Federalist 37 and the Problem of Knowing

Readers of these pages know our special interest in the political thinking that took place around the founding era and now it can help illuminate our politics today. We have talked in the past that many of the framers of the Constitution had a “skeptical” view of human nature: human beings have a tendency to corruption, vice, and selfishness, and our governing institutions must reflect this reality.

But their skepticism extended beyond issues of character. They worried not only about how our vices affected the ways we behaved toward one another, but the ways in which we communicated. Long before modern psychology “discovered” cognitive biases, the framers of our Constitution understood well the ways in which passion and interest would corrupt thinking and communicating. They didn’t chalk this up to malice on our part, but simply acknowledged our nature as creatures who perceive and think and the limits inherent therein.

These limitations would always corrupt the ways in which we communicated with one another, leading to constant misunderstanding which could turn to rancor. In other words: misunderstanding, miscommunication, and misinformation are not bugs in political practice, but features of it. Naturally, we incline ourselves to believe that we alone think and see clearly; we typically don’t hold a position unless we think we are right about it, and the more passionately we hold the position the more certain we become. This creates a near paradox in our politics: the more personal the issue, the more adamant we are in our belief, meaning the less likely we can be shaken off it, and that means our subjectivity rather than objectivity becomes the basis of our certainty.

In Federalist #37, Madison addresses this paradox head-on in his defense of the Constitution against its critics. He acknowledges that the convention had before it two enormously difficult and complex tasks: the balancing of the need for a “more energetic” government with the protection of liberty, and the need to balance the interests of the states against that of the national government. He concedes that there is no template for this, commenting on “the novelty of the undertaking.” In other words, there was no way to know whether they could get or had gotten it right, justifying the claims of the critics who worried that the Constitution was a dangerous innovation with their liberties.

The main complications of political life result from our inability to define clearly the matters under discussion. The first rule of political thinking is always making the effort to get definitions right. We can demonstrate the difficulty of this simply by looking at how we don’t have a clear idea of what politics is (or are). Is it “who gets what, when, and how?” Is it “the authoritative allocation of values?” Is it “the art of compromise?” Is it “a set of activities associated with making decisions in groups?” Is it “a power struggle between people?” If we don’t know what it is, it is hard to know whether we are doing it well or not, and clearly part of the problem is that we don’t know exactly what politics is.

Politics and certainty do not go well together. In politics, we deal with relative goods, with trade-offs, with careful balancing of interests, and with a range of effects we can’t even begin to comprehend because of the limits of our knowing. As a result, we will often stumble around each other not because we disagree about details but because we don't realize the lack of consensus about the very terms under discussion. We don't know what we don't know. Madison phrases the problem succinctly:

Here, then, are three sources of vague and incorrect definitions: indistinctness of the object, imperfection of the organ of conception, inadequateness of the vehicle of ideas. Any one of these must produce a certain degree of obscurity.

Note that Madison begins by identifying the problem: the absence of clear and agreed-upon definitions. These definitions must be broad enough so that they include every instance of the thing we want to define, and narrow enough that they exclude things not of the genus. We tend more toward a too broad definition than a too narrow one, especially since terms such as "politics" are sufficiently vague that they allow for application in other areas.

He goes further: he explains to us why we tend to get our definitions wrong. We must deal, first of all, with the problem that the thing we want to define presents itself to us in a vague form. The outlines are not clear, nor are the categories. We might intuitively know what a tree is while still lacking the capacity to define it, and this could mean that we include things in the definition that don't properly belong. But a tree is easily seen.What's true in the physical world becomes more complicated when we enter the conceptual one. What, exactly, is justice? Plato spent the whole Republic asking that question and when we get to the end we realize he still hasn’t told us what justice is, only what it isn’t.

The second problem is the “imperfection of the organ of conception.” To go back to what we said earlier, Madison is fully aware of the way our interests and passions affect our perception, much like fans at a sporting event rarely take an unbiased view of disputed calls. We have no vantage point from which those passion and interests can be put aside so that we can fully trust our perceptions. Skepticism applies only partly to the object perceived, but fully to ourselves, the instrument of perception. Neither do we have any mechanism at our disposal to insure a correspondence between our mental concepts and the full reality of the thing so conceived.

Even if the object presents itself clearly, and even if we believe (rightly, perhaps) we see it clearly, we struggle to communicate our knowledge to others because communication requires the use and manipulation of symbols, the most complex one being language itself. Trying to capture complex realities using simple words always bedevils us. No one understood this better than the 20th century’s greatest poet, T. S. Eliot, who wrote that poetry was a

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

We find that without words the thing we want to define disappears straight away from us, but trying to capture it in words somehow diminishes the fullness of its being. Thus Eliot called this desperate effort

a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

So how are we to proceed when, on the one hand, we must provide definitional clarity, but on the other, such clarity always eludes us? Perhaps we can invoke the principle articulated by Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Under that principle, our public life, which requires shared meanings, would devolve into a battle of definitions, each person's meaning with reference to a thing only what they want it to mean, and our social sphere devolves into forceful efforts to get others to accept our meanings. But now we are three or four steps removed from the object, caught in a swirl of grammatical games.

Madison and Eliot both suggest a different approach, and that is to rely on experience and tradition as guides to both our perceiving of the object and the way we talk about it. Both acknowledge the fuzziness of the objects of conception. No matter how clearly we can bring ourselves to see, we will still see only blurred outlines. Sometimes, too, the brilliance of the object may be so bright as to blind us, meaning we can only see through a glass darkly. Imagine attending a baseball game and a batter hits a shot down the baseline near the foul pole. Since it was your team at the plate you think it was a homerun. The Ump says otherwise, but you regard the ump as "blind." But then after the game you talk to a friend who was sitting in the left-field bleachers and had a better vantage point and confirms that, from his point of view, the ball was foul. A reasonable person would concede at this point. The only way we can augment our point of view is by dialectic, the engagement with alternative points of view, and dialogue, the engagement with others as we struggle to find an agreed-upon logos (word, or reason).

This means we have to rely on others. We have to rely on those moments when those in the past have found some illumination for us, for (as Edmund Burke observed) “the individual is foolish but the species is wise.” We need to carry that illumination forward, clarify it as much as we can, communicate it as clearly as possible to our fellows and our progeny, ever mindful of our own limitations. When dealing with ideas -- democracy, politics, justice, freedom -- the flashes of insights provided by our forbearers prove indispensable for lighting our own path. For, as Eliot wrote:

…what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Madison worried that some of the wisdom of the past was being circumscribed in the present. His “innovation” with the republican form resulted not from any certainty he had that he knew how things worked, or any audacious claim about knowing what justice required, but instead that he could look at the past and see what hadn’t worked, that the republics of the past “had been as short in their lives as they were violent in their deaths.” He wanted to spare America from that fate.

Experience and tradition not only teach us something about the thing we want to know, they also teach us the limits of our knowing. For Madison, nowhere was this limit more pronounced, or the dangers of transgressing this limit more consequential, than in our talk about justice. With no concept is there a greater gap between our desire for understanding and our inability to achieve it. This inability to know what justice is also means that we have only a vague understanding of what it requires, and that understanding can all too quickly be consumed by passion and interest. Thus we should not be surprised that violence will often cloak itself in the fabric of justice.

These times are, to repeat Eliot’s word, “unpropitious” for gaining greater clarity about the political concepts that mean the most to us: justice, democracy, power, fairness, freedom, and so forth. We can’t agree on the most basic definitions that, for centuries, were universally agreed upon because the object was held to be reasonably clear, the perception not rendered opaque by ideology, and language directly related to the object. Our inability to agree on definitions with regard to things in the physical world that have a determinative structure does not augur well for our ability to generate agreements for definitions of things in the mental world, where we have no direct perception.

Each man believes he is right in his own case. We fear the consequences of holding our beliefs too loosely. The more interest and passion are at work the more certain we become, contrary to Madison’s insistence that interest and passion more likely corrupt knowing than improve it. I think Madison and others warn us of the dangers of being too principled, of allowing our abstract judgements with their “certainty” dictate our actions, especially when those actions have a demonstrable effect upon others. Given the ways in which ideologies codify interests and passions into systems of thinking, the concerns Madison expressed in Federalist #37 are a bigger issue in our ideological age than they were in 1787.

Discussion Questions:

1. Can you think of examples of how passion or interest have clouded your judgement?

2. Can you think of a good working definition of justice? One that could get some sort of general assent?

3. Can our Constitutional system survive if a different account of knowing from Madison’s, one that emphasizes certainty and “being on the right side of history,” is substituted in its place?

By Jeff Polet

Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation

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