Leigh: Welcome back to another episode of Hotel Bar Sessions! My name is Leigh Johnson, and I’m joined by my fabulous co-hosts, Rick Lee and David Gunkel. Today, we’re speaking in praise of instrumentality with a guest who we’ll introduce in just a moment. But first, let’s go around and get some drink orders and hear about your rants or raves. Rick, let’s start with you.

Rick: I’m having a Boulevardier and ranting about landlord-controlled heating. I haven’t lived in an apartment without its own thermostat in years, but I’m currently away from home, and the first two days here were freezing. Then the heat kicked on—and it hasn’t stopped. It’s like a sauna in here, and I don’t think I could record this podcast naked! Let everyone control their own heat. Amen to that.

As you mentioned, Leigh, we’re joined today by a good friend of ours and the podcast, Dimitris Vardoulakis. He’s someone I’ve shared many philosophical conversations with over drinks, dinner, and coffee—conversations that he doesn’t consider frivolous or unserious. Dimitris is a perfect guest for our hotel bar setting.

Dimitris is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University and the author of numerous essays and books. Let me mention a few of his recent works that are relevant to today’s discussion. He wrote Spinoza, the Epicurean Authority and Utility and Materialism, published by Edinburgh University Press, and The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism, which just came out with Fordham University Press. He’s also recently completed a manuscript on what he calls "agonistic love politics." A lot of his work delves into the ethics and politics of what he describes as the ineffectual, and the disastrous consequences it has for contemporary political theory and ethics. Dimitris, welcome to the bar! What are you drinking, and are you ranting or raving?

Dimitris: I’d love a straight bourbon—Woodford Reserve Double Oak, please.

Leigh: Nice choice.

Rick: They must pay you well in Australia!

Dimitris: I discovered the pleasures of bourbon while spending too much time in the U.S. I was actually going to rant about U.S. politics, which is very upsetting to watch from outside the country.

Rick: We’re upset about it too.

Leigh: Same here. David, what about you? What’s your drink, and are you ranting or raving?

David: I’m going with my new favorite shot—the “Fuck Putin” shot, which I discovered at a bar in Warsaw. It’s made with a bottom layer of Advocaat, a yellow liqueur, and a top layer of blue Curaçao. It tastes terrible, but it’s got the best name.

As for my rave, I want to celebrate people who read books on public transportation. I ride the L a lot, and I always bring a book. Recently, I locked eyes with someone across from me who was also reading, and we had a great conversation about how rare it is to see people reading on the L anymore. We looked around, and sure enough, almost no one else was reading. Instead, people were watching videos on their phones—with the sound on, no less—which drives me crazy when I’m trying to read. So, let’s bring back reading as the OG of public transportation entertainment!

Leigh: Love it!

Rick: Leigh, what about you? What are you drinking, and are you ranting or raving?

Leigh: I’m keeping it simple with two fingers of Buffalo Trace on the rocks. Today, I’m raving about a podcast I just discovered called How to Do Everything. The premise is fascinating—they ask people how to do things we all think we know about but maybe don’t actually know how to do. Sometimes they ask celebrities, like Tom Hanks how to handle a 15-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, or Nick Offerman how to cure hiccups.

But they also tackle quirky questions, like how places get to call themselves “world famous.” For example, Rick’s World Famous Hot Dogs—how does Rick know they’re world-famous? I highly recommend this podcast. It’s super entertaining!

Now, as we mentioned earlier, Dimitris is joining us today to talk about instrumentality. Rick, why don’t you set the stage for this discussion?

Rick: Common sense tells us that most of what we do is aimed at accomplishing something beyond the act itself. For instance, we eat to nourish ourselves and stay alive. We drink to enjoy pleasure—or to get drunk. We lie to get out of sticky situations.

But in the 20th century, philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben began criticizing instrumental action. Instead, they celebrated actions done purely for their own sake. For example, someone might play tennis not to get healthy, win, or experience pleasure, but simply to play tennis. Thinking itself, which inherently has no external end, became valued precisely because it accomplishes nothing.

This critique extends to how we view the natural world. When we see nature instrumentally, we’re tempted to use it for purposes outside of itself—exploiting and depleting it without recognizing its intrinsic value.

However, I think pushing this critique too far can lead to an ethics that is ultimately ineffectual. There’s an Italian phrase, dolce far niente—the sweetness of doing nothing—but should this really serve as a universal moral law? Or should we reconsider the importance of actions aimed at accomplishing something beyond themselves?

Dimitris, as I mentioned earlier, 20th-century philosophers heavily criticized actions taken for external ends. Yet common sense suggests that we act precisely to achieve something outside of the act itself. Could you start by explaining why philosophers began critiquing this approach to action?

Dimitris: A significant factor to consider is what has been overlooked in critiques of instrumental action, particularly in the so-called Critique of Instrumental Reason. This includes figures like Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. A good summary of this critique is found in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer. Their argument is that technical or instrumental actions are inherently tied to structures of power, which use instrumentality to perpetuate their dominance, prevent political change, and block broader social and ethical progress.

This critique also suggests that when instrumentality serves these power structures, it not only stifles ethical and political transformation but also leads to violence. Instrumentality, they argue, is inherently violent. I agree with much of this critique. However, my concern lies in the oversimplification or neglect of the historical and philosophical richness of instrumentality itself.

If we look at the philosophical tradition, there are actually two distinct notions of instrumentality. Using Aristotle’s vocabulary from Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, one is techne, which refers to acting with specific, measurable ends that are independent of the individual performing the action. These ends are clear and predefined.

The other notion is phronesis, or practical wisdom, which involves acting for the good—a good that is not individual but collective, encompassing everyone involved in the process of deciding how to act. In phronesis, neither the ends nor the means can be defined with absolute certainty. The “good” is a general and shared aim, and the means are constantly subject to judgment and revision.

My critique of instrumental reason is twofold. First, it is historical: this richer understanding of instrumentality has been largely forgotten. Second, it is practical: if we adopt the idea that actions can be good in themselves, where do such actions originate? And what are their tangible effects?

In much of Continental philosophy, these actions are often described in terms of “the event” or as forms of art that offer ethical or political insight. While these ideas are valuable, they seem to lack concrete effects in reality, and I find that lamentable.

So my question is, what happens if contemporary thought reintroduces the Aristotelian concept of phronesis—this other notion of instrumentality? How might it reshape our understanding of ethics and politics?

Rick: It seems to me, though, that in your discussion of phronesis, you also leave out some kind of instrumentality that might be crucial. This is both a historical point and maybe just a larger point about human action and ethics.

Yes, Aristotle does argue that everything we do aims toward some end which is considered to be good. And then his problem is: yeah, but there must be an ultimate good, right? Because if every action just aims at a good, and that good aims at a good, and that good aims at a good without end, then we would never act on the basis of a good at all. And so, there has to be an ultimate end.

But he never gives up the fact that I eat in order to nourish myself. I take medicine in order to be healthy. That’s one good. And yes, my being healthy might be in order for me to achieve another good, and that might be in order to achieve another good. But I wonder if you give up a little bit too much—this, what could I call it, this internal or mini-instrumentality—that, yeah, I do things for the sake of an end that is outside of its action that I take to be good, even though that’s working toward another good and, therefore, the ultimate good.

Dimitris: Well, absolutely. And I agree with that reading of Aristotle, but in a sense, my point is, can we see a different notion of instrumentality criticized by the Critique of Instrumental Reason? And it seems to me, even the summary that you do about Aristotle points to that.

And the second point, which is a historical one, is to say: what has been forgotten by forgetting that notion of phronesis—and I pointed to it with reference to Aristotle for experience here, but we can have other references. But it seems to me that there is what I call a phronetic tradition that operates over the centuries and gives very different articulations of this idea of phronesis.

So, for instance, the Epicureans completely abandoned the idea of the ultimate end that we’ll find in Aristotle. Or another example would be Spinoza. I mean, I read Spinoza in my Spinoza, the Epicurean as a significant example in early modernity of constructing an ethics and a politics based on the phronetic tradition. And again, in Spinoza, you remember, for instance, the conclusion to Book I of the Ethics, that notion of an ultimate telos is completely rejected.

So I’m not trying to say that there is one phronesis or one idea about phronesis that is the correct one or anything like that. I’m really interested to unearth, to use Althusser’s terminology, an underground current of the phronetic tradition and find different articulations of it, because the contemporary discourse has completely ignored it. And when the contemporary discourse talks about instrumentality, it seems to me that it only refers to the notion of techne, and that makes the description of experience a little bit poor.

David: So, I’m just going to ask us to pause for a minute because we’ve already been mobilizing the idea of the phronetic tradition and phronesis, and we may have listeners who don’t know the phronetic tradition and don’t know phronesis. And I’m wondering if we can maybe lay that out a little bit—in large ideas or brief characterization—so that people know what is actually being mobilized here.

Leigh: Just first starting with—if you’ve never heard the word phronesis before, it’s spelled P-H-R-O-N-E-S-I-S, so that’s what we’re talking about. And as Dimitris said, most people trace it back to Aristotle, but there is a larger tradition in which the content of phronesis is operative. But okay, I’ll let you go, Dimitris.

Dimitris: And I should mention also, when I say phronetic tradition, I don’t mean frenetic tradition, because I had students writing essays about the frenetic.

Leigh: Oh, like with an F, like scurrying-around tradition.

Dimitris: Yeah, that’s right. Yes.

Leigh: Like a squirrel.

Dimitris: The phronetic has nothing to do with the frenetic. As a matter of fact, the image of the ancient sage who has tranquility is someone who has phronesis. So, phronesis, in a sense, is the opposite of the frenetic.

The idea is that phronesis, according to Aristotle—and I think according to most ancients; we find the same idea both in Epicurus and Plato—phronesis is the primary ethical and political virtue. And what they mean by virtue is a kind of action that has effects.

In order for an action to have effects, that kind of action, according to the ancients, has to involve a consideration of certain means and ends. So, phronesis is a virtue that concerns the effects of actions, and these effects of actions have certain ends. But the end of phronesis itself is the good. And the good can never be determined with certainty.

So, it’s a kind of instrumental thinking that I think we do all the time in our everyday lives. I’ve been able to describe that kind of instrumental thinking to my sons. Well, when they were younger, whenever we act, we don’t necessarily act with a specific end in mind. You know, I might be making a meal for my family, and the specific end is to put the meal on the table. But there is another broader end, which is the wellbeing of my family, good relations with other members of the family, because I cater for them, and that kind of thing.

So, it is this kind of insight that alongside the ends that we can specify very precisely, our actions carry a certain instrumentality whose ends cannot be specified with precision. That’s the notion of phronesis.

Leigh: Could you tie that just a little bit to the importance that Aristotle places on phronesis as a kind of habituation? Because I think that often, when we think about instrumental thinking in the way that you’ve been discussing—and as it’s often criticized in the contemporary Continental tradition among others—we think about it as a form of reasoning, a way of getting from point A to point B. And it leaves out the necessity of experience at all, which does seem to be absolutely central to the notion of phronesis.

Dimitris: In fact, I would argue it’s absolutely central to the notion of phronesis—the experience we undergo in order to make a phronetic judgment. Again, Aristotle is very good on that. And maybe other ancient authors would have been very good on that as well, except it’s only in Aristotle’s work that a long discussion of phronesis has survived.

In all other authors, there are, by the way, references, but no systematic discussion. And hence why Aristotle is so important. But the notion of phronesis in Aristotle, in Epicurus, and later, is situated knowledge. In fact, in my book on ancient Greek philosophy, I call it “queer” in the sense that phronesis is a calculation that arises out of our response to given circumstances. And in that sense, it is a performative judgment.

It doesn’t have a telos that is an absolute telos. It doesn’t have a calculation that can be absolutely certain. It is how you respond to the circumstances with an eye to achieve the good. So, it is totally situated. That’s the fundamental idea of phronesis.

So, from that point of view, a lot of the contemporary discourses, like, for instance, queer studies, would be very much working in a kind of phronetic tradition in my terms, even though they do not know that. And even though these discourses tend to not be interested in the history of philosophy and that underground phronetic tradition that I’m referring to.

But that emphasis on the situatedness is very, very significant—on the performativity.

Rick: Following from Leigh’s emphasis on experience and the role—and one might even say necessity—of experience for phronesis, this leads to a distinction I hear you making. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like a distinction between calculation, which always belongs to instrumental reason, and judgment, which I want to say knows something, right?

Judgment has a certain kind of knowledge, but it’s not quite the same as, say, calculation. I might not know all the effects that my action is going to have. I don’t maybe even know all the ends that I’m, in fact, striving for while I’m performing this action. But it’s not like I don’t know anything. It’s not like I’m shooting in the dark. And so, it seems to me that what goes along with your emphasis on phronesis is a robust notion of judgment.

Dimitris: I completely agree with that and would hasten to add that we need to make distinctions about different forms of judgment. So, it’s not a kind of judgment of episteme—to put it in Greek terms.

That is, it’s not a judgment that leads to scientific knowledge or is related to scientific knowledge. The kind of practical judgment, phronesis, is distinct from calculation—if by calculation, we mean something that can be determined as true or false at the end of the process of calculation.

Rick: Right.

Dimitris: But keep in mind also that in ancient Greek, where the notion of logos comes from, there’s a distinction between logos, which is reason in general (and dialectic as well), and logistikon, which is where the word "logistics" comes from.

When we’re talking about practical reason, the Greeks use the term to logistikon, which means both calculation and judgment. So, the distinction between judgment and calculation is very small in ancient Greek. Indeed, practical judgment is always calculated in some sense—in the technical sense, the sense of techne, which we might call today “calculation,” and in the phronetic sense, which we might call today “judgment.” The difference between the two in Greek is very small.

Leigh: I think that’s really important, and it’s helpful in reminding us that phronesis is always tied to virtues in a really, really intimate way.

Just to use the example you gave: I, of course, could calculate how to say something true. I could figure out the logistics of speaking the truth. But I can’t calculate how to be an honest person. To be an honest person requires habituation—a lot of practice and a lot of judgment—to be able to determine, in any particular situation, what is going to be the most honest way of acting here. Which, you know, may or may not involve telling the truth perfectly, anyway.

So, I think that’s really helpful. And I’m wondering if that’s really what you’re aiming for when you say we need to remember or recover this phronetic tradition. Are you saying we need to bring this back to virtue, basically?

Dimitris: Well, absolutely. I think the system of virtue is very important. But virtue can be understood in two ways, okay?

One is the sort of ineffectual way—which in my work I trace back to Stoicism—namely that honesty, or not telling a lie, is good in itself. And then there’s the phronetic tradition, which would say that telling the truth is involved in a calculation that concerns the good.

If we say that truth is a good in itself, we can remember the debate between Kant and Constant. The question is posed to Kant: Well, if you’re at home harboring a friend who is running away from a murderer, and the murderer knocks on your door and asks, “Is your friend inside? Would you let me in to kill him?”—if you’re honest, Kant says, “Well, of course, you’ll say my friend is here. You’re not going to lie.”

Whereas in the phronetic tradition—and here the reference would be to Chapter 16 of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus—Spinoza says you have an inherent right to lie, to be dishonest.

When does that happen? When a kind of contract is broken. His example is: if you’re stopped in the middle of the night by a highway robber and you promise them, under duress, to give them some money the next day. Well, you have the right—if the circumstances change—not to carry on with your promise.

You have the right, in other words, to say, “Well, I lied to you at that point.” So the distinction, then, between the two notions of virtue is whether a virtue is good in itself—just like an action, playing tennis in Rick’s example earlier, may be good in itself. That would be the tradition of the ineffectual. Or, there’s the tradition that says virtue is discernible in its effects, and therefore it is subject to a kind of instrumental judgment that the Greeks called phronesis. In that tradition, we find other names as well.

Rick: We’ve had an episode on lying, and we talked a lot about Kant’s essay on the supposed right to lie. If I’m a Kantian and I tell the truth, and you ask me, “Why did you tell the truth?” I have an easy answer. My answer is, “Well, because I acted in such a way that the maxim of my action could be a universal moral law for all.” So that was the good thing to do, and it was a moral action.

But if I adopt this more complex notion of virtue—that, as you put it, a virtue is not good in itself but in its effects—then when you come to me and say, “Well, why did you do this?” it seems to me I open myself up to you saying, “Well, that’s wrong. You overlooked something,” or “That was the bad thing to do in this context.”

This way of thinking about ethics seems to bring us into a messy social and political world.

Dimitris: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It’s a different way of looking at ethics. I mean, my point against the tradition of the ineffectual would be: sure, you can always take the high moral ground by saying, “Hey, that’s good in itself, that’s honest in itself,” or whatever.

But what about the effects of that good in itself? Like, what if the murderer gets into the house and kills your friend? Sure, you’ve taken the high moral ground, but, gee, now you have to dispose of the body. And I’m not really sure that’s a particularly moral thing to do, you know? So that’s one point.

Rick: And if you have a body on your hands, don’t call it Kantian.

Dimitris: [Laughs] Kant was very aware of this issue, you know. He feels sort of pressed at one point in the Critique of Practical Reason to say, “How do we see the moral law? How do we discern the moral law?” He seems exasperated by his own internal questioning, and he says, “Well, look outside the window—at the gallows in the square.” And that will remind you where the moral law is, what the right thing to do is.

So, it seems to me that despite the appeal to a universal moral law, despite the appeal to something that is virtuous or moral in itself, the idea of the ineffectual—the sort of tradition of the ineffectual, as I call it—that tries to ground ethics on something that precedes effectivity and is outside of effectivity, and therefore outside of any instrumental calculation, nonetheless employs instrumental calculation at a certain point. And it does so in ways that deprive it of effectivity—deprive it of having any stake in what the outcome of our actions would be.

Leigh: I wonder if it’s the case that what actually happens is that what you’re calling the ineffectual approach maybe loses its particular effectiveness in specific cases, but it still always maintains its universal effectiveness.

And I know I’ve said this before on the podcast, but of course, Kant also wouldn’t tell the murderer that his friend was in the house. But he wouldn’t lie to the murderer either—I mean, I assume he wouldn’t, I hope he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t lie to the murderer, but he also wouldn’t turn around and raise his children thinking that lying is good, right?

That’s the point of that story. The lie remains the wrong thing to do, even when, in some circumstances, you choose another good. You know, there’s a conflict of duties here—you’re not supposed to lie, but you’re also not supposed to use people as means to an end. In this case, to, I don’t know, expose someone to the end of being a good, honest, moral person, or to help out the murderer.

Whatever the case, that’s not the point. The point is that the effectiveness of the moral law remains effective universally. It doesn’t have, as you are pointing out, the kind of particular effectiveness, the local effectiveness, of the phronetic tradition. But I don’t want us to caricature too much the effectiveness of what you’re calling the ineffectual.

Dimitris: Oh, absolutely. And I think there’s a very significant value in the tradition of the ineffectual—not only in the Kantian sense but also in the Heideggerian sense and the broader tradition that came to be called Continental philosophy.

Let me perhaps take a step back, because I think I’ve talked about all these issues—especially the distinction between the phronetic and the ineffectual—as if I’m entirely on the side of the phronetic. And I am, but there’s also a larger problem here.

The larger problem can be framed this way: If we go to an absolutely fundamental philosophical question—namely, the question of being and acting, or, to put it differently, the question of ontology and ethics—

David: Okay.

Dimitris: Assuming that the notion of being or ontology does not carry the baggage of metaphysics, meaning it doesn’t rely on transcendence, what happens then? When we have a purely materialist ontology, how can we say that certain things are good or bad?

This is a question we find throughout the tradition, articulated in many different ways. If you don’t have a notion of transcendence to tell you that something outside of being determines what is good and bad, you’re faced with a problem.

Because if being is one—if there is nothing outside being, if being is a totality outside of which nothing exists, as Spinoza called it “God or Nature”—then what is the source of your ethical choices? How can you say that something is good or bad when whatever you do is within being? The qualitative distinction between good and bad disappears.

This is a problem that we already find in antiquity. For instance, Cicero’s On Fate addresses this problem. It’s also the central issue in Pierre Bayle’s dictionary in his response to Spinoza. Bayle critiques Spinoza’s materialist monist ontology by claiming it makes it impossible to ground ethics.

In my argument, I suggest that throughout the tradition, from ancient philosophy onward, there are only two responses to this problem. One is to define virtue in terms of its effects—that is the phronetic tradition. The other is the tradition of the ineffectual, which starts with the Stoics and posits that virtue exists outside of its effects, preceding and grounding them.

I think both of these traditions are very significant. I don’t want to devalue either of them—they both have their advantages and disadvantages.

To address the phronetic tradition specifically, since I’ve been discussing the disadvantages of the ineffectual tradition, I’d say the major disadvantage of the phronetic tradition is that the means and ends of phronetic calculations can never be certain.

This uncertainty opens the door for manipulation. It allows people to be persuaded into actions that are against their own good. This is essentially the problem we might call today populism. Why is it that a political leader persuades people to vote for him, even when he promises things that clearly won’t benefit them? Why do people act against their own advantage?

I think this is the major problem of the phronetic tradition—the issue of voluntary servitude, or, as Spinoza puts it in the preface to the Theological-Political Treatise, the question of why people act for their servitude as if they were acting for their salvation or their good.

So, there are problems in both traditions, but I think it’s really significant to remember both of them. That helps us move beyond the critique of instrumental reason, which, as I said earlier, leads us to forget the notion of phronesis.

Leigh: I think that’s very helpful. But I also think you’re moving pretty quickly over a very slick rhetorical device you’re using here, which is to call the position opposed to the phronetic tradition “ineffectual,” as opposed to something else—like non-instrumental, or ideal. Why not just call it phronetic and ideal?

Why is it phronetic and ineffectual? Because “ineffectual” is a value-laden term.

Dimitris: Oh, it is. I actually get the term from a specific source—namely Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism. Right? There are certain expressions in German, like ohne Wirkungen or ohne Effekte, which are translated as “ineffectual,” meaning “without effects.”

And I like to joke a little bit in my writings because, you know, “ineffectual” both means “without effects” in the sense Heidegger is describing in that very significant letter. I mean, he’s addressing France—Paris, specifically—and that’s a hugely important essay for subsequent French philosophy, as many books document.

The idea of what I call the “ineffectual” enters Continental philosophy through this major source, Letter on Humanism. That’s why I use the term.

But I also didn’t want to use a specific articulation of the term, like the Kantian one, the Heideggerian one, or the Derridean one, because I want to make a broader argument. There’s a tradition here that hasn’t been fully recognized or given a name. It’s a tradition that goes all the way back to Stoicism and consistently responds to the same fundamental question: what is the relationship between ontology and ethics?

Leigh: Yeah.

Dimitris: And the structure of this tradition is that there must be some kind of action that precedes and grounds anything we do, precisely because it exists outside of effects. I wanted to create a new concept to refer to that, so I could capture this whole tradition.

David: In a sense, that’s the opening Levinas provides when he disrupts the primacy of ontology and makes ethics first philosophy.

Dimitris: Precisely. And Levinas is a great example. But you’ll also find very different articulations of the ineffectual throughout Continental philosophy.

For instance, what Derrida calls the “unconditioned”—whether it’s unconditional hospitality, justice, or something else—you see the same structure there. And that’s why I wanted to create my own concept. Concepts like the “other” in Levinas, the “unconditioned” in Derrida, or “authenticity” in Heidegger are very different. They approach the relationship between being and acting in distinct ways and emphasize different things.

Yet, despite how these concepts are built, they share the same structure: to talk about action, we need to presuppose something—difference, for instance, in Derrida—that grounds and precedes action because it exists outside of effects.

Hence, I wanted a concept that captures this move, one that characterizes a number of philosophers, going all the way back to Stoicism.

Rick: There’s a way in which hanging out at the end of Aristotle’s story is a kind of ineffectuality. I’m thinking of how he privileges theoria—the contemplative life—at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics. In a way, that puts the whole ethics on an ineffectual ground.

From a Marxian point of view, I think one would have two problems with this, and they’re intimately connected.

The first is that privileging the ineffectual—in the dual sense of “having no effects” and “doing nothing”—comes from a position within the division of labor where my needs are already taken care of.

And that leads to the second problem: it presupposes a certain kind of class division. There are those who are able to do nothing, and there must be those who do for the people who do nothing.

I’m wondering if this Marxian, materialist-oriented way of thinking plays any role in your concern about privileging what you call the ineffectual.

Dimitris: Oh, I think in the 20th century, the rediscovery of the ineffectual by conservative thinkers was, in part, a way to bypass Marxist thinking about politics and the economy, which they saw as instrumental. So, the critique of instrumentality among conservative thinkers in the first half of the 20th century is, among other things, positioned against Marxism.

We see this clearly in Hannah Arendt. Initially, The Human Condition was meant to be a book on Marx, but when she abandoned that project, she developed a typology of action. One part of it, which she simply calls “action” pure and simple, is precisely the kind of action that is outside any effectivity, outside any calculation.

So, the ineffectual is positioned against Marxism. That’s a good example of the point I was making earlier: if we begin with a materialist ontology—one that has no transcendence, no metaphysical foundation—then there are only two answers to the question of how to construct an ethic. One is the ineffectual, and the other is the phronetic.

It’s pretty easy to see that Marx operates within the phronetic tradition. There are many ways to approach this. For example, the notion of “interest” in the Communist Manifesto reflects a competition between two kinds of interest: the interests of the bourgeoisie and the interests of the proletariat. This allows us to mobilize a political economy analysis to understand these dynamics.

Let’s not forget that the notion of interest originates in the Scottish Enlightenment. Take Adam Smith, for example, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments—that’s how he frames the Epicurean notion of phronesis.

Leigh: That’s right.

Dimitris: He translates phronesis into a discourse of interest. There’s a very direct linguistic link between the notion of phronesis as I describe it and the phronetic tradition that reappears in a new form in Marxism, now translated into the concept of interest.

That’s what I was getting at earlier when I said that I want to point out the great variety—and often contradictory conceptions—of both the phronetic and the ineffectual in the history of philosophy. There are many different articulations of these ideas, but it’s important to recognize that if we start with a modernist materialist ontology, these are the two options.

So, what happens if we approach ethics and politics through this choice between the phronetic and the ineffectual? That question is a significant motivating factor in the books I’m writing.

Leigh: I want to ask you a question that I think might be helpful for our listeners, who might feel we’re getting a bit too deep into the weeds here.

If we start with a monist ontology—where there’s nothing outside of being, no transcendence, just a fully immanent ontology—I think a lot of people would say that it must follow that everything that is, is necessary. Therefore, there’s no freedom, and you simply can’t have ethics and politics without freedom.

So, I’d like to give you a chance to explain to our listeners whether you think there is freedom and why it might be important to reconceive a fully immanent ontology that can still retain ethics and politics—without relying on transcendental cheat codes, as you seem to suggest.

Dimitris: I think this is an excellent question, and it’s really the question that brings freedom to the forefront of ethical and political discourse in the 19th century. A major motivating factor for this was the debates about Spinoza in the late 19th century, particularly with Jacobi.

Jacobi revisits and presents, yet again, the kind of critique of Spinozism that we find in Bayle. Namely, if you don’t have some notion of transcendence, how is it possible to say that one action is good and another is bad? Without transcendence, you are fully determined. You lack freedom.

We see this idea expressed in many different ways. For instance, consider the existentialist notion of angst—there’s nothing transcendent to hang my hat on and say, “This action is good, and this action is bad.”

To take an example, if I’m walking on the beach, whether I kill an Arab or not makes no difference. Everything is the same. You see that in political discourse as well. If there are no principles to tell us what is good or bad, then whether we vote for one party or another, ultimately it makes no difference.

There is certainly a discourse that says unless we have a robust notion of freedom rooted in the individual and individual free will, we cannot have an ethical system. I fully recognize that discourse, and if you hold that position, then you will have to hold an ontology that includes transcendence.

My response to this discourse would be to go back to antiquity, where this issue is already discussed. In antiquity, freedom is not an ethical or political virtue. You don’t find freedom as a virtue in ancient ethics. Why? Because freedom is defined very precisely in antiquity.

Freedom is freedom from the idea that the only causes that determine us are, as Cicero says in his On Fate, “unbroken causes” or natural causes. Freedom, in this sense, is the recognition that we can also make certain calculations about the effects of our actions.

Why is that? Because we will never know all the causes that determine us. We can never be fully conditioned, to use Kantian terms, if we understand “conditioned” from an epistemological perspective. So, freedom is the rejection of reducing our actions to an idealistic conception that we are externally conditioned.

Freedom, then, is not about some independent, free will that allows us to make decisions entirely detached from conditions. If we discard the idea of free will, we need a different foundation for understanding ethics and politics.

What I’m advocating for is an ethics and politics where freedom—or at least freedom of the will—is not a central concept. This aligns with Spinoza’s conception of freedom. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, in their book on Spinoza, describe his idea of freedom as “freedom from the free will.”

Leigh: That’s right.

Dimitris: That was a very influential idea for me, and I’ve worked on it quite a lot. For example, my book on Kafka looks at Kafka as a comic writer in the sense that many of his jokes are about the absurdities of the free will.

Rick: But in this sense, what you referred to earlier as the problem of action now seems to be an epistemological problem. That is, the reason why we should struggle over the ineffectual versus the phronetic, why we might want to champion the phronetic, and so on, is simply because we don’t know the ways in which we’re determined. And we also don’t know the outcomes of our actions.

By the way, even if we did know the outcomes of our actions, we couldn’t choose otherwise.

Dimitris: Well, in a sense, I agree with that. It is an epistemological problem too, but I would argue that the sort of modern separation of epistemology, ontology, ethics, and so on is challenged by the monist materialism I’m referring to.

For the ancient Greeks, the ethical, the ontological, and the epistemological are not separated. So, when I talk about being fascinated by the history of how ontology and ethics—or being and action—come to be thought together, how their relationship is explored in the philosophical tradition, this doesn’t exclude other branches of philosophy.

It’s just to say that you cannot privilege one of these sides. The question about what is, and how we exist within what is, includes every branch of thought. That’s significant.

If that’s the case, then why privilege the epistemological? Why claim that, in order to have any semblance of wellbeing or to escape existential angst, we need a free will? This presupposes that we can make judgments as individuals—whether these are described in epistemological terms or any other terms—judgments in our minds about how to act. And that’s the register of our freedom.

To me, that approach separates discourses that don’t need to be separated.

Leigh: But why wouldn’t arriving at the position you just described be the consequence—the effect—of a certain calculation about several different questions at once? Epistemological questions, moral questions, political questions?

Dimitris: Indeed. And that would mean that philosophy is a practical matter. I completely agree with that.

Leigh: Right. I assumed you were going to say that was the case.

Dimitris: You’re reading my mind.

Leigh: Maybe to connect the dots—aren’t you saying, then, that what you’re calling the ineffectual, the tradition of the ineffectual, is itself a phronetic tradition?

Dimitris: Oh, absolutely.

Leigh: Okay.

Dimitris: I think there are two main arguments against the ineffectual. One is that it’s ineffective for the reasons I described earlier. The second is that it’s self-contradictory. As a matter of fact, it presupposes the phronetic tradition, whether it wants to or not.

Leigh: Right.

Dimitris: And, you know, from that point of view, I think it’s worth remembering that in antiquity, the main philosophical battle lines are drawn between the Epicureans and the Stoics.

Leigh: Right.

Dimitris: The Platonic Academy and the Aristotelians are not as significant from a certain point onward. And why is that? I think it’s because the fault line lies between whether we can think of virtue in terms of its effects or outside of effectivity—and what the arguments are for one or the other.

One of the main arguments against the Stoic position, which conceives of virtue in itself, is to say, well, it’s never entirely in itself; it always has certain effects, and therefore it is always phronetic. Paradoxically—and I think this is worth pondering for those deeply committed to the critique of instrumental reason—this is, mutatis mutandis, precisely the critique of instrumental reason.

When Heidegger and Adorno argue that any form of technicity presupposes structures of power, that’s perfectly correct. But it doesn’t follow that we can step outside the realm of effectivity.

Leigh: Right.

Dimitris: Because everything is indeed structured by forms of calculation.

David: The way you’re describing this forgetting of phronesis and the phronetic tradition brings us to a question of power. How does the ineffectual tradition usurp the position of power held by phronesis in ethics after the ancients? What accounts for the need to recover it and displace the way philosophy has developed since then?

Leigh: Before you answer that, can I piggyback on the first part of that question? Because that’s very close to what I was going to ask as well.

And really, it’s a historical point. You’ve been describing this evolution of these two separate traditions, moving from the ancients directly into the modern and contemporary periods. But it seems to me that you’re skipping what actually usurped the phronetic tradition you’re describing—the advent of the Abrahamic tradition.

The Abrahamic tradition is perhaps the most important institution of transcendental ontology. So when you answer David, if you could slide that in as well, that’d be awesome.

Dimitris: That’s exactly where I was intending to go.

Leigh: We are really mind-melding, Dimitris.

Dimitris: We are in each other’s minds right now.

In my account, there are two fundamental historical points where the ineffectual comes to dominate. One, which we’ve already discussed, is Kantianism and transcendental idealism. The other is Judeo-Christian metaphysics.

The example I like to give—kind of exhibit A for this point—is Augustine’s City of God, Chapter 19. Augustine’s most explicit engagement with ancient philosophy occurs there.

How does he engage with ancient philosophy? He refers to a system of ends, a system of calculations developed by Varro in antiquity. Augustine presents it with great precision and respect, which is not always the case when he engages in polemics. He essentially describes the phronetic tradition.

Then Augustine says: if you want to be a Christian, you cannot subscribe to this tradition, because this tradition reduces the ethical to this world. And this world, he argues, is a world of misery. To escape this world of misery, we must posit another world—the City of God.

The ethical principles that govern this different world are very simple. There are two principles: the love of God and the love of the neighbor—what came to be called in Latin, caritas. These principles are outside this world of material reality. They exist outside natural causality: love of God and love of neighbor.

I would say this marks a really significant political moment for the dominance of the ineffectual tradition. Now, when I make this point, the question I always get is, “Ha, you’ve contradicted yourself because you said the phronetic and the ineffectual are the two ways in which we can respond.”

And I would reply, “Ha, ha, you haven’t read my book on Spinoza,” because I think Spinoza is really, really good on this point.

Rick: Always be selling, Dimitris. Always be selling.

Dimitris: Absolutely. I’ll provide a discount code as well—I’ll ask my publisher for a discount code just for the listeners of Hotel Bar Sessions.

But the point Spinoza makes is that any ontology that relies on transcendence—this is really the focus of the first six chapters of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus—is presupposing a monist ontology whether it wants to or not.

Spinoza uses irony to make this point. For example, he says at one point that Moses went up to Mount Sinai to be closer to God in order to communicate with him. I mean, that’s ridiculous. Even if you understand God as transcendent, you’re not going to get closer to Him by climbing Mount Sinai.

Leigh: You just get better reception up there.

Dimitris: Maybe—maybe they had better microphones, you know.

But when I say we start with a monist materialist ontology, the point is not that there’s another ontology, an ontology of transcendence. In fact, the ontology of transcendence is simply one mistaken version of a monist materialist ontology.

And it seems really significant to me that the ontology of transcendence leans entirely on the ineffectual tradition—not on the phronetic tradition.

Leigh: I have a very practical question I’d like to ask. How do you teach an ethics class now?

Dimitris: Well, I’m not sure. I don’t teach ethics as such, you know. But it seems to me that it’s very important to question certain dichotomies that we take for granted in ethics. For instance, deontology versus utilitarianism, or compatibilism versus incompatibilism.

Take deontology versus consequentialism as an example. Deontology clearly belongs to the ineffectual tradition. You have certain principles or values that govern action, which are themselves, to use Kantian terms again, outside natural causality.

The opposite of deontology is supposed to be utilitarianism. But isn’t utilitarianism also presupposing that, in order to calculate the greatest good, you need a calculus that itself exists outside experience? It exists outside calculation.

So, in fact, I would argue that the consequentialist tradition also belongs to the tradition of the ineffectual because it posits something outside experience. Or, to put it differently, anything that doesn’t understand ethics and politics in a performative sense, or in a queer sense, belongs to the ineffectual tradition.

And there’s nothing particularly queer or performative about utilitarianism. If that’s correct, then it poses a big challenge to what the curriculum for an ethics course in a university department would look like.

Leigh: Listeners won’t have seen this, but when he said “an ethics course,” he put big scare quotes around it.

Dimitris: That’s right.

Leigh: So, I suppose my next question would be: do you think maybe the enterprise of teaching ethics courses or political theory courses in philosophy is just ill-advised? Should we instead only be teaching ontology courses?

Dimitris: Oh, absolutely not. I’m interested in teaching philosophy, whether it’s branded as metaphysics, political philosophy, or ethics. The very modern idea of separating these disciplines—well, that separation starts in medieval times, but the splintering we see now is a product of the 19th century. It has a lot to do with the development of the institution of the university.

Maybe I just want to teach philosophy. I don’t want to teach ethics, ontology, or metaphysics as isolated fields. What would it be like if people thought philosophically, as opposed to thinking about epistemology, or thinking about moral theory, or thinking about metaphysics, and so on?

It seems to me that this approach is more likely to appeal to someone who calls themselves a Continental philosopher, as opposed to an analytic philosopher. An analytic philosopher at this point would freak out, saying, “Hey, how can we possibly have a well-articulated philosophical question unless that question is articulated within the terms we use in moral philosophy, metaphysics, or whatever genre”—scare quotes again—“we want to employ?”

But I think that, to be a consistent modernist materialist, you have to say you’re doing philosophy—not ethics, epistemology, or metaphysics as distinct fields.

Leigh: Totally agree.

Rick: I’m pretty sure that the analytic philosophers would have freaked out way before that moment.

Dimitris: Oh, I think they’ve logged out by now—long before this point, you know.

Rick: What I want to say might be a little unfair because I’ve seen more recent aspects of your thinking about this—namely, what you call agonistic politics. It seems to me that your thinking in that direction is partly an answer to Leigh’s question.

This approach to action—a philosophical approach that isn’t just an ethical approach, but takes in epistemology, politics, metaphysics, and so on—uniquely leads to a way of being human in which we’re working these things out together. Sometimes it’s in cooperation, and sometimes in more antagonistic relations with one another. But that’s what ethics and politics look like: striving to live together.

Dimitris: Well, absolutely. The project is called The Agonistic Condition, and the reason it’s called The Agonistic Condition is as a reference to Hannah Arendt’s book, The Human Condition. So, when I refer to agonism, I’m referring to the ontology of the human that Hannah Arendt is addressing.

But there’s also a very polemical element to the book. It’s probably the most polemical book I’ve written. The notion of agonism is incorporated—or circumscribed—within the book itself.

Basically, the argument is this: if we look at the notion of agonism as it has developed over the last 30 years or so—it’s a relatively new concept that comes from political theory—and examine how it has been developed in conversation with Continental philosophy, we find something consistent.

Across the various theories of agonistic politics or agonistic democracy—whether it’s William Connolly, Chantal Mouffe, or more recent thinkers like Oliver Marchart, whom I regard as a very significant thinker—all of them, invariably and in different ways, have recourse to the ineffectual. At some point, they fall back on a notion of action and ethics that exists outside of effectivity.

Hannah Arendt is a very good example of this. Her notion of action—action for its own sake—embodies this recourse to the ineffectual.

What I’m trying to argue is that if we are to have a robust notion of agonism, we actually need to return to the phronetic tradition. The very idea of agonism as a concept that describes our human condition—to borrow Arendt’s language again—goes back to a fundamental characteristic of phronesis.

Namely, that the phronetic calculations we make are never certain. And this uncertainty is the source, not of the good—for the good can never be defined with certainty—but of the way we interact with each other.

That interaction is premised on a fundamental disagreement. We can never know for certain what the end of our actions—the good—will be. To include the other ethically requires acknowledging that uncertainty. Similarly, we can never know for certain what means are at our disposal to achieve that end.

So, I want to describe the human condition through an agonistic vocabulary, focusing on the ways we interact with one another because we disagree—because we are in a state of conflict—without recourse to the ineffectual, as is often the case in the discourse of agonistic democracy as it has developed over the last 30 years.

Rick: You’ve kind of circled back to something you said earlier. Earlier, you mentioned that one of the dangers of what you call the phronetic tradition is that, yes, the critique of instrumental reason was correct—it can be manipulated. It can be used in ways that take power out of our hands, and so on.

But now you come back around and say, “Okay, yes, that might be the case, but also this phronetic tradition is the only possibility for democracy.” Any recourse to the ineffectual is going to be inherently anti-democratic.

Before, you talked about the danger of the phronetic tradition. But now, you’re pointing out that while the danger still exists and may even be unavoidable, it’s a danger that exists within and is unavoidable in the very pursuit of democracy.

Dimitris: I completely agree with that. I think democracy is a very dangerous concept—not in a negative sense. It’s like something Jacques Derrida says: the greatest threat to democracy is democracy itself.

That idea goes back to the discourse on voluntary servitude that I mentioned earlier. Why is it that people choose to support a political power—whether it’s a single person, a group, or whatever—that doesn’t cater to the good? I think that’s a very pertinent question, especially following the November elections.

Leigh: You know, just a few days after the election, the comedian Jon Stewart made a comment that I think he probably intended as a bit of a salve for people who felt like they’d fallen into the pit of despair. It was also a reminder that elections aren’t really where democracy happens.

He called democracy a “lunch-pail job.” He said there are millions of people showing up every day, making little actions, navigating a million different bureaucratic structures to try to get something done, and then going back and recalculating their way through those structures to ensure it did get done. Then they get up the next day and do it again—forever.

And it seems to me that, in a way, the picture of ethics and politics you’re giving us here is also a lunch-pail job. It’s about a lot of local calculations. To the extent that we want to—as you said earlier—hang our hat on something like the presidential election that only happens once every four years, or congressional elections every two years, we’re really missing where ethics and politics actually take place.

Dimitris: At one level, I completely agree with you. In my terminology, democracy is indeed the agonistic condition: the idea that when we interact, that interaction presupposes a certain element of conflictuality.

Therefore, every action we undertake carries this charged, democratic element, as you described. However, I’d add one thing, and it’s important—I’ll confess that I’ve changed my mind about this over the years.

It seems to me that this idea of continuous democracy can lead in one of two directions. It can lead to a radical anarchism—“Hey, fuck institutions because they cancel out that continuous democratic element.” I’ll admit that, for a long time, I was in that camp. For a very long time.

Or, it can lead to a statist commitment, which says that institutions matter. There’s no ideal set of institutions, of course, but still, institutions matter. The way we interact at the everyday level is important, but the way those interactions are mediated by structures of power—legislated into institutions—also matters.

For me, it was really Spinoza who taught me that to truly belong to the phronetic tradition, you have to be an institutionalist. Anarchism, I think, is a cop-out. It can lead to nihilism, to the idea that whatever you do, it doesn’t matter—it’s all the same.

So, I’m a statist. I think every action we undertake has that democratic charge you’re describing, but let’s not forget that institutions matter.

Hannah Arendt is really good on this point as well. She argues that our actions structure the way we relate to one another. But let’s not forget the realm of the political—the constitution and the role it plays in shaping those interactions, and so on. I mean, there is an idea that our actions structure the way they relate to one another. But hey, let’s not forget the realm of the political—the constitution and the role it plays and so on.

Leigh: Well, I hate to be the one to say it, but unfortunately, our bartender has called last call.

Rick: What an appeal to transcendence!

Leigh: She’s asking us to calculate the judgment to get the hell out of here—ASAP.

Dimitris, this has been a truly fantastic conversation. I can’t thank you enough for joining us here.

Dimitris: The pleasure was mine. It’s always great to have a conversation accompanied by a nice drink.

Leigh: Indeed—and you’re welcome back for another anytime.

Dimitris: Absolutely.

Leigh: All right, folks, I’ll catch you next time.

David and Rick: Bye.