Christopher Coker: Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Coker takes his title from Rousseau’s complaint about theories of ‘just war’ as philosophers have argued them. (“Barbarous philosopher! Come and read us your book on the field of battle.”) His self-described “big claim” is that, far from being barbarians, philosophers “invented” war, by which he doesn’t really mean they invented it but that they “discovered and clarified” its “nature,” distinguishing limited, rule-governed, purposeful conflict from “warfare” or the unlimited conflict of all against all, driven by passions. “A product of reason,” war aims at security, liberty, and justice. However, in line with au courant ‘postmodernism,’ he claims that for Aristotle and other Greeks “reason itself was in essence political.” That is, he denies the Socratic claim that philosophy consists of an ascent from the cave. “Plato was the product of his age. We cannot escape the times in which we live.” He takes his cue instead from the pragmatist Richard Rorty, who argues that “contexts provided by theories are tools for effecting change.” That is to say, reason doesn’t escape the cave, it builds the cave. Neither nature nor ‘History’ provides meaning to war. Everything is political.
Coker divides his book into nineteen chapters, the first three being introductory. The following sixteen chapters are organized in seven groups, in each of which he addresses a central question raised by a philosopher:
1. Why are war and peace so difficult to distinguish? (Heraclitus, chapters 4-7).
2. Why is war not the suspension of politics, but its continuation in a different form? (Aristotle, chapters 8-10).
3. Why are mercenaries, many of whom are often professional fighters, so distrusted? (Machiavelli, chapter 11).
4. Why is competitiveness positive, and competition not? (Hobbes, chapters 12-13).
5. Why should we do nothing in war that compromises peace? (Kant, chapters 14-15).
6. Why is the essence of military technology not ‘technological’? (Marx, chapters 16-18).
7. Why, despite the rules, is war still an art, not a science? (Heisenberg, chapter 19).
Coker does not limit himself to these philosophers, but ranges widely over the major figures of political-philosophic thought. His sweeping and paradoxical formulations—at times it’s rather as if the brightest English schoolboy in his form has been nipping at the bottle of Nietzsche his elders hid in the cupboard—will worry or annoy scholars who prefer more careful textual analyses. (For example, he tells us early on that Rousseau “believed that human beings were, by nature, sociable and peaceful.” Well, no: Rousseau believes that human beings are by nature peaceful because they are asocial.) Better to read his book exactly as his subtitle suggests: as a series of reflections or meditations on themes found in those texts.
Why are war and peace so difficult to distinguish? Heraclitus regards the cosmos itself as warlike, distinguishing its flux from sheer chaos, even as philosophers will come to distinguish war from warfare. Flux is constant, but it has a certain discernible order, not to be confused with Hegelian teleology and its ‘cunning of reason’ or immanent dialectical progress toward the ‘end of History.’ Thucydides is closer to the mark, teaching that war is “violent” but also a “teacher.” One thing it teaches is complexity; when a polis goes to war it may anticipate one outcome but it will very often get another. “What the Athenians learned about themselves from the disaster was their almost limitless capacity for self-deception”—or, at least, that’s what Thucydides tried to teach them. War also teaches tragedy, that even heroes have their flaws, issuing in fatal misjudgments leading to unmerited or disproportionate punishment. Both of these points being true, war also teaches that “the quest for security can result in even greater insecurity” or what writers today now call ‘imperial overstretch’—famously, the Athenians’ Sicilian expedition.
Coker supposes that Plato’s philosophic task was reformist: “to ensure that the social discord that the war had produced within Athens and that had led to Socrates’ death should never break out again.” This means that initially he takes Plato’s Socrates without irony; to Coker, the elaborate education Socrates lays out in the Republic is seriously intended to be implemented in Athens. He is right about one thing, that Socrates teaches “war is not the be-all and the end-all of life; it is not the highest good, or the highest human calling.” Philosophy is. But although he soon and rightly comes around to remarking that the ‘ideal’ regime Socrates describes is part of “a thought-experiment,” he doesn’t understand the dialogue as a defense of the philosophic life, objecting that “the role of reason” as a ruler cannot work because “human beings are not always principled, or consistent—they have an emotional life.” Indeed so: which is why the Athenians executed Socrates and then regretted it. But Coker, following Rorty, supposes that the democratic regime of Athens had nothing to do with the rule of passion. On the contrary, “it just so happens that democracies tend” to keep “the passions in check” and “different principle in balance” “better than most other political systems” because “they channel them in more creative ways.” This is to confuse Athenian democracy with Madisonian republicanism, a confusion Madison himself did not share.
Coker does better with the Ion, a shorter and simpler dialogue. In that dialogue, Socrates encounters a rhapsode, a memorizer and singer of poems, and argues that the Iliad had “locked the Greeks into” a “perpetual song,” seducing them into “fighting war by the wish to imitate the exploits of Achilles and Hector.” He rejects Ion’s claim to divine inspiration, a point that Coker makes but then blurs by claiming that Plato objects to artists because “they tend to refashion [reality] to suit the aesthetic demands of their own art.” ‘Aesthetic’ isn’t a Platonic term, however. It is squarely the claim to revelation poets make that Plato’s Socrates objects to; Plato’s dialogues are themselves works of art, so that can’t be the underlying problem. Coker goes on to make a pitch for art as evocative of “empathy,” a Rousseauian notion. This, I guess, is how Coker answers his first question, why war and peace are so hard to distinguish. With the right kind of war (there is no right kind of warfare) as depicted by the right kind of poetry or art, we can become empathetic, and therefore less inclined to warfare. He rejects philosophic dialectic as the way to do this because human beings are too emotional to be ruled by reason.
Why is war not the suspension of politics, but its continuation in a different form? Aristotle answers that “the only merit of war…is to yield a political result.” This is the purpose of statecraft, to establish reasonable or prudent measures to achieve political purposes. (While Coker denies the capacity of reason to achieve theoretical truths, in his pragmatism he proves friendlier to ‘practical reason,’ a sort of reasoning that can stay ‘inside’ the cave. He goes so far as to assert that “our humanity” itself consists “in the use of reason in action.”) “Strategy is the military realization of statecraft.” If it is not so understood, war will become a way of life unto itself, as it has with the Spartans. “But what does it profit a society to win a war if it goes on toe lose the peace that its victory secures?” He praises Tacitus and Clausewitz for continuing and elaborating Aristotle’s insight. This sets up a polemic against the United States, which (he alleges) yields itself to “an incipient desire to destroy what it cannot redeem.” Fortunately, “the American empire is aging fast,” although “there is life in it yet,” and therefore folly and danger, in which its allies (read Coker’s Britain) often make themselves complicit. He concludes his discussion of the relation of war to politics by very sensibly concurring with Augustine that “peace is never final” or perpetual on this earth, prior to the intervention of God, although the momentum of this thought leads him into a foolish account of the Americans’ regime change in Japan subsequent to victory in the Second World War.
Why are mercenaries so distrusted? Coker claims that Machiavelli takes his cue from Renaissance artists’ discovery of perspectivism, which “introduced the world to the metaphysical as well as artistic idea of the vanishing point beyond which the world ceases to exist, because it is beyond the reach of our senses.” Such a misunderstanding of perspective could only result from an underlying, radical cognitive subjectivism, however, and Machiavelli is no cognitive subjectivist. The world is very real, indeed; the point is to master it. Coker does get that, remarking Machiavelli’s encouragement of “unlimited” human ambition (an encouragement more than a little rhetorical, since it makes princes into disciples of the prince of princes, Machiavelli). He also claims that Machiavelli teaches that “it is human beings who give the world the form it possesses”: not exactly, but he does urge them to try to reform what they are given. Although he claims that for Machiavelli “human desire is infinite because it lacks a definite object,” he somehow elides Machiavelli and Plato, despite the theory of the ideas or forms, especially the idea of the good, all of which put limits on human desire. This gets him to an endorsement of Quentin Skinner’s misinterpretation of Machiavelli as a civic republican, no friend of princes at all, but this misinterpretation at least enables him to say why mercenaries are distrusted: They are not good civic republicans, and indeed pose a threat to republican regimes.
Why is competitiveness positive, and competition not? Here he comes to Hobbes. For reasons best known to himself, he makes Hobbes into a philosopher of “historical consciousness,” not a defender of a theory of natural rights. most urgently the right to life. Coker rejects Hobbes’s state-of-nature theory, the notion of nature as a condition of war and indeed (in Coker’s vocabulary) warfare, saying that such a condition isn’t perpetual, only sporadic, in “hunter-gatherer” societies. But Hobbes doesn’t need to claim that there are no periods of peace or rest in such societies, only that they enjoy no security from the threat of the outbreak of warfare. Coker’s real purpose here is to emphasize “the fact that we politicize war” (emphasis in original) in three ways: by lending it “social substitutability,” that is, by redirecting feuding among families to the larger stage of society, thereby diluting motives of personal vengeance; by organizing it, introducing division of labor, fixed walls and ramparts, and logistical planning to the practice of warfare, thus making it into war; and by reducing the percentage of the adult population killed in warfare. In modern times, death tolls rise usually when a regime converts war into something more like warfare, often using it as a cloak for genocide. Changing warfare into war by politicizing it has been a very good thing, and, Coker argues, the more broadly a given population is politicized (as in a democracy) the more limited wars will be. This leaves out a crucial element of the so-called democratic peace theory, namely, that it isn’t republicanism alone (or commerce alone, as capitalists like to say) that prevents war but commercial republicanism—and then only among commercial republics. This is Montesquieu’s argument, but Coker’s chapter on Montesquieu never quite gets to it.
Coker invokes Kant and Hegel to help him explain why we should do nothing in war that compromises peace. He finds Kant too rationalistic and the categorical imperative too absolute to be of much use in thinking about war. In doing so he loses the sense of war as “an ethical activity.” He does retain Kant’s insistence that “we should respect our enemies,” i.e., treat them as human beings, as ‘ends’ not as ‘means.’ “Once you externalize violence onto the ‘other,’ every tool and tactic becomes justified including torture.” Coker prefers Hegel, who keeps war and soldiering within ethical bounds, especially those associated with honor, “the immaterial things that define our humanity and which define our ground of freedom”—a thought he invests with considerable ontological freight in claiming that ‘History’ “mov[es] from the ‘realm of necessity’ into the realm of freedom'” precisely through this overcoming of material instinct, especially the fear of violent death central to Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy. Coker also endorses Hegel’s valorization of social cooperation via war; war “teach[es] us the contingency of life,” that “history does not come to an end when we die.” If so, then in war men learn to cooperate with one another, sacrifice themselves for one another and for the larger and higher entity, the State, which will survive after they do, and which itself will (even in its own mortality) contribute to the dialectical progress of ‘History.’ Finally, Coker writes that Hegel finds the meaning of human life in this “collective sacrifice”: “History becomes a mythical court of appeal which ante-dates all historicity and demands that every event should be understood as being in accord or not with a human destiny. Destiny is a cultural construction.” Coker thus attempts to make Hegel into a sort of post-modern; to do so he must ignore the Absolute Spirit, which unfolds rationally, according to the laws of (Hegelian) logic, and is no “cultural construction” although it does effect such construction.
Why is the essence of military technology not ‘technological’? Coker asks Marx, Heidegger, Engels, and Nietzsche. He finds Marx not quite up to the task, as Marx was “a better political economist than he was a philosopher” (a point disputed by those of us who maintain he was equally bad at being both). In this, Coker betrays his roots in British logical positivism, complaining that Marx “imported into philosophy quite unsubstantiated and unsustainable moral factors which told his readers what to aim for”; the distinction between rational, philosophic thinking (logic, ‘metaphysics’ generally) and supposedly emotional, sub-rational moral and political assertion comes to us from A. J. Ayer and his brethren. Nonetheless, “Marx’s genius was to recognize that it is in the nature of war we are what we build“; on these grounds, Marx is a genius insofar as he can be bent to the purposes of postmodernist constructivism. Accordingly, Heidegger is the real hero when it comes to distinguishing military technology from the merely ‘technological.’ The ‘technological’ is the merely instrumental, but the ‘essence’ of technology “is how it changes our relationship with the world as well as our relationship to ourselves.” “We are the technology we use”—a sobering thought for tappers on computer keyboards. Again, associating morality with emotion, Coker associates human purposes with use, with what we do, and with how we feel about what we do. Or, as Friedrich Engels claims, “we produce ourselves through labor.” This fits Nietzsche better than it does Engels, who was as much an aspiring scientist as anyone who ever put pen to paper. Nietzsche’s warrior “finds his humanity in war.” Military technology serves not commodious self-preservation of the body but self-sacrificing spiritedness extending, ultimately, beyond even the nation to “an imagined community larger than the nation—the human community,” to the liberation of the oppressed of that “community.” Speaking of imagination, it takes a lot of it to press Nietzsche into the service of the liberation of ‘the many,’ those long-eared, braying ones whom Nietzsche would see ruled by the “planetary aristocracy.”
And finally: Why, despite the rules, is war still an art, not a science? For this Coker turns to a scientist, Werner Heisenberg. “Whenever philosophers have claimed access to the truth (whenever they have attempted like Marx to turn philosophy into a science) the outcome has ended in disaster.” Heisenberg comes in handy, here, because for him science itself ends not in knowledge but in uncertainty: the Indeterminacy Principle. According to it, “there are no fixed things, no fully specifiable entities”; causes have no predictable effects, and this is especially true (beyond the realm of subatomic particles/waves) in war, which so easily turns to warfare. “The chance element is inherent in the nature of the quantum system” and does not arise “merely from our limited grasp of all the variables that affect the system.” In modern physics, “energy” is the equivalent of “fire” in Heraclitus. Philosophers have failed to see this because they never get out of the cave, remaining bound by “cultural bias,” time-boundedness, “personal idiosyncrasy,” and the warlikeness or polemicism of (Western) philosophy. Then again, postmodernist pragmatism may well be equally bound by the egalitarianism that the Nietzsche it abuses would have deplored, but I wax polemical and so shrink back, chastened by the dangers of playing with fire. I will venture so far as to suggest that particle/wave theory may not get us very far in understanding chemistry, biology, morality, politics, or indeed much of physics, which remains steadfastly Newtonian in its larger and more concrete manifestations.
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