Are Good Philosophers Ugly?
Let's play a game: reading a philosopher's worldview from his or her face.
Do hot people think the world is hot? Do uggos think the world is ugly? Is there a relationship between a man’s physical appearance and his worldview? Does the man who looks like Michelangelo’s David think the world is beautiful and ordered? Does the philosopher who looks like Danny DeVito think the world is a playground for the bloody struggle to survive? If we look at photographs of twentieth-century philosophers, can we discern their worldviews? What if the philosopher is French? Will this introduction of questions ever end?
All this and more, with the game of the future:
Philognomy
or TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF THE BEAUTY OF PHILOSOPHERS AS DESCRIPTIVE OF THEIR RESPECTIVE PHILOSOPHIES
There aren’t many novel occurrences in philosophy, theology, or science. Seemingly all ideas can be traced back to ancient man, at least in germ form. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) famously said the safest generalization of all European philosophy is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Clearly, I think he was right.
Anaximander (610-546 BC) theorized the evolution of all living matter from non-living matter. He believed life originated from the element of water or moisture and arose through the process of evaporation. This sounds backward and silly to us big-brained moderns, but what does current biochemistry say about the origin of life? Basically the same thing with about the same amount of certainty. What Anaximander called evaporation, biochemistry calls abiogenesis. This word means “without life, origin”, and The Science™ behind it is about as sophisticated as the name. The properties Anaximander attributed to the moisture element biochemistry attributes to the early-world seafloor of simple molecular compounds.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.Ecclesiastes 1:9 RSVCE
So, how much more do biochemists know than Anaximander? Well, a lot. But how much more do biochemists know about the origin of life than Anaximander? Nothing. That is, in the perennial questions such as the origin of life, modern sciences are not terribly influential. Maybe I’m shifting the goalposts, maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m writing about things I understand deeply, maybe I’m not. Maybe there’s some gray area in there. Or grey area. It’s hard to tell, really. What are you going to do about it? Write a nasty comment? You don’t have the stones. Let it fester and think you’re better than me because I did a fallacy? You know it’s not true. Anyway, as I was saying, abiogenesis is just a more complex version of Anaximander’s hypothesis. This is what I mean when I say there just aren’t many novel ideas, if any.
Despite this, however, the twentieth century has a remarkable flair about it. There was lots of radical philosophizing between 1900 and 2000 AD. For example, there was a push to rigorously systematize the whole of mathematics as a single formal framework. Ultimately, these attempts failed in 1931 when Kurt Gödel (1906-78) created a logically valid statement that was neither provable nor unprovable within a relatively simple system of arithmetic (Incompleteness Theorems).
Twentieth-centuries thinkers also
tried to psychologize all behavior
reduce the mind to computation
create a worldview based upon the appearance of phenomena through the mind’s eye
sociologize societies in which the poorest people are fat
theorize society as a simulation of reality through digital media
critique “late capitalist” societies
critique critiques about society
critique the idea of critiquing
and much else.
Now I seem to contradict myself: the twentieth century did postulate novel ideas. However, the germ of these seeds can be found in ancient man. As Whitehead said, we can find the roots of all modern philosophy in Plato. Moreover, modern physics and biology are essentially meaningless without Aristotle, whether we accept it or not. It is only the bizarre circumstances of post-post-post-etc-industrial life—or whatever our world is—that make the twentieth century appear as an utterly unique time in history.
While the ideas might not actually be new, the times, they are a-changin’. And the way things are going, I’m sure the twenty-first century will not disappoint.
Do Dogs Look Like Their Owners?
Conservatives are more attractive than liberals. Even Psychology Today and WashPo admit this. Moreover, Jonathan Haidt’s work discusses the strong correlation between temperament and political leanings. Basically, those who like order and cleanliness are naturally conservative while those who are open and agreeable are liberal (conservative and liberal in this context tend toward the modern Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. I know, how trite!).
So, there is a well-documented interplay between one’s political leanings and psycho-physiology. People who like order and cleanliness have a cleaner and more ordered appearance than their disordered, dirty peers and are thereby more attractive. Moreover, the ordered and clean folk want their policies to reflect order and cleanliness, and vice versa. Again, what would we do without The Science™?
This is why the dear reader can tell much about a man’s habitual behavior from the man’s appearance. It is reasonable to deduce that morbidly obese people sit a lot more than they walk. It is unreasonable to deduce that skinny men with joints popping out of their skin spend a lot of time eating and lifting weights. And so on.
There is a tradition of taking this much further by using the face to infer the subject’s mental state. Our favorite site Wikipedia says:
Physiognomy (from the Greek φύσις, 'physis', meaning "nature", and 'gnomon', meaning "judge" or "interpreter") is the practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance—especially the face.
Wikipedia classifies physiognomy as a pseudoscience, and with any reasonable outline of “the” scientific method, I might agree. However, I think physiognomy is better thought of as an art or craft—it’s closer to what Ancient Greek philosophers called technê, which is often an interplay of theory and practice.
Moreover, I am not saying we should do physiognomy per se because I am not so concerned about discerning personality, virtues, and vices from a subject’s appearance. Here I am more concerned with the general worldview of the subject. (Although virtue and vice will be implicated, as the reader will see below.) To do this, we must combine philosophy with physiognomy. In other words, we are going to do physiognomy to not just judge personality but the very essence of the subject’s philosophical disposition. I propose a twist on the ancient practice:
Philognomy (from the Greek φίλος, ‘philos’, meaning “love”, and 'gnomon', meaning "judge" or "interpreter") is the love of judging others. This is the judgment of a person’s general worldview from their physical appearance.
The way we shall execute this new philognomy is through a game. The dear reader is going to have a blast. First, I will take a truly nuanced philosopher’s tack and reduce the last 3000 years of Western intellectual history to two camps: Platonists and non-Platonists. Platonism generally asserts that goodness, truth, beauty, order, and hierarchy are constitutive of reality; non-Platonists generally think these characteristics are merely convenient names for the power games played among animals.
Now, this game of philognomy will not be a simple competition between two sets of abstract worldviews. Let me motivate the stakes a bit more. Four of ten of these non-Platonists were or still are involved with heinous ideas. In fact, three of the following philosophers signed a petition in 1977 to lower the age of consent in France after a highly publicized trial of three men (aged 39, 43, and 45) who raped boys and girls aged 12-13. One of the philosophers later made a case for the age of consent to include children:
Listen to what the child says and give it a certain credence. This notion of consent is a trap, in any case. What is sure is that the legal form of an intersexual consent is nonsense. No one signs a contract before making love.
This adds another wrinkle, as several of the following philosophers were defenders of pederasty and pedophilia. So, not only are we dealing with Platonists vs. non-Platonists, we’re dealing with “goodness is real” vs. “pedophilia should be legal.”
The stakes are high. This should be fun!
The Game of Philognomy
Like the game of Life, only more judgment. The game is simple:
Read the philosopher’s worldview from the philosopher’s appearance, especially the face.
10 pairs of photographs of philosophers
Born or did their important work between 1900 and 2000
Platonist and non-Platonist in each pair
As fair of comparisons as I could muster
Similar age, B&W vs. B&W, color vs. color, same gender, etc.
Jot your answer for each pair to see how many you got right at the end
Compare to the answer key
Comment how many you got right
Share this game with friends, family, and workplace superiors
Note: if the reader got this post by email, it is too big to read in your inbox, so open the article in the app or a browser.
Philognomy
One
versus
Two
versus
Three
versus
Four
versus
Five
versus
Six
versus
Seven
versus
Eight
versus
Nine
versus
Ten
versus
Drum roll, please…
Answer Key
One
Michel Foucault (1926-84) vs. Jacques Maritain (1882-1973): non-Platonist vs. Platonist.
Foucault was the one I quoted above about “consenting” children. Just a few months after the 1977 petition, he argued to lower the age of consent to 13. It seems that almost every time we see someone arguing against the natural law, especially virtue ethics, we see marital or general sexual deviancy. Obviously, judging non-Platonists or non-virtue ethicists by the standards of virtue ethics is tautological: of course non-Platonists don’t adhere to Platonism, that’s their whole shtick. But lots of non-Platonists still try to argue for objective morality by appealing to nature in some way or another. Consistent philosophers see natural law as the fabric of the universe and deduce ethics from there. Indeed, virtue ethics is the rigorous philosophy of common sense. My point is that the non-Platonist just seems compelled to remove all hindrances to the indulgence of food, drink, and sex—reduction to a mere beast. Foucault is uniquely forthright in his desires, especially to include children in the mess of extra-marital sex. It is worth noting that he has been accused of child sex abuse, especially of Tunisian boys. He died of AIDS.
Maritain was an agnostic philosopher who converted to Catholicism in 1906. He played a large role in the revival of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) and Thomism in the twentieth century. He was even considered for a position as a lay cardinal by Pope St. Paul VI but turned down the offer.
Two
Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) vs. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970): Platonist vs. non-Platonist.
Gilson was involved with Maritain in the revival of scholasticism. He was a medievalist and specialized in the thought of early modern philosophy as well.
Russell is one of the most important voices of twentieth-century science, especially logic, mathematics, and physics. Kurt Gödel includes Russell’s system from the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910-13) in his demonstration that arithmetic systems are essentially incomplete. Russell was also on the wrong end of one of the best debates ever recorded. Frederick Copleston (a Jesuit scholar), who wrote a much better history of philosophy than Russell, pressed Russell into a corner and it was a sight to behold (audibly, through the radio). Russell is on Mount Rushmore of modern atheism.
Three
Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929) vs. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80): Platonist vs. non-Platonist.
MacIntyre is a monumental figure. His series After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (1990), and Dependent Rational Animals (1999) has acted as a foundation for the revival of virtue ethics.
Sartre was 5’0”. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was also one of the signers of the 1977 petition, the author of mostly incoherent garbage sometimes called existentialism, and had an open relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. In other words, he pioneered the path of the beta male who can’t assert his minuscule will to keep his girlfriend from constantly cheating on him. This is becoming surprisingly common.
Four
Peter Singer (b. 1946) vs. Charles Taylor (b. 1931): non-Platonist vs. Platonist.
The dear reader might know Singer from such hits as
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Necrophilia
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Bestiality
Being the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University
What a track record! Isn’t it great that our kids are killing themselves to get into prestigious universities?
Taylor is the author of A Secular Age (2007), which is a doorstop, among several other important books. His 1964 dissertation against BF Skinner’s behaviorism started him on a path of critiques against the dominant philosophies of mind, anthropology, aesthetics, language, and more.
Five
Alice von Hildebrand (1923-2022) vs. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86): Platonist vs. non-Platonist.
Hildebrand received her name from her husband Dietrich (see below), who took her as his second wife after the first’s passing. Alice was a Belgian doctoral student under Dietrich. Just read one of the last interviews before her death, entitled True Femininity.
Beauvoir was a feminist existentialist who signed the 1977 petition. She was raised as a devout Catholic intending to become a nun by 14. On losing her faith, she said,
Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself.
If only she read [ONE SINGLE IMPORTANT CHRISTIAN THINKER BETWEEN 100 AND 1600 AD], then she could have rid herself of such rudimentary objections to Christianity. Then she went on to have an open relationship with a bug-eyed manlet, be accused of sexual debauchery with young women/girls, and have her teaching license temporarily revoked. What a fall from grace.
Six
Judith Butler (b. 1956) vs. Eva Vlaardingerbroek (b. 1996): non-Platonist vs. Platonist.
Butler is a matriarch of contemporary gender theory, although her Wikipedia page uses they/them pronouns to describe her as of the writing of this article. There isn’t much else to be said about her other than that I recommend New Polity’s multi-part discussion of her work. She is a serious philosopher, but the underlying metaphysics of her critique, which she does not acknowledge as influential on her final analysis of sex, leads to terrible conclusions, not least of which is using they/them pronouns.
Eva is a Dutch legal scholar. She absolutely does not deserve to be on this list, but the contrast of her with Žižek was too good to pass up. She recently converted to Catholicism, and that is how I heard about her. The news of her conversion was the impetus for me to finally create philognomy, something I had been thinking about for several years. The Catholic Church really has all the best people (and some of the worst).
Seven
Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) vs. Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977): non-Platonist vs. Platonist. I know; it’s color vs. black and white.
Žižek is a Marxist cultural theorist and thereby reduces all human existence to material class strife. He is as entertaining as they come. I like Zizek because he has unique critiques of the zeitgeist. I read him like I read Nassim Taleb, for entertaining, orthogonal takes, but not serious advice. I always walk away from Žižek’s work nodding my head and thinking, “Huh, that’s interesting.”
Hildebrand wrote extensively on ethics and aesthetics and was a strong proponent of the pre-1969 Mass. He was called the “twentieth-century Doctor of the Church” by Pope Pius XII. There is no greater title a twentieth-century philosopher could receive.
Eight
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) vs. Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932): non-Platonist vs. Platonist.
Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, was a leading intellectual of the Frankfurt school and the New Left of the 1960s and 70s. His main influences were Hegel, Freud, and Marx. He’s a much less entertaining Žižek.
Plantinga is a huge name in the philosophy of religion and epistemology with God and Other Minds (1967), The Nature of Necessity (1974), and a trilogy of books on epistemic warrant.
Nine
Ralph McInerny (1929-2010) vs. Albert Camus (1913-60): Platonist vs. non-Platonist.
McInerny was a philosopher, president of the Metaphysical Society of America, and a successful fiction author (Father Dowling Mysteries). He was the Director of the Jacques Maritain Center and professor of Medieval Studies at Notre Dame, teaching from 1955 to 2009. McInerny’s Gifford Lectures were published in a delightful volume entitled Characters in Search of Their Author (2003).
Camus was the second-youngest person to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1957) at 44 years old. He was an absurdist. Basically, he contended that the world lacks any inherent meaning or purpose. His extraordinarily popular novel The Stranger (1942) is a book I have read multiple times. I have temperamental sympathies with absurdism and even nihilism, which is why I was a nihilist for many years; however, Catholicism is true, so I am Catholic. Another important work of his is The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Camus holds that man bootstraps meaning into the world despite the howling void of nothingness that responds. We are like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain until it careens over the peak, only to return to the same labor again, ad infinitum. Although, we are not exactly like Sisyphus because we die; we return to the nothingness that preceded our death. Sisyphus embraces his eternal fate and finds the absurdity of it amusing, so Camus says “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Ten
Nick Bostrom (b. 1973) vs. Edward Feser (b. 1968): non-Platonist vs. Platonist.
Bostrom is a Swedish genius who has worked seemingly exclusively on the philosophy of mind, especially “artificial intelligence”, other computation stuff, and the simulation hypothesis of reality. We can probably blame him for a double-digit percentage of the AI fear currently sweeping the world, especially his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014). I think Bostrom and his ilk consume too much science fiction. (To be serious: his entire work depends upon the assumption that “mind” is just computational information processing.) I am not sure if Bostrom fulfills all the criteria of non-Platonism because he does not often peddle answers to perennial questions (although here he discusses the existence of God with “state-of-the-art” analytic philosophy, LOL. Again, these guys are sophisticated sci-fi nerds.). However, he is a scientistic transhumanist who thinks The Science™ and technological advances have taken the place of fuddy-duddy metaphysics and virtue ethics.
Feser is a philosophy professor. He was an atheist who talked himself into belief in God by giving the ancient and medieval arguments for the existence of God a fair shake when teaching them to students. He is the author of a dozen or so books, ranging from a full treatment of John Locke to a Catholic defense of capital punishment—perhaps best known for his Five Proofs of the Existence of God (2017). Listen to this rip-roaring good time and then read all of his books; I can’t recommend them enough.
How many did the dear reader get right?
Here’s the scoring rubric:
0: the reader is a good person, acceptable in polite company.
1: you are a bad but perhaps reformable person.
2-3: irredeemable—I’m contacting your employer.
4-5: fascist—we’re shutting down your bank accounts.
6-8: literally Hitler.
9-10: Saint Bread-Pilled Gigachad.
Conclusion
It seems that hotties see goodness and beauty at the center of reality while uggos find the world chaotic and ultimately meaningless. Michelangelo’s David thinks the world is beautiful. Danny DeVito probably sees interpersonal communication as strife and the playground of power. Perhaps there is some merit in philognomy. Then again, there is always Socrates, the Platonist before Plato:
I take it all back…