People bristle at the prospect of inferiority, of being someone’s subordinate, of being at the bottom rung of a hierarchy; most say they want equality. But could it be that what such people would really prefer, instead of equality, is superiority? Is equality a compromise embraced only by those too weak to dominate?
Nietzsche seems to believe this, describing the egalitarian impulse as a “slave morality” in which physical and psychological weaknesses get reinterpreted as moral strengths: “The lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb,—is good, isn’t he?’ ”1 One finds similar thoughts expressed in the writings of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Foucault. If, as Foucault famously asserted, “Power is everywhere,”2 perhaps that means that true equality is nowhere. This cynical critique of equality also finds expression in Plato: in the Republic, Thrasymachus admires only “a person of great power [who] outdoes everyone else,”3 and his views receive further articulation from Glaucon, who describes the fundamental human motivation as “the desire to outdo others and get more and more. This is what anyone’s nature naturally pursues as good, but nature is forced by law into the perversion of treating fairness with respect.”4 Likewise Callicles insists that
the people who institute our laws are the weak and the many. So they institute laws and assign praise and blame with themselves and their own advantage in mind. As a way of frightening the more powerful among human beings, the ones who are capable of having a greater share, out of getting a greater share than they, they say that getting more than one’s share is “shameful” and “unjust,” and that doing what’s unjust is nothing but trying to get more than one’s share. I think they like getting an equal share, since they are inferior.5
Moralists insist that good people pursue equal recognition whereas bad people pursue power and superiority. One can see that this form of moralism was already operative in the ancient world, from the vehemence with which people like Callicles and Thrasymachus reject it, insisting that no self-respecting man would content himself with an equal share.
The moralist tells you to strive to be on par with everyone else, whereas the anti-moralist tells you to strive for elevated status. I want to first raise some reasons for thinking that neither bit of advice will suffice to make you happy, because what you really want is elevated status and equality. I will then explain how, once equality has been Socratized, you can have both.
When people meet for the first time, for example at parties, they try to impress each other. Each subtly brings to the others’ attention the sorts of facts that predictably elicit respect. It could be a job that someone wants to show off, or where they went to school, or their wealth, or their detailed knowledge of politics, or how well connected they are, or their ability to make insightful observations about some movie or book or foreign city that the pair discovered they have a common interest in. Attention to tone of voice, posture, facial expressions, hand gestures, and eye movements would reveal the ways in which each vies for the other’s recognition: human interactions are replete with status-seeking behavior. This kind of behavior might initially appear to be a way of angling to be placed above one’s interlocutor, but on closer examination, that common assumption isn’t right.
Notice, first, that conversational status games typically involve an expectation of symmetry: we anticipate that our interlocutor will seek the same sort of recognition from us that we are seeking from them—in fact, it is often offensive if they do not!—and we are just as inclined to dole out respect, provided the grounds exist for doing so, as to seek it. If the person presents themselves as a subordinate too lowly to deserve our respect, or as a superior too aloof to seek it, the game of recognizing one another’s importance becomes impossible. This shows that the people involved are usually not trying to dominate one another; rather, they are participating in a shared quest for shared superiority. They want their equal recognition of one another to be grounded in reasons for deserving that recognition; they are trying to get the “equality point” set high, to license the conclusion that both are in some way superior people.
Consider an example. In 1987 the philosopher A. J. Ayer was at a party where the boxer Mike Tyson was making aggressive sexual advances on the (then very young) fashion model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer stepped in to demand that Tyson stop, Tyson was outraged: “Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.” Ayer responded: “And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both preeminent in our field. I suggest we talk about this like rational men.” That is what happened, and in the meanwhile Campbell was able to slip away.6 Ayer’s response worked because it served to set the equality point between Tyson and Ayer high enough that Tyson could feel that he was being respected in a substantive way.
The equality we seek in such encounters is something positive; it is not something you get for free, and two people don’t get it by having been allotted equal amounts of money, or the same basic human rights, or by having started out their childhoods on the level playing field of equal opportunity. The reason we have to hunt for it is that it is not a default, but a conversational achievement, and this is why it can constitute the basis for interpersonal respect. A person wants to be recognized by someone whose recognition she, in turn, recognizes; she wants to be standing on the same plane as that person, and to have that plane be, in some way, elevated. “Elevated” does not mean elevated over the person she’s talking to; and “elevated” also does not necessarily mean “at the absolute top.”
It is striking how often the same people who angle for importance will, in those same conversations, sometimes seem to do the opposite. People who are meeting for the first time often performatively share feelings of stress, inadequacy, or weakness; express discontent with the powers that be; and identify shared sources of outrage, frustration or oppression. People bond by complaining about shared subordination or struggle, eager to have, as common knowledge between them, the fact that neither is in charge of as much about the world as they would like. By making clear that neither of us claims to be at the top—we both know what it’s like to struggle—we avoid positioning ourselves hierarchically in relation to one another, and we minimize the significance of whatever differences remain between us. (I like to imagine that Ayer and Tyson, in the conversation that followed, went on to bond over what it’s like to worry that there is nothing left to achieve in a field one has mastered.)
If we thought that conversational status-seeking always aimed at domination, we would be puzzled by how readily its participants gesture at how powerless or oppressed or overwhelmed they are. These self-lowering gestures can be reconciled with status-seeking if we see them both as part of the quest for an elevated equality: we are trying to be high up, and equal to one another.
How often do we stably secure the kind of equality we seek? The mutual recognition we arrive at by way of our quest for equality is fragile enough to be easily overturned by a word or gesture with the wrong symbolic associations. People are generally averse to deceiving one another, but if you look at where we are willing to bend the rules, it is surprising how frequently these exceptions involve maintaining the appearance of equality. Equality is a value in the service of which we are willing to lie. The defensive practices we use to guard the conversational equilibrium, which range from tactful nondisclosure to downright deception, suggest that what we are guarding is, at most, the appearance of equality.
We reflexively engage in a kind of interpersonal balancing: if I admit I am bad at something, then you have to say you’re also bad at something, or point out that I’m good at something else. We are anxious to even out the appearance of difference in abilities, in social standing, in success. We are especially vigilant in policing asymmetries of affection: if I want to be talking to you more than you want to be talking to me, that is something that it is rarely permissible to be explicit about. Differences in intelligence, attractiveness, and sense of humor are rarely acknowledged by the individuals themselves. For the most part, we make an effort to treat each other as though we were equal, and that often involves tactfully ignoring the ways in which we are not. Much of what gets called “social skill” involves inducing the feeling of equality in the face of all the facts that challenge this feeling.
Our quest for equality tends to end in something that is better described as the conceit of equality. It is possible, indeed probable given their career choices, that Ayer thought more highly of being a distinguished philosopher than he did of being a heavyweight champion, and that Tyson held the opposite view. It is fine for them to think this, and for each to confess as much to their respective (philosophical or pugilistic) associates, but it would certainly be awkward to mention to one another. These prohibitions are not only a feature of casual relationships. Even in a marriage, there might be facts to which neither party is eager to draw attention, such as which spouse has a more important job, is more appreciated by the children, more popular among their circle of friends, more responsible with money, or more sexually frustrated. Beyond our families, we have to actively police, guard, and maintain the feeling of equality across fraught fault lines of inequality such as gender, or race, or religion.
Living in a world of fragile and partly fabricated equality means living in constant fear of disrespecting others, and being disrespected ourselves. This fear might fade into the background much of the time, but it is always ready to surface; the temperature in the room is liable to increase. All of this is a sign that when it comes to equality, we are only just barely keeping it together. The equality arrived at in social contexts is not the real thing, but only an unstable placeholder.
Many an ambitious person learns that power, once achieved, does not always translate into the forms of respect they had anticipated. When you come to be in a position to treat others as subordinates, the respect you receive from them is only respect from subordinates. When they were your superiors, you hungered for their recognition, but you forget to factor in how much less that recognition would mean to you once you came to see them as your inferiors; and so, once one ambition is achieved, your sights naturally turn to the prospect of climbing even higher. The quest for equality drives the ambitious person to excess.
Likewise, the weak, mistreated, or unsuccessful might dream of a time when they secure enough power to lord it over their onetime oppressors, but that fantasy of domination won’t be fully satisfying in reality if what ultimately drives it is the desire for the kind of respect you can only get from equals.
George Orwell explores this point in an essay called “Revenge Is Sour,” where he describes a visit to a prisoner-of-war camp in southern Germany shortly after the Second World War. This is how Orwell reports his own reaction to watching a former SS officer being humiliated by a Jewish man who had been tasked with guarding him:
I wondered whether the Jew was getting any real kick out of this new-found power that he was exercising. I concluded that he wasn’t really enjoying it, and that he was merely—like a man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist traipsing round a picture gallery—telling himself that he was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days he was helpless.7
Orwell is not unsympathetic to the Jew; he observes that “very likely his whole family had been murdered,” and that “a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler regime.” Nonetheless, Orwell marvels at the fact that “the Nazi torturer of one’s imagination, the monstrous figure against whom one had struggled for so many years, [has] dwindled to this pitiful wretch,” the punishment of whom could only be pretended to count as satisfying. Pulling yourself up above the level of the person dominating you looks like an achievement only so long as they are above you.
Orwell also describes an incident after the death of Mussolini, when his corpse was on public display in Milan and an old woman was said to have fired five shots into it, one for each of her five sons. Orwell muses,
I wonder how much satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get close enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a corpse.8
The reason Orwell keeps raising this question of satisfaction is that he is tracking the question of what we really want. The oppressed person imagines that she will be satisfied once the tables are turned and she stands above her oppressor, but when that happens by way of the lowering of the oppressor—to the level of a pitiful wretch, or a corpse—then being above them is not the splendid thing it once appeared to be. It cannot furnish the “real enjoyment” of feeling genuinely respected or valuable. Shooting Mussolini’s corpse, kicking the imprisoned SS guard: these actions have a symbolic value. Their appeal is conditional on our being in a degraded or oppressed condition where we can’t easily get what we really want into view.
On the other hand, it can be quite hard to see how to bring about the thing we really do want—substantive equality—after it has been so flagrantly violated. It is by no means obvious how oppression can be undone. Being treated in ways that would have supported the conceit of equality, had the oppression not taken place, may not suffice for feeling substantively equal, once it has. (We might think here of debates over racial “color-blindness,” or how the Jew would have felt if the SS guard, now supposedly reformed, moved in next door.) Finding a way to balance at that equality point, and then stably rest there—that is difficult in the best of times, but once the relation has been thrown off balance it can seem impossible.
Inequality is much easier to understand than equality. When someone discriminates on the basis of race, or religion, or gender, they are saying that the equality point does not exist, that they are not going to recognize another person as being, substantively, their equal. One can find such inegalitarianism to be clearly, self-evidently, objectionable without having much of a sense of what it would look like if there were the kind of substantive equality between the parties that suffices for feeling valued and respected. When someone treats you with disrespect, you know that you are not getting what you want, but this doesn’t mean that you are in a position to say what it is you do want. We’re not sure how to put that equality point back where it belongs after we are discriminated against because we don’t actually know where it belongs. We never knew; what we had at the best of times was only the conceit of equality. This problem about egalitarianism is not new; it is ancient.
Let’s return to the Iliad. When we left things off in the previous chapter, the Greeks had refused to return Chryseis to her father Chryses, who then prayed to Apollo to unleash a plague on the Greeks. Apollo heeds his prayer, and when the Greeks find out the cause of their predicament, Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, and Achilles, his greatest warrior, disagree about what must be done. They agree that Agamemnon should give Chryseis back to Chryses, but Agamemnon thinks that he needs to be compensated for his loss by way of a different prize, whereas Achilles thinks Agamemnon should, just this once, forgo a prize. This disagreement creates the schism between the two men from which the entire action of the epic springs. Here are Agamemnon’s final words to Achilles:
And Agamemnon, lord of men, replied,
“Then off you go, if that is what you want!
I certainly will not be begging you
to stay at Troy for me. You see, I have
plenty of other helpers at my side,
ready to treat me with respect and honor—
including Zeus, the god of strategy!
I hate you more than any other leader,
any of those whom Zeus protects and loves.
You always relish war and fights and conflict.
You may be strong, but some god gave you that.
Go home! Take all your ships and your companions
and rule your Myrmidons. I do not care!
To me, you are entirely unimportant.
Your anger does not bother me at all.
But this I swear to you. Just as Apollo
will take Chryseis back, away from me,
when I send her to him on my own ship,
escorted by my very own companions,
so I shall take your beautiful Briseis,
your trophy. I myself will come and get her
in person from your tent, so you will see
how far superior I am to you,
and other men will shrink from talking back
to me, as if we were on equal terms.”9
When Agamemnon says that he does not see Achilles as his equal, that marks the end of the conversation. Achilles’ next move is to reach for his sword, and he’s ready to kill Agamemnon when Athena grabs his hair to stop him. Homer is drawing our attention to the most disrespectful things one person can say to another: I don’t seek to be honored by you, I take no account of you, I don’t care whether you are angry at me—which is to say, I don’t care whether you disagree with me about something important—and I do not see you as someone who can talk back to me, standing face-to-face with me and asserting the opposite of what I think.
The language of comparison and equality had surfaced earlier in their conversation, when Agamemnon demanded to be compensated for the loss of Chryseis with a trophy of equal value, by taking one from another of the Greek kings—Achilles, or Ajax, or Odysseus. Achilles objects to losing his prize, and complains that when it comes to prizes, “You always get a better one than mine,”10 in spite of doing more than his share of the killing.
The Greek leaders demand to be recognized by one another as peers—they are all kings, ruling over distinct regions in Greece—but they have to negotiate a tricky situation in which one of them, Agamemnon, has been put in charge of the others for the purpose of conducting this war against the Trojans. The specific situation between Achilles and Agamemnon is touchy in exactly the way that contemporary discourse that crosses certain fault lines (gender, race, religion) is touchy. The question of how they can achieve an egalitarian distribution of prizes is not a trivial one, because in addition to the desirability of the prize, there is the question of the signal that the distribution of prizes sends.
When we dole out equal amounts of something—equal portions of cake at a birthday party, equal numbers of votes, equal speaking time to each speaker, equal health care, equal government payments (as with a universal basic income), and so on—that gesture points beyond itself. It represents or reflects or symbolizes the existence of a form of equality that doesn’t have anything to do with cake or votes or health. We object to getting less cake or fewer votes or less money not only because we want as much of these things as possible, but because getting less than others makes us feel disrespected, as though we deserved less than them because we were worth less. If we were to learn that the unequal distribution was driven by features very specific to the context, we would not be offended. This is easy to see in the case of cake: if I see that there’s a good reason why I should get less cake than others on precisely this occasion—e.g., there isn’t enough cake for both children and adults—I won’t be offended. Of course, the more charged the situation, the more difficult it is to defuse the offense. Neither Achilles nor Agamemnon can see the issue of which of them goes prizeless as failing to point beyond itself, though each of them expects the other to do so. Agamemnon thinks he should be able to take Achilles’ prize without Achilles interpreting that as disrespect, and Achilles thinks Agamemnon should be able to remain prizeless without interpreting that as being disrespected.
They are struggling to find the equal point, and at the end Agamemnon just gives up, effectively telling him: You’re not my equal, Achilles. You don’t matter. You’re not a part of this discussion. I don’t need your recognition, I don’t need honor from you.
The apparatus of respect can take many forms. In the Iliad, it’s prizes, elsewhere it could take the form of honorifics, or titles, or saying vous instead of tu; it could also be reflected in seating arrangements, or dress codes, or gestures such as bowing and curtseying. Homer draws our attention to the connection between that signaling apparatus and the question of disagreement. What causes things to explode between Achilles and Agamemnon is Agamemnon’s insistence that Achilles is not allowed to speak to him as an equal, is not allowed to say that Agamemnon is in the wrong about something; that if Achilles does think Agamemnon is wrong, Agamemnon can ignore that.
Neither the status games by which we quest for equality nor what might be called the revenge games by which we try to reestablish it are fully successful at getting us what we were seeking. They don’t lead, in Orwell’s term, to satisfaction. Sticking it to one’s oppressor is as close as the oppressed can get to the concept of equality, but it turns out that it is not very close at all. Making sure no one gets more than anyone else is a good way to prevent complaints over inequality, but as far as substantive equality goes, such actions are at best symbolic placeholders. They stand in for the recognition we truly desire, which is a matter of being seen and valued for the distinctive value we have. Much of the apparatus of our practice of equality—the titles and gestures and modes of address—is likewise symbolic. What does the reality look like?
Real equality means you know that you are useful, important, and valuable to me not because I tell you those things, or send you signals to that effect, but because I am making active use of you, leaning on you, doing something I could not be doing without you. The practice of equality is where equality comes alive.
I believe that Adam Smith is trying to describe the practice of equality when he writes:
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. It is, perhaps, the instinct upon which is founded the faculty of speech, the characteristical faculty of human nature. No other animal possesses this faculty, and we cannot discover in any other animal any desire to lead and direct the conduct of its fellows. Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition, of real superiority, of leading and directing the judgments and conduct of other people.11
At first glance, one might be inclined to assimilate Smith to Nietzsche and Callicles, as yet another person who thinks that everyone desires to dominate. But I think it’s a mistake to equate what Smith describes in terms of leading and directing with domination. No one wants to be dominated, but Smith does not think that people are averse to being led. He goes on to say that if you knew nobody would ever believe you, you’d die of despair; he says that a liar “forfeits all title to that sort of credit from which alone he can derive any sort of ease, comfort, or satisfaction in the society of his equals.” What you want to do among your equals is, at least every once in a while, lead them; lying is bad because it forfeits your right to lead your equals. An unintentional falsehood is bad for the same reason, if not to the same degree: he says we are “mortified” by speaking falsely because it “diminishes our authority to persuade, and always brings some degree of suspicion upon our fitness to lead and direct.” We’re not horrified by having our minds directed by others; we’re horrified by being excluded from the circle of who gets to direct others. We want to believe we are fit to lead and direct, but we don’t need to do it all the time. Indeed, none of these practices would be a source of ease or comfort among one’s equals if everyone resisted being led because they themselves wanted to lead—because that would put us in perpetual conflict with one another. Unlike Hobbes, Smith very much does not see the basic human condition as that of a “war of all against all.”
One datum that Smith’s theory explains extraordinarily well is the otherwise puzzling human preference for speaking over listening. We use phrases like “getting to talk” by contrast with “having to listen.” We understand being granted a platform as a privilege, whereas being told that it is time for you to be quiet and let others talk is a bit of a put down. We impatiently suffer through what others have to say, eagerly awaiting our chance to talk. We speak of taking turns to talk, not taking turns to listen. We have social norms against interrupting, not against pausing.
It is such an evident fact of life that it’s a challenge to shut people up, and a challenge to get them to really listen to one another, that we don’t stop to reflect on how puzzling this is. Think about it: When I communicate something to you, on the face of it, who wins? I’m the one giving, and you’re the one getting. I already know what I’m going to tell you, and you’re the one who doesn’t know it yet. I get nothing, you get something. Communication, is, roughly speaking, how we find things out from one another; one might expect that domain to be filled with under-talking and over-listening. If two people are on opposites sides of a cake stand, and one of them is handing out cake and the other one is receiving cake, and it’s a yummy cake, which person do you want be? Wouldn’t it be weird if we saw people impatiently gobbling down their cake, trying to eat it as fast as possible, so as to arrive more quickly at their turn to hand out the cake? Are we supposed to conclude that the preference for speaking—which is often censured as egotistical and narcissistic—is actually a sign of some deep altruism in us? With most goods, we prefer to get them, rather than giving them. Why does it work the other way with cognitive goods?
Smith’s answer is: because when you give someone a cognitive good, what you get, in return, is a signal of your own worth. Their willingness to receive the products of your mind is a mark or a sign of your fitness to lead. I think he’s right.
Let me relate a true story. In middle school I had a best friend named Bella, and Bella had a younger sister, Heather. Like many middle school best friends, Bella and I were inseparable, so I was at her house all the time, and when I was there, Heather was always angling to be part of our duo: to join our games and projects, to participate in our conversations. As you’d expect, we mostly ignored, avoided, and excluded her: Bella and I were sophisticated sixth graders whereas Heather was a mere child, an ignorant fourth grader. One time, Bella and I were baking brownies at her house. We had taken the ingredients out of the cabinets, we had measured out the flour, and then we realized that the bag of sugar was almost empty—not enough left in it for brownies. We were annoyed and frustrated, ready to admit defeat, when Heather, underfoot as usual, pointed out that we could use the sugar in the small sugar bowl on the counter. I turned to her and said, “Heather, you’re a genius!” and what happened next—the way Heather responded to that—is seared in my memory in a way that very few experiences from my childhood are. She didn’t say anything in response, she was completely silent, but she gave me a look that I find hard to describe though I can still see it in my mind’s eye—it was a radiant look of pure, complete joy. I think that is the happiest I’ve ever made anyone.
There was just enough sugar left in the bowl for the recipe, so we went ahead with the brownies, and with uncharacteristic generosity, Bella and I even let Heather help us; and of course Heather was glad to be included in the baking, but mostly I think she was basking in the afterglow of the sugar bowl incident. That had been the moment when she was really included. She was listened to, and she directed our minds.
It might be hard to see how Agamemnon’s complaint about not receiving sufficient respect from Achilles was a complaint about inegalitarianism, but perhaps it becomes easier to see if we treat that episode as similar to the sugar bowl episode. In both cases, we have a quest for the recognition of being fit to direct the minds of others. Someone who is placed in charge of others, such as Agamemnon, precisely because they are tasked with continuously directing the minds of others, is unusually exposed to the prospect of being judged as unworthy of doing so.12 Precisely because rulers are in a position to compel obedience, they are highly attuned to the slightest signals of disrespect. This is why those who lead and rule can be so touchy about symbols and signals validating their claim on authority, and so insistent on forbidding even the slightest deviation from their method of directing others’ minds. If, as often happens, they end up oppressing and dominating their closest associates (not to mention many others), the result is a predictable perversion of the quest for equality.
Smith understands the fundamental principle of social life: Whether you are a king or a little sister, you are worth something only if you can direct the minds of others. But even if Smith is right, he’s not completely right. He hasn’t gotten to the bottom of the story. The reason that Heather cared so much about getting to direct our minds is that doing so meant something to her, which is to say, it signified something over and above the particular way in which she was useful to us. Had I responded merely by grabbing the sugar bowl and proceeding with the recipe, that wouldn’t have meant as much to her, even though she would have been able to see that she had directed our minds. What pleased her was that my mode of address explicitly acknowledged her. But every such acknowledgment is a symbolic gesture, one that points beyond itself to the practice of equality in some other arena.
If the reason I care about changing your mind is that your acknowledgment that I can do so is a sign of my worth to you; if the reason we are so happy to take turns talking is precisely that we are offering one another positive indications about what would happen in some other, target scenario; if what Achilles and Agamemnon each ask the other to forgo, given the exigent circumstances, are merely reassurances about that target scenario; if hot or contested issues are precisely ones charged with the tension of “whoever wins this one is really in charge in the target scenario”—then we still haven’t located equality when it is at home.
The power to change your mind bears a more intimate relation to the practice of equality than titles or prizes, but the relation is still not a direct one. In acknowledging, to you, that you can direct my mind, I am allowing you, however temporarily, to play the role of “teacher,” or “leader.” You are in charge; you are, for now, the knowledgeable one; I am your subordinate. But if you really were knowledgeable, you wouldn’t depend on my acknowledgment. There is something very strange in the practice of seeking, from someone, proofs that you do not need such proofs from them.
Suppose I am trying to persuade you, and I am only pleased if you end up persuaded—but not if you end up persuading me. This is a common enough scenario, and yet it reflects a bizarre mix of motivations.
If I am bent on persuasion, then I’m trying to (however temporarily) dominate you. I’m doing something which, were I to do it all the time, would leave me in a position where your respect was worth nothing to me. Orators characteristically hold their audiences in contempt—think back to Gorgias and his boasts—which means that they cannot get, from that audience, the validation they seek. Constantly chase superiors until I run out of them and hold everyone in contempt, and have nothing—this is not a coherent project.
How can I seek your respect sustainably, which is to say, in a way that doesn’t threaten to destroy your ability to give me what I want? How can I direct your mind in a manner that preserves your equality to me? How can I address an audience in such a way that it sustains them as people before whom I have a voice?
The answer is to stop seeking symbolic displays of how independent one is from the recognition of others, and accept dependence. The orator tries to convince himself, by means of the reverberating applause of the audience, that what he has is knowledge; the philosopher eschews this pretense in favor of actually trying to acquire the knowledge. If I need to be the one who does the persuading rather than the one who was persuaded, then I have something to prove. If I have nothing to prove, then I am no less pleased to be persuaded than to persuade.
Notice: If I am no less happy to be persuaded, I won’t use any rhetorical tricks to persuade you. I will only ever give you the arguments that would seem good to me as well. I don’t want you to be convinced on any other grounds than the grounds that convince me, and indeed I want to make it as easy as possible for you to unconvince me. Recall Socrates:
Though I’m only one person, I don’t agree with you. You don’t compel me; instead you produce many false witnesses against me and try to banish me from my property, the truth. For my part, if I don’t produce you as a single witness to agree with what I’m saying, then I suppose I’ve achieved nothing worth mentioning concerning the things we’ve been discussing. And I suppose you haven’t either, unless you disregard all these other people and bring me—though I’m only one person—to testify on your side.13
Socrates goes on to say:
I do know how to produce one witness to whatever I’m saying, and that’s the person I’m having a discussion with. The majority I disregard. And I do know how to call for a vote from one person, but I don’t even discuss things with the majority.14
Socrates describes the kind of “refutation” Polus seeks—refutation by majority—as being “worthless, as far as truth is concerned.”15
In these passages, Socrates is complaining—about not being treated with respect, about not being treated the way that he deserves, about not being treated in the way that he treats others. He thinks that Polus is being a bully. When Polus says that Socrates has been proven wrong without Socrates actually having come to believe that he was wrong, it’s akin to the bully threatening to beat you up unless you give them your lunch money, regardless of whether you think they should get that money. In both cases, we speak of someone as being forced to act in a certain way. Socrates is complaining, “The truth is my property!” in just the way you might tell the bully, “But that’s my lunch money!” The fact that the bully is bigger than you is irrelevant to the question of whose money it is; likewise, the fact that Polus can get a group to agree with him is irrelevant to the question that is to be adjudicated between Socrates and Polus. Socrates is standing up to this attempted use of force—“You don’t compel me!”—in just the way you might stand up to the bully. A bully is someone who dominates another person in a manner that is objectionably inegalitarian. Socrates is saying, “Don’t treat me that way, treat me as your equal.”
So what would it be for Polus to treat Socrates as his equal? It would be for Polus to recognize that Socrates has a claim on the truth. When Socrates describes the truth as his property, he is clearly not insisting that everything he currently believes is true, since that would amount to a claim to knowledge. Socrates means that he has a right to the truth, that it is his property in an aspirational sense. Just as the status of full citizenship—with all the rights that it entails—is the birthright of every baby born into a given nation, so too, the truth is Socrates’ birthright, in that he is destined to come into it. Respecting someone means that even when they say what you believe to be false, you regard their orientation toward the truth as sufficient to structure your interaction with them.
So: they disagree with you, which means you see them as other, as distinct from you, but you still recognize them as being oriented towards the truth, which means you can nonetheless interact with them as a mind. Putting those together, it follows that you see them as another mind. That is a real accomplishment. It’s easy to mock the Cartesian solipsist who stares out of his window and wonders whether the hats and cloaks moving outside could be concealing automata, but all of us overestimate the degree to which we’ve solved the problem of other minds. It is common to give lip service to a solution to that problem. For example, when we “agree to disagree,” it’s as though each of us is saying, “I’m sure there’s a mind in there somewhere.” Or, when we set our differences aside as being unimportant, we’re saying, “Deep down, we’re of one mind—mine.”
In contrast, actually recognizing the existence of another mind means, first, that the two of us are not of one mind, we’re not united in agreement but rather divided by disagreement; and, second, that disagreement doesn’t close the door to our engaging in a mental activity with one another, to our treating one another as minded creatures, creatures who have a claim on the truth; and, third, the most important condition, neither of us counts as “achieving anything worth mentioning concerning the things we are discussing” except with reference to the other. We’re in a closed system. Our interaction is structured only by our respective claims on the truth. To engage with a point of view that conflicts with your own, but to continue to engage with it as a point of view on the truth—that is what it is to recognize someone as your equal.
“Regarding someone’s claim on the truth as sufficient to structure your interaction with them” is my gloss on Socrates’ “calling for a vote from one person alone,” but neither phrase is entirely transparent. Let me describe what they refer to in more detail.
When viewed from the outside, a conversation is a world within the larger world we all inhabit. The conversation is embedded both in the longer narrative of the participant’s lives, and in the wider social environment that contains many other people besides the ones currently talking. There are a variety of ways in which that outer world can become salient during the conversation: You could think about how people might make fun of you if they heard what you said inside this conversation; or how they might misinterpret you, experience what you are saying as hurtful, and go on to decide they no longer want to associate with you. When Callicles says that Polus and Gorgias were restrained by shame from telling Socrates what they really thought,16 he is describing them as speaking with one eye on the audience of the world outside the world of the conversation. When people characterize their interlocutors as arguing “in bad faith,” or accuse them of having “ulterior motives” that govern how they argue or what they argue for, these criticisms are usually invoked in order to explain the critic’s own refusal to prioritize the inner world of the conversation: given your failure to argue “in good faith,” I cannot be expected to call for a vote from you alone. Another way to bring the outer world to bear on the conversation is that you could care about the causal upshot of creating conviction in your interlocutor, and all the harms that could be prevented if they were brought around to the truth. When we speak of certain kinds of ideas as “dangerous” or “scary” we are referring to the impact of those ideas on the world outside the world; inside the world of a conversation, the only danger any idea can present is falsity.
The proper home of equality and respect is not the outside but the inside: the world of the conversation. The rule that you haven’t achieved anything with your words unless the person you are talking to has come to understand your ideas on the same terms on which you understand them: that’s a rule for the world within the world. In the outer world, there are many possible things that your words could do or bring about. In the inner world, there is only one thing, because your interlocutor’s claim on the truth is sufficient to structure your interaction with them. Each of you is calling for a vote from one person alone. And it is quite a privilege to be that person; it is an honor to find oneself playing the part of the one and only being from whom a vote is called.
When you receive that honor, you start to realize that “the world within the world” is only how it looks to those standing outside of it; those on the inside understand it as “the world above the world.” The space of inquiry is elevated above everyday cares, above hunger and busyness and lust and the various drives that drive us toward bodily survival; and it is elevated above concerns about reputation and honor and status and all the allegiances you need to collect and preserve for the sake of your social survival. Inside the conversation, you are immune to the bodily command, and you are immune to the kinship command. When you are playing by the rules of the world where your vote is the only one that is called for, you get to see yourself as the sort of being about whom nothing is relevant but their claim on the truth. For the purposes of this conversation, you are no longer defined by bodily necessities, nor are you just a node in a social network. What defines you, within the conversation, is only your orientation toward the truth, which makes you: an intellectual thing, a mind.
When Heather was elated by my response to her, it was not only because I included her, and not only because I allowed her to direct my mind, but because the way I did those things—telling her that she is a genius—suggested that I saw her as a mind. Praise for intelligence or intellectual ability touches us so deeply because it speaks to our most fundamental wish: to be treated not as a physical thing, nor as a social thing, but as an intellectual thing. The ultimate form of respect is being seen in terms of one’s power to help others figure out how to live. At the end of chapter 5, we discussed the solipsistic illusion that thinking is something a person can do on her own. The complement to the danger of falsely seeing oneself as a mind is the joy of being seen, by another, as a mind, in the context in which that is truly what one is. There’s no higher form of respect an ignorant human being can hope for than to be treated as a mind, and the only way one can get such respect is from the person who inquires with you.
So this is my explanation for why the concept of equality has the peculiar structure that it has: we really do care about being on an equal footing with another person, and that concern really does drive us—both of us—on a quest to occupy a position of superiority. Neither of us is trying to be superior to the other, but we are both trying, together, to be superior, elevated. We are dissatisfied with the merely negative sense of equality where no one gets more than anyone else, or in which no one gets respected or mistreated. The equality we seek is not merely the absence of an evil but the presence of a good; we want to achieve some substantial form of recognition.
Ordinary conversation is a quest for an elevated sort of equality, and that kind of equality can in fact be really, truly, stably arrived at in the right sort of conversation. And now we can see that the sort of conversation I’ve specified—and whose details are the topic of part two (chapters 5–7)—is the same sort as the one that can be described as truly free, and as the mechanism by which questions of justice and injustice can be, not fought over, but adjudicated. Such a conversation is free precisely because it is detached from outer consequences, free to be guided by its own internal principle—namely, the pursuit of the truth.
Someone with knowledge can claim the truth as their property irrespective of how anyone else behaves toward them, but the same does not hold for an ignorant person. If the ignorant person speaks, what she says may not be true, even though she believes that it is. An ignorant person has at most an aspirational claim on the truth. She can speak with a view to the truth, so long as someone is bent on refuting her, and on constraining what she says in no other way. It is by way of this kind of recognition that she acquires the power to speak freely. Freedom of speech is simply the freedom to speak truly.
Socrates’ great insight was to notice that this freedom is not, under ordinary circumstances, available to us. More specifically, it is not available to us whenever we determine in advance that what we say must conform to what other people have said, or what they expect us to say, or what we should say in order to get them to like us, or what, if we said it, would send the right sorts of signals about respect and equality. Since those signals are meant to communicate something about how we would treat our interlocutor if we were in an actual, live, inquisitive disagreement, when we are in one of those disagreements we set aside signals in favor of actual respect: calling for a vote from a single person. This is a substantive kind of equality because it actually satisfies our deep intellectual need for one another: we practice equality by speaking with a view to knowing, which is to say, by inquiring together with one another. It is when you regard my claim on the truth as sufficient to structure our interaction that I have the freedom to speak.
Aristotle is the one who said man is a political animal, but it was Socrates who explained the distinctive need that drives human beings to engage with one another: we live together because we think together. Politics has an intellectual foundation.