Victoria Camps and the ethics of doubt

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The philosopher transmits serenity, although she seems to get uneasy when the photographer asks her to show her hands. "My hands? I've never liked my hands," she warns. We have alluded to the confusing spring of '68 with a jab at her generation, more occupied with the Sorbonne than with the other spring, that of Prague. "It wasn't valued because communism couldn't be touched. At the university, we studied Marx clandestinely with Manuel Sacristán; I was more interested when he taught logic than his political theories. At that time, if you weren't a Marxist, you weren't progressive: I never was, I've saved myself the self-criticism," she ironizes.

She has mentioned Sacristán, but on Wikipedia, Victoria Camps is associated with the teachings of José Luis López Aranguren and José Ferrater Mora. "It seems someone recorded it that way and it has been repeated: my work has more contact with the former —although I was not his student— than with the latter: I have dedicated myself to practical philosophy that Aranguren disseminated long before it became fashionable. Until then, the only ethics was Thomistic ethics."

The Barcelona-born philosopher has brought ethics from university campuses to hospitals. Those who doubt the usefulness of philosophy should note its influence in laboratories and medical centers. Since she joined Spain's first Bioethics Committee, Camps has contributed humanistic knowledge to the management of Hospital del Mar, Hospital Universitario de la Vall d'Hebron, and the Esteve and Grífols foundations. Thanks to bioethical protocols, the patient can preserve their human condition: "The patient is, above all, a person," she emphasizes.

We have mentioned religion... Camps believes it should be optional, that a secular society —not a laicist one— has the obligation to offer different religions in its curricula: "I have a son who is an art historian and his professor's first advice was to read the Bible..

We have mentioned religion... Camps believes it should be optional, that a secular society —not a laicist one— has the obligation to offer the different religions in its curricula: "I have a son who is an art historian and his professor's first advice was to read the Bible... It is very difficult to explain medieval philosophy without knowing what Christianity was. When I was a senator, Gregorio Peces Barba promoted a working group to include the subject Religious Culture: we drafted a program that, unfortunately, was never applied." So much reference to classrooms brings us the image of students absorbed in their mobile phones or tablets while the teacher is speaking. "We should remember a phrase from Steve Jobs more often: more teachers and journalists are needed than ever because we need selection criteria, technological support is only an instrument, that is not studying," Camps emphasizes.

In her experience at the Consell Audiovisual de Catalunya (CAC) and on the committee of experts for the reform of public television promoted by Rodríguez Zapatero, Camps observed that ethics has little impact on communication and social networks. She confesses that it gets on her nerves a bit to give a conference and see how the audience tweets isolated phrases and, possibly, out of context. Faced with the difficult balance between freedom of expression and sanctions for Twitter excesses, the philosopher proposes self-regulation: "Moderation is one of the notes that define ethics: self-control, the middle ground, temperance are not negligible virtues for coexistence to proceed without too many stridencies. The individual must self-regulate and curb their impulses if they can be offensive, unpleasant, or inconvenient for other people," she wrote in one of her articles in El País.

Situated at the limits, we put our interlocutor in a bind. Would she refuse, as in France, to publish Céline's anti-Semitic pamphlets, contextualized with a preliminary study? "If Mein Kampf was published, Céline can also be published if it is explained that he was very crazy and anti-Semitic, which does not detract from the fact that he was a great writer. The problem with this type of work is not censorship but trivialization," she replies.

Words condemned to disuse by postmodern frivolity surface in the conversation: temperance, virtue. We add manners, will, discipline, authority, morality... Camps already vindicated the concept of "virtue" in Virtudes públicas (Espasa Essay Prize, 1990) and has just sent to the UAB press La fragilidad de la ética liberal. Let's go by parts. "Today we educate in values, but not in virtues. Value has an economic connotation, virtue is acting as citizens, forming a moral personality. Maturity consists of being autonomous and thinking for oneself and not seeking for any purpose the security that the group provides." A nuance: "Being autonomous is not breaking all the rules, but knowing what your limits are."

Almost without wanting to, we go back into the classrooms: "I have been very critical of educational reforms that dispense with discipline, authority, the asymmetry between teacher and student when the platform is removed, then the desk is removed and they all end up giving the class sitting on the floor." Philosophy without a platform degenerates into self-help, a distillation of what Lipovetski called the painless ethic, we point out: "Although it does not penalize like law, ethics is normative, it obliges you to act in conscience," adds Camps. As for the fragility of liberal ethics, she reproaches Western democracies for not having built a public morality: "It seems that being liberal has been confused with everything being allowed," she adds. We had started the conversation with May '68... Fifty years later, we ask ourselves what are Victoria Camps' interests and learnings. Since she retired after four years as an emeritus, she can only be a philosopher: she likes to write books like Elogio de la duda (Arpa) at a time when our society is so polarized: "To praise doubt is to encourage reflection, that's why doubt is frowned upon by politicians. Media headlines and social networks are the perfect fertilizer for broad-brush language to spread and become naturalized." Is doubt beautiful?, we propose as a conclusion: "Philosophy is the exercise of doubt. Learning to doubt serves to learn to live."