Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die

 

Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die: Steven Nadler in conversation with Alex Douglas.

 

“The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.” Spinoza
 
The seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza has long been known for his “heretical” view of God and for the radical determinism he sees governing the cosmos and human freedom. Only recently, however, has he begun to be considered in a serious way as a moral philosopher. In his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics, after establishing some metaphysical and epistemological foundations, he turns to the “big questions” that so often move one to reflect on, and even change, the values that inform one’s life: What is truly good? What is happiness? What is the relationship between being a good or virtuous person and enjoying happiness and human flourishing? In this conversation with fellow Spinoza scholar Alexander Douglas, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Steven Nadler connects Spinoza’s ideas with his life and times to offer a compelling account of how the philosopher can provide a guide to living one’s best life (and death).
 
Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy and Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. One of the world’s leading Spinoza scholars, his new book Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die is published in September.
 
Alexander Douglas is a lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He studies early modern rationalism, particularly various forms of Cartesianism and especially that of Spinoza. He is also interested in critiques of political economy and is the author of The Philosophy of Debt.
 
Recording of live webinar hosted by The Philosopher, on 21 September 2020.

 Princeton University Press

We often think of cancel culture as a contemporary phenomenon, driven by social media and rife in our hyper-connected world. But really, punishing people for their ideas and opinions has been going on for as long as people have been thinking. Take the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In the mid-17th century, Spinoza was charged with heresy and cast out from his Amsterdam Jewish community.

Since then, he's gone on to be canonised as one of the great Enlightenment thinkers — and even embraced as a hero of Judaism. But un-cancelling a cancelled philosopher is harder than you might expect, and three centuries later, there are still plenty of people who would prefer to see Spinoza hang onto his outcast status.

 Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 and raised in the city's Talmud Torah congregation. He had a traditional Jewish upbringing and education, attending the local yeshiva until the age of 17, when he went to work in his father's importing business. But Spinoza remained a scholar, and over the next few years, he began to lay the intellectual foundations for what would become one of the most celebrated bodies of work in European philosophy. At the time, however, Spinoza's ideas weren't being celebrated within his own community. While Spinoza's exact heresies weren't documented, rumours began to swirl of his unorthodox views, and he started clashing with the local religious authorities. It's said that at one point, a fanatic shouting "Heretic!" attacked Spinoza with a knife on the steps of the local synagogue. Things finally came to a head on July 27, 1656, when the congregation issued a writ of cherem or excommunication against the 23-year-old philosopher.

 Spinoza is vaguely accused of "evil opinions", "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds", but what religious wrongs did he actually commit? His later philosophical work — particularly the Ethics, published posthumously in 1677 — could offer some answers.  In it, Spinoza articulates a conception of God that would have been highly offensive to any observant Jew at the time. Spinoza's God lacks all the attributes of the God of the Torah, having no will or emotions, no psychological traits or moral character. His God makes no plans or judgments, issues no commandments, and possesses no wisdom or goodness. Spinoza's God is neither transcendent nor supernatural, being more or less reducible to Nature. Indeed, Spinoza's preferred term for this entity is "God or Nature". It's all a far cry from the God of Abraham and Moses, who led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt — and hardly surprising that Spinoza's ideas landed him in such hot water with the religious authorities of his day.

 What's more surprising is that Spinoza has, over the centuries, gone on to become a highly regarded figure in contemporary Judaism, if still a controversial one.  But not all modern Jews have adopted his ideas or extracted a definitive theology from them.  Certainly, from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, Spinoza remains as problematic today as he did in the 17th century. But even anti-Spinozans will admit that many of the big questions that lie at the foundations of modern Judaism — What does it mean to be a Jew? What must Jews believe? Is it possible to have a secular Jewish identity? — are either direct responses to Spinoza, or spring from the history of his interpretation.

 Spinoza has even been hailed as a proto-Zionist. The documentary evidence for this is slim — largely based on his assertion in his text Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that the Jewish people would "one day ... establish once more their independent state", provided they could summon the requisite "manliness" to do so. The passage is more of a loose speculation than a prescient endorsement of a Jewish state, but 19th-century European Zionists took it to mean that Spinoza had envisaged a Judaism based on nationalism. Elsewhere in his work they found a champion of the kind of Jewish identity that they saw in themselves and their project: reason-based, democratic, and at pains to separate rabbinic authority from political governance. And this notion of Spinoza as a secular saint of Zionism carried through to the birth of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, called Spinoza "the first Zionist of the last 300 years", embracing him as not just a philosopher who happened to be born a Jew, but a profoundly and definitively Jewish philosopher. So taken was Ben-Gurion with Spinoza that in 1953, he published a laudatory article about the philosopher that kicked off a raging debate about the justice of his excommunication three centuries earlier. Calls rang out within the Israeli parliament and the international Jewish press to have the original cherem rescinded, and opinions were sought from chief rabbis worldwide. The debate remained inconclusive, largely because neither David Ben-Gurion nor most of the world's Jewish leaders had the authority to reverse the original decision. According to Steven Nadler, a long-standing Spinoza scholar and philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the only people authorised to lift the cherem against Spinoza is the community that issued it in the first place — the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam.

 As it happens, the Amsterdam congregation still exists. In December 2015, they held a symposium to debate the proposition that the ban should be lifted. Scholars from four continents were invited to the symposium, to act as an advisory committee. One of the scholars was Professor Nadler. "They didn't want us to express an opinion as to whether the cherem was good or bad," he recalls. "They wanted to know: what were Spinoza's philosophical views, what were the historical circumstances of the ban, what might be the advantages of lifting the cherem, and what might be the disadvantages?"

The debate was held before an audience of over 500 people and, at its conclusion, the current rabbi of the congregation handed down his opinion: that Spinoza should remain where he was, officially cancelled, and (to quote the 1656 decision) "expelled from the people of Israel".

 Despite the ruling, Professor Nadler says most members of the community would have liked to see the cherem lifted. "It would have been a great PR move," he says. "[To annnounce,] 'Look, we're not the intolerant community of the 17th century, Spinoza is one of us and we're proud to own him.'"

But the rabbi thought differently. Professor Nadler says the religious leader asked: "Who am I to overrule my 17th-century predecessors? Am I that much wiser than them?" The rabbi also held that Spinoza's religious views, considered beyond the pale in 1656, had not really been made any less problematic by the passage of time. Once a renegade, always a renegade — particularly when the renegade in question remained proud and unrepentant in his heresy. "Spinoza knew the rules of the game," says Professor Nadler. "The rabbis warned him, and his response was 'Hey, you know what? I'm leaving anyway.'  "So you can't call the cherem a terrible miscarriage of justice." So Baruch Spinoza, rebel philosopher and abominable heretic, remains officially cancelled for the foreseeable future. Fortunately — for philosophers and secular Jews, but also for Orthodox Jews who welcome a provocative challenge to their theology — his works remain.

 The Jewish philosopher Spinoza was one of the great Enlightenment thinkers. So why was he 'cancelled'? By David Rutledge.  ABC Radio National , October 3, 2020

The abominable heretic

 In July 1656, the young philosopher Baruch Spinoza was cast out of his Jewish community for "abominable heresies". We don't know what those crimes were, but we do know that Spinoza has remained a polarising figure within Judaism ever since. On one hand, his philosophy is atheistic, based on the complete rejection of any notion of a sovereign or even conscious God. On the other hand, he's often hailed as one of the founding figures of progressive Judaism - even as a hero of Zionism. Spinoza is a puzzle, and this week we're putting some of the pieces together.

 David Rutledge interviews Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler. 

The Philosopher's Zone.   ABC Radio National , September 9, 2020. 

On July 27, 1656, the governors of Amsterdam’s Jewish synagogue read out a proclamation of excommunication. With unprecedented ferocity, it excoriated Baruch Spinoza for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds” and banished him from the community. “The fury and zeal of the Lord will burn against this man,” the judgment thundered, “and may the Lord erase his name from under the heavens.” With this the most famous Jewish philosopher in history was exiled by his people.

 
Spinoza, age 23, left Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter and Latinized his first name to Benedict. The causes of his banishment have been much debated. His father, a Portuguese merchant who had joined the flight of Sephardic Jews out of Iberia, had died two years before, leaving his sons a failing trading firm. Baruch Spinoza had scandalized his fellow Jews by having himself declared an orphan in order to escape his father’s debts.
 
But there can be little doubt that it was primarily Spinoza’s ideas, rather than his deeds, that condemned him. By 1656 he had likely begun to express his beliefs, later enshrined in his writings, that the Hebrew Scriptures were not the unerring word of God; that the Jews were not a chosen people; that there existed no immortal afterlife or divine providence. These views would have scandalized orthodox Jews but also the Christian governors of Amsterdam, at whose sufferance the Jews of the city lived in relative peace. Spinoza was a renegade whom the community could neither abide nor afford.
 
For the remainder of his short life Spinoza lived outside of Amsterdam, modestly and without family. To our knowledge he never left the Dutch Republic. He worked as an optical lens grinder, an occupation that probably killed him by filling his lungs with glass dust. Already versed in Hebrew language and Scripture, Spinoza secured an informal but rigorous education in the new philosophies of the era, particularly those of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes.
 
In the 1660s and ’70s, Spinoza produced one of the most significant intellectual systems in the history of Western philosophy. It encompassed natural science, religion, politics and ethics. Of his two masterworks, the “Ethics” was written first but remained unpublished when Spinoza began to fear the intolerant vigilance of the Dutch ministers. His “Theological-Political Treatise” was anonymously printed in 1670, to torrential public outrage. By his death in 1677, Spinoza’s infamy had spread well beyond Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter.
 
The standard biography of the man is the fascinating “Spinoza: A Life,” by Steven Nadler, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin. A revised edition of this much-admired book has recently appeared. It is highly recommended for the general reader. Spinoza’s philosophy is intricate and obscure, but Mr. Nadler writes with beautiful lucidity. There are large gaps in our knowledge of Spinoza’s life (his friends burned his papers), but Mr. Nadler fills out his narrative with absorbing accounts of Amsterdam’s Jews and Christians during the Dutch Golden Age.
 
Readers more interested in Spinoza’s philosophy, and particularly his ethical thinking, might instead turn to Mr. Nadler’s latest book, “Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die.” Spinoza inspires a rare devotion in many who study him. Descartes, Hobbes and Locke are all granted historical importance, but Spinoza is often read as a kind of timeless sage. There exists an entire genre recommending him to modern readers as a philosophical and ethical guide. “Think Least of Death” is just such a book. As an accessible introduction to the complex thought of Spinoza, it is a success. As an effort at advocacy, it is less of one.
 
The first sentence pulls no punches: “Every day billions of people devote a significant amount of time to worshiping an imaginary being.” Spinoza, Mr. Nadler continues, exposed this anthropomorphized God—who commands, judges and governs—as a “superstitious fiction.” Mr. Nadler is here speaking for or paraphrasing Spinoza—but there is no doubt that he endorses these teachings. His book is marked by a profound identification with its subject.
 
 
Spinoza’s ethics emerged from his ontology, his theory of all being. With Descartes and Hobbes, he swept aside the Aristotelianism that had, once adapted by Christian philosophers, dominated European intellectual life for centuries. This older and still powerful tradition held that every individual thing had a particular essence and end, with the whole animated by the purposes of a providential God. The new thinkers of the 17th century instead taught that, beneath the deceptive appearance of discrete “things,” the visible universe was a swirl of atomistic matter. Creation might have been launched by a God of some kind, but it was not sustained by constant divine intervention. The mechanistic laws of nature drove the universe forward, toward incomprehensible and perhaps random ends.
 
Descartes’s dualism preserved a realm of non-bodily spirit, where individual souls and God might exist alongside the material universe. Hobbes bit the bullet and reduced all things to matter. Descartes preserved human free will. Hobbes was a determinist: Human will, for him, was merely appetite produced by the clash of atoms.
 
For his part, Spinoza produced something like a fusion of these views. He preserved a figment of Descartes’s dualism by arguing that “ideas” existed in parallel with material extension (or visible things). But whereas, for Descartes, spirit and matter were two different substances, for Spinoza they were not. “There is and can only be,” explains Mr. Nadler, “one substance or ultimate reality—God or Nature—and so the human mind and the human body must be modes of or items in God or Nature.” Mr. Nadler makes a heroic effort at explaining this inscrutable doctrine. For practical purposes, Spinoza’s account of existence most resembled that of Hobbes: The mind is buffeted matter, lacking free will; God, if we must preserve the concept, is nothing more than the sum total of natural causes in an eternal physical universe.
 
Spinoza’s account of nature informed his ethics, which is the primary subject of Mr. Nadler’s book. “The inviolable necessity of Nature,” he writes of Spinoza’s philosophy, “governs not only the world of physical bodies—where apples fall from trees and rocks roll down hills—but also the domain of human activity, including whatever happens in the human mind.” According to Spinoza, some traditional notions with a powerful mental sway—our own free will, our ability to objectively measure good and evil or to recognize true beauty and ugliness—were nothing more than subjective fictions.
 
One can begin to see why Spinoza has earned a coterie of modern advocates. He elevated the material methodology of natural science into a metaphysics. His system appeals to the reductive “naturalism” of the modern outlook and to the militant atheism that is particularly strong among evolutionary biologists. Mr. Nadler—with Spinoza—wishes to convince us that a universe of matter, necessity and appetite can be ethical.
 
This is a heavy lift. Spinoza’s humans have no free will. Like all substance, they only strive—without conscious intention—to “preserve” and maintain themselves. For this purpose they seek power. Our emotions (happiness and sorrow) and our conventional moral valuations (good and evil) merely reflect the random waxing and waning of our power. The dominant notes here are egoism and a fatalistic determinism. “Whatever is, just is,” writes Mr. Nadler; “whatever happens, just happens (and had to happen).” This seems, he concedes, “a rather bleak picture, one worthy of the most radical form of nihilism.”
 
For Spinoza, however, the path through this thicket of blind wanting and striving is a kind of quietude. Contentment, or “blessedness,” is achieved by those who minimize the emotional turmoil triggered in them by exterior causes. The wise man (Spinoza was rather less confident about the capacities of women) would come to see his modest place in the whole of nature.
 
It has never been entirely clear that all of this holds together as a coherent ethics. Is Spinoza merely describing what is rather than what should be? Buffeting the mind from external agitation in a world of chaotic matter seems an impossible task. What is more, minds governed by irresistible nature can’t really intend or purposefully will themselves to learn, and so Spinoza’s blessed humans presumably can only “recognize” the truth of the universe, like some sort of elect elite granted a revelation. Spinoza surrendered the vulgar—those incapable of true “intuition”—to what he considered the noble lies of religion. But if happiness is all that we seek, what is wrong per se about living with such comforting illusions? Why should the minds of the wise track the truth of the universe at all? And if they do, why is Spinoza’s intuition that we humans lack free will superior to the much more common intuition that we enjoy it?
 
Mr. Nadler explores all of these questions, shoring up Spinoza’s system with a series of thoughtful, but often rather charitable, interpretations. He tries to soften Spinoza’s elitism and misogyny and to massage away the paradoxes of Spinoza’s deterministic account of freedom.
 
In the end, what is most striking is how traditional Spinoza’s ethical system remains. Much of it is lifted from Stoicism and the Abrahamic religions, counseling inner peace, a resistance to ambition and to unchecked appetite, freedom from the fear of death, control of the passions. It turns out that control of the passions requires honesty, fortitude, altruism and charity. These traditional virtues can, perhaps, be recoded as strategies for avoiding conflict with the exterior world, but such an effort is tendentious. There is no particular reason to think that virtuous living will fortuitously maximize individual power and happiness. Like most accounts of “enlightened” egoism, the notes of enlightenment here often seem smuggled in from older ethical systems that have better claims on them.
 
There is, in short, a question-begging quality to Spinoza’s philosophy. His cryptic and even bizarre account of nature doesn’t produce a particularly unique ethical outcome, and so the ethics lend no added plausibility to the science. Spinoza’s system reconciles an unorthodox theory of being with a conventional ethics, but there is nothing incontrovertible about the result. In many ways the sacrificial, modest and pacific life that he commended—and that he led—is profoundly appealing. But it is an ethic better supported by belief in foundational good and evil and human free will.
 
Like all materialists, Spinoza can’t demonstrate that free will and objective good and evil do not exist; nor can he disprove a God distinct from nature or a soul that lives beyond the body. Such things are not subject to physical measurement or experimentation. His own belief in the mechanistic world of blind matter, and the similar belief of his modern devotees, is at bottom a mere opinion, a faith—if you will—in disenchantment. It is perhaps telling that these faithful so delight in Spinoza’s conclusion that disillusioned laws of nature will not upend our traditional moral inheritance. With these assurances, the old heretic has become a consoling prophet.

Spinoza: A Heretical and Modern Mind. By Jeffrey Collins. The Wall Street Journal, October. 9, 2020 

Socrates says in Plato’s Gorgias that there’s nothing more serious than “the question [of] how we ought to live.” We may aspire to live a good and happy life—but what does such a life consist in? Good in what way? And happy how?
  
For a pious Jew or Christian, perhaps, the answer seems simple: a life in line with God’s will as expressed in the Bible. But what about the rest of us who have turned our backs on revelation? One of the first to do so was the Dutch Portuguese Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza in the seventeenth century. The prophets had no wisdom, he claimed, and the Bible’s picture of God was utterly wrong: there is no creator God who performs miracles and reveals his will to Moses, let alone records it on tablets. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Jewish community in 1656 for “horrible heresies.” He was twenty-three.) Spinoza had to find a new answer to that most serious question. Forget revelation, he argued, and follow reason, which will lead you to peace of mind and lasting joy. If you want to be “blessed” and “saved,” let the philosopher guide you, not the prophet.
 
This may strike some as hubris, but Spinoza was in good company: from Socrates to the skeptics, all ancient philosophers advertised their teachings as gateways to eudaimonia—a happy and flourishing life. They didn’t just ponder philosophical questions but also campaigned for philosophy. If you want to succeed in life, they argued, don’t seek advice from priests, poets, politicians, businessmen, or celebrities. It’s the philosopher’s job to investigate the true nature of things, including that of happiness. Plato dismissed Homer and Hesiod long before Spinoza dismissed the Bible.
 
In a new book on Spinoza’s ethics, Steven Nadler argues that Spinoza “fits well in this broad eudaimonistic tradition.” Over the centuries Spinoza has been many things to many readers: an atheist, a God-intoxicated man, a master metaphysician, a revolutionary, the founder of the radical enlightenment. But his “overriding goal,” according to Nadler, is to show us “the path to true wellbeing.” Nadler’s account of this path is clear, engaging, historically informed, and philosophically nuanced. But his ambition goes further. He suggests that the path Spinoza traces is one we can still walk on, as it provides “valuable insights about how to live today.”
 
It would be wonderful if Spinoza could show us a philosophical path to “blessedness” and “salvation.” It is “very hard,” Spinoza concedes in the Ethics, his philosophical masterwork, but “it can yet be discovered.” Nadler agrees; I don’t. Spinoza’s path is inseparable from his concept of God. As laid out in the Ethics, it starts with demonstrating God’s existence and nature, and ends with demonstrating that the best life consists in the intellectual love of God. That’s the God of the philosophers, to be sure, established by rational argument, not revelation. But it is still a God I doubt we can embrace.
 
There’s now a cottage industry of books that peddle philosophers, from Socrates to William James, as life coaches and therapists. The target audience is a secular, urban, often highly educated crowd eager for some form of “spiritual” guidance. Recent titles in this genre include John Kaag’s Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (2020), Edith Hall’s Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (2018), and Massimo Pigliucci’s How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (2017).
 
Spinoza may well be the best bet for moderns seeking a philosophical guide. He suggests that we can have our cake and eat it too: attain blessedness and salvation in a disenchanted world.
 

Nadler doesn’t explain why we should prefer Spinoza over others, but what he describes as Spinoza’s “bleak picture” of the world and of human nature offers a powerful argument for it. For Spinoza, no transcendent God designed the world, watches over it, and gives our lives purpose and meaning. Everything, moreover, is strictly determined, including our will. (If you believe that you freely chose the merlot over the cabernet sauvignon, that’s because you ignore the causal chain that determined your choice from all eternity.) Human beings are selfish, seek their advantage, and strive to increase their power. No wonder Friedrich Nietzsche applauded Spinoza as a precursor!

 
And yet, Spinoza thinks he can carve out a space for a free and joyful life in which we rise above the rollercoaster of fortune and emotions to attain peace of mind. If we pursue our advantage rationally, moreover, we’ll care for the well-being of others as much as for our own. Given Spinoza’s ostensibly “bleak” outlook, this sounds pretty cheerful.
 
Nadler duly lists echoes of ancient philosophers in Spinoza’s work, especially of Aristotle and the Stoics. But what makes Spinoza so intriguing isn’t that he picks up the “eudaimonistic tradition.” It is that he reinvents it. Spinoza not only breaks with the God of the Bible; he also breaks with untenable versions of the God of the philosophers that underpin the ancient concepts of the good life—Aristotle’s unmoved mover, for example, or the Stoic divine mind that providentially orders the universe. That’s why Spinoza may well be the best bet for moderns seeking a philosophical guide. He suggests that we can have our cake and eat it too: attain blessedness and salvation in a disenchanted world.

But how disenchanted is Spinoza’s world, really? On Nadler’s view, it is “worthy of the most radical form of nihilism.” That’s exaggerated. Spinoza isn’t Nietzsche, for whom God is dead. For Spinoza, God is everything. True, he identifies God with Nature (“Deus sive Natura,” as he famously puts it). But Spinoza’s “Nature” isn’t the universe of modern physics: an expanding, mostly empty space that burst into existence 14 billion years ago. It is an eternal, infinite substance whose infinite power produces every possible thing. Nadler denies that for Spinoza this amounts to the best possible world—but it does. Spinoza’s world isn’t best in the sense that God has optimized it for human beings. But it is best in the sense that it includes every level of perfection from the highest to the lowest. Even the withering flowers you forgot to water on the balcony add to it. Their existence admittedly expresses God’s being and power in a very limited way, yet without them, the world would lack something. Spinoza, in short, equates being, power, and goodness. God is the best thing because his being and power are infinite. All other things have as big a share in God’s goodness as they have being and power. At work here is a version of the “principle of plenitude” that can be traced back to Plato.
 
If God is the best thing, he is as foundational for Spinoza’s ethics as he is for his metaphysics. Spinoza couldn’t be clearer on this in a letter to Jacob Ostens, his most forceful rejection of the charge of atheism:
 
    “Does that man, pray, renounce all religion, who declares that God must be acknowledged as the highest good, and that he must be loved as such in a free spirit? And that in this alone does our supreme happiness and our highest freedom consist?”
 
Plainly, we can’t detach Spinoza’s concept of the best life from his concept of God. What does such a life look like, why does he think we should choose it, and why does Nadler concur?
 
The shape of our lives depends to a large extent on the good we aim at. Consider how starkly the lives of Giacomo Casanova, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Immanuel Kant differed: the first pursued sensual pleasure, the second power, and the third wisdom as the highest good. Spinoza, like his ancient forebears, wants us to center our life on the true good.
 
One of his early works, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, opens with a stylized autobiographical text that also serves as the starting point for Nadler’s book. Spinoza tells us how he “resolved” to turn away from what “men regard as the highest good”—things like “riches, honor, and sensual pleasure”—to pursue “the true good” which affords “continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.” The conventional goods have in common that they’re transient and unstable: beauty fades, children leave the house, power and honor can be lost (Napoleon died in exile on St. Helena), health decays, crystal shatters, a villa burns down, the stock market crashes.
 
 If the love of God could reliably offer us superior joy (which, on top of it, doesn’t cease with our physical demise), we would be fools to neglect it for the sake of “riches, honor, and sensual pleasure.” That’s a big “if,” of course, but Spinoza is confident he can prove it. His portrait of the homo liber, the “free man” who pursues his advantage guided by reason, is meant to illustrate this choice. He is, Nadler contends, Spinoza’s “model of human nature,” the ideal we all should aim at.
 
But on closer inspection, it is not clear that “freedom” in Spinoza’s sense is better than “bondage.” Consider children: I love mine; they’re a source of great delight. But they’re also a source of anxiety: Will they succeed in life? Fall sick or be harmed in other ways? What will I do when the nest is empty? How can I prepare for the final goodbye? If my happiness depends on my children, I’m in bondage: how well my life goes depends on “fortune”—factors I can’t fully control. The anxiety this induces disrupts my peace of mind. The “free man” is free because he is able to detach from such transient goods and connect to the true good whose attainment is entirely in his power. Unlike me, he won’t lose sleep over a child’s fever or college entrance exam.
 
The “true good,” Spinoza argues, consists in intellectual activity: in particular, what he calls amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God. Just as all things necessarily follow from God’s nature, we can deduce all things from the idea of God. Since the idea of God is innate, not acquired, we depend on nothing outside of us. We do for nature’s rational order what a geometrician does for the properties of space: deduce them from self-evident axioms. In Spinoza’s view, the mind knows God as it knows the axioms of geometry (we know, rather than learn, that things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another). All we have to do, then, if we want to be happy, is to start deducing. And since God—in the form of his innate idea in our mind—is the cause of our happiness, we will love him in return.

But even if we buy into Spinoza’s rationalist account of knowledge, why should deducing truths from God be a source of supreme joy? Spinoza, as we saw, equates being and goodness. Since existing is good, all things hold on to their existence as much as they can (even the withering flowers on your balcony try to hang in there for as long as possible). This “strive to persevere” is Spinoza’s fundamental law of nature. Success here depends on power—the power to keep oneself going and ward off external threats. The more power the better. That’s why an increase in power is experienced as joy, a decrease as sadness. Power for Spinoza isn’t measured in the number of people you can boss around, but in the number of effects you cause. God’s power is infinite; he is the cause of infinite effects, Spinoza’s universe containing all possible things.
 
The more effects we cause, in short, the more powerful we become, and the more our life is filled with joy. We produce the largest number of effects by deducing true insights from the idea of God in us. Intellectual activity, therefore, is our greatest source of power and joy. (On Spinoza’s scale, Albert Einstein was much more powerful than Adolf Hitler.) It also makes us successful in more conventional ways. Expertise in nutrition and anatomy, for example, helps us to efficiently preserve our health. The “free man” navigates the world wisely, but this is but a side benefit. The main value of knowledge lies in the joy derived from understanding.
 
All of this will be a tough sell to secular readers looking for guidance in confusing, fitful times. Even if we acknowledge that a “strive to persevere” defines us, are we also ready to attribute this to our being finite expressions of an infinite God who hold on to the portion of goodness that constitutes our existence? Do we persevere most successfully by deducing true insights from the innate idea of God? And are our fellow human beings valuable only as a means to our persevering? This doesn’t mean that Spinoza was wrong, of course (Charles Darwin’s theory also was a tough sell, and still is in some circles). But Spinoza’s view is surely not obvious, and certainly not immune to challenge. If Nadler wants us to embrace it, he needs to do a lot of convincing. There is a great deal of strange metaphysics we must take on board if we want to view the world through Spinoza’s eyes.
 
Though Nadler sketches the metaphysical foundations of Spinoza’s free man, he doesn’t defend them. Instead he argues that the ideal is inclusive (he translates “homo liber” as “free person” to signal that women can be free, too, despite some unflattering things Spinoza says about their intellectual abilities). And he shows that it is attainable on Spinoza’s terms. That’s persuasive enough. But what we want to know is not if the ideal is attainable on Spinoza’s terms, but on ours. Does Spinoza’s love of God remain a viable path to a good and free life?

Nadler’s book is strongest when he explains what the free man’s life actually looks like. Detaching from transient goods (“riches, honor, and sensual pleasure”) allows him to be moderate, courageous, and generous, as well as to avoid hatred, envy, and vanity. He’ll also do everything in his power to promote the well-being of others—not because he is an altruist, but because he knows that a life in the company of wise people like himself gives him the best shot at focusing on the love of God. Here Spinoza builds on one of the greatest draws of the eudaimonistic tradition: making morality, including caring for others, part of seeking one’s own advantage. Spinoza even manages to rationalize Christ’s command to love our enemies: if I love my enemy, I do good things for him, which increases his power and joy. Since we necessarily love the cause of our joy, my enemy’s hostility toward me will turn into love, which, in turn, increases my power and joy. Everybody wins!
 
Nadler insists, correctly, that the free man remains part of, and interacts with, the natural and social world. Nobody can live from the love of God alone. As Spinoza writes in the Ethics:
 
   “It is part of the wise man . . . to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater and other things of this kind, which anyone can use.”

But Spinoza stresses that he does so “in moderation . . . without injury to another.” To the extent that these things are empowering, they add joy to the free man’s life. Detaching from transient goods, then, doesn’t mean rejecting them altogether like an ascetic, but desiring them in the appropriate way—as means to the true good, not as ends in themselves. What allows the free man to maintain the right measure of detachment—neither succumbing to the lure of transient goods nor despairing over their loss—is that the joy derived from the love of God overpowers whatever joy transient goods offer and whatever pain their loss inflicts. This, Nadler contends, is the key to freedom for Spinoza. Like everyone, the free man is affected positively and negatively by the things around him. But these things can’t move him to act. He won’t eat the apple because it looks tasty but rather because it sustains his intellectual activity. Love of God, not love of the apple, draws him to the fruit basket. From deducing to eating, he is always in charge of his acts.
 
Even marriage and children, Spinoza says, can be beneficial in this instrumental way. And if the free man’s child were in hospital with a severe illness, he’d behave like a good parent—do all he can to save the child, cheer the child up, and delight in the child’s love. But if the child dies, the free man wouldn’t shed a tear. The pain of the loss is eclipsed by the joy derived from the love of God.
 
My objection is not that I find this behavior heartless; I just don’t think that we can make it work. For a Spinozist, it makes perfect sense to choose freedom over bondage. Detaching from transient goods—including loved ones—liberates the Spinozist to wholeheartedly embrace the good he deems most worth desiring. It’s an excellent trade-off. But if Spinoza’s true good doesn’t exist, then detaching from transient goods leaves us with no good at all.

 
 Grasping the order of things caused by God, Spinoza contends, provides supreme joy. But how delightful is understanding the structure of the universe, really? Can it comfort us over life’s losses? Frankly, I don’t find reflecting on the age, size, and composition of the universe and my place in it especially uplifting. I can’t see how it would help me come to terms with the death of a loved one. Nadler thinks that determinism does much of the comforting. But will parents not be devastated over their child’s death from leukemia if they recognize that it was inevitable given the system of causes and effects? I think detachment is Spinoza’s key to consolation, which, in turn, requires loving God. So unless we can make a compelling case for Spinoza’s God, or some other God who can do his job, the fleeting joy of transient goods is all we have (nights wrecked by anxiety over children notwithstanding). In the disenchanted world, we can manage our bondage more or less well, but not break the chains and attain blessedness and salvation.
 
Nadler’s book is an excellent introduction to Spinoza’s ideal of the free man. He shows how appealing this ideal is—but I doubt that he’ll convince many readers to adopt it.
 
Are we doomed, then, if we can’t find a way to God through either faith or reason? I don’t think so. For one thing, transient goods are goods, and there’s plenty we can do to make them less vulnerable to fortune: from finding cures for diseases to distributing health care, wealth, and recognition fairly.
 
We should, moreover, seek rational guidance to manage our attachments to transient goods, though less from metaphysics than from empirical sciences such as biology and psychology. In often surprising ways, these correct our assumptions about what makes lives better or worse. Psychologists, for example, have shown that winning the lottery or becoming paraplegic affects a person’s well-being much less than we would expect.

Attaching to a higher good that gives our life purpose adds a great deal of value as well. But we’ll have to take it down a notch: not Deus sive Natura, but contributing to an artistic or literary tradition, joining a scientific endeavor, finding meaningful work, championing a noble political or social cause. Such attachments, besides being valuable in themselves, surely also help to mitigate losses we suffer among more fragile goods.
 
Finally, not looking at the universe as perfect by default (even in Spinoza’s sense of perfection which doesn’t mean perfection for humans) makes it much easier to embrace one of the most distinctive ideals of our time: to make the world better (and, with increasing urgency, preserve it from destruction).
 
Note, also, that I’m not saying that Spinoza’s God doesn’t exist. Einstein famously equated Spinoza’s God with what he considered the universe’s intelligibility. When a cardinal charged his theories as “cloaking . . . ghastly atheism,” an upset rabbi from New York cabled Einstein: “Do you believe in God?” Einstein cabled back: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the lawful order of existence, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and doings of mankind.”
 
What I am saying is that we can’t have the one without the other—Spinoza’s path to well-being and freedom without amor dei intellectualis. If we want to convert modern readers to Spinozism, we need to convince them that Spinoza’s God exists and that loving him is the highest good.
 
But if Spinoza can’t sway us, is this a reason not to study him? That surely doesn’t follow. On the contrary: What better opportunity to break out of our echo chamber than a philosopher of the past who has put together—with exceeding care and powerful arguments—a view of the world and of the good life that we disagree with? At the very least, it’s a chance to critically reflect on and give reasons for our own convictions. If we engage in conversations across religious, cultural, and ideological divides to consider alternative views and entertain the possibility that the other is right and we are wrong, why would we make a pass on as astute an interlocutor as Spinoza? We may not agree with Spinoza’s answer to Socrates’s question in the Gorgias—“the question of how we ought to live.” But he can certainly help us to avoid the “unexamined life” which, as Socrates says in Plato’s Apology, “is not worth living.”
 
 
 
Can We Deduce Our Way to Salvation? By Carlos Fraenkel. Boston Review , December 14, 2020

Jeremy Bentham : Nothing But Pleasure and Pain

Jeremy Bentham was born in Houndsditch, London – not far from the present-day Aldgate underground station – on February 15, 1748 and died at his home in Queen’s Square Place, Westminster (the site of his enormous garden is now occupied by the Ministry of Justice) on June 6, 1832. He grew up in the Age of Enlightenment, lived through the American and French Revolutions, witnessed the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and died at the height of the Romantic period. He spent most of his life in London, though for two-and-a-half years in the late 1780s he stayed with his younger brother and naval engineer Samuel at Krichëv in Russia, had summer retreats at farms in Hendon and Oxted, and in 1813–17 rented the idyllic Ford(e) Abbey, Devon (now Somerset). Bentham’s father Jeremiah was a successful lawyer, who accumulated a large property portfolio, including the house and garden in Queen’s Square Place which Jeremy inherited in 1792. His mother Alicia Whitehorn, the  daughter of  a mercer from Andover, died in 1759, having borne seven children, of whom only Jeremy and Samuel survived. Jeremy was learning Latin and Greek before his fifth birthday, was sent, aged seven, as a lodger to Westminster School, and such was his precociousness that in 1760, at the age of twelve, he began his studies at Queen’s College, Oxford. He took his BA degree in 1764, aged sixteen, reputedly the youngest person up to that time to graduate, and was admitted to the bar on his twenty-first birthday in 1769. His father had ear-marked him for a career in law, hoping that he would rise to the summit of the legal profession as Lord Chancellor of England. Bentham decided, however, that such was the absurdity of English law, rather than practising it, his vocation lay in reforming it. Having been born into a politically conservative and religiously orthodox upwardly mobile middle-class metropolitan family – his step-brother (his father re-married) Charles Abbot distinguished himself as Speaker of the House of Commons and was raised to the peerage as Baron Colchester – Bentham became one of the most severe critics of Britain’s political, legal and religious establishments that the country has ever known.

It was again in 1769, in what he termed “a most interesting year”, that Bentham formulated the ethical doctrine we now know as classical utilitarianism. A theological version of the doctrine  was first expounded in 1731 by John Gay, a Cambridge don, and eventually received its most popular statement in William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785). According to the theological utilitarians, it was God’s will that we should promote the happiness of his creatures, and if we did so, we would be rewarded with the pleasures of heaven, but if we inflicted pain and misery, we would be punished by the pains of hell. According to Bentham, who developed his secular utilitarianism independently, the right and proper action was that which promoted “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”, with happiness being understood as a balance of pleasure over pain, and conversely misery or suffering as a balance of pain over pleasure. Terms such as “right” and “wrong” and “good” and “evil” only made sense when they were related to pleasure and pain: the only good was pleasure and the only evil was pain. Taking into account all its consequences, an action was right when it led to a preponderance of pleasure and wrong when it led to a preponderance of pain. In Bentham’s hands, the principle of utility was a critical standard by which institutions, laws and practices could be examined and, if found wanting, reformed.

Bentham’s secularism was a product of a religious scepticism that was evident by the time he took his degree. He was required to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. He was reluctant to do so. The dilemma he faced was between compromising his intellectual integrity and disappointing his father. He subscribed, but resented it for the rest of his life – a resentment that eventually bore fruit in his scathing Church-of-Englandism and its Catechism Examined (1818), which was ostensibly a call to divorce the provision of education from any religious test, but which exposed the corrupt practices of the established Church and made mockery of its doctrine. A major influence, who drove Bentham towards his radical secularism, was Epicurus, or rather modern writers in the Epicurean tradition – and particularly writers associated with the materialist wing of the French Enlightenment. He took two crucial lessons from the Epicureans: first, all that mattered was reducible to pleasure and pain; and second, our senses had access to nothing beyond the physical world. Given that our knowledge was founded on sense-experience – in other words, our perceptions of the physical world – we could know of nothing beyond that physical world. All talk of the supernatural, whether of angels, devils, or God, was either fantasy or nonsense. Bentham was not an atheist insofar as that implied a belief that there was no God. The proper basis for belief was evidence – faith was belief without evidence – but there could be no evidence to claim that God either existed or did not exist. Underlying Bentham’s utilitarianism, therefore, was a materialist ontology. For a proposition to make sense, it had ultimately to be related to “real entities”, that is to objects existing in the physical world. Bentham invented the technique of “paraphrasis” in order to make sense of propositions that included abstract terms, such as right, obligation and power, and which as such did not represent a real entity. To say that a person had a legal right to a service meant that another person lay under an obligation to provide that service, and to lie under an obligation meant that one faced the prospect of suffering a pain imposed by a legislator. Hence, talk about legal rights made sense because such propositions could be translated into other propositions referring to such real entities as persons, objects and sensations. The problem with “natural rights” as instanced in the French Declaration of Rights of 1791 was that they were, at best, wishful thinking, since no legislator had created them: hence, “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts”.

Bentham’s career through to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 was dominated by his efforts to draw up a complete penal code based on his utilitarian science of legislation. In 1764 he had returned to Oxford to listen to the lectures of William Blackstone, which would be published as the famous Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9). Bentham was far from impressed by Blackstone’s celebration of the English common law, which, in his view, was characterized by “[f]iction, tautology, technicality, circuity, irregularity, [and] inconsistency”. Made up by judges, the common law was “dog law” – equivalent to a man beating his dog in his yard for doing something of which he disapproved, and then expecting all the other dogs in the neighbourhood to know that they would be beaten if they did the same thing. Bentham advocated a codified system, enacted in a publicly accessible way by the legislator, the only proper source of legal authority. Certain states, such as Prussia, and later France under Napoleon, had introduced law codes, but, according to Bentham, these schemes were no more than consolidation, where, instead of the law consisting of several little piles of rubbish, it was heaped up into one big pile. In contrast, the legislator should proceed logically, beginning with the general principle that no action should be designated an offence, and thereby subjected to punishment, unless it caused harm. Such harm could be caused to one’s self, to a particular individual, to a part of the community, or to the community as a whole. In the case of the individual, he or she might be harmed in person, property, reputation, or condition in life (status); and in the case of person, in mind or body; and if in body by corporal injury, restraint or compulsion, banishment or confinement, and homicide; and so on. The result of such a classification would be a “map of Jurisprudence”. If an action did not find a place on the map, then it was no offence and people should be left at liberty to perform it. Bentham devised a detailed set of recommendations for the organization of a complete code of laws, explaining, for instance, the distinction and relationship between civil, penal, constitutional and procedural law in a form radically different to that accepted by Blackstone and other English lawyers of the time. Bentham’s basic approach was that the law should be “cognoscible” and justice accessible. Make it easy for everyone to know the relevant law and give everyone easy access to a judge whenever they needed it.

Bentham is perhaps best known now as the promoter of the panopticon prison scheme and for his “auto-icon”, the combination of skeleton, stuffing, clothes and wax head that for many years resided in a pair of wooden boxes in the South Cloisters of University College London, but has recently been moved to a glass case in the University’s new Student Centre. He would have approved of the openness and transparency of his new lodgings, for these were features he incorporated into the design of the panopticon, a circular or polygonal building in which a central inspector could supervise the activities of those on the periphery. Samuel Bentham invented the idea, or at least first applied it to practice, in workshops in Russia. When Jeremy visited, he realized that it could be adapted to any institution that would benefit from central inspection, whether a factory, hospital, school, or prison. At the time Bentham was writing, building national penitentiaries for male and female prisoners was on the government’s agenda, since some alternative to transportation to America, which had been curtailed by the War of Independence, had to be found. The government did find an alternative destination – in 1787 the First Fleet sailed to Botany Bay – but the colony could not cope with large numbers of convicts, while others were not liable to be transported. To meet the demand for a penitentiary, Bentham proposed his panopticon, which led to the passing of the Penitentiary Act of 1794 authorizing its construction. Having suffered a series of rebuttals and delays, Bentham was put in possession of a site at Millbank, but was eventually informed by government in 1803 that the panopticon would not be built. When a penitentiary was eventually constructed at Millbank and opened in 1816, it was a confusing, dark labyrinth made up of six interconnected pentagons, rather than the open and light-filled iron and glass circular structure that Bentham had envisaged. Bitterly disappointed, Bentham felt that a decade of his life had been wasted. He had made one last determined effort in 1802–3 to save the panopticon. Drawing on his general position that colonies produced expense, war, corruption and bad government, he argued that the penal colony in Australia was objectionable not only on the grounds that it was a colony, but also because it could not achieve any of the proper ends of punishment – example, reformation, deterrence, compensation and economy – that would be achieved by the panopticon.

One of the effects of the failure of the panopticon scheme, and perhaps of the government’s refusal to listen to various other schemes that Bentham proposed in the 1790s and early 1800s – including the housing of the nation’s poor in a network of pauper panopticons and measures of financial reform – was to drive Bentham to political radicalism. The political system was dominated by the monarchy and aristocracy, though there had been increasingly vocal demands since the American War of Independence for a widening of the franchise. In 1809 Bentham began writing in favour of “democratic ascendancy”, whereby effective power would be placed in a House of Commons elected annually by universal male suffrage (though Bentham had advocated for women’s suffrage as early as 1789, he saw no prospect of achieving it until other reforms had been implemented), and from around 1818 committed himself to republicanism. His “Constitutional Code”, the major endeavour of the final decade of his life, was a detailed blueprint for a representative democracy. Rejecting the standard doctrine of a separation of powers between executive, legislative and judiciary, Bentham insisted on the primacy of the electorate – “[t]he sovereignty is in the people” – to whom the legislative power, vested in a single assembly, would be subordinate, while the executive and judicial powers would each be subordinate to the legislative. Early in his career, Bentham had accepted that rulers wished to promote the well-being or interests of their subjects, but lacked the relevant legislative science to understand how to do this effectively. He had intended to present a penal code to a monarch such as Catherine the Great of Russia, who would recognize its merit and order its adoption. His experience with the panopticon prison scheme drew him to the conclusion that rulers did not want to further the interests of their subjects, but their own interests. This opposition of interests between rulers and subjects could be resolved by a democratic system of government, organized in such a way that rulers could promote their own interests only by promoting the interests of the community as a whole. In this respect, the eighteenth-century Bentham of the Enlightenment made the transition to the nineteenth-century Bentham of political radicalism, and thereby made Enlightenment values relevant to the democratic age.

Less acceptable to the Victorians, had they known much about them, however, would have been Bentham’s writings on religion and sexual morality. The typical attitude towards homosexuality had been expounded by Blackstone: “the crime against nature” had received its divine condemnation in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and was rightly punished by death. As early as his first major published work A Fragment on Government (1776), Bentham had argued that consensual sex between men should be decriminalized, on the grounds that the law should only prohibit and punish practices that caused harm overall (and not always then), but that there was no harm in consensual sexual activity. People engaged in it because they expected pleasure. He developed these ideas in detail in essays written in 1785 and again in the mid-1810s. Bentham argued that the dominant attitude, whereby all sexual activity apart from that between one man and one woman within the confines of marriage for the procreation of children was condemned, had its origin in the Mosaic Law and the teachings of St Paul. Bentham’s strategy was to draw a distinction between the teachings of Jesus and those of Paul – while the latter was an adherent of asceticism (favouring pain over pleasure or at least the denial of pleasure), since it furthered his purpose of gaining control of the followers of the nascent Christian religion, Jesus himself was a proto-utilitarian. Bentham suggested that Christians, if they were seriously committed to their religion, should adhere to Jesus’s acts and teachings, and reject the contrary injunctions of Paul. There was evidence in the Gospels that Jesus was not an asexual being, as the orthodox portrayed him, but was bisexual, given the presence of many women as well as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” among his followers. There was, moreover, he maintained, “the stripling clad in loose attire” who stayed with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane after all the disciples had fled (Mark 14:51–2). He appeared to be a male prostitute, and may have been Jesus’s lover. As for Sodom and Gomorrah, if any crime had been condemned by their destruction, it was not sex between men, but gang rape.

There is much more besides in Bentham’s corpus awaiting our discovery. We are still far from being able to offer a definitive account of Bentham’s thought because the authoritative edition of his works is still in progress. An incomplete and poorly edited version of The Works of Jeremy Bentham, issued between 1838 and 1843 “under the superintendence” of Bentham’s literary executor John Bowring, has traditionally been the main resource for Bentham scholars, at least for those who go beyond the opening chapters of his best-known work An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). Bentham himself printed or published around fifty works, ranging from short pamphlets to the massive 2,500 page Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827), edited by the young John Stuart Mill. When Bentham printed or published a text, he usually destroyed the manuscripts on which it was based. Nevertheless, there survives an archive of around 100,000 pages of his writings, divided between the larger collection in University College London Library and the smaller in the British Library. While some of this material consists of correspondence and family papers, the bulk of it is related to works that Bentham did not publish or only partially published. UCL’s Bentham Project (of which I am Director) was established in 1959 in order to produce a new authoritative edition of Bentham’s works and correspondence under the generic title of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. To date, thirty-four volumes have been published, but it will take around eighty to bring the edition to completion. There is no other comparable project of its size and philosophical importance in the Western world, with the possible exception of the Marx–Engels edition in Germany. Transcribe Bentham, an online scholarly crowdsourcing initiative, is an  attempt to accelerate the production of the Collected Works. Volunteers select a manuscript image, enter the text into a transcription box, and submit it to the Bentham Project, where it is checked and added to an online digital repository. Since 2010, members of the general public have transcribed over 23,000 pages of Bentham’s manuscripts, but there remain tens of thousands of pages still to do. If you happen to have a little bit of time on your hands, the Bentham Project would welcome your involvement.

Philip Schofield is Professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought, Director of the Bentham Project, and General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, in the Faculty of Laws, University College London.

Jeremy Bentham: Nothing but pleasure and pain.  By Philip Schofield. The Times Literary Supplement,  June 4, 2020.

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his will that his body be dissected and put on public display. This came to pass, and his skeleton now sits in a glass case at University College London, adorned with a wax head, waistcoat and jacket and sat on a wooden stool, staring out at students from its glass case.

Bentham was regarded as the founder of utilitarianism and a leading advocate of the separation of church and state, freedom of expression and individual legal rights. And now, from beyond the grave, his cadaver contains a webcam that records the movements of its spectators and broadcasts them live online, part of UCL’s PanoptiCam project which tests, amonst other things, surveillance algorithms. As I write this, a young couple are walking across the corridor, his hand pressed against the small of her back.

Prof Melissa Terras, director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, tells me that the camera is used to learn the best way “to identify and count different people in still images, accurately.” UCL are hoping that it will spark discussion around contemporary surveillance, but it isn’t a coincidence that this webcam is attached to Bentham’s box. The PanoptiCam project is a pun on the “panopticon”, a type of institutional building that has long dominated Bentham’s legacy.

 As a work of architecture, the panopticon allows a watchman to observe occupants without the occupants knowing whether or not they are being watched. As a metaphor, the panopticon was commandeered in the latter half of the 20th century as a way to trace the surveillance tendencies of disciplinarian societies. Is it still a useful way to think about surveillance in an age of NSA and GCHQ?

The basic setup of Bentham’s panopticon is this: there is a central tower surrounded by cells. In the central tower is the watchman. In the cells are prisoners – or workers, or children, depending on the use of the building. The tower shines bright light so that the watchman is able to see everyone in the cells. The people in the cells, however, aren’t able to see the watchman, and therefore have to assume that they are always under observation.

“The panopticon wasn’t originally Bentham’s idea. It was his brother’s,” says Philip Schofield, professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought and Director of the Bentham Project at UCL.

“His brother Samuel was working in Russia on the estate in Krichev and he had a relatively unskilled workforce, so he sat himself in the middle of this factory and arranged his workforce in a circle around his central desk so he could keep an eye on what everyone was doing.”

Bentham went to visit his brother in the late 1780s, saw what he was doing, and decided the centralised arrangement could be applied to all sorts of different situations - not just prisons but factories, schools and hospitals.

Bentham managed to persuade the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, to fund a panopticon National Penitentiary, but a stream of problems eventually meant the project was abandoned. Bentham never saw a panopticon built during his lifetime. A number of prisons have since incorporated panopticon elements into their design but it wasn’t until the 1920s that the closest thing to a panopticon prison was built – the Presidio Modelo complex in Cuba, infamous for corruption and cruelty, now abandoned.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault revitalised interest in the panopticon in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish. Foucault used the panopticon as a way to illustrate the proclivity of disciplinary societies subjugate its citizens.

He describes the prisoner of a panopticon as being at the receiving end of asymmetrical surveillance: “He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication.”

As a consequence, the inmate polices himself for fear of punishment.

“The principle is central inspection,” Schofield tells me. “You can do central inspection by CCTV. You don’t need a round building to do it. Monitoring electronic communications from a central location, that is panoptic. The real heart of Bentham’s panoptic idea is that there are certain activities which are better conducted when they are supervised.”

In many ways, the watchtower at the heart of the panopticon is a precursor to the cameras fastened to our buildings – purposely visible machines with human eyes hidden from view.

The parallels between the panopticon and CCTV may be obvious, but what happens when you step into the world of digital surveillance and data capture? Are we still “objects of information” as we swipe between cells on our smartphone screens?

Jake Goldenfein, researcher at the Centre for Media and Communications Law, University of Melbourne, tells me it’s important to remember the corrective purposes of Bentham’s panopticon when considering it as a metaphor for modern surveillance.

“The relevance of the panopticon as a metaphor begins to wither when we start thinking about whether contemporary types of visuality (effectively digital and data-driven) are analogous to the central tower concept. For example, whether this type of visuality is as asymmetrical, and – I think more importantly – being co-opted for the same political exercise. Does the fact that we don’t know we’re being watched mean we are being normalised in the way the panopticon was intended to correct behaviour?”

As Goldenfein suggests, the asymmetrical exposure of inmates in Bentham’s building is of a different order to how government bodies such as GCHQ conduct surveillance. In the panopticon the occupants are constantly aware of the threat of being watched – this is the whole point – but state surveillance on the internet is invisible; there is no looming tower, no dead-eye lens staring at you every time you enter a URL.

It wasn’t until the Snowden leaks that the scale of NSA and GCHQ operations became known. This arguably makes the system more panoptic post-Snowden, when we are aware of it, but it hasn’t been the official rhetoric. The original emphasis, and still the emphasis today, hasn’t been on correcting behaviour but on providing security, namely from terrorists.

Another important difference is the relative intangibility of data surveillance. With Bentham’s panopticon, and to some extent CCTV, there is a physical sense of exposure in the face of authority.

In the private space of my personal browsing I do not feel exposed – I do not feel that my body of data is under surveillance because I do not know where that body begins or ends. We live so much of our lives online, share so much data, but feel nowhere near as much attachment for our data as we do for our bodies. Without physical ownership and without an explicit sense of exposure I do not normalise my actions. If anything, the supposed anonymity of the internet means I do the opposite.

My data, however, is under surveillance, not only by my government but also by corporations that make enormous amounts of money capitalising on it. Not only that, but the amount of data on offer to governments and corporations is about to go through the roof, and as it does the panopticon may emerge as a model once more. Why? Because our bodies are about to be brought back into the mix.

The looming interconnectivity between objects in our homes, cars and cities, generally referred to as the internet of things, will change digital surveillance substantially. With the advent of wider networked systems, heralded by the likes of Google’s Brillo and Apple’s HomeKit, everything from washing machines to sex toys will soon be able to communicate, creating a vast amount of data about our lives. And this deluge of data won’t only be passed back and forth between objects but will most likely wind its way towards corporate and government reservoirs.

With everything from heart-rate monitors in smartwatches to GPS footwear, a bright light is once again being thrown on our bodies. Will we feel exposed under the gaze of a central tower? Perhaps not, but with habits and physical stats charted against the norm, we will feel scrutinised nevertheless. Much of the justification of this is the alleged benefits to health and wellbeing. “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated” – not Apple marketing material but Bentham’s words on the panopticon.

There may not be a central tower, but there will be communicating sensors in our most intimate objects.

Bentham didn’t want the panopticon to be a tool for oppression, and in fact its failure eventually led him to develop a type of anti-panopticon later in life – where a minister sits in an exposed room and is surrounded by members of the public who listen and ask questions.

The idea is that this transparency holds power to account, because the most dangerous people in society can be rulers. It is important that they, as well as prisoners, workers and children, feel watched.

It is difficult not to think of that audience chamber when you stare at Bentham in his box, a skeleton on a stool, an object of information posed for all to see.

What does the panopticon mean in the age of digital surveillance? The parallel between Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and CCTV may be clear, but what happens when you step into the world of data capture? 

By Thomas McMullen. The Guardian, July 23, 2015.

As he lay dying in the spring of 1832, the great philosopher Jeremy Bentham left detailed directions for the preservation of his corpse. First, it was to be publicly dissected in front of an invited audience. Then, the preserved head and skeleton were to be reassembled, clothed, and displayed "in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought and writing". His desire to be preserved forever was a political statement. As the foremost secular thinker of his time, he wanted to use his body, as he had his mind, to defy religious superstitions and advance real, scientific knowledge. Almost 200 years later, Bentham's "auto-icon" still sits, staring off into space, in the cloisters of University College London.

Nowadays Bentham is hardly a household name. Yet his ideas have proved extraordinarily influential in law, economics, philosophy and politics. Among other things, he was the inventor of the modern doctrine of utilitarianism, the foundational theorist of legal positivism, and the first exponent of cost-benefit analysis. If you've ever weighed up the pros and cons of doing something, you're treading in his footsteps.

In his own time he was celebrated around the globe. Countless practical efforts at social and political reform drew inspiration from him and his disciples (the most famous of whom was John Stuart Mill). From the 1790s on, in Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece and across Latin America, liberal governments and politicians sought his advice and assistance. He was made an honorary citizen of revolutionary France, while the Guatemalan leader José del Valle acclaimed him as "the legislator of the world". Never before or since has the English-speaking world produced a more politically engaged and internationally influential thinker across such a broad range of subjects. The first constitutions of the independent republic of Colombia owed as much to Bentham as do modern theories of animal rights.

After his death, the keepers of his memory invariably sought to portray him as a man whose intellect and concern for the public good were so all‑consuming that there had been no place for sexual passion in his life. As Mill put it, "knowing so little of human feelings, he knew still less of the influences by which those feelings are formed": even in his 80s, "he was a boy". Leslie Stephen thought him "all his life both a philosopher and a child … he was not only never in love, but looks as if he never talked to any woman except his cook and housemaid".

This was a travesty of the truth. In his 20s, Bentham fell deeply in love with Polly Dunkley, the orphaned daughter of an Essex doctor. He wanted to marry her, but because she didn't have enough money, his rich and overbearing father prevented it, and after several years their relationship came to an end. Later in life, after his father's death had made him independently wealthy, Bentham loved and proposed marriage to the clever and radical young aristocrat Caroline Fox, niece of the Whig leader Charles James Fox. When the vivacious Irish painter Amelia Curran, a friend of the Shelleys, came to paint Bentham in the early 1810s, the two of them appear to have had some kind of entanglement. And among his surviving manuscripts are some remarkable notes on sexual techniques, toys and positions whose explicitness would have made Mill blush.

Bodily passion was not just a part of Bentham's life: it was fundamental to his thought. After all, the maximisation of pleasure was the central aim of utilitarian ethics. In place of the traditional Christian stress on bodily restraint and discipline, Bentham sought, like many other 18th-century philosophers, to promote the benefits of economic consumption, the enjoyment of worldly appetites and the liberty of natural passions. This modern, enlightened view of the purpose of life spawned a revolution in sexual attitudes, and no European scholar of the time pursued its implications as thoroughly as Bentham. To think about sex, he noted in 1785, was to consider "the greatest, and perhaps the only real pleasures of mankind": it must therefore be "the subject of greatest interest to mortal men". Throughout his adult life, from the 1770s to the 1820s, he returned again and again to the topic. Over many hundreds of pages of private notes and treatises, he tried to strip away all the irrational and religious prohibitions that surrounded sexual activity.

Of all enjoyments, Bentham reasoned, sex was the most universal, the most easily accessible, the most intense, and the most copious – nothing was more conducive to happiness. An "all-comprehensive liberty for all modes of sexual gratification" would therefore be a huge, permanent benefit to humankind: if consenting adults were freed to do whatever they liked with their own bodies, "what calculation shall compute the aggregate mass of pleasure that may be brought into existence?"

The main impetus for Bentham's obsession with sexual freedom was his society's harsh persecution of homosexual men. Since about 1700, the increasing permissiveness towards what was seen as "natural" sex had led to a sharpened abhorrence across the western world of supposedly "unnatural" acts. Throughout Bentham's lifetime, homosexuals were regularly executed in England, or had their lives ruined by the pillory, exile or public disgrace. He was appalled at this horrible prejudice. Sodomy, he argued, was not just harmless but evidently pleasurable to its participants. The mere fact that the custom was abhorrent to the majority of the community no more justified the persecution of sodomites than it did the killing of Jews, heretics, smokers, or people who ate oysters – "to destroy a man there should certainly be some better reason than mere dislike to his Taste, let that dislike be ever so strong".

Though ultimately he never published his detailed arguments for sexual liberty for fear of the odium they would bring on his general philosophy, Bentham felt compelled to think them through in detail, to write about them repeatedly and to discuss them with his acquaintances. In one surviving letter to a friend, he joked that his rereading of the Bible had finally revealed that the sin for which God had punished the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah was not in fact buggery, but the taking of snuff. He and his secretary had consequently taken a solemn oath to hide their snuff-pouches and nevermore to indulge "that anti-Christian and really unnatural practice" in front of one another. Meanwhile, they were now both happily free to enjoy "the liberty of taking in the churchyard or in the market place, or in any more or less public or retired spot with Man, Woman or Beast, the amusement till now supposed to be so unrighteous, but now discovered to be a matter of indifference". Among those with whom Bentham discussed his arguments for sexual toleration were such influential thinkers and activists as William Godwin, Francis Place and James Mill (John Stuart Mill's father). Bentham's ultimate hope, "for the sake of the interests of humanity", was that his private elaboration and advocacy of these views might contribute to their eventual free discussion and general acceptance. "At any rate," he once explained, even if his writings could not be published in his own lifetime, "when I am dead mankind will be the better for it".

Yet after Bentham's death his voluminous manuscripts on sex disappeared. His Victorian editor hid them from the public. Even after his papers were deposited at UCL, and a huge project was begun to publish a modern edition of his works, his sexual writings remained unknown. In 1931, the polymath CK Ogden printed some brief extracts, and in the 1970s and 1980s, Louis Crompton, an American scholar of gay history, and Lea Campos Boralevi, an Italian feminist who wrote the first major study of Bentham's views on women and sex, both published books that showed how radical his views were. But the official Bentham Project largely ignored this aspect of his thinking. That neglect is all the more surprising given that for many years the project's director was the philosopher HLA Hart, a noted advocate for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Had Bentham's arguments been published under his editorship in the 1960s, they might have made a real contribution to current political and legal debates. These days, by contrast, they are mainly of historical interest.

Unfortunately this volume makes only a partial start on the work that is really needed. Only three of Bentham's documents from the 1810s are printed, and none of his many other texts on the subject is included or even cross‑referenced, so that the development and full range of his thoughts on sex are impossible to trace. Beyond a few general remarks we are left in the dark about the significance and originality of Bentham's sexual ideas, and their relationship to the intellectual currents of his time. Still, it is a notable event. Bentham was the first major English philosopher of sexual liberty, and it's about time we celebrated that. "If there be one idea more ridiculous than another," he once wrote about the sexual prohibitions of his day, it was that "of a legislator who, when a man and a woman are agreed about a business of this sort, thrusts himself in between them, examining situations, regulating times, and prescribing modes and postures". Today we are all the heirs of this once revolutionary way of thinking. So, the next time you try out any new modes or postures in the privacy of your bedroom, do take a moment to salute him.

Of Sexual Irregularities by Jeremy Bentham – review :  Jeremy Bentham's revolutionary views on sex have been kept hidden for too long.

By Faramerz Dabhoiwala. The Guardian , June 26, 2014. 

Jeremy Bentham is not unlike  an aging British rock star: The older he gets, the more tours he seems to go on. Sometimes Bentham’s severed, mummified head accompanies the rest of him. Other times it’s kept in a climate-controlled room at University College London for safekeeping. After every trip, until its most recent one, the English philosopher’s remains—most of them, anyway—have been returned to a box within a box in a side corridor at the college.

In February, the “auto-icon”—Bentham’s skeleton, cocooned in stuffing and the clothes he wore when he was alive—made one of the shorter, albeit more permanent, moves in its 188-year history. Bentham was deconstructed, removed from the wooden boxes that’ve been home to his remains since World War II, and shepherded into a new glass case in UCL’s new student center.

“At the moment, UCL is in the middle of a big refurbishment program,” says Hannah Cornish, a science curator at UCL who helped supervise the cross-campus commute. “[A]s part of that we had to move the auto-icon. We’ve taken the opportunity to look at the best way to preserve it.”

Since Bentham’s death, in 1832, his auto-icon has traveled across England, Germany, and, just last year, the Atlantic, to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But after every trip since it was evacuated from London during the second World War, it’s always returned to the wooden boxes in UCL’s Wilkins Building. Inquisitive students and curious tourists could find the dead philosopher’s wax replacement head gazing beyond them, toward nothing in particular. That same glassy stare persists today, only through a new, modernized container.

“What we were looking for is somewhere we could rely on the light, temperature, and humidity conditions,” Cornish says. “It brings the auto-icon into the center of the student body—and Bentham was a big advocate of education for all, regardless of things like class, race, and gender.”

Bentham’s resurrection as an auto-icon was inscribed in the late philosopher’s will, which requested that a number of fixtures be put in place to preserve his remains, that they be dressed in the clothes he wore in life, and that they occasionally be brought into meetings involving his still-living friends, so that what’s left of Bentham might enjoy their company.

“It’s very hard to describe it to people because there aren’t any other auto-icons,” Cornish says. “[Bentham] thought it’d catch on.”

The auto-icon’s existence is a peculiar addendum to the life of one of England’s most radical philosophers of the 19th century. Bentham was a champion of utilitarianism, which posits that what does the most good for the most people is what’s best. He knew he wanted to donate his body to science after he died, in line with his ethical code—that people should be useful in life and in death. But he also wanted his remains preserved, in part to spite the church, which he frequently criticized.

Due to a combination of bureaucratic mismanagement and crude taxidermy, Bentham’s head became unsuitable for public display—it became too ugly, in other words—and his organs were separated from the rest of his remains. But the skeleton remains the literal backbone of the auto-icon.

The recent bump-up from two wooden boxes to a novel glass case has caused a stir in the UCL community, as students and faculty alike have weighed in on the aesthetic and practical utility of the move. Many have brought up one question: What would Jeremy Bentham do?

“For Bentham, assessing the move of the auto-icon—as indeed for anything else—would be a utility calculation,” says Tim Causer, a senior research associate with the UCL-based Bentham Project, an initiative to produce a new edition of Bentham’s life works and correspondence. “Does the auto-icon’s new location make people happy or not—that would be the only thing that matters.”

This isn’t the first time the auto-icon’s location has drawn criticism. In 1857, when it was just 25 years young, its creator (and Bentham’s longtime friend), the physician Thomas Southwood-Smith, lamented UCL’s placement of the remains.

“No publicity is given to the fact that Bentham reposes there in some back room,” he wrote. “The authorities seem to be afraid or ashamed of their own possession.”

The auto-icon bounced around quite a bit—from Southwood-Smith’s charge to the UCL Anatomy Museum to the UCL Library to Stanstead Bury and back to UCL—but by the 2010s, its longtime mahogany-box home had become a haven for pests like carpet beetles and clothes moths, eager to take a bite out of the early 19th-century garb that clothes the stuffing-encased skeleton. That, combined with the Wilkins Building’s imminent renovations, made now an ideal time to find the auto-icon a new home.

So it was unboxed, dismantled, and shepherded through UCL’s Japanese garden, on a choreographed route to minimize the risk of what Cornish calls “birdstrikes”—pigeons confusing the stuffed person for a privy and defecating on it.

“It was wrapped in plastic, because we [took] the whole thing outside,” Cornish says. “It was a rainy day, so we wanted to make sure Bentham stayed dry.”

Once in the new student center, the auto-icon took the elevator down to its new case, where it was reconstituted in the image of Jeremy Bentham.

Soon afterward, concerns began to proliferate on social media. Some are upset that Bentham isn’t in his original box. (Only one of the older wood boxes—the smaller one—may be original. The larger wooden one dates to the 1940s.) Others have called out discrepancies between the wishes outlined in Bentham’s will and his new case.

Causer, however, notes that these wishes were bungled pretty much from the outset. Nor were the old boxes perfect. “There was a typescript label on the inner wooden box, stating Bentham’s name, dates of birth and decease, and wrongly claiming that Bentham founded UCL,” he says. “I’ve wanted to rip that label off for years, as that’s one of the myths about Bentham that refuses to die.”

Others have expressed concern that the auto-icon is merely on public display, rather than tastefully sequestered until a proper “Bentham commemoration event” comes along.

Treating Bentham’s remains in the manner requested in his will and ensuring that the objects remain preserved in perpetuity is “quite a difficult balance” to strike, Cornish says. “The way we looked at it is that the auto-icon is now a museum object that we’re responsible for. We’ve taken the approach that our duty of care is to preserve this unique object.”

There are also those who feel that the glass casing is too modernist, and is aesthetically dissonant with the traditional trappings of the dead philosopher (one Twitter critic likens the case to a “department store clothing display”).

But Causer says that some of Bentham’s own ideas run counter to this line of thinking. “While I have some sympathy with the view that the relocation seems to go against tradition and doesn’t look right,” she says, “Bentham himself would have had no truck with that argument. In his Book of Fallacies, Bentham discussed what he called the ‘Ancestor-Worshippers’ Fallacy’—that is, the argument that since something had always been done one way, it should always be done that way. Bentham spent most of his life, after all, taking that attitude to task in trying to reform the British establishment.”

One thing is inarguable : Bentham’s new location makes the auto-icon more visible and accessible—the UCL student center is located in the heart of London—and improves the conditions of its preservation.

“The auto-icon is undoubtedly a weird thing,” Causer says, “and Bentham evidently had a sense of high self-regard that he would ask for his body to be preserved in this way. But I would hope that the move might encourage visitors not to dismiss the auto-icon as a macabre curio, the final wish of a strange old man, or something ghoulish or creepy.”

Perhaps, as Bentham hoped, it can be wheeled out for events that he would have enjoyed in life: a good party or a lively debate, its presence spurring conversations about—and perhaps actions toward—the greater good. The move has already sparked discussions about what’s best for the remains themselves.

“People are very fond of the auto-icon,” says Cornish. “We hesitate to call him a mascot, because the auto-icon contains human remains. We treat it with a bit more respect. I hope more people will see him in the student center.”

Currently, the auto-icon sits next to a large panel that describes Bentham and his work in a couple of pithy paragraphs. Cornish says that a booth with more information and context, as well as a touch screen, are on order, and will soon supplement the auto-icon’s new home.

As eerily vacant as that glassy gaze may be, says Causer, Bentham, an atheist, is making a point from beyond the grave, vis-à-vis the auto-icon—his final refutation of religion and life after death.

“Even though to a visitor the auto-icon and its benign waxy smile gives the impression that Bentham is present,” he says, “it is not him any more, and is a reminder that Bentham the human is—like we all will one day become—‘senseless matter.’ And that what matters is to make the most of the life we have, and to promote the greatest happiness during that time.”

Why a 272-Year-Old Philosopher Just Got Carted Across a College Quad :  A new home for Jeremy Bentham’s old bones is prompting a philosophical debate.

By Isaac Schultz. Atlas Obscura , March 4, 2020.

One day toward the beginning of March, an unusual object arrived at a New York City airport. Carefully encased in a foam-padded, specially built wooden chair and strapped in with a bright-blue sash, it was the stuffed skeleton of one of Britain's most famous philosophers—transported not for burial, but for exhibition.

"We all refer to him as he, but the curator has corrected me. I need to keep referring to it," says University College London conservator Emilia Kingham, who prepared the item for its transatlantic voyage.

The stuffed skeleton belongs to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832. But for well over a century, his "auto-icon"—an assemblage including his articulated skeleton surrounded by padding and topped with a wax head—has been on display in the south cloisters of University College London. Starting March 21, it will be featured in The Met Breuer exhibition "Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now)," marking its first appearance in America.

While the auto-icon has sometimes been seen as an absurd vanity project or memento mori, according to Tim Causer, it's best understood as a product of Bentham's trailblazing work. "I would tend to ask people to reckon with the auto-icon not as macabre curio or the weird final wish of a strange old man," says the senior research associate at UCL's Bentham Project, which is charged with producing a new edition of the philosopher's collected works. Instead, "[we should] accept it in the manner in which Bentham intended it, as a sort of physical manifestation of his philosophy and generosity of spirit."

Bentham is best known as the founder of utilitarianism, a philosophy that evaluates actions and institutions based on their consequences—particularly whether those consequences cause happiness. A man frequently ahead of his time, he believed in a world based on rational analysis, not custom or religion, and advocated for legal and penal reform, freedom of speech, animal rights, and the decriminalization of homosexuality.

His then-unconventional ideas extended to his own body. At the time Bentham died, death was largely the province of the Church of England, which Bentham thought was "irredeemably corrupt," according to Causer. Instead of paying burial fees to the Church and letting his body rot underground, Bentham wanted to put his corpse to public use.

In this he was influenced by his friend and protégé Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith, who had published an article called "Use of the dead to the living" in 1824. Smith argued that medical knowledge suffered from the limited number of bodies then available for dissection—the Crown supplied only a handful of hanged criminals each year—and that the pool of available corpses had to be expanded to allow surgeons more practice material, lest they begin "practicing" on the living.

From his earliest will, Bentham left his body to science. (Some scholars think he may have been the first person to do so.) But he also went one step further. His last essay, written shortly before his death, was entitled "Auto-icon; or, farther uses of the dead to the living." In it, Bentham lambasts "our dead relations" as a source of both disease and debt. He had a better idea: Just as "instruction has been given to make 'every man his own broker,' or 'every man his own lawyer': so now may every man be his own statue."

Bentham envisioned a future in which weatherproofed auto-icons would be interspersed with trees on ancestral estates, employed as "actors" in historical theatre and debates, or simply kept as decoration. The point, he felt, was to treat the body in terms of its utility, rather than being bound by superstition or fear.

"It was a very courageous thing to do in the 1830s, to ask yourself to be dissected and reassembled," Causer says. "The auto-icon is his final attack on organized religion, specifically the Church of England. Because Bentham thought the church had a pernicious influence on society."

There was only one man Bentham trusted with carrying out his last wishes: Smith. After a public dissection attended by eminent scientific men, the devoted doctor cleaned Bentham's bones and articulated the skeleton with copper wiring, surrounding them with straw, cotton wool, fragrant herbs, and other materials. He encased the whole thing in one of Bentham's black suits, with the ruffles of a white shirt peeking out at the breast. He even propped Bentham's favorite walking stick, which the philosopher had nicknamed "Dapple," in between his legs, and sat him on one of his usual chairs—all just as Bentham had asked for.

But not everything went quite according to plan. The philosopher had asked to have his head preserved in the "style of the New Zealanders," which Smith attempted by placing the head over some sulfuric acid and under an air pump. The result was ghastly: desiccated, dark, and leathery, even as the glass eyes Bentham had picked out for it during life gleamed from the brow.

Seeing as how the results "would not do for exhibition," as Smith wrote to a friend, the doctor hired a noted French artist, Jacques Talrich, to sculpt a head out of wax based on busts and paintings made of Bentham while alive. Smith called his efforts "one of the most admirable likenesses ever seen"—a far more suitable topper for the auto-icon than the real, shriveled head, which was reportedly stuffed into the chest cavity and not rediscovered until World War II.

Smith kept the auto-icon at his consulting rooms until 1850, when he donated it to University College London, where Bentham is often seen as a spiritual forefather. It has been there ever since, inside a special mahogany case, despite rumors that students from Kings College—UCL's bitter rival—once stole the head and used it as a football.

"His head has never been stolen by another university," Kingham confirms. Causer says there is reason to believe the wax head was stolen by King's College in the 1990s, but never the real head. The football part of the story is particularly easy to dismiss, he notes: "We all have human heads, and kicking them doesn't do them much good, particularly 180-year-old human heads. If anybody kicked that, it would disintegrate on impact, I think." (Kingham also notes that the real head is not decomposing, as is sometimes claimed: "It's actually quite stable, it just doesn't look like a real-life person anymore. The skin is all shrunken.")

Another beloved myth has it that the auto-icon regularly attends UCL council meetings, where he's entered into the record as "present but not voting." Causer says that's not true either, although fiction became reality after the auto-icon graced the council meetings marking the 100th and 150th anniversary of the college's founding as a nod to the legend; it also attended the final council meeting of the school's retiring provost, Malcolm Grant.

Bentham always wanted to visit America; Causer says he was "a big admirer of the American political system" as the one most likely to promote the greatest happiness for its citizens. But before he could accomplish in death what he failed to do in life, UCL had to mount a careful conservation operation.

The first step: a spring cleaning. The conservation team at UCL removed each item of clothing on the auto-icon piece by piece, holding carefully to the delicate areas, like a loose left shoulder and wrist, where they knew from previous x-rays that the wiring was imperfect. After a detailed condition report and an inspection for pest damage (thankfully absent), the team surface-cleaned everything.

"The clothes were quite grubby because the box that he's sitting in, it's actually not very airtight," Kingham says. A vacuum with a brush attachment took care of surface dirt and dust, but the inner items required a more thorough clean. "We determined that his linen shirt and also his underwear could do with the wash, so we actually washed those in water. It was quite exciting saying I've been able to wash Jeremy Bentham's undies." The wax head was cleaned with water and cotton swabs, and occasionally a little spit, which Kingham says is a common cleaning technique for painted surfaces.

Kingham's team rearranged the stuffing around the skeleton, plumping the fibers as you would a pillow. The stuffing around the arms, in particular, had started to sag, so Kingham used a piece of stockinette fabric to bind the area around the biceps—making them look more like arms, she says, but also reducing some of the strain against the jacket, which threatened the stitching.

But the most labor-intensive part of the preparation, according to Kingham, was devising a customized padded chair for the auto-icon's transport. Their final creation included a wooden boarded seat covered in soft foam that had been sculpted to hold the auto-icon lying on its back, knees bent at a 90-degree angle to minimize stress on the pelvis—another weak point. The auto-icon was bound to the chair with soft bandages, and the whole thing inserted into a travel case. The wax head was also set inside a foam pad within a special handling crate (the real head will stay at UCL, where it is currently on display), while Bentham's regular chair, hat, and walking stick got their own crates.

‘’ We had originally joked that it might be just easier to buy him a seat on the plane and just wheel him in on a wheelchair," Kingham says, laughing.

Luke Syson, the co-curator of "Like Life," says it was touching to watch the stick and hat emerge from their travel boxes, even if the auto-icon's special chair did look a bit "like how you would transport a lunatic around 1910—or indeed 1830."

Reached by phone just after he had finished installing the auto-icon, Syson says he wanted to include the item as part of the show's emphasis on works of art made to persuade the viewer that life is present. "This piece really sums up so many of the themes that the rest of the show looks at, so the use of wax, for example, as a substitute for flesh, the employment of real clothes … And then, above all of course, the use of body parts." And the auto-icon isn't the only item in the show to include human remains—when we spoke to Syson, he was looking at the auto-icon, Marc Quinn's "Self" (a self-portrait in frozen blood), and a medieval reliquary head made for a fragment of Saint Juliana's skull, all of which are installed in the same corner of the museum.

Syson says he was initially worried the auto-icon might not "read" as a piece of art—worries that were dispelled as soon as he installed the wax head. "The modeling of the face is so fine," he says. "The observation and expression, the sense of changing personality … there's a lovely jowliness underneath his chin, the wrinkles around his eyes are really speaking, and the kind of quizzical eyebrows, and so on, all make him really amazingly present."

And unlike at UCL, where the auto-icon sits in a case, viewers at the Met are able to see him on three sides, including his back. "He sort of springs to attention on his chair, he's not sort of slumped, which you couldn't see in the box [at UCL]."

Those who have worked with Bentham's auto-icon say it encourages a kind of intimacy. Taking the auto-icon apart, Kingham says, "you really do feel a closeness to Jeremy Bentham, because you looked in such detail at his clothes, and his bones, and his skeleton." The wax head, she says, is particularly lifelike. "People who knew him have said that it's a very, very good realistic likeness of him," she notes, which made it both eerie and special to handle so closely.

"This is both the representation and the person," Syson says. "We've been calling him 'Jeremy' these last few months, and he's sort of here, and it's not just that something's here, he's here. So that's an amazing thing."

Nearly 200 years later and across an ocean, Jeremy Bentham's auto-icon has arrived to serve another public good: delighting a whole new set of fans.

How Jeremy Bentham Finally Came to America, Nearly 200 Years After His Death. By Bess Lovejoy. Mental Floss , March 19, 2018.

Also interesting :

''Bentham and the Arts'' is a collection of essays which consider the implications of Bentham’s radical utilitarian approach for our understanding of the history and contemporary nature of art, literature, and aesthetics more generally. UCL Press, June 2020. Free download

Bentham Project : this website gives information on Jeremy Bentham and about the work of the Bentham Project.