Three Philosophical Moments That Speak to Us Today

Plato’s Cave, Descartes’ Evil Genius and Simone de Beauvoir on Woman-as-Other

Interviewing for my first teaching job at the December “job market” meetings of the American Philosophical Association:

Six young white guys sprawled on a bed in a hotel room (it was allowed in those days, along with receptions called “smokers”—at which we did smoke—and had lots of drunk sexual hookups.) They scrutinized me in my stiff back chair across the room: “Your dissertation is very interesting, but is it philosophy??” I heard that a lot in those days. Then, after I’d started to publish, readers were really confused. Anthropology? Psychology? Sociology? Communications? There was no “cultural studies” or even “interdisciplinary” programs in those days, and certainly no gender studies departments. Even my father and mother weren’t sure what I was “in.” The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which elected me to membership last year, has me listed under “Literature and Literary Criticism.” It’s as accurate as any other category, I guess.

But my PhD is indeed in Philosophy, and—more than that—it’s kind of in my intellectual DNA. And today I’m going to indulge it, because some of the most basic philosophical metaphors and images speak so acutely—with a little tweaking—to our current troubles.

Plato’s Cave

In The Republic Plato presents a parable well known to students in introductory philosophy classes. He asks us to imagine our usual condition as knowers as comparable to life in a dark cave, where we have been confined since childhood, cut oft from the world outside. In that cave we are chained by the leg and neck in such a way that we are unable to see in any position but straight ahead, at a wall in front of us, on which is projected a procession of shadow figures cast by artificial puppets manipulated by hidden puppeteers. In such a condition, Plato asks us, would not these shadow images, these illusions, seem to be "reality" to us? They would be the only world we knew; we would not even be aware that they were artificially created by other human beings. If suddenly forced outside the cave, we would surely be confused and even scornful of anyone who tried to tell us that this, not the cave, was the real world, that we had been living inside an illusion, deceived into believing that artificial images were the real thing.

At this point, we need to do some tweaking. Plato, like many philosophers, worshipped the power of mind (reason, rationality, thinking, however you want to imagine it) to transcend the illusions of everyday experience, which relies so much on the senses. We think we see a black cat creeping cross the room; it turns out to be a shadow cast by clouds moving across the sun. Asleep, we imagine we are swimming in the ocean; we wake, and it turns out our body is drenched from a fever. And so on. The cave is a metaphor for our confinement in the sense-dominated world of our bodies, and we remain in the dark, chained to illusions, so long as we mistake what we see, hear, taste, feel-for the Reality of enduring ideas, which can only be "seen" with the mind's eye.

This is where lots of philosophy teachers notice that their students are starting to glaze over and decide to major in something else. But I was never a big believer in the disembodied reason ideal. (Why then did I go into philosophy, you ask? That story is for another stack.) And I was always trying to find ways to connect with my students. So I had them imagine Plato’s puppets as magazine ads (no internet in those days) designed to lure us into believing in products and services that can make us happy. And because I was at the time writing about images of the body, I asked them to bring in illustrations that featured those. They immediately got the idea that we could be seduced and frequently are—into imagining that an air-brushed artifice—is the “real thing.”

The point was even easier to make once computer-enhanced technology replaced old-fashioned air-brushing:

But in this vastly mediated culture, why stop with altered photography? In broadening the scope of our cave, I found Daniel Boorstin’s prescient concept of the “pseudo-event” useful. What is a pseudo-event? A pseudo-event is reality configured and packaged for the viewer into an image or narrative which is “more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.” And with enough amplification and repetition, it can virtually replace reality for the viewer or reader.

In 1960, Boorstin seemed alarmist. But by the time I taught my “TV Culture” course, the pseudo-event had become the coin of the realm. When computerized images first began to replace air-brushing we were shocked to learn how much digital alteration was seeping into the creation of magazine imagery. By 2009, Adobe photoshop had begun to market its digital software with the incitement to “Spread Lies” (remove those wrinkles, love handles, dog drool) in your photos. And today, 12-year-olds post glamour-shots on Instagram as artfully retouched and transforming as the covers of Vogue.

In 1960, we got our news from Walter Cronkite, who was on for 20 minutes a night, and focusing on unsubstantiated rumor was a luxury news television couldn’t afford. Today, whole stations are devoted to news broadcasting and the need to fill up time and keep audiences tuned in and ratings high has elevated speculation, potential “scandal,” competition (e.g. among presidential candidates, and the more neck-and-neck the better) to the status of “breaking news” that gets repeated and amplified—and often distorted, like a bit of high-school gossip making the rounds—until it’s difficult to discern what’s hype and what’s reality. And it’s not just Fox (although Fox is a master at it, and lacks the scruples of CNN and MSNBC). In 2024 the pseudo-event rules the air-waves, as leaks, poll results, gaffes, and blunders are immediately turned into high-voltage headlines and endlessly repeated, organizing people’s perceptions into yet-to-be-analyzed “narratives” of dubious factual status.

To give my students a sense of how much has changed, one of the films I began my “TV Culture” course with was James Brooks’ 1987 Film Broadcast News. I happen to love this film—it’s one of my favorites—but I used it in this particular course for illustrative purposes.

The film poses an ethical dilemma. Attractive, good-natured, and morally flexible anchorman Tom (William Hurt), filming an interview with a survivor of date rape, tears up as she tells her story. The entire crew realizes it’s a powerful moment; the problem is, the interview was shot with only one camera, and when Tom’s eyes filled with tears, the camera was pointed at the woman telling her story. After a moment of disappointment, Tom comes up with a solution: He can bring himself to tears again and they can film it this time.

Nothing wrong with that, right? It’s not as though his reaction was a fiction. “After all, I did it the first time,” Tom reassures the crew. But old-school journalist Jane (Holly Hunter), when she finds out, doesn’t see it that way. In fact, she’s outraged, calls his action “god-damn awful,” and  breaks up with Tom over his breach with broadcast ethics. In faking tears—even though it replicated what actually had happened—“You crossed the line,” she tells Tom.

Tom’s reply is probably the most trenchant point in the movie: “The line? They keep moving the little sucker all the time.”

My students, as if proving Tom’s point, found Jane’s actions ridiculous. Here was this handsome hunk, offering a trip to Hawaii during which they could have fun sex, drink tropical drinks, and argue the respective merits of their positions, and Jane was turning him down? Over faking some tears? What was the big deal?

We had this discussion in 2005. And I have to say, I personally would have gone on that trip with Tom. But my students wouldn’t even have argued with him. By then, the idea that Tom’s actions were morally questionable was a quaint—and quite boring—relic to them. They had just watched a clip of Anderson Cooper, wandering through the rubble of Hurricane Katrina, picking through people’s scattered belongings. We see his anguish mount as he picks up personal items and children’s toys. He begins to choke up. He gestures to the cameraman to stop shooting. It’s a version of the Tom moment, and none of my students found anything “wrong” with it. At first, they couldn’t even see the comparison. True, Cooper isn’t faking emotion. But the segment is taped, not live. If Cooper really wanted the eye of the camera to back off, I asked my students, why didn’t he just edit the moment out? The answer is obvious: Anderson’s distress made the story more “human,” more moving, more compelling television. (And showed off Cooper’s modesty and “integrity” as well.)

The increasing dominance of the pseudo-event has changed our relationship to the facts of history, too. A watershed moment was Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie account of the JFK assassination and Watergate scandal. It was such an inseparable stew of fact and fantasy—all meshed together through the verisimilitude of film—that students in U.S. History courses enrolled entirely befuddled about the most basic elements of “what happened. ”

Increasingly, image and narrative work hand-in-hand in creating this confusion. As the technology of image-making has become more and more sophisticated, historical dramas look more and more like documentaries, as careful attention to the details of historical “accessories” has made revisionist cinematic history much more seductive and powerful. 

After spending years of research into the life and death of Anne Boleyn, I became especially aware of this confounding, as my students argued with me about history on the basis of their viewing of the movie of “The Other Boleyn Girl.” Their arguments were supported both in postmodern terms—for example, by actress Natalie Portman, who played Anne and who said in an interview that “you have to accept that all history is fiction”—and by those who simply accepted Philippa Gregory’s version as the accurate one. “Well done and beautifully produced” read one headline; “satisfactorily explains the incest charge against Anne Boleyn.”  Well, actually, no, there’s no evidence at all that Anne begged her brother to have sex with her to conceive a child—or that Henry raped Anne—or that she “stole” Henry from her tender-hearted sister (let alone had.a child with her.) But the gardens around the castles look so real, and Natalie Portman curtsies with such historical accuracy!—how can a teacher challenge all that vibrantly simulated reality with boring old documents written in an English that tries the patience of a twitter-educated reader.

By the presidential election of 2016, facts had become increasingly irrelevant in our culture, replaced by “narrative” and “optics” as the subjects of political reporting. The blurred lines between information and entertainment, celebrity and expertise; digital technologies of image-making that have normalized the “perfected” over the real; the popularity of narrative fictions (journalistic, novelistic and televisual) that privilege the sensational and scandalous over the verified/historically recorded; a political arena in which lies have become the norm, and journalists see “equivalencies” in covering candidates as more important than investigation and truth-seeking.

This is our cave.

The one out of which our first pseudo-president crawled and convinced millions of people that pretending to be a fabulously successful businessman on a “reality” tv show made him qualified to run a nation.

Descartes’ Hyperbolic Doubt

The thing that bothered those philosophers who questioned whether my dissertation qualified as “philosophy” wasn’t its feminism. It was the fact that I took Descartes famous doubt seriously as an expression of the epistemological insecurity of his times rather than a strictly methodological move. In those days (it’s changed now), doing the history of philosophy was following a conversation among talking heads. The art, literature, commerce, geographical exploration, and changing understanding of the self in relation to the world and other people was for the other disciplines. Philosophy was a series of arguments (about Truth, Reason, God, etc.) conducted between philosophers and only between philosophers, criticizing each other, modifying each other, refuting each other, etc. without any interest in differences in their historical (or any other “material”) circumstances.

Analyzing ideas floating in space didn’t interest me. What did interest me was why ideas emerged, grabbed hold (or didn’t), became dominant when and how they did. And that required exploring the cultural context of a philosophical text, not just the maneuvers of the text itself. That was how I approached Descartes’ Meditations, and it’s why those boys on the bed wondered whether I was a “real” philosopher or not. (They ultimately decided I wasn’t and gave the job to someone else.)

If you were in the usual 17th century philosophy course in those days, you’d go through the stages of Descartes’ doubt—first (like Plato) over the untrustworthiness of the senses, then the illusions of dreams, and finally, the possibility that an evil genius rather than a benevolent God had deceived him into believing that everything and anything he believed to be true was in fact a kind of scam. You approached all of it purely as a thought-experiment aimed at wiping the mind’s slate clean of everything about which there can be the least doubt.

I shall then suppose, not that God who is supremely good and the fountain of truth, but some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me; I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity ...

The supposition may be a thought-experiment, but it’s powerful enough to shake Descartes up so much that he begins to fear that his “natural attitude" of naive acceptance of his beliefs is a dream from which he “fears to awaken," and which requires a conspiracy with "illusion" to maintain. And throughout the Meditations I was struck (it was probably the first indication I was in the wrong field) by the vivid, “literary” way Descartes expressed the chaos of the radically questioning state into which he’d plunged himself. His uncertainty is visceral, at times nightmarish in its details—the mad man who thinks he is made of glass, the paranoid sense of sensory deception, the insomniac who thinks the hand before him is not his—and it keeps returning, even after his discovery of “I think, therefore I am” and the proofs of a benevolent God. If you pay attention to the imagery and psychological mood—rather than just the arguments—the Meditations seem less like a rebuilding of certainty from the ground up than a portrait of the human mind as having a very fragile and fleeting contact with reality and a tenuous hold on the objects it surveys.

In my “not really philosophy” dissertation I went on to explore the historical changes and challenges that had, indeed, shaken up the medieval world view. Cartesian doubt, I argued, wasn’t just a philosophical experiment; it was the philosophical expression of the dying of an older, once-stable and reassuring set of ideas about human beings, knowledge, and their place in the world—and the anxiety and dread that the dying of that culture engendered.

I’m not going to go through those 16th-17th changes and challenges here. My point, is that we have our own—some of which I described in the first section of this piece—and they are as, maybe more, disorienting than those Descartes experienced, and should be taken just as seriously, as I argued against philosophical tradition, as we should take Cartesian doubt. The European medieval world view had guardrails—mainly religious and cosmological—that provided security and a sense of trust in the order of things. They didn’t cure suffering, but they provided solidity, and when challenged by new scientific ideas, new forms of economic and social organization, and the discovery of other cultures, all that was solid melted into air (Marx’s great phrase) and humans were thrown, spinning, dizzy, doubting, dreading.

That’s how we feel now, isn’t it? The fact that our guardrails are more secular and scientific doesn’t change the fact that we counted on them, and they’ve failed us, betrayed us, left us bereft, without solid ground. Maybe you were taught by more cynical teachers than I was, but although many of my high-school teachers were left-leaning and highly critical of the injustices and inequalities of U.S History, I don’t remember any warnings about the fragility of the basic structures of democracy and how much their functioning depended on a minimally informed citizenry and minimally ethical officials. Neither of which we now have. As far as the rule of law goes, I was taught that it’s skewed (racially, class-wise) in its application but the idea that the Supreme Court could declare the president virtually exempt? What? And no matter how much analysis I bring to my understanding of the re-election of Trump, something like Cartesian doubt overwhelms me: Is this a dream? Is some evil demon in charge of vote counting? How can it possibly be that a majority of voters put a pathologically lying, sexually abusive, unscrupulous, mentally unstable, cognitively degenerating, would-be dictator in power again? Is the senate really going to stand by and let him install a cabinet of incompetent sycophants to do his bidding?

Everything solid has melted into air. Yet the media anchors and commentators, like the philosophers who imagined Descartes’ doubt was just a thought-experiment rather than a philosophical expression of actual anxiety, minimize the profound upset of what we are feeling. Sure, they talk—talk a lot—about how “not normal” Trump is behaving, how derailed the constitution is, how dangerous the future looks—but the medium is the message, and through it all they’re still smiling, joshing with each other, complimenting each others’ latest books as though something unthinkable hasn’t happened. I get it. It’s their job. To show how scared and depressed I assume that they actually are would alienate viewers. Or maybe they enjoy what they do so much and are paid so well they still feel pretty good. Whatever, their normalization creates a cognitive dissonance that makes the rest of us feel even crazier.

Simone de Beauvoir: Woman is Still Other

I don’t often get over 5,000 “likes” and 400 restacks on my notes. I did with this one:

They are blaming Latinos, they are blaming white women, they are blaming the crazy thinking about the economy, they are talking about the delusions that people hold about Trump.

Why does no one mention the most obvious: Too many people still can’t deal with the idea of a woman president.

It seems that although the corporate media persists in blaming Kamala and/or the Democrats for Trump’s win, not everyone outside that world agrees that Kamala’s gender was an irrelevancy.

I’m not going to do a full gender autopsy of the 2024 election here. I’ve pretty much covered that in previous stacks about the election (you can find them all under the “Election 2024” category on my home page.) But since this stack is devoted to philosophical concepts that zing for me when I consider the disaster, I have to include a cut and paste of an earlier discussion about what I still consider the biggest obstacle any woman has faced and will continue to face in aspiring to the U.S. Presidency: The fact that she is not a man.

French philosopher Simone deBeauvoir remains the expert on it. In every era, in every culture, she pointed out, Man is the norm, and Woman is defined in terms of her difference from that norm. She may be reviled, she may be revered, but she is always judged by standards that are “special” to her sex, while the fact that men have a sex, too, goes unnoticed.

So, while we accept it as “normal” when male politicians shout, interrupt, hog the stage, or aggressively interrogate, when Hillary raised her voice it was described as “screeching” and both Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris were told to shut up when they claimed too much time on the Senate floor. Warren was famously rebuked by Mitch McConnell (“She was warned…nevertheless she persisted”) when, during confirmation hearings for Jeff Sessions, she read a critical letter from Coretta Scott King. (Male senators later read the same letter without being cut off.) Richard Burr ordered Harris to be silent and lectured her about her lack of “courtesy” for not allowing poor Sessions to ramble on evasively as she questioned him during the Senate Intelligence Committee into Russian interference in the 2016 election. (No one, as I recall, took Trey Gowdy or any others to task when they hammered away at Clinton during the Benghazi hearings.)

Beauvoir called this normalization of male behavior and singling out of women for special notice the “woman as Other”—and it’s especially pronounced when it comes to our norms, visual images, and expectations of the head of state.

A tour of magazine covers shows how thoroughly our images of what makes someone “presidential” (or aspiring presidential) are full of codes for masculinity. Some are Western (Reagan, Beto) some “Working-class” (shirt-sleeves rolled up: Joe and Bernie) some are “Classy” (Obama and, when he isn’t on a horse, Reagan.)

Women leaders or aspirants to leadership are also coded as masculine, because leadership is imagined as male. But on women, maleness is translated to stern, humorless, even scary— an indication that the role of leader requires stepping outside our female natures, relinquishing any “feminine” softness, any playful appeal. And then, of course, we risk become “unlikeable.

Ironically, the “naturalness” of male authority is what allows male leaders and aspirants to power to be playful without being taken less seriously. Reagan and Obama—probably the most playful of our presidents—were able to poke (“There you go again….”) and joke (“He has this weird obsession with the size of crowds”) without any loss of stature. Women aspirants, in contrast, risk being trivialized if they do a charming little dance outside their offices (AOC.)

Women have to carefully calibrate their toughness/softness quotient. Elizabeth I felt it crucial to convince her subjects that although she was a woman, she had the “heart and stomach of a King.” But Elizabeth also realized that there was danger lurking in presenting herself as too “masculine” (and thus seen as “unnatural”—a special problem for her, as she remained unmarried and childless) and took care to promote herself as a loving, maternal figure, too, with all English subjects as her children. Instinctively, she recognized that being the Other in a masculinist world was not escapable, only negotiable.

It’s a classic double bind. To command authority requires demonstrating that you’ve got cahones; but to win the affection of subjects/voters one can’t be seen as too self-contained or in control—qualities that translate as “cold” in a woman. So, when Hillary Clinton teared up in a New Hampshire coffee shop after losing the 2008 Idaho primary, reporters declared that “the icy control queen” had finally “proved that she is human.” (She went on to win the New Hampshire primary.) Obama has wiped away tears on several occasions; it’s never seen as proof of his humanity (which has never been questioned, even when he is being his most professorial.) And almost unquestionably, if Clinton had actually spilled over with tears rather than simply welled up, her competency for office—especially as commander-in-chief—would have been questioned.

In my opinion, Kamala Harris blasted right through the classic double-bind. Even in debate with a babbling Donald Trump she resisted having her femaleness erased but at the same time projected an authority that—for centuries—has been assumed to be “natural” to men and a distortion when embodied by a woman. Kamala defied that zero-sum-game, that necessity to choose between being all the things women have been associated with (nurturance, flirtatiousness, tenderness) and the power and authority associated with men as leaders—an authority immortalized in the moment when Kamala strode across the stage to an already retreating Trump and declared her confidence (and how to pronounce her name) with a firm handshake.

Kamala was masterful in that debate. Trump fell apart. Commentators remarked how “unhinged” he became after she called his rallies “boring” and how “presidential” she looked.

.What a president she would have made.