility for Kant’s claims to universality, as well as the ‘philosophical’ positions that contain what she calls an ‘axiomatics of imperialism’. When Kant claims that the existence of certain inhabitants of South-America and Australia is less natural than others, as he does, then this might serve as a legitimation for colonial subjugation.

    Subsequently, Spivak (1999) offers us a parallel reading of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics on the one hand, and the Bhagavad Gita on the other, in which she seeks to supplement Hegel’s reading of the Hindu scripture with her own deconstructive one. This is already a remarkable intercultural dialogue in itself, but Spivak’s aim is to show that whilst Hegel invokes the Gita to exclude India from the teleological dialectics of history, the Gita itself contains dialectical elements which can be manipulated for nationalist and/or colonial purposes. Finally, then, Spivak turns to the afterlife of a notorious statement by Marx on ‘the Asiatic Mode of Production’, in order to render visible how Marx, along similar lines as Hegel, excludes Asia from his historical materialism. Since Asia does not have the capitalist system, so Marx’s reasoning goes, it cannot take part in the revolution and attain a state of freedom. According to Spivak (1999), this is also the kind of reasoning used to legitimate imperialist intervention in Third-World countries. In each of these readings, Spivak demonstrates how the philosophical theories of Kant, Hegel, and Marx are inextricably connected to the prejudices of their time, which, via these canonical texts, continue to influence the present.

    To recall, I have selected these two authors—Derrida and Spivak—because they agree with those that argue for the inescapability and importance of tradition, but at the same time, they recognize the feminist and postcolonial concerns of those that have problematized the canon, and rightly so. What both Derrida and Spivak oppose is a traditional reading of the history of Western philosophy that starts from the putative unity and neutrality of the works of canonical authors. And what they oppose to it, is a deconstructive approach to what we read, study and teach. I am not arguing that we all have to become deconstructivists—in the next section I will explain why not. My point is rather that when we want to reconsider the question of how we study and teach, the work of Derrida and Spivak provides us with valuable, if not indispensable, resources.

    Critique/Postcritique: Felski’s Postcritique  

    The attentive reader may have noticed that I announced I will confront three approaches that provide an answer to the question ‘how do we study and teach?’. This third approach is called ‘postcritique’. Within the field of literary and cultural studies—if not the humanities in general—the past decade is marked by an attempt to develop approaches to cultural objects that move beyond the dominance of ‘critique’ in its various manifestations. Within this context, Felski (2015) has recently coined the term ‘postcritique’ as an alternative for the omnipresent method and style she calls—drawing on Paul Ricœur—a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. Felski joins two highly influential essays here—‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ (2003) by queer theorist Eve K. Sedgwick and ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’ (2004) by philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour —in challenging the hegemony of interpretative approaches that start from suspicion and critique.

    In this endeavor, deconstruction is criticized for its emphasis on contradictions, instabilities, and foreclosures, as well as for its excessive vigilance and abundant use of scare quotes (Felski 2011; 2015; Anker and Felski 2017). Meanwhile, postcolonial-feminism is taken to task for its focus on ideological oppression and social inequalities, and for its persistent wariness of the reader’s own complicity (Felski 2008; 2015; Anker and Felski 2017). This position is all the more remarkable, considering the fact that Felski’s first books are all contributions to feminist theory. Nevertheless, Felski renounces feminist critique no less than deconstructive and postcolonial critique, because of their investment in denaturalization, their outright negativity, and their attitude of analytical detachment (Felski 2008; 2011; Anker and Felski 2017).

    Yet, one might question whether this characterization is appropriate. Indeed, Derrida and Spivak are focused on destabilizing and denaturalizing, but both have resisted the idea that their approach would be negative (Derrida 1992; 2005; Spivak 2014). In fact, present-day critics have suggested that Felski’s postcritique may be based on caricatures (Robbins 2017). Conversely, one could ask whether postcritique could be regarded as a hermeneutics of trust? These doubts might compel us to consider what method or style—critical or postcritical—would be best suited to approach texts within and beyond the philosophical canon. Needless to say, critical readinghas yielded valuable results, also—or perhaps especially so—in postcolonial-feminist contexts, and it will maintain its relevance for the decades to come. But when it comes to reading texts from a diversity of authors and traditions, a largely critical or suspicious interpretative attitude seems to be less appropriate.

    Besides a vigorous debunking of critique, Felski’s recent writings (from 2008 up until the present) are marked by a rather constructive spirit that tries to develop new forms of aesthetic engagement. From Latour (2007), Felski takes the insight that texts have agency: they are actors that can make an impact on the world by making connections, just like humans, animals, or things can (Felski 2011; 2015; 2020). It is because texts, like all artworks, are actors, that they can affect us and create various forms of attachment: they can move us to act in a certain way, make us feel a wide range of emotions, and change our ways of looking at the world (Felski 2008; 2011; 2015; 2020; Felski and Anker 2017). From the methods of Actor-Network Theory and phenomenology, Felski derives the inducement to describe these experiences, giving rise to novel ways of reading that take texts to be co-actors rather than reducing them to something they supposedly express. In fact, Felski replaces the explanation of texts or other works of art with an effort to describewhat she calls the ‘uses’ of literature (Felski 2008) and art more generally (Felski 2020). The guiding question of her postcritical project is thus not what works of literature/art mean, but what they do.

    What if we would translate Felski’s theory within the discipline of philosophy? What if we would transpose her project from the uses of literature to the uses of philosophy? That would certainly force us to reconsider why we study and teach certain texts in the first place—which is my third, and last question. Usually, answers to this question resort to arguments of canonicity, whether in the form of historical influence (we read Plato because, as Whitehead famously said, the European philosophical tradition is nothing but ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’), or philosophical quality (we read Ryle and Wittgenstein because they proposed such innovative arguments). But could we not also provide justification criteria for our selection of texts without recourse to what Felski (2008) calls ‘the canon-worship of the past’? Such criteria would depart from the relevance of particular philosophical texts for the present-day reader rather than their canonicity. As Felski (2011; 2015) remarks, this would involve a rethinking of the relationship between past and present: we would no longer read texts because they belong to a certain historical period or context (such as ‘modern philosophy’ or ‘German idealism’), but because they appeal to us in the present, as they somehow affectively or cognitively transform us or assist us in addressing questions we currently care about.

    Conclusion

    The goal of this paper has been to invite academic philosophers in the Netherlands to reconsider three questions: What do we study and teach? How do we study and teach? And why do we study and teach? I used the first question as an entry into the current debate about the canons within the humanities, and the philosophical canon in particular. In the past decades, the body of literature, philosophy, and works of art known as the Western canon has come under increasing pressure for being dominated by white male viewpoints. In the Netherlands, the canon debate has been given a recent impetus by the publication of a series of articles about reforming this ‘dead white males’ canon for the history of philosophy. I observed that responses to such a reform show great division between those who defend the canon as it stands, stressing the value of tradition, those who agree the philosophical canon should be more inclusive, stressing the richness of diversity, and finally those who have challenged the very idea of a canon for philosophy.

    To answer my second question (how do we study and teach?), I turned to Derrida’s deconstruction and Spivak’s postcolonial-feminism, because they share both a sense of the value of tradition, and a sense for the concerns of those who have criticized this tradition for its limitations and biases. I have argued that Derrida and Spivak both oppose a traditional reading of the history of Western philosophy that starts from the alleged unity and neutrality of canonical philosophical texts. What they oppose to it, is a deconstructive approach to what we read, study and teach, which highlights a multiplicity of voices rather than a unity of thought, and historical and political context rather than merely arguments. Felski’s postcritique then enabled us to reflect on the hegemony of interpretative approaches that start from suspicion or critique, like the deconstructive ones practiced by both Derrida and Spivak.  I briefly discussed Felski’s own approach to literature and art, which starts from the idea that texts have agency and can create various kinds of attachments in present-day readers, to subsequently describe these readerly experiences or ‘uses’ of literature.

    Now, if we want to move beyond the canon, we must not only reconsider what and how we read, but also why we read, study and teach certain philosophical texts in the first place—my third and last question. I argued that by transposing Felski’s project from the uses of literature to the uses of philosophy, we may be able to develop new justification criteria for the selection of texts within research and education. These criteria would depart from the relevance of particular philosophical texts for the present-day reader rather than their canonicity. In some sense, this changes nothing: we can still read texts by authors that are part of the current canon, as long as we can justify their contemporary relevance, thus accommodating those that seek to defend the canon as it stands. In another sense, it changes everything: we are now unshackled from tradition, which allows for the inclusion of forgotten thinkers by making a case for the value of their work—thus accommodating those that emphasize the richness of diversity. To see how this might work, let me conclude this paper with two examples.

    Returning to my initial question (what do we study and teach?): we might study and teach on the relationship between the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Franz Fanon; not because de Beauvoir is a woman, and Fanon is a person of color, but because each of them makes us think and feel in a different way. And if we want to teach a course on power, exclusion, and civilization, we probably do well to discuss Foucault, but we might just as well discuss Aimé and Suzanne Césaire; not for political reasons, but for hermeneutical ones, if you will; because their work can enchant, shock, or hook us—to use some Felskian terms. What I am looking for here, is a justification criterium that is neither founded on canonicity, nor on mere representation, but one that is founded on agency and attachment, or ‘use’. The value of philosophy, I would argue, lies at least in part in its uses—which are vital, but understudied. My hope is that transposing Felski’s project within philosophy enables us to fill this lacuna, since it may very well be a path on the way to reconcile the opposing parties in the canon debate.

    [1] Since this paper was first presented at the 2023 annual conference of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy, its primary target audience is academic philosophers in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, the issues it addresses extend beyond these institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

    [2] Although these sources are in Dutch, they are not necessary to make this point: one can find more or less the same positions in the books quoted earlier (or in staff meetings about curriculum reform, for that matter): there are always those who urge for a diversity of perspectives and those who argue for the relevance or the quality of the current canon.

    Bibliography

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    Doorman, Maarten. 2022. “Witte mannen domineren de canon, maar Descartes wegstrepen schaadt álle studenten.” Trouw, July 25. https://www.trouw.nl/opinie/witte-mannen-domineren-de-canon-maar-descartes-wegstrepen-schaadt-alle-studenten~bf78d25f/.

    Drayer, Elma. 2021. “Een canon betekent heel veel, maar is niet per se bedoeld om je in te herkennen.” De Volkskrant, August 12. https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/een-canon-betekent-heel-veel-maar-is-niet-per-se-bedoeld-om-je-in-te-herkennen~bccfd4d5/?referrer=https://www.google.com/.

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    Felski, Rita. 2008. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell.

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    Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

    Felski, Rita. 2020. Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

    Gramsci, Antonio. 2014. Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana. Torino: Giulio Einaudi.

    Grever, Maria, and Siep Stuurman, eds. 2007. Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-first Century. New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.

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    Ierna, Carlo. 2021. “In de filosofische canon gaan grote namen sneuvelen.” Interview by Lodewijk Dros. Trouw, August 4. https://www.trouw.nl/religie-filosofie/in-de-filosofische-canon-gaan-grote-namen-sneuvelen~b4f26a1e/.

    Ierna, Carlo. 2022. “Te wit, te mannelijk en te westers. ‘Een canon voor de filosofie kan überhaupt niet meer’.” Interview by Lodewijk Dros. Trouw, July 16. https://www.trouw.nl/religie-filosofie/te-wit-te-mannelijk-en-te-westers-een-canon-voor-de-filosofie-kan-uberhaupt-niet-meer~bbb754c0/.

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    Molenaar, Laura. 2020. “Filosofie kan niet zonder canon, vinden deze filosofen.” Trouw, January 19. https://www.trouw.nl/religie-filosofie/filosofie-kan-niet-zonder-canon-vinden-deze-filosofen~b08962ef/.

    Morrissey, Lee, ed. 2005. Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi. New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.

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    Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 123-152. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

    Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 271-313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

    Spivak, Gayatri C. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Spivak, Gayatri C. 2009. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York/London: Routledge.

    Spivak, Gayatri C. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Spivak, Gayatri C., and Nazish Brohi. 2014. “In Conversation with Gayatri Spivak.” Dawn, December 23. https://www.dawn.com/news/1152482.

    Spivak, Gayatri C. 2021. “How the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies Thinks Colonialism Today.” Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies 1 (1): 19-29. https://doi.org/10.2021/ju.v1i1.2309.

    Spivak, Gayatri C. 2022. Living Translation, ed. Emily Apter, Avishek Ganguly, and Mauro Pala. London/Calcutta: Seagull Books.

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  • Splijtstof 52-3

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  • Into the Mirror World

    Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World (2023), begins with Klein sharing an incident on social media where she was mistaken for Naomi Wolf, a feminist thinker who shifted her views to becoming a conspiracy theorist and engaging with very right-wing thinkers and public figures. This all took place around when the COVID-pandemic hit the world. Throughout the pandemic, Wolf propagated online and in a book that vaccines and public health measures were part of a scheme orchestrated by a “transnational group of bad actors” with intentions ranging from sterilization to transforming children into drones and undermining the Constitution.

    The confusion between the identities between Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf got so bad that it practically became an internet meme. Naturally, it was disconcerting for Klein, who is known for her serious works like No Logo (1999) and The Shock Doctrine (2007), to be associated with a figure like Wolf. No Logo explores the impact of globalisation and corporate branding on culture, society and the economy. It delves into the rise of multinational corporations and the increasing dominance of branding in consumer culture. In the book, Klein argues that these corporations exploit cheap labour and tax regulations in developing countries, while also homogenising culture and undermining local economies. The Shock Doctrine explores the concept of disaster capitalism, a notion in which economic elites exploit crises to push policies that would not be accepted under normal circumstances. Those policies often involve privatisation, deregulation, and cuts in social services. This push benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

    Initially, Klein attempts to disregard “Other Naomi,” finding the humour in the mix-up and categorizing it as one of those things that are confined to the domain of the internet alone. However, she eventually becomes fixated on Wolf’s ascent in what she terms the “Mirror World” of conspiracy theories and right-wing paranoia. During the pandemic, Klein isolates herself from her family to closely follow Wolf’s discussions on Steve Bannon’s podcast. This transforms her analysis of her “doppelganger” into a meticulous exploration of online culture and political duplicity. Rather than giving in to the urge to dismiss Wolf and others in the Mirror World as strange people that should not be taken seriously, Klein undertakes a thorough investigation into their concerns and what makes them so appealing to some.

    By looking into what caused the transformation of her namesake and examining other instances of online paranoia that flourished during the pandemic, Klein traces what caused the gap between well-intentioned liberals and anti-vaxxers. She observes that we distinguished ourselves from one another, yet increasingly found similarities, even to the extent of deeming each other as non-persons.

    Her writing in this book remains clear and dynamic even though the subject matter is incredibly confusing and has so many layers. The book is therefore a nice easy read even though the contents could easily be confusing. It is a personal story which makes abstract issues in the political realm concerning conspiracy theorists and anti-vax movements into something tangible. Though Klein explains every step clearly, not expecting the reader to know everything about her, knowing something about who Klein is and the books she has written before adds an extra layer to the story.

    While Klein’s language may feel sensationalist sometimes, using terms like “Mirror World” and “doppelgangers”, it is exactly this use of words that makes the book so captivating and fun to read. By using the language of psychological thrillers, she brings her occasionally dense or theoretical content truly to life.

    The result of the whole ordeal is that Klein finds herself feeling less attached to who she is perceived as online. She finds it silly, looking back how serious she once took her online persona. In result, she now feels liberated from her public self. This book precisely documents a journey that is an example of so many of these stories that unfold in this day and age. Klein’s story is a testament to the last couple of years of our world. It tackles socio-political issues that have grown during the pandemic, mostly to do with polarisation, and it adds dimensions of social media and its effects on the public debate. Klein shares her story, in which we can all relate to certain aspects, and puts forward interesting observations and ideas that one can philosophise further about, academically and privately.

    References

    Klein, Naomi. 1999. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. London: Picador.

    Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt & Company.

    Klein, Naomi. 2023. Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. London: Penguin Books Limited.

  • An Interview with Herman Westerink on Hopes, Freud and Dreams

    Herman Westerink is Associate and Endowed Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University. A significant portion of his research is dedicated to Freudian psychoanalysis, alongside his studies in the philosophy of religion. Following his participation in a public lecture at Radboud Reflects, titled ‘What Are Dreams Made Of’, we decided to interview Herman and discuss a Freudian approach to own our theme, ‘Hopes and Dreams’. While the lecture was very informative, we had some remaining questions, especially since terms like ‘hope’ and ‘dream’ are often used interchangeably. Herman was happy to join us and further discuss these matters.

    Sophie: Thank you for joining us today. We’d like to ask you about your thoughts on dreaming, especially since the theme of this Splijtstof edition is ‘Hopes and Dreams’. Given your recent work, particularly with Radboud Reflects, we thought it would be interesting to explore the topic more.

    Herman: Excellent.

    Sophie: For the uninitiated, could you tell us a bit about the relationship between your work on Freudian psychoanalysis and dreams?

    Herman: Well, the ‘dream work’ of Freud is his most famous text, certainly among a larger audience. The Interpretation of Dreams is not necessarily in the centre of my research, but again and again, I am confronted with his dream analysis. Again and again, various texts refer to The Interpretation of Dreams, and to the dreams of patients, which are always very important in his clinical writings, as well.

    For Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams is not his only work on dreams; it is a topic that comes back again and again. Notably, the topic appears in his clinical writings, and sometimes also in his metapsychological writings, because dreams are supposed to give us an insight. That’s the first important thing to say about Freud’s interest in dreams: they tell us something about an aspect of our psychic life to which we normally have no access. To this, even dreams only grant us access to a certain extent, because there is also a kind of censorship mechanism. So, it’s also always in a filtered and indirect manner that dreams give us insight into unconscious mental processes, but nevertheless they do.

    Having said that, according to Freud, dreams also give us insight into the fundamental principles that organise psychic life. Since dreams give insight into unconscious processes, they also help us detect when certain mental principles are no longer at work, like consciousness or perception. For instance, this is the case in our ability to organise impressions into a spatial or temporal chronology. They function not only as an insight into certain principles that organise mental life, but also show what psychic life looks like when these when these principles are shut down, or partly shut down.

    Sophie: Do you think there’s much overlap between Freud’s perspective and your own? What do you think about dreams?

    Herman: I don’t have much opinion on dreams, but what intrigues me is the cultural, historical perspectives. Freud is part of that history. Generally, we in the Western world, although certainly not exclusively in the Western world, tend to attach a lot of meaning to dreams, whereas it’s not self-evident to do so. In the case of Freud, you could say dreams are a way to know more about ourselves than we would normally be able to detect or see. This is something that you find throughout Western history. I find that intriguing because it’s not self-evident that dreams have a meaning or a significant place in the way that we understand ourselves.

    Although, that’s just an observation. That’s not an opinion. I don’t know if Freud’s theories can be maintained. He argues that dreams are wish fulfilments – or attempts at wish fulfilment. There is current research, especially in neuroscience, from those who claim that Freud made a good point here. Though, I don’t know whether Freud’s arguments about dreams are absolutely plausible. It’s not my field, but as I said, I find it intriguing that he paid so much attention to dreams as being meaningful and providing self-knowledge, whereas one could also spontaneously argue dreams have no meaning – that it’s just chaos.

    Charlie: Since you mentioned wish fulfilment, I was thinking about how sometimes we use the word ‘dream’ as a synonym for a hope or a desire. I was wondering what Freud would make of this, and maybe also what you think about this yourself.

    Herman: Yeah, that’s the popular use of dreams, right? The American Dream, dreams about the future, et cetera. This use of ‘dreams’ could well be seen as a kind of popularised version of a Freudian take on dreams, right? There’s a lot of stuff in Freudian thought that has been popularised. The idea of dreams as wish fulfilment is among them. I’m not really sure whether ‘dreaming of the future’ in terms of what you hope or what you wish to happen can fully be reduced to Freudian thought. Although, I think that Freudian ideas have been very important for shaping this idea of dream as wish or hope for the future. It is indeed phrased like that today, as opposed to the classical idea that dreams can be messages from the gods that reveal what is going to happen in the future – that was a very antique idea. So, I think the idea of dreams, as wish fulfilment, or hope for the future, is a kind of popularised version of Freudian thought. I think Freud is part of that, at least.

    Charlie: That’s very interesting. I’ve never made a connection between the American Dream and Freudian thought.

    Herman: Well, the American dream, of course, also has other sources, right? It’s also the dream of the colonists to have their own country, to have their own land, et cetera, to make to make your life a success – ‘Manifest Destiny’. There are also other sources for that, but I think to phrase it in terms of dreams and dreams as wishes is a very Freudian idea popularised.

    Charlie: Yes, that’s interesting. For those of us who perhaps have less pleasant dreams, could Freud offer any words of comfort for us, or is his work likely to make us feel worse about our weirder, more uncomfortable dreams?

    Herman: Ah, yes, most dreams are uncomfortable. First of all, I would have to start by saying that Freud is very analytical, in honest and realistic depictions of dreams, and taking seriously what is communicated in dreams. If dreams are wish fulfilments, they are closely related to fantasies. That also means what you find in dreams, as I already mentioned, is somewhat – but not fully – censored. Repressed or unconscious thoughts show themselves in the form of very violent dreams. For example, you can kill people in your dreams, or you can get killed in your dreams. There is violence and absurdity in your dreams. There is also power in dreams: being able to do things that you would normally not be able to do, like flying. There are all kinds of bizarre things, but also some aspects of human life that we would normally rather not be confronted with, especially violence and anxiety.

    For Freud, nightmares are also wish fulfilments, but they are wish fulfilments in the sense that we react with fear to the consequences of what we are dreaming about. Waking up in a nightmare is usually at a point where something we do not find acceptable is going to happen. When the censorship breaks in, or when consciousness breaks in, you suddenly start to realise the implications of what you are about to dream, and this is where the dream ends. This is the point where the wish fulfilment shows its implications and then something in psychic life says, “this this is unacceptable, this cannot be!” Dreams are not just wish fulfilments in the sense that they show us pleasurable sides of our own fantasies and imaginations. Quite to the contrary, they can also show the violent or the anxious side of psychic life.

    There is also a special case to which Freud devotes some attention: the traumatic dreams of traumatised people. They may repeatedly dream about the traumatic events that they lived through. This is a really puzzling issue for Freud, because if dreams are wish fulfilments, even anxiety dreams to some extent, it is very difficult to explain why a traumatised people would return to their trauma in their dreams. That is counterintuitive for Freud. Therefore, he believed that there are some dreams that are ‘beyond’ wish fulfilments because they have something he calls ‘demonic character’. Dreams that bring us back to scenes of trauma are special case, but also shows, again, that dreams are not in any way related to pleasure.

    Sophie: Following that line of thinking, how satisfied would you be with the conclusion that our dreams don’t mean anything – none of them?

    Herman: I think that nobody would actually object to that. This is also something I said in Radboud Reflects: from the very start of our own cultural history of thinking about dreams, there has always been the idea that at least a part of our dreams is perhaps meaningless. Of course, in the antique world, that means there are dreams that don’t entail any messages about the future. Sometimes the gods are not speaking in dreams.

    Freud would probably say that some dreams are more significant than others, but there are no dreams that have no meaning. All dreams reveal something of unconscious and repressed material. In this sense, dreams are, per definition, informative about psychic life. Yet, some dreams are more significant than others.

    Sophie: What do you make of the dreams that come true? For instance, something bad might happen or things go wrong in an anxious dream and might really go wrong in practice.

    Herman: Apart from self-fulfilling prophecy? You could give an answer from the idea of a wish fulfilment. If you dream that something is going to go wrong, it’s probably because you wish, to some extent, that it goes wrong, and so why wouldn’t it go wrong? Maybe dreams can also reveal something of an unconscious self-sabotaging mechanism. They may at least show you that there is a conflicting voice to what you may consciously think. Freud would say that our psychic life is always in conflict. There’s always also another voice. There’s a counter-tendency – for instance, not succeeding in things you think you want to succeed in – and it is that kind of mechanism. A Freudian answer to your question is that there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in this case.

    I certainly don’t want to return to the idea that that dreams are really messages from ‘gods’ about what is going to happen unavoidably in the future. We can only prepare for what might happen. In the example that you mentioned, someone dreams of something that goes wrong, and it actually goes wrong. That indeed shows that they are probably self-sabotaging.

    Sophie: Would you say this further illustrates that some dreams may be considered more meaningful, or at least less random or chaotic, than others?

    Herman: Yes. I am now voicing a more or less Freudian take on dreams, but such cases are quite telling of our relation to what is going to happen. Our relation to persons or objects is never straightforward, but always ambiguous.

    Charlie: I was doing some homework for this interview and I found that Freud analysed his own dreams for his work. I was wondering if, in your opinion, we should be able to get away with this kind of practice in our own work. Could I cite something that I’ve dreamed as a source for my own dream analysis book or essay?

    Herman: I think this is a challenge. Strictly speaking, in psychoanalysis, it is not a good idea to analyse your own dreams. You could bring your dreams into analysis, vis-à-vis an analyst, but the idea of a self-interpretation of dreams is probably not the most fruitful form. At the same time, having said that, there’s a long history since Freud in psychoanalysis where analysts, and also patients, keep dream books. This is not only something in psychoanalysis: there are people who do that, who wake up and the first thing they do is make a note about what they have dreamt and keep it in a book. This can be seen as an ongoing diagnosis of their own mental states.

    There is a technical problem with doing self-analysis, which can easily take the form of a kind of self-deception. This is because I’m not sure whether we are the best interpreters of ourselves given the censorship I already mentioned. The other element in your question would be whether it is a good idea to do any form of self-analysis. Why would we be so obsessed with analysing ourselves? Self-analysis is also a way of self-problematisation, and why would we make our lives so much more difficult than necessary? This is a somewhat Foucauldian answer; he criticises psychoanalysis, notably for the obsession with analysing ourselves in Western history.

    But are we a problem? I don’t know. Should we be a problem for ourselves? Who says that we should be a problem for ourselves? This kind of argumentation that you find in Nietzsche and in Foucault can be used against psychoanalysis and against any form of treatment. Why would you make a problem out of yourself? Or consider yourself a problem? That’s actually part of the idea of self-analysis. There is something happening in myself that I want to gain control over, and what is beyond my control is de facto a problem.

    In the Radboud Reflects lecture, I already mentioned this in connection to the early Christian monks. They fought their dreams and thought the thoughts and images that appeared in dreams were fundamentally a problem. They thought their dreams were a problem, and self-analysis was a way to gain control over one’s inner life. That’s another way to answer your question.

    Charlie: Thank you. When I was re-watching the lecture, you were talking about how the contents of the dreams were worrying to the monks. I was wondering if you’ve ever had a dream about Freud when you’re in the midst of all of your writing!

    Herman: Did I ever have a dream about Freud? I must have, but I don’t remember anything. I’m not very good at remembering my dreams, and I don’t keep a dream book.

    Charlie: What do you think Freud would say about that? If you think you’ve dreamt about him, but you can’t remember, does that say anything about things going on with your psychic apparatus?

    Herman: It would be very strange if we would be able to remember our all our dreams. According to the Freudian argument that dreams reveal something of the unconscious, when you are asleep, the consciousness is more or less shut down. You would expect that in waking life, these things are again repressed, unconscious, and not accessible. In this sense, they are also not remembered for the large part. My colleague (and neuroscientist) from the Radboud Reflects lecture shows that you have a lot of dreams during the night – you don’t remember most of them. The participants in dream experiments need to immediately share what they have been dreaming about when they wake up, because otherwise the dreams are forgotten. Most dreams are normally forgotten, that’s not a strange thing.

    It is actually more or less abnormal when you remember very vividly what you have been dreaming. This is likely the case for the dreams that were really impressive somehow – disturbing or perhaps very pleasant. I don’t think that I’ve ever dreamt, for example, being in an analysis with Freud. That would be the ultimate Freudian dream – to be a patient on his sofa. And, as far as I know, I’ve never dreamt that I was the analyst and Freud was on the sofa – I’m sure about that.

    Charlie:     That must be reassuring to some extent.

    Sophie: Returning to the Radboud Reflects lecture, one thing we were curious to discuss is whether any new questions about dreams occurred to you throughout the process of preparing for the lecture and working with Sarah Schoch.

    Herman: No, not really. The lecture that I made was based on research that I had been doing in the past, which I already knew quite well. Instead, what I hadn’t realised before was that most dreams in the antique world were not about big, societal future events. For instance, when gods were believed to give messages in dreams, most dreams concerned medical issues. That was quite a new insight.

    Those dreams in the antique world still had a kind of prognostic quality in the sense that something was predicted to happen in the near future. Nevertheless, there was already something also of a diagnostic quality in these dreams because they were supposed to reveal something about psychic or somatic processes that were, as of yet, hidden and going to be a problem. This nuances the distinction between predictive dreams and more analytic dreams telling us about unconscious or hidden processes.

    Another thing I found interesting, in relation to Sarah’s talk, did not necessarily surprise me, but more or less confirmed something I had already expected. The team at Radboud Reflects discovered that there was not that big of a difference between our work. They tried to create an opposition between the neuroscientific work of Sarah and my talk, which focused mainly on Freud. They initially thought there must be a fundamental disagreement on the issue of dreams, but there isn’t. Neuroscientific research does not falsify Freud or, at least, not completely. Freud is important for thinking about dreams and putting dreams on the on the scientific agenda – I would say historically, that’s certainly true. However, they expected that the neuroscientific research would show a fundamentally different perspective on dreams and that Freud would be basically nonsense. Yet, that’s not true, there is no such fundamental disagreement. As I said, this is what I actually expected from the research, although they are completely different forms of science – if psychoanalysis is a science at all.

    Sophie: That’s certainly an interesting reflection. Given everything we’ve discussed today, I’d like to ask one final question for the readers of Splijtstof. Most of this interview has been about dreaming, but our edition is themed around ‘hopes’, too. Is there anything you’d like to share about ‘hopes’? Perhaps I’m returning to wish fulfilment with this question.

    Herman: Yes, this comes back to wish fulfilment. I don’t have specific hopes or wishes apart from very general ones that everybody would immediately agree with; these are open doors. I hope the next generation, such as you and younger people, will use all their efforts and all their creativity to find solutions to fundamental problems in our society and in our world. I’m thinking of the problems that my generation did not succeed in resolving and only made worse, such as climate change. That’s a very open-door and very general answer. I’m not very pleased with this answer, but maybe this is exactly what you wanted to hear.

    Sophie: I think that answer is a hope in itself.

    Herman: It’s always my hope that the next generation does better than the previous generation.

    Sophie: That’s a good hope to have.

    Herman: It’s a good hope to have, indeed.

    Sophie:     Thank you very much for joining us today. I’m sure Charlie and our readers would agree that this conversation has been very insightful.

    Charlie: Yes, thank you very much for your time.

    Herman: Thank you. It was a pleasure. If you have any afterthoughts or dreams about what is missing, you can always contact me.

    For further information, the Radboud Reflects lecture can be found on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/xQI9vU9PIrU?si=5V3SHc3EvMmhzP0j.

  • Whispers of Vanity: Unmasking the Hopes and Dreams in Wilde’s Classic

    Book Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

    “He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.”

    The Picture of Dorian Gray is an aesthetic book that is a treat for anyone who enjoys philosophy, literature, and the arts. The book goes into all of these in great detail, while providing the reader with some of the most intense internal conflicts in classic literature. It is a fascinating, absurd, and horrifying story about how a person’s individual interests and vanity can affect not only their life, but that of everyone around them. Oscar Wilde’s focus on beauty, ugliness, youth, old age, and all that comes in between makes this one of his most important pieces to date as well as an essential book to read; by putting all of the reader’s own desires, hopes and dreams in the spotlight, the book calls out our own morality and the importance that we attribute to the vainer things in life, while comparing it to the frivolous, majestic, bon-vivant and careless lifestyle of the careless, the vexed, the one and only: Dorian Gray.

    To understand how this wonderful book relates to the hopes and dreams that are attached to our mode of living, we must first and foremost know what the story is about. The story begins when the artist Basil Hallward presents Lord Henry, his close friend, to Dorian Gray, his most recent muse and fascination. Dorian Gray is captivating young man, known for his remarkable looks and charming way of being. This beauty not only captivates Basil Hallward, who decides to dedicate a large portion of his time to painting Gray, but also Lord Henry, a man of high society who is equally fascinated by Dorian’s youth and beauty. Lord Henry is a very philosophical man, always keen on presenting his interlocutors with debates and creating turmoil within every conversation he has, promoting in himself a sort of intellectual superiority for having access to the greatest books. But despite this interest in intellect, he is still a mere mortal and therefore also very focused on appearances. In fact, he influences Gray, on one of their first encounters, to realize that “when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything, [(…]) Youth is the only thing worth having” (Wilde 2012, 26).

    Upon this encounter, where the artist is painting the young man, Basil realizes that this is the best painting he had ever created, and therefore gives the piece to Dorian, his muse. Upon reflecting on the painting, Dorian realizes how truly beautiful and young he is, and wishes to never age himself, and let the man on the painting age and wither away. Locking the painting away, deciding to never see it again, Dorian moves on with his young, promising, desirable and beauty-filled life.

    Fast forward some time, with a formed friendship between Dorian Gray and Lord Henry, one filled with debate and conversations, Dorian falls in love with a beautiful, young actress with the name of Sybil Vane. Vane plays several different classical characters, all of which with such love, sincerity, beauty and earnest that Dorian proposes to her, on a whim. He soon finds out, however, that the person he was in love with is not the innocent Sybil, but the characters she plays. Hurting her to her core, he breaks off their engagement in a very blunt, coarse way.

    Once he returns home, in a fit of introspection, he decides to take another look at the mighty painting that Basil Hallward had painted. Upon this, he finds that the man on the canvas had become uglier than before, forcing him to realize how harshly he has treated the poor girl and attempts to repent. However, the next morning, on preparing to meet her and apologize, he hears that Sybil Vane has tragically died, assumedly taking her own life, due to the heartbreak. Sybil Vane, a girl whose personality was not half as vain as her name, was destroyed by a man who many could consider to be the vainest of them all.

    Indignant with all that had occurred, Dorian attempts to move on with his life when Lord Henry offers him a book, one which soon becomes Dorian’s Bible. The book follows the story of a Frenchman who lives life attending to his every whim and desire, seeking pleasure and new sensations above all else. For the next two decades, in a life full of sin, disgrace, shame, pleasure, bliss, luxury, thrill and immorality, Dorian travels to several places in order to live a life filled with new sensations, as Lord Henry and the book had advised him.

    He returns to his home in London once he is more prominently talked about within his circle. Although he is the object of gossip, people can never truly hate him because his beauty and youth are unmatched and purely supernatural. While his body rejoices and remains the same as 18 years ago, the picture locked away in the hidden room withers and turns as hideous as one can be.

    Eventually, his old friend Basil confronts Dorian on his new ways of life and is aghast when Dorian shows him the painting in his ugliest form, demonstrating Dorian’s true soul. Basil begs Dorian to repent for his sins and to find morality in an immoral life. In a sort of tantrum of agony, rage and frustration, Dorian stabs Basil to death, refusing to forgive him for having created such a horrible creature as the one in the painting.

    He then calls on another friend of his, a doctor, blackmailing him to help dispose of the body. Giving the doctor the time and space to take care of the body he had violently killed, Dorian goes to an opium den. Here, he enters a minor conflict with Sybil Vane’s older brother, James, who tries to avenge his sister’s death. Scared, for having killed a man and been threatened by another, Dorian Gray flees to his estate, where he expects peace and quiet. Dorian eventually finds James there, waiting and lurking on him, prepared for anything. However, in a hunting accident, before Dorian can do anything to protect himself, his own hunting party accidentally shoots James Vane. This finally provides safety for Dorian. While this happens, the doctor friend finds no way of coping with what he had done for Dorian and he, too, takes his own life, for what the bon-vivant had forced him to gruesomely do.

    Once Dorian Gray returns to his home, in a huge house filled with only him, his servants, and an obnoxiously painful reflection of his own life in a locked room. The room is his crime scene, the murder location of one of his closest, oldest friends. Dorian confronts himself, realizing all that he had done, counting all the people who had died because of him. Realizing all the blood that lies on his sinful hands, Dorian picks up the same knife he had used to kill Basil Hallward and tries to destroy the painting. Upon hearing a crash, his servants enter the forbidden room and find their master, with a knife in his heart, uglier than ever before, lying absurdly on the floor, putting an end to an unbearable, insufferable, despicable life.

    In a strangely horrifying way, Wilde has managed, in this short novella, to present us with an incredibly internally tortured man. This is a man who pays no attention to his consequences, who lives his own life searching for that which he and only he desires, without moral concerns, and freely and candidly attending to his own dreams and hopes to live a carefree life.

    The biggest message to obtain from The Picture of Dorian Gray seems to be quite cliché in a much more sophisticated, philosophical, and beautiful way; something which can essentially be summed down to “be careful what you wish for”. We learn that although each one of us has, indeed and rightly so, their own aspirations – which in this case was to do certifiably nothing – there are other things to consider in the life we lead. There are people who walk with us in our life, like the young innocent Sybil Vane, who are hurt by the words we speak. There are friends of ours, like Basil Hallward, that take an interest in us and genuinely care about our wellbeing. There are people like Dr. Campbell, who get unwillingly involved in our own messes and for some reason end up having to clean them up all while dealing with their own internal conflicts – and sometimes, like Dr. Campbell, they do not survive them.

    Of course, a short paragraph on the ongoing theme of beauty and ugliness is also worthy. It is significant to understand how beauty has always played such an important role in our societies. From 19th century society where word of mouth was the main way of communication to now, where we are constantly bombarded by information and pictures of beauty, we can acknowledge that Dorian Gray would never have survived in the 21st century. This is because he would never be able to properly hide the dreadful picture: the digital footprint in today’s day would never allow one to fully hide away a picture which unsettles one as much as the painting did for Dorian Gray. His constant efforts to hide a picture which, to him, symbolizes the deterioration of his own soul ends up corrupting him, for fear of how ugly he could become. In reality, he was already becoming an ugly creature by hiding it in the first place.

    At the end of the day, it is about the importance we give to people like Lord Henry, to the pretentiousness of living a grand, dreamy life, without a realistic vision of what life is actually like. There are certain dreams, hopes, and wishes that are better off in our own heads, because sometimes they catch up to us and, like they did Basil Hallward, eat us up, day by day, until there is nothing left.

    It is a magnificent piece that makes each of its readers carefully rethink their past actions, thinking about their own existence and what role they play in life. Are you a Basil Hallward, a Sybil Vane, a Lord Henry, a Dr. Campbell, or perhaps even, a Dorian Gray? If you fit in with the latter then I pray that you can recollect yourself, change your ways, read this novel, and let Wilde’s incredibly philosophical statements reinvent yourself, hopefully for the better.

    On his first encounter with Lord Henry, the tragic day, Dorian claimed that “when I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself” (Wilde 2012, 26) and indeed he did. Only, at that time, he probably did not yet know all the people, the hopes, and the dreams who would be killed along with him.

    Bibliography

    Wilde, Oscar. 2012. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Books.

  • Animal Citizenship in Gene Drive Ethics

    An Evaluative Application of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Citizenship Framework to Human Intervention and Management of Non-Humans in Gene Drive Engineering

    Introduction

    Increasing interest in methods of conserving non-human animals has emerged in light of the ever-growing Red List of Endangered Species. The Red List appraises each species on a series of standards in its scientific approach, ranging from population decrease within ten years to decreases in the size of their (local) population area (Hogeback 2023). This appraisal determines a statistical prediction of whether the species will become extinct within the next 20 years. As a result, the utilisation of genetic engineering techniques has gained significant attention due to their potential to address the challenges of conservation by tackling issues raising the number of predictions.

    As the Red List expands, new and innovative methods of genetic modification are explored by scientists, policymakers and ethicists. One of these methods is gene drive engineering. Characterised by their ability to alter the genetic makeup of species through biological inheritance, gene drives present a particularly interesting approach to conservation. While traditional methods of conservation rely on natural selection to spread desired genetic traits, gene drive mechanisms bias the inheritance process, ensuring that certain traits are passed onto offspring. Therefore, by targeting certain genetic traits, such as disease susceptibility and reproduction capability, gene drives offer the potential to significantly change conservation practices.

    However, the use of gene drive technology raises various ethical considerations that must be addressed carefully. Many of these considerations stem from a debate in animal rights theory on whether humans should intervene in the livelihoods of non-human species. In the case of gene drive engineering, this debate is especially relevant since the method affects the species directly, as opposed to the traditional conservation efforts that affect their surrounding environments. The method raises the question of whether non-human animals should be left alone or if humans owe them moral obligations to help actively keep more species off the Red List.

    It is also worthwhile to consider to which animal species, if any, humans owe moral obligations. This is especially the case for positive obligations, whereby humans actively intervene in efforts to help other species. Although traditional animal rights perspectives may advocate for preventing human intervention in wild animals’ livelihoods (Gamborg, Palmer, and Sandoe 2012), this approach can be considered unhelpful in gene drive discussions insofar as it provides no criteria constituting what makes an animal “wild”. Many species choose to live in close proximity to humans, benefitting from human communities while holding a status distinct from wild and domesticated animals. Since the obligations humans owe to them may differ, it is essential to explore a framework addressing the concerns that arise from the human management of non-humans.

    Furthermore, core political dimensions are at play in the ethical considerations of gene drive engineering. In investigating the relationship between climate and animal ethics, human interference and obligations to others, Donaldson and Kymlicka’s citizenship framework should be consulted. As influential authors in animal rights fields, they offer a reconceptualisation of citizenship theory that includes the role of non-human animals in political communities. Their citizenship framework can be applied to the case of human interference via gene drives, resulting in a reflection on its usefulness in navigating the method’s complexities given the urgency of the Red List’s expansion.

    This paper aims to examine the ethical dimensions of the prospective conservation method, focussing on insights from ethics, ecology and conservation biology. The examination will demonstrate these complex dimensions in terms of human interference and obligations to other species. It will first provide an overview of gene drive modification, analysing its capabilities and prospects. Following the analysis, the paper will explore the consequences gene drives can have on the target species alongside the ecosystems and communities in which they live. Next, Donaldson and Kymlicka’s extension of animal rights via citizenship theory will be consulted, reflecting on the moral obligations owed to different groups of non-human animals. Their conceptualisation of animal citizenship will then be used as a lens through which the themes of intercommunity interaction, agency and responsibility can be applied to gene drive inquiry. This exploration will lead to the conclusion that Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework provides a nuanced approach to intervention that is useful in navigating gene drive ethics insofar as humans have different, complex responsibilities to different kinds of animals.

    Exploring Gene Drives and Their Ethical Dimensions

    Due to the rapid expansion of the Red List of Endangered Species, biologists and ethicists alike have begun to consider modifying the gene sequences of species in order to conserve or increase endangered populations. A particularly intriguing variation of this research concerns gene drives, defined as “systems of biased inheritance in which the ability of a genetic element to pass from a parent to its offspring through sexual reproduction is enhanced” (National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine 2016, 15). Therefore, gene drive technology aims to spread a desired trait throughout a species’ population through reproduction, ranging from decreased disease susceptibility to the decreased reproduction of invasive species.

    The attractiveness of gene drives is found in their ability to offer new strategies for conservation when other methods are ineffective. For instance, a study conducted by Antoni Margalida outlines the use of supplementary feeding strategies in rearing bearded vulture chicks, a Red List species, in the Spanish Pyrenees. Despite his research demonstrating a widespread use of supplementary food provisions in the conservation of scavenger species (Margalida 2010, 673), the strategy was ineffective in increasing the success of rearing the chicks. Margalida concludes his research paper by considering the application of other conservation strategies whereby humans intervene in the procuring of necessary resources for the bearded vultures’ wellbeing. Nevertheless, the proposed functions of gene drive engineering could be beneficial in efforts to optimise the chicks’ survival. Since the technology promises to be “effective in reaching the entirety” of a target-specific population (Sandler 2019, 223), gene drives are considered a potentially groundbreaking conservation method.

    Furthermore, a feature unique to gene drive engineering is the use of modification technology (such as CRISPR) to actively copy a fabricated mutation from one individual’s chromosome to its partner chromosome (Caplan et al. 2015, 1422). This process means that almost all of a parent’s offspring will inherit the same mutation (desired trait). In contrast, other forms of genetic modification modify only one chromosome (Esvelt and Gemmell 2017, 3), resulting in a 50:50 chance of inheritance. Over generations, this continuous inheritance would significantly alter the population of a species, also impacting other species that rely on it for sustenance.

    Gene drives entail the biased inheritance of a selected genetic trait, meaning that its likelihood of passing from a parent to its offspring is optimal. In order to better understand the methods that could benefit the conservation of Red List species like the bearded vulture, an exploration of research conducted by The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine will prove useful. In a collaborative publication, researchers from the association explain that gene drives offer two key population control methods. The first of these methods is called population replacement, which refers to the “spread of a genetic element through a population that causes a population’s genotype to change” (The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine 2016, 16). Consequently, a species is “replaced” because its genetic makeup changes as new generations carry the desired mutation. This method could be applied to projects like the conservation of bearded vultures in the Spanish Pyrenees by optimising chicks’ digestive systems in attempts to decrease the (hatchling) mortality rate.

    On the other hand, the second method is called population suppression, referring to the “spread of a genetic element that causes the number of individuals in a population to decrease” (The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine 2016, 16). With this method, the biased trait inherited by a parent’s offspring may be maleness, for instance, resulting in decreased overall fertility of a population. Population suppression aims to decrease the population of invasive species in an effort to conserve local biodiversity. Therefore, the application of gene drive engineering to endangered and invasive species is a crucial development that proposes to effectively target an entire local population of a species.

    Nonetheless, a series of ethical questions arise in discussions surrounding the use of gene drive engineering. For decades, animal rights theorists have debated whether “wildlife policy” (Gamborg, Palmer, and Sandoe 2012), guidelines for human interference in non-human livelihoods, should leave non-domesticated animals alone. In particular, many traditional animal rights perspectives have argued that humans have no right or duty to manage non-domesticated animals. In this view, animals have shared capacities with humans, such as the ability to feel pain or self-sustain, implying their ownership of moral rights. Hence, they maintain that animals possess the (moral) right to live without human meddling, as seen in confinement, culling, and other forms of management.

    However, in debates concerning the extent of human interference in non-human livelihoods, “respect for nature” perspectives have also emerged (Gamborg, Palmer and Sandoe 2012). This view often advocates for human interference insofar as it protects the integrity of an ecosystem. It also maintains that species’ moral significance depends on “how far they promote or threaten the key environmental values at stake” (Gamborg, Palmer and Sandoe 2012). Thus, while traditional animal rights theorists argue that humans should not interfere with non-domesticated animals, other perspectives maintain that a species may be protected or culled depending on how it alters the perceived value of its ecosystem. Since the new gene drive technology places a focus on target species themselves instead of conditions affecting the species, it is important to consider the potential consequences of interacting with non-human communities.

    In their research report, Caplan et al. claim that manipulating non-human species’ genes could have detrimental effects, “not all of which concern only humans, but also other species and the environment” (Caplan et al. 2015, 1421). Consequently, the human interference and management of (non-domesticated) species have crucial implications for the ecosystems in which they live. Alongside the target species, gene drives have the potential to disrupt the livelihoods of many others due to the impact of population suppression on food webs, for instance. The research report also demonstrates that several academic centres and private biotechnology labs have started to investigate the reduction of some insect species’ lifespans and reproduction in efforts to prevent the spread of diseases they may carry to humans (Caplan et al. 2015, 1422). While humans may consider these insects pests, one must also consider the consequences of reducing their populations for species that rely on them as food sources. Therefore, although this approach to gene editing appears useful at first glance, one must consider its impact on communities other than humans.

    Another concern raised by these researchers regards oversight of the modification and release of genetically edited organisms. Specifically, they draw on the necessity of effectively monitoring organisms edited by gene drive technology. Claiming that the current framework for international regulations fails to “foster public trust in the safety” of the technology (Caplan et al. 2015, 1422), they are sceptical about the management of genetically modified organisms in the wild. Their concern further highlights the stakes of the debate on whether humans should interfere with non-human livelihoods, especially when the capabilities and usefulness of human management are questionable.

    Therefore, developments in gene drive research bring forth a host of ethical discussions surrounding human intervention and management of other species. Notably, one must question whether humans have responsibilities to maintain in their interactions with non-human communities, and if so, which framework could be applied in this case. While traditional animal rights theorists have long debated the extent of human involvement with non-domesticated species, gene drives entail the direct management of the target species instead of their surrounding environments. Due to this development, a more nuanced conceptual framework is needed.

    Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Citizenship Framework and Its Relevance to Gene Drives

    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis (2011) is considered a widely influential contemporary work in the domain of animal rights theory. Considering the intersection of moral obligations and the various ways non-human animals relate to human societies, they offer a political approach to animal ethics. In doing so, they reflect on “relationships of cooperation, of collective self-government and of histories of interaction and injustice” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2015). Their ideas are relevant to ethical discussions surrounding gene drives due to the complexity of interspecies relations at play. Nonetheless, before one can apply Donaldson and Kymlicka’s work to the ethical dilemmas of gene drive engineering, a broadened understanding of the connection between citizenship theory and animal ethics in their work is necessary.

    An important point of analysis concerns Donaldson and Kymlicka’s conceptualisation of citizenship. In Zoopolis (2011), they begin their discussion of animal rights and citizenship theory by distinguishing between universal (human) rights and citizenship rights. The former, universal rights, do not depend on an individual’s relationship to a particular political community (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 52). Consider an example of passengers disembarking from a plane to illustrate this concept. When the passengers leave the plane, everyone has certain foundational rights, such as the right not to be enslaved and the right not to be killed.

    Nonetheless, some passengers, such as tourists, are temporary visitors to the country. These passengers do not have an “unqualified right to enter the country” insofar as they may have needed permission to enter, and they may not have permission to settle permanently (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 51). Similarly, the destination country is not obligated to adapt their political institutions to accommodate the temporary visitors. On the other hand, citizenship rights are dependent on an individual’s relationship to a particular political community. Citizens are the passengers who disembark the aircraft with the unqualified right to enter and reside in the destination country. In this sense, once they enter, citizens are “full and equal members of the political community” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 51). This means that their concerns and opinions play an equal part in determining what is considered to be the public good. Thus, one always has universal rights regardless of their location and relationship to a particular political community. Nonetheless, one only has citizenship rights when they are situated within a political community in which they are a member.

    However, Donaldson and Kymlicka’s extension of animal rights via citizenship theory emphasises that the analogy of passengers disembarking the plane is an oversimplification of reality. While it paints a clear picture of what is meant by “universal rights” and “citizenship rights”, the authors imply that the rigid categories of citizen and non-citizen do not reflect reality. In a later publication, they expand on this notion, claiming that there are “various ‘in-between’ categories of people who are more than mere visitors but not (or not yet) citizens” (2015). For instance, immigrants may receive residence permits for long-term stays in a country. In this case, they have a different political standing from temporary visitors despite not having citizenship. Yet, they also have a different political standing from citizens. Nonetheless, despite categorisations of citizens, non-citizens, and those in between, an underlying principle within Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Zoopolis is that “universal human rights under-determines one’s legal rights and political status” (2015).

    Donaldson and Kymlicka apply their understanding of citizens, non-citizens, and those in between to animal rights. Like humans, they suggest that the moral standing of non-human animals under-determines the rights humans owe to them. Nevertheless, they maintain that the rights owed to animals “will vary with the types of relationships they have with human communities” (2015). Aiming to demonstrate that a framework of citizenship theory can be applied to animal rights, Donaldson and Kymlicka propose three descriptions of animals that will prove useful in distinguishing the characteristics of a citizen. The first description concerns animals who are fellow citizens of a (human) political community. The two authors explain that these animals have the right to reside in and return to the shared political community while also having the right to the inclusion of their interests in determining the public good (2011, 53). Animals that are fellow citizens tend to be domesticated animals due to the intimacy and proximity of their relations with humans.

    Next, Donaldson and Kymlicka describe animals who are citizens of their own separate communities, situated in their own bounded territories that are not shared with humans. In regard to these animals, the main obligation humans have towards them is “to comply with fair terms of intercommunity interaction” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 58), meaning that humans should not intervene in the framework of their community. Therefore, Donaldson and Kymlicka maintain that animals that are members of their own separate communities are generally considered wild animals, vulnerable to “human invasion and colonization” (Nurse and Ryland 2013, 203).

    Lastly, the third description concerns animals that are residents of the human political community without being full citizens. Donaldson and Kymlicka claim that the main obligation humans have towards them is “to respect their rights as side-constraints on how we pursue our public good” (2011, 53). These animals may be described as “liminal opportunist animals” (Nurse and Ryland 2013, 203) due to their choice to move in or out of areas of human habitation. Thus, Donaldson and Kymlicka provide three descriptions of animals that function as the basis on which non-humans can be included in the political framework of citizenship theory.

    Moreover, a significant feature considered to be a characteristic of citizenship in the theory is political agency. Donaldson and Kymlicka claim that if they “accepted that animals are incapable of domestic political agency, it would not follow that citizenship theory is irrelevant to thinking about their rights” (2011, 53). In this sense, political agency is not a criterion of citizenship; it is one of several features. However, they maintain that animals can be capable of political agency, reconceptualising the term as a “cluster of values” (2011, 53) such as autonomy, trust, authenticity and self-determination. In this regard, acknowledging someone’s citizenship means respecting these values.

    Donaldson and Kymlicka also endorse animal or human citizenship through a “‘dependent’, ‘assisted’ or ‘interdependent’ agency” (2011, 60). This form of agency offers an inclusive perspective on the values it entails. One may reflect on moments in which everybody is, at some point, in need of assisted agency. For example, young children need assisted agency to help them understand new phenomena and express their frustrations. This form of agency can range from the explanation of political debates to the expression of trust seen in puppy training classes. Consequently, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that a notion of citizenship should uphold the value of agency while also acknowledging that “capacities for agency expand and contract over time” (2011, 60). Hence, agency is not a rigid criterion of citizenship. Instead, it unravels through one’s interactions with others.

    Overall, Donaldson and Kymlicka’s application of citizenship theory to political animal rights provides an interesting foundation for exploring the ethical dimensions of gene drive engineering. Notably, their argumentation can serve as a framework for understanding the status of individuals in relation to a political community. In the context of gene drive engineering, the manipulation of non-human animals raises questions about the rights and ethical considerations owed to them. An especially relevant reflection includes Donaldson and Kymlicka’s three descriptions of animals: fellow citizens of a political community, citizens of their own separate communities, and those who may be residents of a political community without full citizenship. A fruitful discussion of this conceptualisation in the ethics of gene drive engineering can consider potential differences in obligations towards animals based on which of the three descriptions fits them best.

    Similarly, Donaldson and Kymlicka’s emphasis on the role of political agency is also relevant to ethical discussions about gene drives. Since they acknowledge that an animal may require a form of assisted agency, one may consider applying it to genetic modifications in cases such as reducing disease susceptibility. Alongside this, an evaluation of the ethical concerns surrounding gene drive engineering may consider the modification’s impact on an animal’s autonomy, trust, self-determination, etc. Since these are some of the values that constitute political agency, a discussion of how it may influence human intervention is relevant.

    Applying Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Citizenship Framework to Human Intervention via Gene Drives

    When applying Donaldson and Kymlicka’s citizenship framework to human intervention via gene drives, it is useful to consider the ethical implications of directly managing each of the three animal categories. Since they maintain that wild non-citizens, (non-human) citizens, and liminal residents without citizenship are owed different moral obligations, the degree of intervention permitted may differ. Therefore, their framework can help unravel whether managing non-humans in gene drive modification is too intrusive and, if not, when it may be an ethically viable option.

    Donaldson and Kymlicka suggest that wild animals neither want nor need an active relationship with humans, especially not the direct management of their livelihoods. As a result, they advocate for wild animal sovereignty, which means that wild animals are free of human management insofar as they meet their own social and sustenance needs. Nonetheless, the authors provide a more nuanced view than the traditional animal rights approaches arguing that humans should leave wild animals alone entirely. At the same time, their view is more considerate of animals’ universal rights than the “respect for nature” perspectives that endorse the management of non-humans based on their own ideas of an ecosystem’s worth (Gamborg, Palmer, and Sandoe 2012). Notably, the authors claim that the question one should ask is: “what are the appropriate sorts of relations between human and wild animal communities?” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 166). In this sense, they do not believe that there should not be any relationships between humans and wild animals at all. Yet, they also do not support an active relationship that manages and may ultimately affect their capabilities to self-sustain. Thus, Donaldson and Kymlicka provide an approach to human intervention that considers the intricacy of the balance between meddling and conservation.

    Additionally, they claim that although humans should be careful in justifying interference with non-human communities, “this does not mean that all conservation interventions are illegitimate” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 180). Consequently, their framework aspires to provide a conceptual lens through which humans recognise that they have no right to dominate animal territories while acknowledging that they may react to urgent circumstances, such as a species’ addition to the Red List. Therefore, one could apply this notion to gene drive modification by considering it a potential last resort. The nature of gene drives is more intrusive than other conservation methods as it affects the target animals directly. Despite this intrusiveness, the framework may be compatible with using population replacement gene drive modification in dire wild animal cases whereby other conservation strategies are either unsuccessful or do not achieve results fast enough. One could argue this is the case in Margalida’s study of rearing bearded vulture chicks (2010).

    Furthermore, within Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework, domesticated animals are the only non-humans considered fellow citizens to humans. Although they reflect on how domestication has been historically exploitative (2011, 88), domesticated animals have formed co-dependent interspecies relationships with humans that are compatible with co-citizenship. Their domestication has caused them to adapt to human society, which “closes off their alternatives” (Nurse and Ryland 2013, 203). Thus, in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework, their preferences should be considered in the determination of the public good. While non-human animals cannot vote in elections, for instance, their active presence in a community suggests that they have a moral status that deserves equal consideration to all other (human) citizens. As citizenship entails active participation in a political community, domesticated animals have responsibilities to humans, too, such as the responsibility (to be trained) not to bite them. This notion reflects the equal standing of domestic animals in a community.

    Therefore, following the conceptualisation of domesticated animals as citizens in (human) political communities, one must question whether gene drives could permissibly be used to optimise the genetic makeup of a fellow citizen. As Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that not all conservation methods are illegitimate, the same line of argumentation could be applied to one’s fellow citizens, regardless of species. Donaldson and Kymlicka hold that “new models of ‘dependent agency’ or ‘supported decision-making’” are required (2011, 59) when considering an animal’s best interests in topics like gene drive engineering. They refute outdated models such as paternalistic guardianship whereby a human will make decisions about an animal such as their pet. Instead, they advocate for updated models that seek ways of “eliciting a person’s sense of their subjective good, often through ‘embodied’ rather than verbal communication” (2011, 59).

    Similarly, human citizens also require assisted or dependent agency, such as when suffering from illness. In these situations, loved ones often make decisions on behalf of an individual, upholding Donaldson and Kymlicka’s values of agency, such as trust, which unravel in their relationships. A similar circumstance may occur for domesticated animals, such as genetically modifying dogs carrying the canine parvovirus – a genetic virus “quickly spread among dog populations all over the world with high morbidity” (Li et al. 2017). In this case, the nature of dogs’ subjective good within a political community is discovered through learning their temperaments in unravelling interspecies relations with them. Assisted agency could be applied, meaning that a human may choose to use population replacement gene drives, removing the parvovirus carrier gene to ensure the health of generations of dogs with whom they work and interact.

    However, while animal citizens of (human) political communities have responsibilities towards humans and vice versa, animals in their own external communities also have relationships with each other. Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that humans must “comply with fair terms of intercommunity interaction” (2011, 58). This principle should apply to both wild and liminal non-citizens, even when humans may not fully understand their intricate relationships with each other. Thus, one may argue that gene drives can potentially disrupt the frameworks of non-human communities, regardless of how their internal relations manifest. This is especially the case in population suppression gene drives since the decision to decrease a species’ local population threatens the target and all other species with which it interacts. In a risk assessment of gene drive engineering, research from the International Risk Governance Center demonstrates that the (re)introduction of a modified species can impact the health of other animal and plant species (Kuzma 2023, 55). Consequently, human interference in non-human livelihoods via gene drives does not comply with the intercommunity interaction terms established by Donaldson and Kymlicka. This is because the terms suggest that humans have no right to alter the structures and relationships between beings in communities where they are not members.

    The dilemma gene drives face in the terms of fair intercommunity interaction is also echoed in the research report of Caplan et al. (2015). Suppose humans are permitted to intervene in non-human communities using gene drives. In that case, their management capabilities must be adequate to avoid disrupting the constitution of ecosystems, at least to some extent. Nonetheless, the report demonstrates that many national and international regulations are insufficient in addressing the impact of genetically modifying organisms on other species within their ecosystems (Caplan et al. 2015, 1422). Consequently, one may argue that human regulatory bodies must strive to improve the effectiveness of their management before the application of gene drives to any non-citizen animals becomes compatible with Donaldson and Kymlicka’s citizenship framework. This conclusion is important because although the potential application of gene drives to domesticated animals may uphold mutual agency in cases such as canine parvovirus, almost all Red List species are non-domesticated (Hogeback 2023). Thus, their citizenship framework is useful because its applications can help identify additional work needed to ensure humans do not overstep the boundaries of fair intercommunity interaction in conservation.

    Meanwhile, discussions surrounding human intervention in liminal non-citizen livelihoods may be considered even more complex. Liminal animals hold a political status in between that of citizens and non-citizens since they depend on human communities to some extent, e.g., for food sources, but do not actively interact with humans. Consequently, this limited degree of dependence means humans must “respect their rights as side-constraints on how we pursue our public good” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 53). In considering the extent of intervention via gene drives, it is difficult to determine whether humans may modify liminal animals to optimise their health, as one may allow in the case of domesticated animals, or to treat gene drives as a potential last resort, as argued in the case of Red Listed wild animals. In addressing this dilemma, one may consult a response to other liminal animal dilemmas like predation, as seen in a journal article by Andrée-Anne Cormier and Mauro Rossi (2016).

    In their discussion of liminal animals, Cormier and Rossi demonstrate some assumptions made by Donaldson and Kymlicka in their framework. The first relevant to human intervention via gene drives is that liminal animals choose to avoid humans. The second assumption is that they would prefer the risks posed by other species and their environments to restrictions of liberty (Cormier and Rossi 2016, 731). In response to these assumptions, Cormier and Rossi claim that liminal animals’ aversion to human intervention loses moral weight when their fundamental, universal rights are at stake (2016, 732). As Donaldson and Kymlicka intend to include animals in the human citizenship framework, they should be treated in the same way as humans. In particular, Donaldson and Kymlicka liken liminal species to human denizens (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011; Cormier and Rossi 2016) – long-term residents settled within a state’s borders while not possessing citizenship. Yet, even for human denizen groups that opt out of political membership, the state may intervene in managing threats to their safety and livelihoods. In this sense, like wild animals, one may consider using gene drives as a last resort in conserving endangered liminal species.

    However, Cormier and Rossi’s article discusses predation, which entails a host of dilemmas concerning the risks some species pose to others. As a result, they identify the incompatibility of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework with interventions to prevent one non-human animal from harming another due to the notion that liminal (and wild) animals are capable of navigating observable risks in their own communities. This incompatibility is arguably reflected in applying their framework to population suppression gene drives since they include the reduction of populations considered invasive and posing risks to other species, human or otherwise. Nevertheless, it does not mean the citizenship framework is also incompatible with population replacement gene drives.

    As seen in their potential to optimise domesticated animal citizens’ health and to aid the conservation of non-citizen Red List species as a last resort, population replacement gene drives appear to fit into Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework. Since the method tackles often unobservable and genetic risks to animals that may not be instinctively detected in the way pigeons may evade cats, it is not plausible to rule out population replacement alongside population suppression. Thus, although the potential applications of population replacement should differ between citizens and non-citizens, Donaldson and Kymlicka offer a nuanced framework that helps navigate a discussion on the degrees of human intervention for animals with different political statuses in light of the expanding Red List and other risks to non-human health.

    Conclusion

    In conclusion, Donaldson and Kymlicka’s citizenship framework, applied to the ethical dimensions of human intervention via gene drive engineering, offers valuable insights into the intricate relationships between humans and animals. In analysing their framework, this paper explores the moral obligations owed to different categories of non-human animals and the ways in which these apply to the potential use of gene drives.

    Within Zoopolis (2011), the authors distinguish three categories of animals: fellow citizens, wild animal citizens of separate sovereign communities, and liminal residents. By analysing the rights and responsibilities associated with each category, one can develop a nuanced understanding of the extent to which human intervention via gene drives may be ethically permissible. While (population replacement) gene drives may be considered respectful of these rights when optimising domesticated animals’ health or as a last resort for conserving Red List species, the framework suggests that interventions should be carefully weighed against the autonomy of non-human animals.

    Furthermore, it is important to consider the concept of political agency within Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework and its relevance to gene drive ethics. By acknowledging that animals possess political agency, although different from human agency, one must recognise the importance of respecting their interests and subjective good in decision-making processes. This perspective demonstrates the need for inclusive models of decision-making that allow a reflection on the livelihoods of non-human animals affected by gene drive interventions that move beyond domination and paternal guardianship.

    Nonetheless, further complexities must be explored when applying this framework to gene drive technology, particularly concerning fair intercommunity interaction and the potential disruption of non-human communities. While gene drives offer conservation methods that can affect entire populations, they also pose significant risks to ecosystem integrity and the liberty of non-human species. Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework is useful in discussing these complexities because it acknowledges that there is no singular, fixed answer to questions surrounding human intervention. Therefore, the extent of this intervention must differ for different groups of animals, following the various degrees to which they interact with human communities.

    Meanwhile, the type of intervention is important, too. Gene drives may be considered more intrusive than other conservation strategies, as they affect the target species rather than its surrounding environment. Consequently, the citizenship framework is incompatible with population suppression gene drives. For Donaldson and Kymlicka, one must respect that (wild and liminal) animals are capable of navigating observable risks in their own communities. Alternatively, population replacement gene drives appear to be compatible with Donaldson and Kymlicka’s approach, given their potential to optimise domesticated animal citizens’ health and to aid the conservation of non-citizen Red List species as a last resort. Nonetheless, this compatibility requires that a more effective regulatory framework is developed to avoid as much disruption to ecosystems as possible.

    Overall, Donaldson and Kymlicka’s citizenship framework provides a useful conceptual lens for navigating the ethical complexities of human intervention with non-human species in gene drive engineering. By emphasising the importance of respecting the rights owed in various political communities, the framework encourages a nuanced approach in light of the expanding Red List and other risks to non-human health.

    Bibliography

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    Cormier, Andrée-Anne, and Mauro Rossi. 2016. “The Problem of Predation in Zoopolis”. Journal of Applied Philosophy 35, no. 4 (2016): 718-736. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12250.

    Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2015. “From Polis to Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights.” In Ethics in Canada: Ethical, Social and Political Perspectives, edited by Karen Wendling. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Esvelt, Kevin M., and Neil J. Gemmell. 2017. “Conservation demands safe gene drive.” PLoS Biology 15, no. 11 (November): e2003850. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2003850.

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    Kuzma, Jennifer. 2023. “Gene drives: Environmental impacts, sustainability, and governance.” In Ensuring the environmental sustainability of emerging technologies – 2, edited by M. V. Florin, 53-71. Lausanne: EFPL. https://doi.org/10.5075/epfl-irgc-298445.

    Li, Gairu, Senlin Ji, Xiaofeng Zhai, Yuxiang Zhang, Jie Liu, Mengyan Zhu, Jiyong Zhou, and Shuo Su. 2017. “Evolutionary and genetic analysis of the VP2 gene of canine parvovirus.” BMC Genomics 18, no. 534 (2017): PMCID: PMC5512735. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-017-3935-8.

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  • Longing for a Fantastical ‘Home’

    Self-Reflections on the Problematics for a Queer Tourist and Future Expat in Budapest

    “And when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it

    Another version of me, I was in it

    Oh, I wave goodbye to the end of beginning”

    (Djo 2022 “End of Beginning”)

    In early 2024, the song “End of Beginning” by the artist Djo, more commonly known as actor Joe Keery, started to trend on the social media platform TikTok. Suddenly, the song was everywhere. It refers to the singer’s lived experience in the city of Chicago, at a time before he was famous. He expresses his nostalgic feelings about being back in the city in which he experienced a significant change in his life. A trend was constructed around the song, in which creators posted videos or slideshows with photographs taken of a specific place that they had visited that they have a deep emotional connection with. At this location, they feel like they can be their authentic Self; they can express themselves and grow as individuals; they feel like they have the chance to realise their full potential. The location, often a city, then becomes the stage in which dreams become true, in which one can become a better person just by being there in this magical space. While this message is somewhat removed from the original intent of the song, this interpretation was unanimously accepted by its audience and creators on TikTok.

    In this essay, I would like to talk about my experiences with my own ‘Chicago’. A Chicago that feels like the place I am destined to be, in which I feel like I can grow to be the person I will like the most – my Best Self, so to speak – in which I can teach myself how to be free. A ‘Chicago’ that does not exist for a trans person, and even less so for a trans person in a homosexual relationship: my Chicago is Budapest, Hungary. Budapest has featured in various videos and slideshows shared on TikTok accompanied by Djo’s song, a trend to which I contributed by sharing personal photos that I took during a recent trip to Budapest. Unsurprisingly, all content of Budapest frequently features the architectural flagships of Budapest that are recognisable by a larger audience as part of Budapest’s regional attractions, framed in a way that underscores a romanticised emotional engagement with those sites. Through this, the city is presented as a space in which individual freedom of expression and movement is implied and encouraged. However, when one further investigates the socio-political discourses surrounding Budapest and the Hungarian nation, peeking behind the façade of romantic tourist engagement, an engagement with Budapest as one’s own ‘Chicago’ reveals a very contrasting view.

    The Fantasy

    I am not able to explain my fascination with all things Budapest. In my defence, the city is recognised as a city of fairytales, although it is not explicitly marketed as this. As László Puczkó, an economist specialising in Tourism and Logistics, attests: Budapest “embodies the past, the present and the future” of Hungary (Puczkó et al. 2008, 22). The capital embodies the things that are most emblematically Hungarian, signposting what is pertinent to the Hungarian national identity, and developing the building blocks that will shape Hungarian identity in the future. In contemporary times, Budapest stands out through its architectural diversity which contributed significantly to the central city area being taken aboard the UNESCO World Heritage List, with special attention given to the banks of the Danube river (which splits the city into Buda on one side, and Pest on the other), the Buda castle quarter and Andrássy Avenue. According to UNESCO, the area is “one of the world’s outstanding urban landscapes and illustrates the great periods in the history of the Hungarian capital” (UNESCO n.d.). Photographs of the city proliferate on social media platforms, in which romantic imaginations of Budapest flourish. Beautiful architectural sites, flagship attractions of Budapest, become the main points around which these romantic imaginations are anchored. The perhaps most pertinent is the Hungarian parliament building (Országház) located on the Pest side of the Danube river, which the late Queen singer Freddie Mercury jokingly expressed a desire to acquire. This building, the third-biggest parliament building in the world, is lauded as an architectural icon and is regarded as the country’s most famous building. Its mainly neo-Gothic style makes the complex appear to have just been transported out of a fairytale with its mesmerising grandeur: a shining white symmetrical facade with intricate details, stained glass windows, and crowned by a massive central dome. Other architectural sites such as the Fisherman’s Bastion, the St Matthias Church and the Chain Bridge (Szechenyi híd), amongst others, carry on this fairytale vibe. During nighttime hours, yet another visitor experience is offered when Budapest’s significant architectural landmarks are illuminated in bright orange and white lights (one exemption being the Freedom Bridge (Szabadság híd) which is illuminated in green light). The special architecture and its framing then contribute significantly to the atmosphere of the city. But beyond that, the city also gives rise to the imagination, specifically for a younger audience, with its raging nightlife. The infamous ruin bars in the city’s Jewish Quarter (Erzsébetváros) provide the stage for wild nighttime adventures in dilapidated buildings. Another intriguing aspect for visitors is provided by Budapest’s rich spa culture, and (which is generally very appreciated by tourists) the cheap prices for wine, beer and hearty meals.

    Since the fall of the Soviet Union, as with many of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Hungary had run into some issues with its marketing towards tourists. Besides the already existing architectural sites, much of what tourists generally appreciate about Budapest has been initiated since the post-socialist transition years (1989 onwards). To overcome negative stereotypes of ‘Easternness’, the promotion of a quintessentially European image was highly desirable (Smith and Puczkó 2010, 288), and for Budapest, this meant moving forward to establish a distinct city image. Currently, Budapest aims to attract tourists by moving towards developing a more cosmopolitan, tolerant and dynamic image by including the creative industries and contemporary culture, embodied in part by, for example, the annual Sziget Festival.

    Fantasy, Disrupted

    Despite the international marketing of the city, national politics take on a dominant role in shaping the city for a tourist audience. Scholars of tourism have often observed that the politics intrinsic to a destination seep into the marketing discourse aimed at tourists in some form or another; tourism has an inextricable connection to politics. This is highly evident from the generally positive effect of tourism on a country’s economic capital, and the funds allocated by governments towards the goal of attracting visitors to their country. The ruling ideologies in a destination country also play a part in tourism, or even shape tourism explicitly, where governments “introduce initiatives to manipulate tourism for political purposes” and tourists are indoctrinated with certain ideologies that promote the political goals of the destination to which they have travelled (Zuo et al. 2016, 177). In Hungary, tourism is governed by the state. The Hungarian Tourism Agency (HTA) is operating under the Ministry of National Development (OECD 2018), and is therefore intimately tied to contemporary political shifts and presences.

    In the case of Budapest, perhaps the most obvious tourist sight connected to current politics is the parliament building. A stage for Hungary’s political presence, the parliament houses the national assembly that is led by Viktor Orbán’s national-populist government. In their congregations, laws and legislations are introduced or changed, such as the 2021 anti-LGBT law. The parliament also provides the backbone for Orbán’s selective usage of Hungary’s past and heritage in the attempt to establish unity amongst Hungarian people, in a move to revitalise the country back to its ‘former glory’. In general, a dominant trend of altering historical and social memory through carefully constructed propaganda campaigns is completely inescapable in the case of Hungary, and with that, its capital Budapest. While there are many instances to be pointed out in this essay, I will present a select few here.

    A recent visit to Budapest by me, in March 2024, reveals political sentiments pervading the cityscape of Budapest more openly. Recently, the National Consultation has been completed, a survey that encourages Hungarian citizens to share their opinions on Hungarian government initiatives and political sentiments expressed by the European Union. On the 25th of January 2024, Hungarian government published some of the results to the questions of the latest National Consultation, entitled “Szuverenitásunk Védelméről” (trans. “The Protection of Our Sovereignty”), on Facebook, while simultaneously launching a billboard campaign presenting the results in Budapest. While the survey was answered by 1.5 million people, less than a quarter of the country’s 8 million voters, the billboards touted that upwards of 98% of the respondents are in agreement with the government’s position on multiple pertinent issues, such as supporting the stop of weapon transfers to the Ukraine, and opposing: ‘migrant ghettos’ in Hungary, ‘gender propaganda’, EU membership to the Ukraine and genetically-modified Ukrainian grain, and the support of Palestine, as it is seen as supporting terrorism (Inotai 2023, Dlhopolec et al. 2024). While the National Consultation is presented as a reliable source of the dominant political thoughts for all Hungarian citizens – which can be easily dismissed on account of the number of respondents – the billboard campaign nevertheless displays prominent anti-EU sentiments in public. These are seemingly taken for granted, as most of the banners are not showing obvious signs of intervention, e.g. by graffiti or other signs of disagreement with its messages.

    In another space, anti-Semitism has been a problem in Hungary as the country struggles to come to terms with its role in the Second World War. Two memorial sites, both of which are in close proximity of the parliament, contextualise historical events of the Hungarian past in the 20th century: the Shoes on the Danube River (by artist Can Togay, 2005) south of the parliament, and on the Freedom Square (Szabadság Tér), the “Memorial to the victims of the German occupation” (2014), constructed on Viktor Orbán’s orders. The shoes commemorate the victims of fascist Arrow Cross militiamen, as indicated by a plaque near the monument. In September 2014, multiple of the shoes were stolen. However, the Budapest police did not investigate the case, as no crime had been reported. Shortly before this, the 2014 memorial was erected on the Szabadság Tér, under the cover of night and against the wishes of a large majority of the public, just two days after Orbán’s re-election. His intention with the monument was to honour all victims of the German invasion. With that, his attempts to use history for his own political purposes become visible: the monument portrays Hungary as an innocent victim in the war, while completely dismissing its allyship with Nazi Germany. The monument has now become a permanent protest site and hosts a counter-display, against the “forgery of history” initiated by the Hungarian government. Despite the amount of anti-Semitic sentiments, Orbán has established friendly relations with the Israeli government and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu since 2005. In the current genocide against Palestine, Hungary openly supports Israel and has become the only European country banning all Palestine-related demonstrations since the Hamas attacks in October 2023 (Zsurzsán 2024).

    An Implicated Subject

    In spite of my knowledge of everything I outlined in the previous paragraph, I cannot help but feel like I will be at home in Budapest. I felt this way before I even visited the city, just by looking at pictures, and the feeling has intensified through three past visits. Even though I need to convincingly cross-dress when I go outside, at least I am not getting cat-called on the street, like I do in any other country that I am visiting as a tourist or that I am living in as a resident. One of my dreams is to study in Budapest for a semester abroad and learn the language fluently. I have the unshakeable feeling that I will have the chance to feel more at home than I currently do in the Netherlands. Nonetheless, reality, obviously, is not that dreamy. For one, being able to study in Budapest comes at the cost of having to dismiss my own identity and having to pretend to be something that I am not. Dreaming of a life in Budapest, even just for my own life, actively dismisses the existing socio-political tensions in Hungary. Additionally, sharing the positive image I have of Budapest on social media implies, at least to an extent, an agreement with Orbán’s LGBTQ-phobic, xenophobic, anti-democratic policies and sentiments that are openly expressed in the city, for example through the billboard campaign of the National Consultation. One could argue that if an individual like myself feels at home in a location like Budapest there is no inherent harm in that. However, the only group of people who have the privilege of not having to care about politics – because it does not impact them – are the ones who have been enabled by hierarchical structures to be in a dominant position and are actively benefitting from it. To this end, I would like to briefly argue alongside the American literature and memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg, specifically engaging with his category of the “implicated subject” and “implication”. What he calls attention to is the state of being “‘folded into’ events that at first seem beyond our agency as individual subjects” (2019, 1), and how implicated subjects “occupy positions aligned with power and privilege …; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes” (1). Implicated subjects do not take on either the role of the perpetrator or the victim, but their “actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions” (1) of these roles. While one can argue that I could be a potential victim of Hungary’s current politics, in proclaiming my love for Budapest, I see myself as contributing to the perpetuation of these politics. The position I am finding myself in is one produced and kept in place by its tensions: yes, I am in a vulnerable position by being in Budapest, and yet my own position is still one that is in power, as I currently do have the privilege to decide whether or not I want to live in Budapest. The only struggle that I have to fight in this space is having to decide whether I am content with temporarily having to disguise myself as a woman – because nothing Bad has happened to me yet. Other people do not have that privilege. 

    Conclusion

    To revert to the beginning of this essay, and Djo’s song “End of Beginning”, in sharing my personal ‘Chicago’, I am making myself complicit in sharing an image of Budapest that implies the possibility of free expression and freedom – an image that is clearly romanticised and removed from reality. Other people who are sharing their personal ‘Chicago’ to a larger audience, for example via TikTok, might be perpetuating similar messages. Audiences of this content consume not just the visual material shared by other people, but also their ways of emotionally engaging with specific destinations, which are often mediated through the framing of a romantic fantasy that lies at the centre of the ‘Chicago’ experience. They might then also be inspired to share their own ‘Chicago’. Personal engagements might, as shown here, also serve to overshadow socio-political tensions in specific contexts, establishing a location to be ‘safe’ and desirable to visit for all audiences, when reality actually looks very different.

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