Inside and Outside — Paulo Barrozo
A philosopher and a teacher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.
First let me say how grateful I’m to you, Giorgio, for inviting me to this dialogue and for making publicly available the conversations you had with those who preceded me.
To your question, I studied in Brazil (mostly at the State University of Rio de Janeiro) and in the United States (at Harvard University), where for the last 15 years or so I have been teaching at Boston College Law School. This autumn I’m teaching philosophy of law and next spring I will teach a seminar on theories of justice. My work has both strong explanatory and robust normative dimensions. In the former dimension, I’m building a new theoretical account of the evolution of law in high-complexity societies. My normative work has focused on cruelty and mercy and, more recently, on the foundation of rights (where I develop the endowment theory of rights) and the future of humanity.
What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour?
As I think about humour, I’m tempted to appeal to a distinction in perspective with which legal philosophers are familiar: the internal and the external perspectives.
Basically, the internal perspective is that of those immersed in a practice; their meaning horizon and interpretive capacities are constrained by and fine-tuned to adapt to the practice in question. Thought from this perspective, I think of humour in two ways. First, it is a gift to self and others; it is a form of detachment from within that remains within the practice; it’s a source of bliss but also potentially of criticism made more palatable. Second, and still from the internal perspective, humour is the ability and the phenomenon of adding a meta-level to communicative practices without ever leaving them.
The external perspective leaves the cathedral, so to speak, to look at it from the outside. From this perspective, I’m led to ask what processes caused or favored the emergence of humor in human life, and what ends it serves. Here I speculate that humour was made possible by the development of the ability to simultaneously superimpose different meanings to a situation; that this ability found its adaptive value in allowing members of human groups that were constantly complexifying to flex their sociological joints which was required by the dilution of rigid social roles and scripts brought about by social complexification. From thereon, humour became second-nature to us, which helps also explain how our political and economic systems are able to use it to shape preferences and to drive and direct consumption.
Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena?
Let me start with a general point before I turn to an even more general one.
Whether cruelty will always present in human life or not, no one should be neutral in relation to it. Because cruelty as I think of it is a human only phenomenon, it calls for responses in the form of preventive and corrective action. It is in this sense that cruelty is a problem of practical reason, one of action preoccupied with its legal or moral obligations, rational grounds, value commitments, and actual consequences. I will be the first one to recognize, though, that the connection between abstract conceptions of cruelty and the implications practical reason can draw from their application to actual phenomena in the world is too detached to be able to philosophically capture and explain people's actual experiences witnessing, causing or suffering cruelty and of confronting the question of what to do about it. A philosophical step is missing. What is missing is the integration of conceptions of cruelty and the practical reason implications of detecting cruelty in the world into normative models which operate as meaning matrixes for cognition, meaning, and action. My work on cruelty tried to fill that gap and provide the missing step.
Unlike the work of other thinkers on cruelty, which tend to be more concrete and pedagogical, appealing to sensibilities and emotions in order to combat cruelty, my work on cruelty is conceptual and rationalistic.
Speaking now more directly to your question, one serious objection to the hopes I place in rationality, reflectivity, and legal and moral constructivism is that which sees evil — and with it cruelty — as a part of the human condition that we cannot will away. For example, Paul Kahn has powerfully argued that he does “not believe we are in a position to reframe the character of our experience, such that love and evil disappear. In truth,” he added, “we have no choice about the nature of the human.” Kahn may well be right, for as biographies and history abundantly show, no amount of rule-following, rational attachment to values or concern with consequences has proven enough to guard actors against committing cruelty or societies against embarking on cruel paths.
I expect, however, that this objection will also be proven wrong in the longer term. The human condition is not outside evolution. The expansion or decline of the human endowments to endure, self-bind, individuate, reason, learn, connect, create, communicate, and plan is the most important front in emancipatory and dignitarian struggles. A future is not impossible in which these capacities would have evolved enough to largely remove the blight of cruelty from human institutions if not from each human life. For the sake of this possible future — near or afar — we need to understand better the notions of cruelty, the normative models they inhabit, and what is entailed by the ideal of cruelty-free existences. My work on cruelty has that future in sight.
The hope is that better understanding of the different conceptions and normative models of cruelty help the sort of cultural introspection that reminds us of the promises of justice, mercy, and respect for the dignity of every person that we often make each other and that our institutions often pledge to uphold. Whatever the future may hold, as we embark on this sort of cultural introspective journey, we must remain alert to what is at stake for both individuals and societies in the rejection of cruelty. And whatever is found at the end of this journey of cultural introspection, I suspect we would be ill-advised ever to abandon the search for the critical self-knowledge that inspires it.
Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend?
Perhaps I’m stepping a bit outside the box here, but I’d like to recommend the novels of a Brazilian writer of the 19th and early 20th century, Machado de Assis. He was a literary genius who, as a black man in a society transitioning away from slavery and writing mostly to white readers, he made of humour an epistemic and moral powerhouse. I find it interesting how Schopenhauer uses humour in his work as a coping mechanism in the realm of high thought. What else… Perhaps Niklas Luhmann’s social theory focus on communication might be relevant, reading the work with the following question in mind: what in our communication does humour code?
Before you let me go I want to thank you again for having me on your blog, Giorgio.