Thinking Snurp-Style

Sartre: The Flies

2010-09-28T18:44:00.002-04:00

Sartre, Jean Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

I

The sky above Argos, even when the sun is shining, hangs heavily over the earth. The ground seems barren, whatever may grow on it. The streets are largely silent. And in their houses, the people pray for repentance, for salvation from their crimes. The Argos of Sartre’s “The Flies,” like its people, is filled with, in Zeus’ words, “the good old piety of yore, rooted in terror.” (54) This is Argos after the Iliad, after Agamemnon has returned home victorious only to be murdered in a scheme by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. A man who fought for Greek honor (dishonorable though he was) returned to betrayal, and the people, in their lust for blood, relished his death. The story of every person in Argos on the day of Agamemnon’s death is the story of the old woman of whom Zeus says, “while you peeped behind the curtains and held your breath, you felt a little tingling itch between your loins, and didn’t you enjoy it!” (54)

This is the backdrop of Sartre’s play about freedom and responsibility: it takes place amidst the very personification of guilt and repentance. After the cruel death of Agamemnon, the city began to feel dark, however bright the skies were; the soil became barren, landscape bleak; and in came the flies, to torture the people who listened to Agamemnon’s cries that night. They and their children wallow in repentance every day of their lives, wishing only to be forgiven. And one day every year, the dead rise from their place in hell to torment the living, to take revenge on those still breathing. The living in Argos regret many things, but nothing more than their forgetfulness of the dead, their ability to live while the dead linger in Hades; above all, they say, “Forgive us for living while you are dead.” (78) Only such regret, they believe, can make them whole.

Into this setting walks Orestes, son of Agamemnon and heir to the throne of Argos. Thrown from the city when he was a youth, saved from death only by chance, Orestes has no memories of his home to cling to or be restrained by; his past was one of high education, skepticism, and light-heartedness. He was never given to regrets, nor was he given anything to regret; in fact his past remained, until shortly before the events of the play, a completely mystery to him. Orestes thus stands as an absolute opposite to the people who were to be his subjects: they are weighed down by the shame of their actions, their desires, and their past, whereas Orestes can say truthfully of himself: “I’m free as air, thank God. My mind’s my own, gloriously aloof.” (59) Orestes is free; he has nothing to bind him, no secret regrets to enslave him.

Yet one must always be wary when quoting a play; a poorly chosen quotation hides the context, the subtext that only performance can show.

When I was seven, I know I had no home, no roots. I let sounds and scents, the patter of rain on housetops, the golden play of sunbeams, slip past my body and fall around me—and I knew these were for others, I could never make them my memories. For memories are luxuries reserved for people who own houses, cattle, fields, and servants. Whereas I—! I’m free as air, thank God. (59)

Argos is scorched earth; all in Greece know to give it a wide berth. And yet Orestes has entered the town itself to see it with his own eyes. Why? He has no memories of his family, no bond to lure him. No belongings of his are there, nothing to retrieve. Instead, he seems driven by a desire to see the thing that should have been his home: “an Argos evening like many a thousand others, familiar yet ever new, another evening that should be mine . . . .” (60) Orestes was raised an enlightened Greek, given the best learning and the finest fruits of civilized life. He had no need to suffer for crimes that he did not commit, that children who were not alive are paying for (“Please forgive us. We didn’t want to be born, we’re ashamed of growing up.” (78)). Yet he has a strange desire to return to his home, to have its past be part of him. He seems to be almost willing to take on the suffering of the people, a suffering that isn’t even his own, to do so. The question is, why?

II

Another question lingers as well: what of the people? Why do they stay in Argos? After all, the whole world is not cursed with swarming flies and repentance as Argos is. What keeps them there year after year, regretting their lives but unwilling to end them? There is at least one that doesn’t accept this fate: Orestes’ sister, Electra, who remains captive in the palace. Washing dirty linens all day, she scorns her fate and hopes for the day when it will end, when justice will be paid. She refuses to fall into the cycle of regret that the rest of the city has fallen prey to: “if I let myself be tainted by your remorse; if I beg the gods’ forgiveness for a crime I never committed . . . . Ugh! The mere thought makes me sick.” (67) Electra has suffered vengeance for a crime she did not commit. The people of the city, even those too young to remember the cardinal sin, allowed their freedom to be taken away by guilt; she, however, seeks only the moment when things will be set right. And every day she prays for the day when Orestes will be there to free her from her suffering, to make everything right.

And on this day, Orestes has come for her. He arrives and does the job, killing Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, who is also Orestes’ and Electra’s mother. In so doing he sets his people free of their corrupt king, and sets his sister free of the slavery their parents inflicted upon her. The people, driven by whatever drives their repentance, are livid; they beat on the door in anger the next day. But the people one can almost understand. The greater question is, why Electra?

For Electra does not celebrate in the shadow of their victory. She feels the weight of Orestes’ actions, and thus her desires, weighing in upon her. “Your crime. It’s tearing off my cheeks and eyelids; I feel as if my eyes and teeth were naked . . . .” (109) The sudden regret on the part of Electra is surprising, and it’s not clear where it is coming from. Is it the simple realization that what they have done will have consequences? Was her lust for blood just the longing of a foolish youth who didn’t yet understand the gravity of her choices? Perhaps it is a strange surge of filial piety?

It’s something else. For this crime was theirs both, but she said, “Your crime.” And she says it again, more clearly: “I dreamt the crime, but you carried it out, you murdered your own mother.” (111) She was the one who begged him to do it, she was the one who snuck him into the palace, she was the one who commanded Orestes to strike Aegisthus down at the vital moment. So why regrets now? Why does she, in the moment after her passion, act in the same way as the other people of Argos do? And why does Orestes not? What is their difference?

III

It’s not because Electra loved her mother; she hated Clytemnestra far more than Orestes could. It’s not because Electra is an innocent soul and Orestes has no morals. It is because, in the end, Electra couldn’t commit herself to her crime, and Orestes could. For there is an important difference between Orestes and Electra, the same difference that separates Orestes from all the other men and women of Argos, and the single difference that animates the play. Electra, like the people of Argos, is ashamed of herself, of her choice. In wishing death upon another, and in seeing the dead, she suddenly sees herself a criminal, the same as all those citizens of Argos who wished death upon their previous king. Her past becomes her shame, and she wishes to disown it, to put it behind her. For this she prays to Zeus, who offers her this solace: “You never willed to do evil; you willed your own misfortune.” (114) Electra was, Zeus tells her, the tragic heroine, tortured by living itself until, like any human would, she acted rashly, and in so doing brought about her own misfortune. She did not choose to be treated so harshly, to be degraded; had she known better, she would have been just. She did not wish to be so. There is a similarity here that is no coincidence. The children did not wish to be born; but they were, and now they can only regret it, and hope to be forgiven. They are criminals, all of them, Electra included; but they do not want to be; they only want forgiveness.

Except for Orestes. “I am no criminal, and you have no power to make me atone for an act I don’t regard as a crime.” (113) Orestes is not, with these words, pleading innocent to the killing of Aegisthus, nor trying to defend himself against Zeus. Nor does he wish to excuse himself of his crime by calling it a youthful indiscretion or a moment of passion. His act he declares without qualification to be his own:

Do you imagine that my mother’s cries will ever cease ringing in my hears . . . ? And the anguish that consumes you—do you think it will ever case ravaging my heart? But what matter? I am free. Beyond anguish, beyond remorse. Free. And at one with myself. (111)

Man is free; so says Orestes. And the god of thunder himself is powerless before this freedom: “Once freedom lights its beacon in man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him.” (102) Zeus can do what he will, summon whatever powers he chooses, throw lightning and crash down thunder, but he cannot take from Orestes the ability to choose his own actions. Determinism is of no account, for determinism is a matter of atoms and particles, of physical laws and constants. It never touches the person, who is free to make of his past, his future, of all of the events of the world what he will, to own or disown them freely. (If you think I’m being flowery here, it will be seen shortly just how literal this notion is for Sartre.) What of the past? What of one’s desires, wishes, and actions? They can crush one under the weight of fact, or they can be thrown aside in an instant. Orestes has no past to crush him; but those who let their pasts weigh them down, the people of Argos and Electra, are just as free to throw it all aside. First, however, they must accept the past for what it was, for the real events that they did or didn’t do, what they wished and desired and hated. Only then can they choose how the past will decide their future.

This is the weight of Sartrean freedom, the responsibility that comes with being the owner of all of existence:

Thus, totally free, undistinguishable from the period for which I have chosen to be the meaning, as profoundly responsible for the war as if I had myself declared it, unable to live without integrating it in my situation, engaging myself in it wholly and stamping it with my seal, I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse . . . . (Sartre, Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992 709-710.)

This requires the recognition that one cannot step away from one’s actions, one cannot lay the blame on the contingencies of history or moments of weakness. History is one’s own to take as one will, to ignore or be controlled by, to love or hate. Humanity is free of gods, but as a result is left solely to its own devices. The past is the past, but it is still one’s own. The future is open. This tremendous responsibility on one’s shoulders is the greatest of burdens, as it is the recognition that there is no relief in confession, either to the priest or one’s own conscience. In light of this, Electra commits the same crime against human dignity as the people of Argos; she disowns her act, and thus her freedom. She succumbs to the temptation Zeus has offered her: an excuse, a story about her that takes away her freedom and makes her the plaything of social forces that forced her, like a doll, to act according to the assigned moves. But acceptance of this, like the repentance of the townspeople, is to throw away one’s freedom for the comforts of slavery to the gods.

Orestes, however, knows that such slavery is never absolute. Try as one might, freedom cannot be given away or disowned; “Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself. But I shall not return under your [Zeus’] law; I am doomed to have no other law but mine.” (119) Every citizen of Argos is just as free, but they flee their freedom and themselves. Orestes is free, and he cannot escape it. All he can do is find a path of his own, choices of his own, which were what he lacked and what really brought him to Argos in the first place. “Today I have one path only, and heaven knows where it leads. But it is my path . . . .” (105) With the killing of his mother and her suitor, the taking of a sorrowful throne, Orestes has finally taken on a responsibility worthy of human freedom. Rather than being an insect flitting over the pages of history, he has a story, a life of his own; his mission is the liberation of his people, his task to free them from themselves. “Fear your dead no longer; they are my dead. And, see, your faithful flies have left you and come to me.” (123)

On Muslims

2010-09-12T01:19:00.008-04:00

This year’s 9/11 has had a different tone than in years past, enough to take notice. In previous years 9/11 was a very straightforward day: it was the day that today’s America remembers its morality. Remembers that we, too, can suffer, that we, too, may be asked to sacrifice. There’s something terribly human in this that brings us together on days like these. But times have changed, it seems. For this 9/11 was clouded by two things above all: first, the controversy over the construction of a mosque. Second, the decision by a preacher in Florida to burn several copies of the Qu’ran, later cancelled (thank the gods). That these two things happened at the same time, and around 9/11, is mostly coincidence (‘mostly’ because the Qu’ran burning was planned for 9/11 for obvious reasons). That they both represent the same thing is not coincidence.

In both cases, the anger is about Islam. The mosque being built near the site of the former World Trade Center, which is actually a prayer room rather than a full mosque, is, according to some, an Islamic victory mosque celebrating what happened on 9/11: “A mosque is built on the site of a winning battle,” he said. “They are symbols of conquest. Hence we have a symbol of conquest here? I don’t think so.” Terry Jones, the leader of the church that was to have the “International Burn a Koran Day,” has in the past posted a sign that said “Islam is of the Devil.” The conflict is one of either American or Christian values (some conflate the two) against Islam.

I’ve followed these parallel stories long enough, and there is much to be said. Luckily, most of it has been said, so I will only linger on a particular point I want to make, one that can be emphasized by reflecting on the good pastor himself:

Mr. Jones said that nothing in particular had set him off. Asked about his knowledge of the Koran, he said plainly: “I have no experience with it whatsoever. I only know what the Bible says.” (Source)

I don't want to address everyone who opposes the center at Park51 near the World Trade Center site, as they're clearly not all quite that bad (though I'm not going to make exceptions for members of Jones' congregation). Though I think those who oppose the center are generally wrong for other reasons, some of which I'll give a sentence to below, they are not what I'm interested in here. Rather, I'm interested in people like those quoted above, who exhibit what is simply an appalling level of stupidity. It’s not just because burning the Qu’ran is a surefire way to bring Al Qaeda more recruits, though it is. It’s not just because the 9/11 mosque is actually one part of a community center that will include, among other things, a swimming pool and a 9/11 memorial, nor is it just because there are, among other things, adult stores at a similar, if not closer, distance to the WTC. These things are true, but my concern is something else.

Islam is the world’s second largest religion, having about 1.5 billion adherents. It appeared almost thirteen hundred years ago, and has expanded to include most of the Middle East as well as much of South Asia and Africa, and is currently expanding in Europe. Both Terry Jones and those who call the prayer room a “9/11 victory mosque” seem quite certain that they know what Islam is. Why, in Terry’s case, it’s not even necessary to know anything contained in their holy text! No, they know what Islam is, all right.

So what is it, according to these people? Clearly, it’s a single, unified religion, all of whose adherents follow the exact same list of tenets, with the exact same beliefs and goals. The Muslim, apparently, is an appendage of the Islamic system, which is a single strain of belief that is bent towards clear goals towards which all Muslims expend their efforts. All Muslims think, act, and believe the same. They all have the same ideas of what society should be, and there is no other option. All one billion, five hundred plus million of them.

Apparently, the concept of the individual is unimportant to people like pastor Jones. Either that or individuals with independent capacities for thought do not exist outside of their narrow worlds. Not that everyone is so simple: pastor Jones would quite likely agree that not all of Christianity agrees with his particular interpretation of his religion. There are those who believe that the pope is supreme, and those who think he is the mouthpiece of the antichrist. There are social liberals and those who think that blood transfusion is a sin. There are literalists and those who take the Bible as symbolism. There are some that think some of these groups do not count as Christian at all. This profusion is, as I'm sure even Terry understands, the work of human beings over history, taking Christianity in accordance with their own understanding of the world and the meaning of life. Obviously, people take Christianity to mean different things, because they are different people. Even if there is one Christian truth, the simple fact that we are talking about human beings means that there will be vast difference of opinion. I don't think any of the people against the "victory mosque" would disagree there.

But apparently, then, the people who follow Islam are not humans in the proper sense. Instead, Muslims are like the Communist armies of the 50’s, mindless waves of perfectly organized machines that act upon the singular mission of the manifesto, in this case the Qu’ran. Its purpose is to fulfill its role as the power, and to replace all else that has any difference from its clear dictates, and the Muslim individuals exist for nothing else than its fulfillment.

Whether they admit it or not, those people who say that what’s being built is a “victory mosque,” those who think that we are at war with Islam, they believe this. How else could you explain being at war with Islam? That puts us at war with millions upon millions across all the continents. The Middle East, South Asia, Africa, large portions of Europe are all full of the enemy, and wherever they go, the goal is the same: install Sharia law and overthrow democracy. Those Muslims who say otherwise are apparently not to be counted. This is what is being held, consciously or not, by the people who never stop to ask whether Islam is a real thing, or whether it’s a collection of over a billion individual Muslims who all have thoughts and perspectives their own. They never stop to consider that they are making claims about real, existing human beings; rather, it’s reduced to a group, and the group is the enemy. This is the only proper way to interpret a mosque as a monument to victory against America: assuming that all adherents of Islam are against American values, that they all basically agree with the actions of Al Qaeda on 9/11.

Is it any better to say, as one man does, “Not all Muslims are extremists, but all the extremists are Muslims.” Does Islam really have a monopoly on extremists? Was it Muslims that were behind the Oklahoma City bombing? How about the attack on the IRS building early this year? Were Muslims behind the Holocaust? How about the Crusades? Islam has no monopoly on extremism. But does Islam, as a religion, support extremism as a principle? When one stops reading news stories about radical Muslims and starts to talk to ordinary, non-radical Muslims (which, as it turns out, exist), one finds otherwise. Christianity has its radicals, yet it is far more than that. The point is obvious: extremism is a human thing; you'll find it wherever there's room to interpret it in. It's not a religion defined by extremism that could preserve Greek philosophy during the European Dark Ages.

Whether there are legitimate concerns about the prayer room at Park51 (I see none) is not the point. Nor is freedom of speech the point. The point is that, nine years ago, nineteen men launched an attack on American soil, nineteen out of 1.5 billion. Al Qaeda probably has, at most, a number of members in the four-digit range. Even if you claimed the entire Middle East as one groupthink block, you have less than 500 million people; that is, less than one third of all Muslims. The point is that Islam is Sunni and Shiite, who are in conflict more with each other than with America, as well as the mystically-bent and peacefully minded Sufis. The point is that, just like we all know there is no singular entity called "Christianity," but rather a profusion of different sects and systems that fall under that general heading, and as we know that there is no single set of beliefs and practices that defines an American, there is no “Islam;” there are Muslims, who are people with real lives and concerns all their own. There are liberal and conservative Muslims, those who take the Qu’ran literally and those who don’t, those who support terrorism and those who don’t, and many who are too busy being poor and downtrodden and trying to get on with their lives rather than caring about such things. They’re human beings; it’s about high time they were recognized as such by those who would demonize them.

Sartre: No Exit

2010-09-03T00:29:00.006-04:00

Sartre, Jean Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

I

So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people! (45)

So they say (and, in fact, this is where they got it from). Harsh words, and not only harsh: here they are meant literally. No Exit, probably the best-known of Sartre’s plays, takes place in hell. In hell (at least, in Sartre’s hell) there are no flames, no pitchforks, no racks: just a series of rooms, some of which are apparently “Second Empire drawing rooms.” (3) Into this room go three people: Garcin, the reporter; Inez, the postal clerk; and Estelle, the rich girl. Also, there are no mirrors and one no longer sleeps, and one can see what the people still living are saying about oneself on earth. That’s the extent of it. Not very gruesome. So what’s so terrible about it? What is it about being stuck in a room with two other people (granted, it’s forever) that can lead Garcin to make that famous claim about what hell truly is? Whatever the answer is, this is a one-act play, so Sartre had better explain quick.

Of course, at the beginning the three new arrivals are just as confused as we are (amusingly, and not surprisingly when one thinks about it, they were expecting flames and pitchforks and whatnot). When they come to find that it’s a drawing room that they’ve been brought into, and that they don’t seem to be leaving any time soon, they do what one would expect and just kind of sit around awkwardly. Garcin seems nice enough, if a bit cool and distant. Inez is straight-up cold, but she’s honest and a realist, if nothing else. Estelle is somewhat frivolous, but at least she’s cheerful. A strange combination of people, but it could be worse; they could be shacked up with psychopaths or genuine torturers. Granted, it might get tedious after a while as is, but there are greater torments than boredom.

There is at least one thing to keep them busy: the fact that they can see earth. They can only see what involves them, however; people who are talking of them, mourning their deaths, and so on are clear, but when thought of the deceased ends, the vision fades as well. In the end, then, they keep coming back to themselves – or rather, each other.

‘Each other’ is the proper way to put it. It is rather difficult, after all, to just ignore two people whom you’re locked in a room with. They’re always there, even if they’re not talking to you. Eventually, they might notice that little twitch you do (“INEZ: Can’t you keep your mouth still? You keep twisting it about all the time. It’s grotesque.” (9)) It should take more than unconscious tics, though, to drive people to insanity. But it’s Inez, in any case, and she’s just like that. It’s not as though she denies it: “Well, I was what some people down there called “a damned bitch.” Damned already. So it’s no surprise, being here.” (25) Unfortunately, this doesn’t resolve the problem of her being a bitch; an honest bitch is still a bitch. Though she’s also pretty sharp, and with that honesty it leads her to be the first one to state what seems to be going on: “It’s obvious what they’re after—an economy of man-power—or devil-power, if you prefer. The same idea as in the cafeteria, where customers serve themselves . . . . I mean that each of us will act as torturer of the two others.” (17) Or at least Inez will.

II

Not that Inez is having fun herself. Given that, there’s at least one solution to the problem: just stop talking to each other. And that’s exactly what they all do. Hell apparently suffered a rather serious oversight in not considering that people could just quit communicating with each other. Although you have to admit, even when you intentionally avoid talking with someone in the same room (or rather, exactly when you intentionally avoid talking) it’s kind of hard to ignore them. You get a bit self-conscious. Eventually Inez starts singing. Thank you, Inez. Garcin keeps quiet. Estelle has been playing with make-up but then realizes that she has no mirror to see (since, despite not allowing mirrors in hell, they apparently allow lipstick). Apparently even in hell she’s concerned about her lipstick, though it’s not clear who she’s going to impress. Inez, though, is perfectly willing to help her perfect her appearance: “I’m your lark-mirror, my dear, and you can’t escape me . . . .” (21) A bit creepy, though. And she keeps going: “Suppose the mirror started telling lies? Or suppose I covered my eyes . . . .” (21) Estelle seems disturbed at the thought, and Inez clearly has the upper hand. But, as one could guess, it’s not Inez that Estelle is really concerned about. “But I wish he’d notice me, too.” (21)

Now, Garcin is not a particularly attractive man by any measure. At least he has some dignity, though; he died trying to escape from being forced to fight in the war (this was written during the 40s) because he didn’t agree with it. But is he really worth the attention of a pretty girl like Estelle? Inez doesn’t think so, though it might just be more the fact that Estelle wants his attention, and not hers, that’s the problem: “even if I didn’t see her I’d feel it in my bones—that she was making every sound, even the rustle of her dress, for your benefit, throwing you smiles you didn’t see . . . .” (22) It’s rather painfully obvious; Estelle is one of those people who has to always be seen, always put on a show. She lives to be looked at, to be that perfect flower: “how empty it is, a glass in which I’m absent! When I talked to people I always made sure there was one near by in which I could see myself.” (19) Just like a doll; all show, all perfect appearance, with something else altogether behind it, or just nothing at all. Without a mirror, she’s helpless; after all, there is a man in the room, she can’t be a mess in front of him! Inez sees what’s coming from a mile away. Estelle sees a person she cared for on earth; or at least, someone who cared for her. But time passes faster on earth; she is long gone, and he’s found someone else, her friend (or supposed friend, given the circumstances). Just like the minx she is, Estelle wastes no time in turning to Garcin: “I don’t want to be left alone.” (31) Inez doesn’t intend to give them the right of privacy, though she’s surprisingly shaken by the whole thing: “Under my eyes? You couldn’t—couldn’t do it.” (35) But Estelle’s had enough of her gaze, in which “my smiles will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.” (21) Inez feels the situation turning against her; she knows that this won’t go through, because she won’t allow it, because Garcin won’t allow it. But Garcin, who maintained his dignity up to this point, finally gives in to Estelle, in part because he is as tired of Inez as she is.

But something stops him. “Will you trust me?” (36) A final flash of earth, of those who remember him. Coward! they call him. An outright lie; he died for what he believed in. Not surprisingly, Inez doubts this. Turns out she was right: “INEZ: And how did you face death . . . ? GARCIN: Miserably. Rottenly.” (38) But he tried! Or he wanted to try, to be brave, to know himself a brave man. At least Estelle still believes in him. She’s willing to give him everything: “I’m giving you my mouth, my arms, my whole body—and everything could be so simple . . . . My trust! I haven’t any to give, I’m afraid . . . .” (36) Except her trust. Not that it would be genuine, anyway. In a sense, she’s even worse than Inez: “You’re even fouler than she . . . . Like an octopus. Like a quagmire.” (41) At least Inez is honest. Estelle doesn’t have a dignified bone in her body; she only wants attention. Still, why can’t Garcin even earn the trust of the woman who is giving himself to her? He tried to stay silent, but they had to get back to talking. He tried to avoid contact, but they dragged him back in. He took the high ground in every case, and now look where it’s gotten him! He spent his life trying to be a man, trying to be the man he should be with the respect such a man deserves, and now Estelle is clinging out of desperation and Inez is parading his cowardice for the world to see.

At this time Garcin is struggling to force the door open, to escape the liar and the cold-hearted bitch. And it opens. The hall is outside. There is no monster behind the door, no bottomless staircase: they are free to leave.

“GARCIN: I shall not go.” (42)

Why? Garcin has been besmirched; his worth as a person is gone, he has no honor, so long as Inez, who knows his nature, continues to see him as a coward, as someone who never proved himself. And as long as she sees a coward, so does he, and he knows it to be true. “And how did you face death?” The question still hangs over him, because he knows he has no good answer. Estelle will protect him; she couldn’t dare leave Garcin, the only man left, the only one who could worship her. And why would Inez want to leave, when she possess power over Garcin, when he is paralyzed until he earns her seal of approval?

But let’s not pretend that Inez, or anyone else, won this round. Estelle knows what to do: “Kiss me, darling—then you’ll hear her squeal.” (44) Squeal she does; she can throw all the insults she wants, but one act like this shows her powerlessness. Not that that’s forever: “What do you hope to get from her silly lips? Forgetfulness? But I shan’t forget you, not I!” (45) Garcin the coward, forever remembered. The greatest nightmare. Estelle, of course, is caught between the tyrant Inez and the man who can never love her because she could never have an honest respect for him. Inez the tyrant, who dominates those around her with her piercing gaze and cold retorts but crumples when she sees her influence wane. Estelle the seductress, dependent on everyone but herself to accept her, to need her, to worship her, and nothing in a moment when she is no longer the goddess; and Garcin the martyr, the man who must be a man, who must prove himself, but who cannot live until he’s proven it to others. Hell is three people in a room where none can escape the others’ gaze; where one is always watched, always being examined and defined by the other’s eye. You can never control the gaze of the other; it is always free, always behind those eyes, no matter how you try to possess it; it can always turn away, always see you for what you are. An eternity under this power with no reprieve, no rest, is hell. “There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!” (45)

III

One question has not yet been answered: just why were these people sent to hell, anyway? What were their crimes?

Inez lived with her cousin and his wife. The cousin got on her nerves; when he died by freak accident, she threw the widow into a depression by insinuating her in his death. Cold remarks and bitter half-lies took control of the defenseless woman, and Inez relished it:: “When I say I’m cruel, I mean I can’t get on without making other people suffer.” (26) Eventually the widow turned on the gas in the house while Inez was asleep, and both died.

Estelle had an affair with a young but poor man. This man adored her, worshipped her; she was his everything, she possessed him. But then she became pregnant. Now the whole relationship changed, the whole story had to be rewritten; it was no longer innocent love, no longer his pure and simple adoration. “It pleased him no end, having a daughter. It didn’t please me!” (28) She tied the baby to a large stone and threw it into the river. Her lover killed himself soon after.

Garcin the moral had taken a woman from out of poverty and made her his wife. He was her hero, her everything, the most important thing; she lived safe because of what he had done. She believed him perfect. And Garcin exercised this power. “Night after night I came home blind drunk, stinking of wine and women;” (24) he was in bed with one mistress when his wife brought him his morning coffee. She said nothing; “she admired me too much.” (24) She died of grief several months after him.

Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea

2010-09-01T00:41:00.001-04:00

Sartre, Jean Paul. Nausea. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1964.

I

Antoine Roquentin is a man with a problem: he sees things. Not exactly strange things, or unusual things. In a sense, he sees the same things that we all see, day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. It’s just that he sees too much of things. He sees them exist. Everything exists for him, including himself. And apparently this is a problem. “I have no troubles, I have money like a capitalist, no boss, no wife, no children; I exist, that’s all. And that trouble is so vague, so metaphysical that I am ashamed of it.” (105)

Yet it is a problem. Nausea is about a metaphysical problem, the sort that most people would never bother themselves about; and those who ever have, have probably never done so except in the abstract, which is to say, they haven’t. The fact that things exist, that, for Jean-Paul Sartre, they exist absolutely, beyond, behind, and before all of our attempts to think through and thereby categorize them, to organize and thereby mollify or control them, is a problem that is of the most extreme order, at least if you are a person like Antoine Roquentin. Roquentin is a man with no connections to anything: there is only one person in the world he almost cares about, someone now just a memory he can hardly grasp. He has no mission, no purpose besides writing a book about a dead Frenchman, a task he comes to abhor with time. He has no serious financial troubles, no enemies, nothing to challenge him. At the same time, he has no home (he spends the entirety of the novel living out of a hotel room, one he has lived in for years), no one close to him, nothing to give direction. He has no concerns, no ties. He just is; he just, as he says, exists.

And that’s the problem. Existence, that is. When you spend enough time apart from everything that binds, you risk becoming unbound yourself. The story of Nausea is the progressive unbinding of Roquentin, as he becomes more and more separated from the human world around us, more and more disconnected, and for that reason more and more clearly recognizes the true nature of existence. For what Roquentin finds, and what Sartre wants to argue, is that, when one strips away all the layers of meaning and significance that are placed onto the world by ourselves, everything we build into our meaningful world, one finds existence plain and simple. That is to say, before all names, before all designations, there is what is, and that means everything. This is the reality that Roquentin finds himself in the middle of, the reality that Sartre thinks is our own, behind the scenes: raw existence, complete plenitude literally without definition. The distinctions, the names, are products of ourselves, of our social mores, our language, our little shortcuts through life. The world around is divided into concrete objects by the way in which we have chosen to make our way through it, the designations we have as individuals taken on. But the designations are not the things themselves. What Roquentin is coming to see is reality itself, existence freed of human meaning. In these states “[t]hings are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things.” (125) In such moments Roquentin finds himself unable to act, think, or speak; he is afraid to touch anything; everything forces itself upon him in its total selfness, its total existence. It is, and this fact is something deeply unsettling.

What are we supposed to think about this problem? What is the nausea, really? And who is the man who can see what we apparently cannot? Nausea is a novel about seeing the world as it really is; though he certainly acts like a crazy person at many points, the point seems to be that Roquentin is the sane one, the one who understands. But why should we believe this? What should we think of the nausea that reveals reality? Is such an experience believable, even possible at all? Does Sartre have something here, or is this all just pretend?

II

To understand the nausea, and our connection to it, we need to understand the man who lives it, Antoine Roquentin. As I said before, Roquentin is a man with no connections to anything, which is to say that there is nothing driving him, nothing possessing him or compelling his day to day life. He has no passions, no interests, no real motivations. Most of his days are spent sitting around cafés or walking down streets. His only recognizable project, and the only reason he is in the town he is in, is a biography of the Marquis de Rollebon. But over time this project, too, suffers from a lack of passion, until it is finally given up altogether. But take away Rollebon and there really is nothing. No reason to do anything or be anybody. Roquentin is simply left with his existing.

What would happen to such a person? Certainly it’s not a normal sort of thing, and not even unusual; is there one man or woman that actually lives a life so absent of interest? Without friends, without passions, with hardly even a will to survive? Roquentin has, to a degree virtually unimaginable, shed any connections to outside sources of value, of meaning. In this sense, he is importantly different from any of us who read or think about him, much less those who just go about their lives. Only this inhuman perspective can allow a proper view of the world, for the world we know is an impure one. The world we look at for every moment of our lives is a world full of names, of significances, of tasks which need to be done and ways through which those tasks are accomplished. The light, the chair, everything takes on a significance in accordance to the systems we set up. This is not a revolutionary point, either now or when Sartre wrote Nausea in the 1930s (by that point Heidegger’s Being and Time had already presented an existential conception of worldhood, one where the world is a collection of significances rather than an objectively defined thing). But what had been missing from such discussions is the real feeling of such a claim. To say that the world has no significance in itself is an abstract claim; to see it is something else altogether, a task that is much more difficult. For we cannot simply throw away the meaning that we find in the world; it must be broken down, degenerated, ripped out like teeth one at a time (to understand this point, simply ask: who among us can just “unsee” meanings, unsee the way the world is organized at our most basic levels of understanding?). Our ‘world’ is a conceptual thing, then; the world in the sense of the actual, existing world is something else.

How does one show the world in its purity, then? For that, you would clearly need someone who either never was or no longer is operating under the conditions that seem basic for any functional human being. But how could such a person even survive without grasping the world in the way that we typically do from moment to moment? Even in Roquentin’s case, the way that the world is understood is by and large the way that we ourselves understand the world. A café is a café, his hotel room is his hotel room. This is the ordinary way of experiencing the world, and the one that we are in basically all the time. Yet there are times when, for Roquentin, it all collapses at once. Everything loses its purpose, its alignment, and it all becomes an oppressive force, a massive fact pushing on him. His ability to function virtually ceases in these moments; he is afraid to even touch anything. And this, the recognition of existence, is the nausea.

III

What is the nausea? It is the moment when all distinctions brought about by human endeavor collapses. The world, as has been stated, is there independently of us, before our names for it and utilizations of it for ends. But the world without us is one without meaning, without significance. All facts, all understandings fall to the wayside. Things don’t exist with purposes, to fulfill function, they are just there. It all just exists. Roquentin’s nausea is the moment in time when the scales over his eyes fall and he sees things as they are, which is to say, things which are nothing more than “are.” What are things, after all? Are they colors, like black?

Black? The root was not black, there was no black on this piece of wood—there was . . . something else: black, like the circle, did not exist . . . . I did not simple see this black: sight is an abstract invention, a simplified idea, one of man’s ideas. That black, amorphous, weakly presence, far surpassed sight, smell and taste. (130-1)

The tree root that Roquentin is looking at, is focusing on with all his effort to the point of being possessed, is not a thing that is black; there is no colorless substance which has the ephemeral characteristic ‘black’ that clings to it. There is only the root, its being there as it is: “It looked like a colour, but also . . . like a bruise or secretion, like an oozing—and something else, an odour, for example . . . .” (130-1) It does not mean something, it is not a sum of parts; all of that is our coloring of the existent. This root is reality; but more significantly, this moment is the seeing of reality, reality without filters, without concepts, just pure seeing. It’s a bit disconcerting, to say the least.

But it’s certainly not something I’ve seen, and I doubt you have. Why not? Because we live and die by our concepts, in a world organized (not created, not shaped, but organized) by our minds and reflecting a permanent, solid, graspable and ordered structure. This way of living ignores the existence of things, existing in the sense recognized by the nausea, instead simply treating existence as a predicate, a checkbox below such categories as “black,” “solid,” and so on. The existence of things is buried by our categories; the existence of persons, the fact of one’s existing just as free of purpose as the tree root, is covered up by one’s projects: “Each one of them has his little personal difficulty which keeps him from noticing that he exists; there isn’t one of them who doesn’t believe himself indispensible to something or someone . . . . But I know. I don’t look like much, but I know I exist and that they exist.” (111) We follow through on our tasks, our objectives, with a constancy that doesn’t once allow us to stop and recognize existence. Sure, we exist; everyone knows that. But that’s just as empty as the admission that trees and chairs exist. They exist, but for us they are just ordered parts of an ordered world, where things have significances which we can see the moment we look at them. If Sartre is right in this interpretation, then we can confirm that people today are less likely than ever to recognize existence. So much activity, so little time. Everything we see either is or is not part of our purpose, be it completing a job, getting something to eat, meeting a friend, avoiding harm, and so on; the significance of something is understood immediately according to one’s purposes. The resistance of things, their existence pressing on us, is a property to be dealt with, rather than a fact to be marveled at. Heidegger’s question, “Why is there being rather than nothing?” is metaphysical speculation, the occupation of idle minds (who themselves are no more cognizant than anyone else of what existence really is). Roquentin himself was one of these people, even during the time of the novel, insofar as he still sought purpose in the Marquis de Rollebon:

M. de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist, I needed him so as not to feel my existence . . . . I did not notice that I existed any more, I no longer existed in myself, but in him; I ate for him, breathed for him, each of my movements had its sense outside, there, just in front of me, in him . . . . (98)

What makes Roquentin so special is that all of the significances which we normally accrue from our absorption in a world of projects is missing for him; there is nothing, absolutely nothing, which requires a world of significance, and so it all starts to fall apart. This is the nausea; the loss of all meaning, awareness of existence qua pure existence, naked reality. And this is why only Roquentin can see it, why it takes a novel to tell us about it, and why even then we will likely never see it ourselves.

IV

But if we will never see it, what good does a novel do? Not much, one would think. Certainly Sartre, even through the medium of Roquentin, can’t directly portray the true nature of experiences which by definition are beyond description. But what Sartre can do, or at least attempt to do, is to show the process by which one discovers these experiences, the sort of person who would see them, and how she would come to a recognition of them. It takes a person who can separate herself from all projects that assign importance (a task much more involved than just quitting your job), from all driving desires; someone who can live outside of the procedures of daily life itself. Roquentin is this person, or at least a chance. But even this is not enough to let us see. That is something we have to do on our own.

The Reformation

2010-08-30T00:07:00.001-04:00

I'm still here, and in fact I'm about to move in a wholly new direction. Blogwise, it's actually something of a return to form, but the motivation on this end is rather drastically different. The culture blog is now absorbed into this one, and the posts from it condensed into single-link pieces as a special part of the blog. Coming up next, Sartre. We're moving into new waters, people, and with a sense of purpose at that.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2010-08-29T23:50:00.012-04:00

It’s small, made of hard plastic, and has “Don’t Panic” in large, friendly letters on its cover. In fact, it seems a lot like the sorts of things that we use today, both in terms of how it works and what it does. It’s the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it’s a device meant to give you a guiding hand in a universe that is, for all intents and purposes, basically insane.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first a radio play, becoming the series of novels, the one discussed here, in the late 70s and early 80s. The story starts when the Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. One human, Arthur Dent, survives, along with a strange friend, Ford Prefect, who is actually from a planet somewhere near Betelgeuse. These two later encounter Zaphod Beeblebrox, the president of the galaxy (who has just lost that very title because he steals a ship of incredible importance and power), Marvin the Paranoid Android, who is everything but emotionally stable (well, I suppose he is stable if scorn and loathing are the sorts of emotions that can be stable), and a host of others. What happens along the way is largely incoherent and unrelated to any sort of plot whatsoever. Ostensibly, the first two novels are concerned with two issues: finding the true ruler of the universe, a task that Zaphod set to himself before wiping his own memory, and finding the question that matches the answer to life, the universe and everything, a purpose for which the Earth itself was built and the key to which, therefore, lies in the head of Arthur Dent. (The later novels start to move in their own directions, and also change structurally somewhat, and so won’t be the focus of attention here.)

This is what is supposed to pass for a plot, but the plot is notable above all for being basically ignored thereafter, not simply by the author, but by the characters themselves. Zaphod doesn’t want a damn thing to do with finding the real ruler of the galaxy, though he set himself up to do it. As for life, the universe, and everything, pieces of the puzzle are thrown in virtually at random, with a new lead or some such suddenly emerging by chance. It’s almost as though it appears to say ‘yes, there is something bigger motivating these people, but really it’s not that special.’ In the end, the plot is not very significant, and the ultimate revelations only become significant in terms of their ridiculousness and triteness. I will not spoil it, but the conclusions to both story threads are not merely underwhelming, but fiercely opposed to any satisfying answer. The basic resolution is that, in a nutshell, the galaxy is nuts.

And this revelation, in terms both of what it really is and how it is played out, is the whole point. The first thing to understand about HHGG as a series of novels and as an idea is that, in the end, there’s no point to everything, no conclusion with some sense of finality which makes everything fit. The galaxy where these events take place, when all is said and done, is ridiculous. The hunt for answers doesn’t give the characters, much less the reader, much satisfaction, because the galaxy is not a satisfying thing. In fact, the galaxy as a whole ends up feeling much like our own world; arbitrary, full of self-serving individuals and bureaucratic nonsense, diverting its energies to progressively more useless results, and all around something that looks worse the closer you look at it. The only moments in which Arthur, the man in whom the answer to life, the universe, and everything supposedly lies, is truly satisfied are the moments where he is furthest from the whole, the times when he is (literally) making sandwiches rather than pursuing the truth. Ford, the hitchhiker who’s seen the universe, would rather chase drinks than save galaxies, and is quite clear that he doesn’t care enough to act. Zaphod is even less serious than Ford. And Adams takes it less seriously than all of them.

If there is a real main character to this story, it is not Arthur; he is more of a perspective, a way to wedge our own limited perspective into a story spanning space and time. (Perhaps for this reason he is also the only genuinely believable character. The others are all amazing, beyond belief, and intentionally so; they are mostly caricatures of various sorts. Arthur, on the other hand, in his confusion, irritation, and constant resorting to sarcasm when the situation least calls for it, seems very average in his attempts to reconcile with existence.) The real central character is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself, or, more specifically, the editors who create its content. The guide, rather than being an impartial encyclopedia, is more of a how-to guide for life in the galaxy. It is practical and cynical; it recognizes the ignoble side of the universe and lives it, offering advice on making drinks and on what planets to avoid, on how to charm your way into the exclusive club on the exclusive planet and on what any idiot should now about space-time disruptions and how to take advantage of them. There is no grandeur in the tone of the guide; just a recognition that, despite it all, people just want to get by as well as they can, and possibly reduce their misery on the way.

Adams’ writing style, again particularly in the first two novels, revels in and perfectly reflects the nonsense of the world he portrays. A towel is the hitchhiker’s best friend, because you can use it to, among other things, keep warm, fight off enemies, store bits of wire, food, and other handy items, and even keep yourself dry. Doors have personalities, excited to open and close for you (which is about as irritating as it sounds). The ship Zaphod steals is powered by the improbability of events, which it then makes happen in the process of propelling itself through all points in the universe at once to reach its destinations. It is these oddities, their genesis and purpose, that make up the real content of the novel, because they all engender a sense that the galaxy is full of fools who make and do silly things, and as a result have made the galaxy a complete mess. A door that is excited to open for you tells a lot about the sorts of things people buy in the supposedly advanced galaxy, and makes for a lot of fun. But at the same time it almost sounds like something we might do. An elevator that can see into the future to be at the right floor ahead of time is a phenomenal waste of resources, and perhaps a danger. But there’s also something about it that doesn’t make it seem to stupid not to be made by somebody. What we see here, beside the humor that keeps us reading is a perspective about the way our own world works, a backdrop where great power and effort is expended in useless ways. This universe that Adams has made is broken, but it is also believably our own, and it’s this scene that is the real story.

A short story written by Adams taking place in the setting of the novels, “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe,” highlights this more clearly than the rest. Though the usual Adams comedic writing is there from time to time, this story is strangely serious in its tone. In it, Zaphod is charged with investigating (along with a couple public safety officials) a crashed ship full of dangerous items. The usual items, such bombs, poisons, and so forth, are present. But there are other things. One is a device that harnesses energy from the past in order to use it in the present. There was a lack of energy at some point, so someone had decided, why not take energy from the past? It’s not like they’re using it. Of course, this not only was self-defeating (that energy is no longer there in afterwards, reducing available energy in the future and starting a cycle) but terribly damaging to the past itself, and by extension the present. The most dangerous item of all, though? “Designer personalities,” artificial people made to order, who were in some cases designed such that they could get away with anything, and no one would suspect them. There’s something eerily believable about the possibility of these creations, not necessarily in terms of technological possibility, but as the sort of things our human race as we know it would do. Once again, this universe is believably our own in its insanity and incoherence.

And it’s that universe which HHGG is really about. It’s not about the plot, which Adams appeared to try and finish off for good at least three times. It’s about a world gone mad, about new technology suffering from the same old problems, about all the disaster that new opportunity brings. Basically, it’s about us, the power and stupidity we simultaneously wield, and how, no matter what changes, our problems always seem to stay the same. Adams was no fear-monger or conspiracy theorist; he was a greater fan of technology, and a more avid user of it, than just about anyone else. But unlike many others, he was also acutely aware of the very human problems that technology couldn’t solve, and HHGG is the chronicle of that. It’s the story of a world gone mad, where the characters, the plot, and everything else serve to show us this picture. And like the best parody, it’s simultaneously hilarious, engaging, and really, really disturbing.

Salience

2010-08-29T23:48:00.004-04:00

We all know from the television ads you see late at night that there are a lot of starving children out there. We also know that not most of us who see those ads don’t bother to donate a rather small amount of money towards helping those starving children eat. We know that we should, and we know that it wouldn’t be very painful for us to give what’s being asked of us. So why doesn’t it seem to bother us much who don’t give? Why don’t the starving children of the world haunt our dreams, our thoughts, our consciences? Why is it that we seem so much more concerned about the destruction of a local landmark, even one we don’t care much for, than mass starvation?

The same question can be asked in the political realm. Ostensibly, people want politicians who will cut back on pork-barrel spending and focus on what’s really important. Yet every congressman (and woman) fights to get money to his or her district, to get special local projects financed, and this always pays off at the ballot box. At home, the argument is: “Look at what I’ve done for us;” in Washington, it’s “We need to cut this wasteful spending!” Thus, one man’s bridge to nowhere is another’s support of the local economy. Certainly, we know as a general fact that other states and locales have projects at least as important, if not more important, than our own, and that, if our projects deserve attention, so do theirs. So why don’t we take this into consideration? Why do we tend to keep the big picture out of mind?

The salient is that which strikes us, that which grabs our attention, and salience is the degree to which something is salient. Salience is not to be confused with relevance, which is the actual strength of the connection of something to an issue; something can be very salient to us while having no real affect on us, and something can be relevant without it even being on our radar. Salience, in short, is how something rates on our attention span, and understanding how it works in our minds can help to explain why some issues grab our attention while others that should do not.

Salience itself is not a complicated concept. The idea is simply that, the more salient something is, the more likely it is to draw our attention. The important question is why some things are salient and others are not. Why isn’t world hunger salient? Why are those pork-barrel projects salient in the positive sense when they’re local, and in the negative sense when they’re not? An easy answer seems to be selfishness. We are selfish, so we don’t care about others. The starving children in Ethiopia are not my problem, nor are voters in another state or district. But this doesn’t always hold. People who give to charitable causes don’t always think in terms of what cause specifically does the most overall to combat need. People always seem more likely to commit to causes that are more local; we give to local fundraisers and such more often than to distant causes, even if the distant causes are greater. Might this still be attributed to selfishness? Not if the local cause, despite being local, doesn’t affect us. Some give to local organizations that have no direct impact on them or those connected to them, and do so more often than to those charities that focus their work in other countries. Likewise, with the example of pork, we support projects that keep the local economy strong, and congressmen who look out for our interests, even if we ourselves and those we know are not in need of such help. Such a congressman (or woman) “cares for the community.” But don’t the others as well, if they are operating in a similar way? Perhaps selfishness has some involvement in the overall equation. But at the least, it doesn’t seem to be the sole factor at work here.

Might it be knowledge, or, more specifically, awareness of the issues? Perhaps those who are concerned simply don’t know enough about the plight of children in other countries; they may not realize the depth of the suffering. Likewise, when we support the bringing money to our home state through political means, we may not really stop to consider the situation of others, and how having a senior senator on the appropriations committee is rather unfair to most other states. One doesn’t see the other side. Again, this isn’t quite sufficient. Salience isn’t all about mere knowledge; for, as noted in the very beginning, we all very well know that people are actually starving to death in other countries, and that for a very small amount of money we could feed some of them indefinitely. We know that those pork-barrel projects in other states create jobs for those states, and that some of those states may be worse-off than our own. But this knowledge is abstract; while we know that kids are starving, do we really feel it? Has each of us spent some time today considering what it is like to not have any food for a week? For two weeks? Has each of us considered that, by forgoing a minor pleasure each day, we could keep people from death?

The truth of the matter is, we really have not. We are too preoccupied with our own lives; our jobs, our relationships, the circumstances of those close to us. These things have more salience to us. Likewise, issues in our own state or country have more salience to us than those in other states or countries. And now, perhaps, we are ready for a better definition of salience. It includes all of the elements mentioned so far; a bit of selfishness (not necessarily in the negative sense), a bit of knowledge, and a good bit of feeling. Salience is the degree to which a circumstance grabs us by the shoulders and gives us a good shake. It requires knowledge, and is often accompanied by selfishness, but most of all it requires emotion, specifically care; salient things are those we care about, in the general sense as those things we are somehow concerned with. It’s important to us as individuals. This, of course, does not necessarily imply that it is important in general, or important at all; but it is taken as being important, and here, that’s what’s important.

So, to return to our question: why isn’t world hunger important to us? We have knowledge of it. Given the smallness of the contributions usually asked for in those late-night commercials, selfishness is likely not central (or else it would be a very petty selfishness indeed). The answer is problem a combination of distance and overexposure. For one thing, world hunger is a very abstract problem, one that seems beyond our capacity to change. Sure, we can help one child, but what does our tiny contribution really do? Further, it’s very difficult to conceptualize any influence one actually does have. What do our donations actually result in? What have I done? Sure, a family is saved; but that’s still too abstract. It’s some family out there, five thousand miles away. There are thousands, millions of families like that. On that scale, it seems virtually unreal; the family saved is lost in the multitude. Thus abstraction and distance form a major stumbling block to salience, as they loosen the visceral emotional grip that the most local, the most visible acts and consequences have on us. It is to fight against this that those late night commercials ask you not just to give money, but to sponsor a child. If you sponsor a child, it sounds as though you are directly responsible for that person’s well-being. Your impact becomes tangible in the letters and pictures you are sent from that child’s family. Solving world hunger thus becomes more relevant, because it becomes more personal, more pointed straight at you. It’s tangible, and beyond all else the salient is tangible.

Keeping to this thread, overexposure (and constant exposure) is perhaps just as great a threat to solving world hunger as distance and underexposure, ironically enough. Overexposure, seeing images again and again and again of starving children, leads to a dulling effect. Everyone is starving over there, it seems; what can I do? While it’s not necessary for salience, novelty is an easy means through which to make something salient; likewise, familiarity does not always make salience disappear, but absent some other reason to stay salient, with it goes interest. If something is new, mysterious, unknown, or surprising, it grabs our attention and does not easily let go. Once we understand, or have seen it repeatedly, we lose interest as our mind categorizes it and moves on. Thus, the first time you tied your shoes, it was novel and cause for celebration; now, you give it virtually no conscious thought whatsoever; it occupies no place in your schedule or planning; its salience is basically nil; whereas, at age four, it was all-consuming. When we see examples of corrupt politicians again and again, it ironically serves to dull the interest of many in fixing corruption, as we just resign ourselves to the idea that all politicians are corrupt and that there’s nothing we can do about it. Selfishness and laziness play a hand here, as they often do; but, if anything, we should be expected to fight for our interests as we find more corruption. Yet, those who fight corruption actively and vocally seem a minority; for the rest of us, we are more concerned with immediate issues, such as whether our local economy is suffering and our jobs are safe. Thus, pork-barrel spending is an abstract problem, bad but not something that we feel directly impacted by; money just flies in all directions in government, and we can’t be expected to know what to do about it. We feel powerless and distant before the scale of it all. Local issues, on the other hand, the money we have for community projects and such, are clear, direct, and impact us immediately (and, though I downplayed it to a degree before, it would be stupidity to deny that how something impacts us literally (and financially) has no effect on salience). We not only know, we see with our own eyes what a little extra appropriation can do. We know it’s needed, and the government can live with a couple million dollars less (our yearly GDP, after all, is greater by a factor of six zeroes). In other states, other local economies, things may be worse and have greater need; but that’s distant from us, not something that we can see the effects of. It’s not mere selfishness; if we saw, if we felt the suffering a community in bad financial straits is going through, we would likely feel more sympathetic. When we talk to relatives in other communities, we can feel genuine sympathy for those otherwise distant communities. But without that eyewitness account, we don’t feel it. And if we don’t feel it, it’s that much harder to muster the will to argue for change. To get true involvement, then, in politics and otherwise, requires a proper method, a way of making salient.

Being in Time

2010-08-29T23:48:00.003-04:00

There was once a time, not too long ago, when time itself was something that we had precious little of. Back in the height of the industrial age, for instance, when young boys had fifty hour workweeks just like their fathers. Back further, in the centuries of agricultural predominance, when the daily clock and yearly calendar revolved for most around the tasks that had to be done in order to maintain orderly operation at a farm. Even further back, before agriculture, when survival depended on making good use of your time. Compared to these ages (except perhaps the earliest, depending on the specifics of their lifestyle and the predominance of food sources), we have far more free time than anyone ever in history. Western cultures in particular, including America, have a lot of free time, to put it simply. We have limits on regularly paid workweeks. We generally make enough to have a lifestyle that is at the top of the worldwide heap. We don’t have to watch after our own lives in most cases. We, civilized men and women that we are, have it good.

But if that’s the case, why do we never seem to have enough time for anything? For isn’t that the way it always is these days? We don’t have time to do all the things that need to be done. We have chores, we have jobs, we have family, upcoming events, children’s sport games, shopping, housework, bills, so on, so forth. As the time and place for which the least amount of work is required in order to survive, we seem to have the least time of anyone else. How come so many, especially in the cities where all basic needs are basically provided for assuming one has the money, have so little time? What do we do with our time that leaves us so limited? Do we actually need to do more in order to have the same standard of living, or is it rather our sense of time that has it changed?

A comparison might help here. With labor laws and living wages that provide us with a universal way of access to necessities, the advent and constant advance of technology, and the overall move forward in coordination that humanity has undergone, the intuition seems to be that we should have more time than ever before. After all, we don’t have to work all day to supply enough money to live, at least not in the case of your average middle-class (and even lower-middle class) household. So something else must have changed in the shift from agricultural to industrial, or from industrial to technological, society that has more than offset any gains in literal free time. Perhaps a change in perception, or maybe in what sorts of things are necessary. Perhaps both.

Let’s first take a look at the more literal aspect: what sorts of things do people ‘have’ to do to maintain a basic level of living? Note that I said ‘basic’ level of living, rather than something such as subsistence. This will, of course, be important later.

For much of Western history (which is what’s under consideration here; other culture, which have less clear developmental paths, will be left out for now), the farm, and agriculture in general, was the standard way of living for a broad majority of people. Cities were not the centers of human population, and with their absence came the absence of a centrally coordinated process of production. As a result, much of what was necessary to live was produced either wholly by oneself, or wholly by someone else. A blacksmith acquired all the necessary materials and made his product himself; hence the need to train someone, an apprentice, in all the necessary steps. The same went for a miller, a baker, and so on. Everyone put their lives into their product, and that took a long time and a lot of work. Technology, of course, was also lacking; farming, blacksmithing, and so on were done by hand. Each product cost a great amount of labor. And because of the lesser degree of urbanization, and the general lack of technology, people had to do much more simply to maintain basic security. Even daily products unrelated to one’s work had to be made by oneself. You couldn’t just go out to market and find, for instance, ready-made clothing; often, someone in the family had to make it. Thus everything required effort, and the time spent meeting a base level of existence was consuming.

The assembly line represented an amazing change, as it completely altered the way in which a thing is made as well as the role of the worker. Rather than going through the long process associated with the creation of a single thing by a single individual, now a person practices a single step, simple and quick on its own. The process becomes streamlined, with people whose job it is to acquire materials, others who build basic components, and others who put the basic components together into a complete product. Much time is saved, and much more is produced. Further, with the advent of the industrial age, many of the most basic needs of societies were starting, slowly, to be taken care of. Cures for diseases were emerging. Basic management of waste would start to show up. The move to cities would reduce the problem of security against a hostile environment, taken in the literal sense. Many basic supplies that would take hours, days, months of work to produce at home now could be simply purchased as mass-produced products.

However, the industrial age did not eliminate some of the most basic problems. Sanitation, health, and so on still had little outside support. Most seriously, rampant poverty existed. The time not spent making one’s own livelihood was now spent making a wage; the fourteen-hour, six day a week work schedule does not count time spent maintaining the household along with any of the other affairs of daily life. Thus time was still nowhere to be found for most.

But what about now? In America there are forty-hour workweeks (sometimes less in Europe), and for perhaps the first time a good number of people don’t have to work those extra hours to maintain a subsistence level of living. Our basic needs are in many ways met simply by our working, in the form of taxes. We no longer face any real external dangers, there are cures for many of our illnesses, and we have a culture with many pastimes. So why do we still seem so busy? It still seems like we always have something that needs to be done. There’s always something to get out of the way, something unfinished. What hasn’t changed from the past, if everything seems so different?

The answer seems not a lack of change, but in fact the exact opposite; what has changed most essentially is our frame of reference. First we must ask, what sort of lifestyle do we today consider, to use the term I used before, ‘basic?’ In the agricultural and industrial eras, what was sought after was not what we today would consider a sufficiently complete life. Everyday life, of course, was extraordinarily hard back then, and the most one might hope for was a life that met basic needs. One wanted bread on the table, and much more was not expected. In sum, what seems ideal for the starving person is food, not a palace; likewise, what is important for the life of the agricultural or industrial person, what has to be done, is enough to maintain the basic means of living.

But if a palace is not what makes the starving person happy, what about the person who is well fed? More food will only do so much; soon one wants more. A life where the basic needs are already met, and where (relatively) little effort is spent achieving such ends, is a rather boring life in practice. People want more, not simply more to do, but more to have, to accomplish. In fact, we grow up with the urge, the drive, the desire, whatever may be its source, to go further. The person raised in a middle-class household is generally not satisfied with a lower-class existence, even if it would be enough to supply basic needs; such a life is worse than the one spent growing up, and we think that we should at least be able to do that well. A good capitalist economy runs on such desires, where people want not just to be getting by, but to be more successful than they have been. It’s always better to do more and to have more; if this is a fact, then not even the rich man should be expected to be satisfied with what he has (and almost never is, it seems). In times past, this was perhaps true for only the few; but now, we are all raised with a sense that we can do better not only than the minimum, but better than whatever we have started at. Thus, from the beginning, we are driven to do more.

But what more? One usually becomes rich not by increasing working hours, but by doing something new. One breaks into a new area, or works one’s way into a position that isn’t easy to acquire. The drive for greater success means that more effort than is necessary must be expended to succeed. But even this doesn’t seem to give a complete answer to the question of lost time. For though many are absorbed by such desires, and all of us usually feel them, it’s more than that that takes up our time; what makes us so busy now often don’t seem necessary from a subsistence point of view, but when viewed from outside, say from the perspective of a middle-class person in a third world country, don’t seem important at all. Things like community groups and associations one is a part of, side projects one takes on, the many small tasks associated with raising children (more on this in a bit, as it’s not quite right, of course, to just call this ‘unnecessary’), and so on. Many of these things, from the perspective of the past, don’t seem necessary. What is the vital importance, for instance, of being a part of the PTA? Why do our kids need to be in a sport, or to practice an instrument? Surely these things have good effects, and prove their worth, but how necessary are they? Couldn’t our children get by without them? For our own part, why do we spend so much time attending shows or meetings for things that aren’t at all essential? Why do we try so hard to get in touch with the culture, to know people, and so on? Are these tasks really necessary, and can they even truly be separated from our success drives? What are we aiming for here?

This mode of reference constitutes a real change. What was ‘necessary’ in the past? Basically, things tied to survival. There were some things beyond that, but they didn’t have the simple presence of something that needed to be done. What is necessary now? Or to go back a bit, what sorts of things are required to live at the current minimum standard? No longer survival; now, we want well-rounded, capable people who will succeed and reach a higher position in the world than those that came before. We need a complete personality, whatever that means, not just a breadwinner. Our children are going to be astronauts, presidents, whereas children of the past had the certainty that they would simply do what their parents did. Their jobs were time-consuming, but straightforward; we, of a more obsessive generation, want more for ourselves and our children. There’s nothing ignoble about this dream of social mobility, and we do now have the real means to make it real; however, it doesn’t come without a cost, a sacrifice. That cost is that we can only settle for more. To become a success, or to be a real member of the community, or to have kids that we can be proud of, seems now to require so many more things; keeping up with the Joneses is about far more than a bottom line. These infinite tasks take on the hue of necessity, because we can’t see ourselves aiming for less. Even vacations become part of the program; we have to see so many sights, do so many things together; we allot time spent as a family relaxing. There’s something a bit disturbing, and decidedly American, about this constant striving, though any culture that starts to shift its emphasis to the success story, the story of rags to riches through hard work and dedication, is probably going to see it. Less than ever before is needed to carve out a simple but sufficient existence, but as I sit here typing on my computer with the intent of working towards the development of my thought, so that I might someday become a serious writer that can get recognition based on the quality of his ideas, someone for whom being a career janitor would be seen by his friends and family as a failure plain and simple, it seems that the leisure we now have the possibility to act on has been absorbed by a new world of needs.

A final question, in that case, is whether it is even possible to live a relaxed life for someone who is raised in such a culture. The answer is of course; people do this all the time. But one must have the right mindset for it, one that is willing to step back every once in a while and doesn’t become obsessed easily. Some have this by nature, whether because they are naturally free of stress or naturally lazy. For the rest, we need to make sure to instill in them a sense that sometimes you need to not do anything useful if your goal is to keep your head on straight.

Conservatism and Small Towns

2010-08-29T23:47:00.001-04:00

It seems strange when you give it some thought. Small towns, it is said, vote conservative, by which is usually meant Republican. Partly this is because of the ‘values voter’ (which will probably be the subject of another post), but also it is economic; people in conservative, small-town America, insofar as there is such a thing, are generally distrustful of ‘big government.’ Yet, looked at from a perspective of self-interest, it seems like it is the Democrats and their big-government style that are best for people in small towns. Small towns as a general rule are less prosperous, and both families and individuals tend to make less, simply because there is less opportunity; there’s not much in the way of career choices and advancement, not much of a market whose demands need to be met; and social services are limited for obvious reasons. Thus, big social programs such as Medicare, Social Security, welfare, and so on seem more likely to benefit a greater percentage of people there than in big cities or more populous areas generally, where there is both more upward mobility and more access to services. So why is big government an epithet in the very sorts of places where it would seem to be most needed? Up to this point in this blog we’ve dealt mostly in abstraction from the reality on the ground, talking about culture as from a distance. Now, we’ll see if we can’t learn anything practical from this. As you can probably guess, I think we can.

But back to our question, which is this: why are the types of persons who live in small towns generally distrustful of government, as opposed to people in cities? This is not a cultural fate etched into the populace, but does seem common enough to be significant and worth explaining, at least if all those red/blue vote maps that show up on election night are to be trusted. As our general rule, ‘the heartland’ is conservative (which, for the purposes of this article, is equivalent to ‘prefers smaller government, generally distrustful of bureaucracy,’ and so on), the more populous coasts liberal. Likewise, people in cities tend to be more liberal than people in small towns. Before we start, let’s recall what was asserted previously, that there is no really uniform American culture outside of some symbols and values understood in the vaguest sense. Within one country, there is a wide spectrum of values. Further, those clusters of values are not arbitrary. As noted, the issue here is that small towns in particular tend to distrust government, and big cities are more trusting, comparatively speaking. This is probably not without reason. So what’s the reason?

Let’s begin with some general observations. When conservative and liberal politicians alike (but mostly the former) try to appease anti-big-government people, among which small-town people are a large portion, there are consistent themes to how they work. The anti-incumbency theme in current political times tells us a lot. In particular, there are two themes that keep coming up: Wall Street versus Main Street and the Washington Insiders. Remember, we’re not interested inthe particular issues and facts at play in these cases; rather, what’s relevant to our question is the context, the ways in which these messages are presented and what they are supposed to appeal to. For instance, when stocks surge while unemployment continues to be low, it is said that Wall Street is gaining while Main Street is being left behind. Economic policies of the Obama administration are often being attacked as being too friendly to Wall Street, and therefore somehow against Main Street. The other title, the dreaded Washington Insider, is not something isolated to one party), and in particular has become a catch-all theme for the upcoming election. However, the language itself, along with the movement in general, is far more closely associated with conservatism (as, for instance, seen at http://www.prisonplanet.com/loophole-exempts-washington-insiders-from-obamacare-mandate.html), and when it goes against conservatives it is more often than not in the name of something more conservative. The fact that much of the discussion is about whether or not the Republican Party can incorporate this sentiment is telling as far as what side it falls on is concerned.

These two labels reflect current events, but are also instances of the general trend that was noted above. What these labels share is an image: the image of either the stock broker or the politician, distant from his or her constituents, off far away (this is important, we will see later) doing things that are anything but in our own interests. Granted, people come to distrust the government for many reasons. Often, those reasons are probably related to particular events in their lives. Or it may be more abstract, coming from the idea that the government is doing too much or too little. Still, this image always seems to resonate more with conservatives in general, and especially with small-town conservatives who don’t trust their government. What I assert is that growing up in a small community will make it more likely that you will distrust the national government. It doesn’t guarantee it, but it makes it more likely. This is not a drastically new proposition; the question is, what might be behind it?

The answer is distance, both figuratively and literally. In fact, it’s a part of the same phenomena in which people complain about the disappearance of “mom and pop” stores and their being replaced by large chain stores. In a small town, there isn’t much distance (again, figuratively and literally). Town councils are made up of people you are familiar with. Local businesses are run by people who you have known for all of your life. You are always at a short remove from the people who are acting at these cases; no one with a position of prominence in a small community has any anonymity of the sort that an unknown city controller or district manager for a grocery chain has, in the sense of lacking personal connections to customers or constituents. The most substantial consequence of this is that the integrity of the person in charge is on the line in every decision he or she makes. You know the ability of the person who makes the product, as you know how much integrity the person who makes decisions has. With this knowledge of what a person can do and their immediate recognition of you as an individual there comes trust, and these informal trust-relationships are an important component to the way life in small towns works. After all, you know everyone. These relationships are important for getting things done neatly and effectively, and do work. One need not live in a small town to recognize this: just like you would be willing to let an able friend hang on to your car for a while if she says she can fix it, leaving a car with a local businessman who runs a tiny shop and who you see every day is not an issue. Certainly, it’s not an issue compared to bringing your car to get fixed at a large market auto center in the middle of the city, where you have to be vigilant to make sure everything goes okay and that you don’t get overcharged. That is in large part because of the sense that the people at the large auto center feel no personal accountability to you: you don’t know them, you aren’t important to them beyond being a customer. In this vein, you often see mottos such as Big Enough to Serve You, Small Enough to Know You, and Small Enough to Care, Big Enough to Serve. These mottos unwittingly recognize a conflict that is central to our discussion here: even when the large, faceless corporations offer us convenience and a lower price, we are inclined to trust the smaller company ran by someone we trust.

As business, so politics. I noted in passing that the idea that politicians are far away from us is important. The reason is, for a small-town mindset, the same as that which highlights the difference between the local manager and the guy sent in by Wal-Mart to manage the new Supercenter. Trust relationships are important for the conduct of business of any kind in a small town; the facelessness of more bureaucratic, corporate, large-scale operations, something familiar to the citizen of a city of ten million, is almost offensive to someone whose daily life depends on trust and familiarity. If you’ve grown up in a context where local familiarity is absent from the basic conduct of daily life, then having a familiar face isn’t a necessary or even important feature; other factors which were present in the small-town case as well, but not completely central, come to the fore. On the other hand, if trust and direct contact is central to daily goings-on, it will influence the way you see politics. In that sense, it’s hard to get much bigger than a group of people, many appointed, way off away from you (out of sight, out of contact, out of range of accountability - this is where distance comes in) using your money to finance some big program explained in a thousand page bill. You don’t know whether to trust such people, because you have no idea what sort of people they are, and this is vital information in a context where the informal rules of interpersonal relationships often take priority over the exacting enforcement of compulsory laws (after all, these guys are the ones making the laws). Big government, as a distant, unaccountable entity made up of people who have no reason to care about you or listen to your opinion, are inherently less trustworthy than the local candidate who’s helped you personally, because of distance. This is why, for instance, a black man in an area broadly considered racist can become an important local political figure, not because of a sudden change of belief of the people, but because he knows the way people think. ““James Fields,” you will hear whites explain again and again, “is one of us.”” James Fields could succeed as a black man where Obama couldn’t because Fields, unlike Obama, is not an abstraction to the people he has worked with since he was young. “Fields has no office in Cullman — he comes to you. Most of the county seems to know his cellphone number, with a result that, like an old-time family doctor thrust into the wireless age, Fields’s days unfold from house call to house call.” James Fields is a man who’s proven himself to the people, something which has the potential to overcome powerful barriers. In short, if politicians want to avoid the supposed anti-incumbent, anti-establishment wave that’s coming, and if big-government Democrats want to show that they “understand the American people,” that they “get it,” they need to be out there with the people, not just giving speeches but putting their face and integrity into the hands of those whose trust (and vote) they want, providing not just a name but a person.

What is American Culture?

2010-08-29T23:46:00.002-04:00

I

What is American culture? Since this blog will probably be read by Americans for the most part, it seems relevant. Given the American, or, more broadly ‘Western’ role of moral leadership in world affairs that continues to this day, it’s an important question for everyone. Wherever the tides may be turning, at the moment America still stands as a figurehead for world leadership, the lifestyle of its people something to be aimed for. But there are also many problems, many critics. Many think America, or rather Americans, to be ignorant. It is thought that they pursue a selfish, materialistic way of life. Alternatively, America and Americans remain in some ways an ideal, a goal to be reached, and immigration to this country continues. So what exactly is American culture? What are the elements that shape a distinctly American identity and way of life? This is the question with which we start.

To answer any question of the form “What is the culture of x like?” the most workable way to move forward is through simple enumeration of common characteristics of the people in that culture. This should work for Americans, Europeans, atheists, punk fans, vegetarians, and so on; what we want is those set of elements that sets America apart, and that all Americans (or at least a broad majority) share. This list would include beliefs, icons, habits and tendencies, a sense of one’s own history, and so on; basically, it is a list of factors that make up the socially constructed part of one’s identity. Not only must the concrete elements be shared, but there should also be a shared sense of meaning; two very different groups can start from the same basic ideas, documents, historical figures, etc. and draw very different lessons from them, based on other factors. Keeping all of this in mind, what do we find when we look at America?

Maybe the most firmly established line of commonality is a shared historical identity. There is a definite history, beginning with European discovery at the end of the Middle Ages and leading through colonization, war, and independence. The Founding Fathers represent both war heroes and icons of statesmanship; they set standards for bravery, sacrifice, prudence, and so on. In a way, the Founders are like the figures of a religious epic; larger than life figures who faced a great opponent and great odds, and came out successful, with their work establishing the foundation stone for many customs, habits, and practical facts of life that we encounter today. Thus, for example, the Constitution is the standard for law, having an absolute authority that shall not be superseded (and not just because it says so); unlike the laws of daily life or younger constitutions in younger countries, the Constitution has a sort of tangible sense of importance and necessity attached to its provisions, of historical destiny. Of course, it is a human document, made by human minds; but time and story changes many things, and the Constitution, along with the thoughts and beliefs of the founders themselves, has become something more than the sum of its parts.

This document provides a huge source of shared identity and sense of selfhood for what is a very large nation. One can compare, for example, the American reaction to 9/11 to any number of terrorist acts in Iraq during the occupation period. When Americans saw the terrorist attacks on television, what many felt was a sense of patriotism and compassion for the victims, despite in most cases not knowing a single person who died. Iraq, where terrorists attacks are still all too frequent, does not go through this range of events. What happens is more frequently a process of blame, and a consequent increase in tensions between ethnic groups. This is important; what is widely seen, in the news at least, is not related to a national patriotism in Iraq; if anything, it’s a threat to a commonality and a cause of further danger and potentially warfare (as Al Qaeda knows). Americans feel proud of their country -and what it stands for- in a way rarely seen, neither in Iraq nor Europe nor elsewhere.

But, as noted, we must pay attention not only to symbols and ideas but also how they’re interpreted, that is, their meaning. It’s not enough to share a belief in the role of the Constitution; there should also be some common ideas about what it stands for, exactly. After all, Christians and Jews all share a set of texts, but they deviate greatly in the significance those texts, foundational though they may be, play in identity. We run into something similar here, for, as recent events have demonstrated, there has been developing recently a very vocal dissention between groups as to what exactly America stands for. I’m of course referring to the conservative anti-government attitude that has developed recently, the Tea Party. These are people who see a great danger in what is happening to America and the direction it is headed. They hold firm to their understanding of the Constitution, and cite it frequently. Further, they hold that the opposition is not simply misguided but anti-American (note: this does not describe the whole Tea Party. It is, however, a clearly visible and driving undercurrent in the movement). Those on the other side, including the Democratic government leadership and opposing protest groups, think the same thing, that they are doing what is right according to fundamental American values and objectives. Where does this difference come from?

II

Whatever it is, it isn’t new. Though we might want to think otherwise, serious dissention and mass protest movements are not new to American life, nor is the scale a novelty. It’s not too long ago that the Vietnam protests occurred, as well as the civil rights movement. And for anyone who thinks that this can be isolated to recent decades, one ought to remember that the Civil War involved differences great enough to literally split the country. What I’d like to point out here is that, while it is true that there is considerable dissention in America about many fundamental issues today, and many of those differences seem poised (or are said to be poised) to affect the structure of American society, this is not a new phenomenon, and not without precedent.

What led to such differences, in this case and others? Much of this will be discussed in greater depth in the next article, so I am anticipating somewhat. But there are some important general features that can be made out now. The first is the very unusual nature of America’s development. Unlike, for instance, most European and Asian countries, America doesn’t follow any sort of rough natural ethnic boundaries. In fact, it went directly towards the opposite direction; America was a recipient, starting long before it became independent, of a broad mixture of ethnic, religious, and other groups from many parts of the world, something that continues to this day (though more now come from Asia and Mexico/South America than from Europe). What those people found was a huge swath of land, what has become one of the largest countries in the world. Thousands of square miles and everything from desert to tundra to Pacific Island are found in America. There are collectives of port cities on the coasts, and broad swathes of farmland with towns through much of the middle. You can find a huge variety of local habits and shared interests, different common practices (theater-going is still a possibility in New York City, and hunting remains important throughout the Midwest) and different levels of contact with the world at large. In short, America’s sheer size, variety of geographies, and different immigrant influences (the latter having perhaps less significance now than in the past) lead to a huge diffusion of ‘mini-cultures’ within American culture, more broadly construed. The incredible degree of variety, as well as the unusual history, allows greater variation than might be possible in many smaller countries, making America uniquely open to difference.

Which makes it very strange that America has held on so well through the years, particularly today, when, in the wake of greater world-exposure and the increase of casual relativism, one would expect more dissention than before. Yet again, there are influences for commonality at work. With the rise of world-exposure came the ability to move farther and quicker throughout our own country, an expansion of political, economic, and social spheres. This combines with the fact that the United States government has remained a consistent player in American life to strengthen a common element in daily life; the presence of persistent institutions that frame common problems and methods for their solution for people throughout the country. This provides a common backdrop of issues that every person deals with and reacts to (everybody, after all, is supposed to pay taxes) and thus another important piece of identity. These institutions are not just political; in addition to the Founding Fathers, there are pop stars that provide shared entertainment and information interests, common trends, visible social movements, and so on, with the latter being a bond of identity (whether you love or hate the newest television show) just as the Constitution is, since both provide a common object towards which one relates and against the context of which one defines oneself. What is important here is not the ‘purity’ or historicality of these sources; rather, it’s how they help to define one, and whether these sources give us a common starting point from which there is a mutual understanding of what is up for debate and interest, and what, broadly speaking, is to be held close to one’s heart, even when there are cases of disagreement. In this sense, taste in music or food has just as much possibility for forming identity as the Constitution of the United States; it’s something that helps us to announce who we are, in the process explaining to ourselves who we are, and letting us know who is like us, who shares our world.

III

This last point is important, since it seems to me that this form of identity is moving more to the forefront than the more traditional, historically based forms of identity. History has become less central to our identity than it was before (another subject of a later post), which helps in part to explain what the Tea Party members (and conservative movements in general) are after. The new small-government movement is a curiosity in part because of its obsession with its interpretation of history; the sight of a Tea Party member wearing colonial clothing and holding up a copy of the Constitution was not always an everyday thing. Part of what they’re trying to preserve is the identity that comes with that outfit, the historical values that they feel are threatened. Of course, whether those ideals are ‘historical’ in the sense of being the exact values the Constitution was meant to uphold is up for debate; what isn’t is that these protests are meant to represent of a sort of culture that the average Tea Partier feels is being threatened. A set of values is now being challenged, or so it appears; and the danger is significant enough to make sometimes substantial sacrifices to preserve it (as a note, this isn’t reflective, of course, of everyone in the Tea Party movement; but at the same time, it’s clearly present often and as one of the major driving factors in the movement). The same was true in the other historical cases, such as the civil rights movement; there was a growing conflict introduced between a shifting universal ‘American’ identity and the ‘American’ identity of a certain way of life, a subculture within the broader American culture.

Such fragmentations are not limited to America, of course; what’s interesting about this case, however, is the fact that the idea of ‘American’ culture in the universal sense is fighting with ‘American’ culture in particular instances. It’s not like an ethnic conflict with national implications, such as in various separatist movements through history. Think again of the civil rights movement; both sides not only claimed to be preserving American identity, they most certainly and strongly believed it. This is a very strange thing; America is shared as an idea, as a common history, set of values, and so on. But at the same time, there is great differentiation in practice, in what ‘America’ means. Part of the conflict is the distinction between symbols and meaning; the common symbols have different meanings that lead to conflict in cases such as the ones highlighted. At the same time, the symbols (and understood meanings) are so powerful as to preserve a common identity against all opponents, even the American culture itself. Whether this has ever happened before, I don’t know.

We’ve wandered far and wide here, so let us finally get back to our question before we close. What is American culture? Overall, it seems to me that there may be no such thing. There are clear common elements in history, figures, and so on, and they have clear unifying power. Even if one assumes that the role of such things is declining, there are shared institutions (and with it many shared issues and concerns) and many shared media that convey common messages across the country with ease. We share a general economic outlook and lifestyle as well, meaning that our position relative to other countries is mostly consistent. Yet at the same time one can find vastly different ways of living in different states, vastly different sets of values, and so on. It is clear that there are differences in how life is lived depending on where you go and who you talk to, to a high enough degree that you may sometimes think that you are in another country. What is not clear is how deep these differences run, and, the most difficult thing of all, how, in spite of it all, we can still claim so many common symbols and still stand together as a country when the time calls for it. How has America stood so strong, in spite of the challenges it has faced? And what can we learn from this? Might we be able to find, in this seeming contradiction, a way to strengthen the unity of other societies?

Is Cultural Discourse Relativist?

2010-08-29T23:43:00.002-04:00

There is one more objection to the project as a whole that we should deal with before we get started, and that is the charge of relativism. Relativism, in short, is the idea that all truths or values are relative, that there is no objective standard of judgment, and thus that there is no true right or wrong. This can be applied to our project mainly as a criticism of our attempt at an impartial standpoint: what we are doing in this blog is trying to build a structural analysis of the elements of culture and how particular cultures operate. In a sense, what we are doing is a softer form of science: given the observations we make about culture, we want to develop a picture that accounts for those phenomena and allows us predictive power to explain phenomena outside of our grasp. So we will, for example, examine phenomena in American culture and see if we can find a model which describes the forces at work and material being worked upon in a way that both explains what we see and allows us to make sense of other phenomena as they arise. (Unfortunately, the actual process won’t be this ideally clean: I will be picking particular topics, and I will be providing theories of my own to work through them, rather than simply collecting data and formulating hypotheses after. But then again, science is not ideal either.)

The problem with this, so the relativism charge goes, is that cultural discussion is not a field where you can just impartially observe and describe phenomena. Culture is a realm of human behavior, and of behavior in society. Thus, it must be guided by norms of right and wrong, by good standards and practices. Unlike when dealing with groups of animals, there is an imperative to discuss what sorts activities and social structures are right and wrong in a normative (i.e. in the context of ethics) way. Our analysis will not do this; instead, we will be focusing on description rather than prescription, on describing things as they happen rather than on whether they are right or wrong.

It might not be clear yet how serious this objection is, so let me explain. Let’s say that we discuss the Tea Party phenomenon that has arisen in American politics. There has been much recent talk not only about the merits of their position, but about topics such as whether they are a danger to democracy, whether they are in fact democracy in a truer form, whether their sort of methods should be permitted or not based on what could happen in the future, and so on. Furthermore, the Tea Party is something that it is difficult to be impartial about; they invoke emotion in their approach, and receive emotional responses both affirmative and dismissive. Their loud, aggressive nature seems to require more than just a descriptive response; one should expect a judgment on them. Are they a danger? Are they a great move forward? What do we do with them? By and large, I will try to avoid that. If I discuss the Tea Party, I will be interested in just describing what forces are at work behind them and where they might lead. I will likely discuss whether they appear to endanger civil society and how such danger, if it exists, might be averted, but I will not on such grounds call them terrible, immoral, or foolish; instead of offering the prescriptions of the preacher, I will offer those of the medical doctor. I will try to avoid judgments when I can, except when it is a part of the process of explanation (which is to say, of course, that there most certainly will be judgments; they just won’t be of the kind we first think of when we hear the word ‘judgment’).

So to explain the relativism objection again: I am offering a simple description of social phenomena as such. I try to avoid making political or moral judgments, as I don’t consider that to be my aim. However, there are times where moral judgments are right or necessary, and I should not exempt myself from them. Furthermore, it may be the case that, by not casting judgment, I give the appearance of balance where there is none. I get the feeling that this last charge will be the most common one: that, say, in offering a description of the phenomena that produce the Tea Party, but not making a judgment as to the rightness of their cause, I will be seen as giving them equal treatment with opposed groups or positions which clearly seem superior. To use a more extreme example which cuts to the heart of the matter: I might describe the rise of the Nazis and say that “this is how the Nazis emerged” without judgment, as though it’s just a fact of nature and excuses the actions of the Nazis. Thus, the relativism charge says that no one is accountable in my view, because I treat every group or individual as a product of the forces that I am describing, without saying that, say, the Nazis formed not only a wrongheaded but a terribly immoral view: the most I will say is that Nazi fascism is a major threat to individual rights in a society, and that’s not enough to place the Nazis in the context they belong, namely as genocidal terrorists. I forgive the Nazi by giving his side of the story, so to speak.

First I should discuss the question of will. The underlying assumption in the argument just given is that I assume the person to be a product of factors outside his control, be they nature or nurture: the Nazi is the product of indoctrination, or of inborn tendencies to anger combined with the opportunity provided by the Nazi party. By being a product of outside forces, the Nazi is absolved of guilt. But I don’t make this assumption, at least not as it’s been explained here.

First, as to the metaphysical question of free will: do I assume here that everything is ultimately caused by factors outside of us, and so that we have no control over our own actions? In part, my response is that that isn't what concerns me here. I'm not interested in metaphysical debates about free will, just as the applied ethicist isn't interested in debates about freedom of the will. If you are an applied ethicist, as opposed to a theoretical or meta-ethicist, then your concerns will not be about questions so broad as the freedom of the will; rather, you will take the situation on the ground as a given and work from there. I operate in a similar fashion; rather than taking big metaphysical positions, I am simply working with the observation that there are influences on our behavior, both innate to our physiology and coming from literal external sources. Even if one assumes that institutions and physiology guide our behavior, it then follows that a change in the institutions and physiology (the latter being more and more of a possibility today) can change our behavior, assuming that the individual is determined totally by those causes, which are both outside of the will. One could then ascribe the change in those individuals to institutions, which were then shaped by previous individuals, and so on ad infinitum; in the end, there is no clear 'first cause' given our mode of operation (empirical and inductive), so the answer to the free will question is an unknown.

Metaphysically, it appears to be unknown; what tips the scales for our purposes is the simple observation that we act as though we have free will. We 'choose,' and in putting it in those terms assume that it's our will that chooses. This is how we always operate; and so, whatever the metaphysical answer is, we will operate under a framework of free will, broadly speaking. I don't disallow the possibility of ethical judgments, then.

But this isn't really the objection against me here. The objection is that I just don't make those judgments; even if I act as though I believe in free will, I'm not judging the Nazi as I should. I am excusing the Nazi because nature and nurture made him what he is; what I need to do is say that his choices were wrong, and that we need to shape conditions so as to avoid people like him. Given that, let’s answer the question: is it my job to make judgments? My argument is simple: I don’t have to. Not only that, I don’t yet have the right to, nor does anyone else, without a proper understanding of the nature of the matter. One must know what is going on before one has the right to cast judgments about better or worse. There is no shame, then, in description without prescription; description is a necessary part of the process, and is furthermore the necessary antecedent to any worthwhile prescription. My work is justified in itself from the relativism charge, because it is necessary to know the facts of the matter without having yet cast judgments.

Which is really the core of the matter: those who object, say, to a neutral description of the Tea Party or the Nazis do so in virtually every case because they’ve already made their moral judgment. I take Socrates’ position: all that I know is that as yet I know nothing. To this I add: and so, it would be rather silly of me to judge. Perhaps the judging reader is wiser than me: if so, then good for that person. But many are not, and, even worse, many are fools without realizing it. It is them that I wish most urgently to reach, and them who are most in need of what I offer. So the sort of work I do is not only justified, it is exactly the sort of thing that should be done. It provides the grounds of proper judgment to those who are not yet ready to make such judgments. Or, to paint a less idealistic picture, it offers the chance to more carefully consider one’s judgments so that they might be better made. It is in this spirit that I begin.

Why Talk Culture?

2010-08-29T23:40:00.002-04:00

Why talk culture? Or more specifically, why care enough to talk about culture? Is there really a point to doing so, besides making conversation? Is there anything to get out of it? Cultural discourse seems to be in that realm of topics that is nice to talk about until it’s time to get serious about things, at which point you apparently put on your serious hat and leave any contemplation at the door. But if that’s the case, is there any point to having a blog on it besides making conversation? Should I have any goals outside of the occasional deep thought? A couple years ago, I tried to give a defense of the humanities in general (including cultural discourse along with literature, philosophy, and so on) in my other blog. At some point I will likely revise that defense. What I want to do here is more limited. Instead of humanities education in general, I am defending cultural discussion; and, while there are a variety of grounds on which I might defend these topics, I will be using one specific one here.

The idea of cultural discourse seems related to the general ‘humanities’ subjects, such as history and philosophy, in that it considers broad questions about the nature of things rather than thinking about how to solve exact problems. With all of these topics there is always, implicitly or explicitly, a question of whether they have any concrete value, or if instead they are amusements at best or distractions (perhaps even some sort of high-minded corruption) at worst. If you want to be well-rounded and think broadly, so the general conception goes, you go with a humanities education; if you want to focus on success, look for something more specific, like med school or occupational training. The thought that always follows behind this is the idea that, while it would be nice to be well-rounded, really we should focus on being successful first; the time for becoming cultivated, if it is even necessary, comes later. In short, culture can wait.

My contention is that no, it cannot. The reason is that culture is not something we can stand apart from while we focus on our own lives and then return back to when we’re financially secure and comfortable. Consideration of cultural developments is not something that should be avoided, because culture itself cannot be avoided, nor can its effects on us. Previously I defined culture as “the set of factors, including institutions, traditions, history, values, and symbols, that has developed into the defining background for a group’s identity, into the means through which the members of the group make sense of their situation and make decisions about how to live.” Assuming this to be true, the influence of culture on our lives begins even before we can speak. Culture helps to decide what preferences we have; it pushes us towards certain associations and causes us to shun others. But it is not limited to these, which are rather obvious; culture’s influence extends beyond the types of choices we prefer to affect the very choices we think we have. That is, not only preferences but possibilities themselves, including what we think makes an ‘acceptable’ career and life path, and what sorts of factors make up a livelihood and ‘security’ are influenced heavily by the background in which we grow up, the values which are transmitted into us from day one; what is important to us and what constitutes a good life are not simply free-floating choices made on our whim, but ranges of possibility determined by what we have accepted as good and bad, worthy and unworthy, and this is done through that broad range of social affects which I have called culture.

This means that there are external factors pushing on us at all times and in all situations, to such a degree that they have the power to define possibility. And those forces are always at work. Ironically enough, one way in which we can see these forces explicitly try to influences us is through the “culture wars” as defined by conservatives. It is said that our culture is under attack, and that we have values that need defending. But rather than being a matter of preservation, diversity, cultural contribution, or some other such justification, it is accepted as given that the culture under attack is the only acceptable culture for America. Apparently, it is a given that there is a certain universally binding set of values that needs defense from all opposing factions no matter what. These values themselves are not interrogated, nor even politely questioned as to their own justification. Not that they are evil values; that’s not the issue. What is the issue is that what they represent is never considered, nor are their sources (in a genuine, historically verifiable sense) or relations to other cultures and elements of daily existence, such as the natural world. What is good and right is already decided, without debate, and people are willing to pay a great price to defend it; this is not a case of culture acting like a casual outside influences suggesting one possibility over the other, for the culture warriors and for those they are trying to “save,” us, the people in the middle.

Culture war isn’t the only way in which control is exercised in this realm, of course; all of the component pieces of culture are engaged in the struggle for influence. Our upbringing conflicts with the things we learn from schoolyard friends, which is different from the expanded world that post-secondary education offers, which is again different from the world of work. We listen to family members and internet friends and 24 hour news channel talking heads, and they all present a view. Left alone, all of this can confuse us, leaving us desperate for an anchor in the shifting seas and willing to grasp onto any strong authority (one of the motivations of “culture warriors”). It can make us lose faith in any chance of carving out a sensible existence in the chaos. Or it can lead to apathy.

But this is not a foregone conclusion. We still have a way to pull apart and coherently reconstruct the mess of vectors that pull on us, and that comes first of all through awareness. I said before that cultural discourse, as a humanistic study, is something to help you “be well-rounded and think broadly;” what I didn’t say is that this is in itself a powerful and necessary tool for taming the influences in one’s life. The reason that this sort of investigation doesn’t appear to offer an immediate value is because its influence has to do with the whole of life rather than one specific possibility of one specific component of it; its effects are lived through us in the way we handle social pressures and psychological urges, how we consider our options and weigh the validity of evidence, rather than in accomplishing a set task. In this sense, cultural discourse acts as a tool of knowledge, and knowledge is power. But while that’s a truism, it’s never explained why knowledge is power: it’s because it takes knowledge to see the field for what it is, and it takes insight to turn so bind so many moving pieces into an order that makes victory possible where sheer force falters. Here, it means that cultural discourse is what makes you aware of what culture is and does. You become aware of what influences your choices, so that you can decide what influences are to be trusted as benevolent; you become aware of the alternatives, so that the total set of options, rather than a set of possibilities pre-determined by others, is opened to you; you also learn to see the strange and mysterious other for what it is, another human being under the same influences in a different situation, so that you can begin to understand how to communicate and how to separate the beneficial from the harmful in the lives of others (something the culture warriors do not spend much time considering). In other words, you were blind and now see; and when it comes to navigating a maze that shifts constantly, that doesn’t hurt.

So anyone who tells you that there are more important things to think about is not only not an intellectual; that person doesn’t understand his or your own best interests. That person either isn’t aware of or isn’t interested in understanding the real factors that go into making the human amongst humanity, which includes himself; he thus is unable to pursue the real sources of his discomfort, his indignation, or his anomie when he feels them. He will mistake the lack of clarity with which life greets him for simplicity, and he will make enemies where he could have valuable friends. True, he could live happily; but his happiness is subject to the whims of his captors, nature and nurture; he does not consider that the former can be directed, and the latter overcome, if the need arises, and so you should wish him luck that he not have to face such a time. In short, with talk of culture comes understanding of culture; and with understanding of culture comes understanding of yourself; and with understanding of yourself, comes control of yourself; and the person who possess herself is a person with genuine power.

What is Culture?

2010-08-29T23:38:00.001-04:00

Culture. It’s one of those abstract ideas that we all understand in conversation, but can’t for the life of us define. When someone refers to, say, cultural exchange between two countries, we know rather specifically what that means: getting each group exposed to the other’s way of life, customs, foods, political and social issues, and so on. It’s a way of exchanging not just lifestyles, but something like another nation’s way of being. Likewise, when we talk about cultural discourse, we know basically what the term means: something like talking about the social structures and way of life of our or another social group.

But when you try to get more specific, things get a bit murky. What elements compose culture, exactly? What is the relationship between culture and the individual? How does one judge cultures, and change them if one finds reason for change? This blog is to be a blog that discusses theses questions and possible answers; in short, it is a blog about cultural discourse. It is semi-academic in nature, working with commonplace ideas about humanity rather than sticking with scholarly standards, but still within the realm of logical argument and judgment based on merit rather than mere opinion. Thus, what I will be doing here is discussing our culture and its manifestations in society, what these manifestations mean, and what we should do if there is a need to take action. But first, we need to know what we are talking about. We need to define culture.

So let’s follow the method I describe above. Instead of looking for scholarly pursuits of culture, let’s see if we can peruse our intuitions for the start of our answer, and then refine it through evidence and argument into something consistent and usable.

The first thing we can note is that culture is not something determined just by the individual. One person alone in the woods does not a culture make. Nor does a nuclear family. A nation, on the other hand, certainly has a culture (in fact, it can have man within it). Regional groups, such as Native American tribes or other indigenous groups, have their own cultures. It’s not clear whether a town or city can have a culture; it seems like a big city, such as New York, certainly has a culture of its own, but we usually think that small towns have their identity as part of a larger culture.

Which brings us to our next point: culture is not restricted by area, nation, or people. Cultures can move: a section of Chicago has several cultures, with Chinese, Indian, Irish, and other parts of the cities each having a unique culture that they brought from their respective countries. Cultures are also not necessarily rigid: they influence each other, with, for instance, the movement of colonists in history bringing their cultures to bear on indigenous peoples. Yet that does not guarantee cultural dominance. Looking at Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, we can see that, rather than being carriers of the cultures of their places of origin, they tended by be incorporated into the cultures of the areas in which they appeared, giving them a “local flavor.” Tibetan Buddhism, for example, talks of spirits and reincarnation, whereas Japanese Zen places the emphasis on balance, control, and tranquility, and the more spiritual ideas of Tibet have no place.

Culture is thus definitely a social thing, and it is not part of a particular social element or force, such as nation or religion. It’s more fluid than that. Let us next ask what culture “does.” What things make up culture?

Culture is thus definitely a social thing, and it is not part of a particular social element or force, such as nation or religion. It’s more fluid than that. Let us next ask what culture “does.” What things make up culture?

For some reason, the first thing that jumps to my mind is food. Each culture has its dishes. And they’re not random choices, either; you can generally place a dish without knowing beforehand what culture it came form by its ingredients, method of cooking, and so on. While this may seem to be a regional aspect (i.e. Indian or Chinese food), I think we must allow first, that region and culture are often though not always closely linked, and second, that other factors can influence “cultural” cuisine, like religion or history. So, in short, each culture has a particular “taste” which it develops in its food. It does so in part because of what it has at hands: what sort of crops, animals, spices, and special food items, such as berries with flavor-altering properties, it has at its disposal. From this certain particular methods of food-making are developed, which generally follow throughout the cultural cuisine: Mexican food has its tendencies and basic ingredients, as does Chinese, as do different African cultures.

I think the food analogy is helpful here, because it’s an unusually clear one that shows how other elements that we associate with culture develop. Take, for example, closeness of community. While America has a largely individualistic social ideal, different parts of America place vastly different emphasis on the role and necessity of close familial and community ties; broadly speaking, small communities place a greater emphasis on personal contacts and close families, on knowing people personally, whereas in the cities the situation is more individualistic, and impersonal contacts are not just common but expected. In both cases it seems that the social structure has built itself up to deal with its conditions; the close ‘tribal’ structures usually play a role in smaller and more localized societies, where you are always in contact with everyone and good relations are important, whereas the expansion of the social space to city-size paradoxically leads to an increasing individualization, as one has to deal with more and more people whom one will never know in depth, and local ties become less of a predominating fact of life. Like with food, there is a sort of localized development of structure and tendencies (cooking methods) based on the situation (the ingredients, if you will). It develops into its own unique system which has its own way of dealing with its situation. Once a system has been defined, it can be moved while remaining intact; thus, like Irish dishes, Irish culture is capable of being moved while maintaining its distinct nature. But it can also incorporate new elements; a lack of ingredients or local factors leads to compromise; the dishes may have to change somewhat, as do the methods, and eventually a totally new culture can develop based on parts of what was brought over and the situation it found itself in.

This, roughly speaking, is the way cultures grow. But we should point out some more elements as well. Cultures, we have said, include a unique cuisine and a social structure. They also have their heroes; that is, their major figures, whether military, political, literary, or otherwise. Likewise, there is a canon; the Declaration of Independence is not a legal document on par with the Constitution, yet in America it has equal if not greater importance, because it defines what America should be. There is a shared history; the greatest example of this is Judaism, a culture that has defined itself against its oppression, dispersion, and destruction for thousands of years. This leads us to what might be most important about culture; it is a source of identity.

Judaism is an instructive example, because of its will to survive over the centuries. Israel was never a large state in its heyday, and it was sandwiched between larger ones. Eventually, as most small states are, it was broken apart and consumed, and many of the people were physically removed and imprisoned. Yet in spite of this they survived. How? Through identity. The Jewish people had several things. First, they had a history: they had memories of their power and then their destruction which they shared as important events. They had a canon and heroes: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses were remembered as great men to be thanked and admired, and over time a single compiled work, the Hebrew Bible, came to be the definitive canon of history, heroes, and literature. They had those particulars by which a culture is more easily defined: they had a cuisine, customs, particular social habits (such as circumcision), and a religion. All of these factors, brought together in the Hebrew Bible, became a complete and singular source for what it means to be a Jew, for where you are in the world historically, for how you identify yourself and who to identify yourself with, and even the smallest regulations for how a Jew lives her life. As Nietzsche proclaimed: “every respect for the Old Testament! I find in it great men, heroic landscape and something of utmost rarity on earth, the incomparable naivety of the strong heart; even more, I find a people.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality III:22)

I think that this finally gets us to what a culture is. It is, above all, how one becomes part of a people. When we talk of cultural exchange, we mean the interaction of different peoples with different histories, customs, and foods. When we talk of cultural discourse, we mean the social and political institutions that shape the way we make our way through the world. Culture, then is the set of factors, including institutions, traditions, history, values, and symbols, that has developed into the defining background for a group’s identity, into the means through which the members of the group make sense of their situation and make decisions about how to live. Culture is the way in which humanity as a group determines the nature of the human individual. It is everything social which determines what we think ourselves to be; only innate characteristics and those developed in complete isolation from outside human influence can be said to not have been affected by culture. Given the rise in consideration of the role of the social in philosophy today, and the importance of identity in politics, there is, therefore, both a theoretical and practical impetus to consider more deeply how culture shapes us and what particular cultures have done, how a culture grows and how it can be altered. In short, there is a need for cultural discourse, and it is my intention here to start the conversation.

My Other Blog

2010-03-16T12:08:00.002-04:00

I suppose I should announce it formally, since the bulk, if not all, of my efforts will be going towards it: http://snurpculture.blogspot.com/. Expect regular updates and consistent objectives, among other things.

Discourse on the Culture

2010-02-28T22:10:00.003-05:00

There was an article in the New York Times wherein David Brooks, a man I don't mind reading, was talking about the lack of cultural discourse:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/whats-happened-to-cultural-discourse/

I gave it a bit of thought, and I think there's something important to this idea, if true. "Cultural discourse," that sort of parlor room conversation of pseudo-philosophical matters and human nature you've heard of but rarely see, is an important bridge between the academic and, for lack of a better word, the "man on the street." Given how isolated academia is these days in areas such as sociology and philosophy, that's a real problem, for both the academics (who are continuing unknown, unappreciated, and potentially unrewarded for their hard work) and everyone else (who is not learning from such discussion, whether it is up to "publishable" level or not).

This seems to me to be a real problem. In fact, on reflection, it's close to the reason I wanted to become a professor. I originally wanted to do it to teach more than anything. And by teaching, what I wanted to do was help people understand things more clearly in the abstract sense; that is, be able to deal with themselves and their world with some self-awareness and the ability to avoid the most obvious fallacies. Cultural discourse, as a concept, seems exactly tailored to do this, since it tries to take what can be learned from those who spend their lives on this stuff, but with as much effort as is possible for those who have 40+ hour jobs and families.

If this is the case, then I think I could at least do my small part to help. What this means is that, in the short run, this blog might change a bit. The same content that's always been here will continue to be here and expand, but with the difference that there will actually be posts more than once a month! Now I will try to give serious thought to cultural thoughts in general, something I always think about but usually avoid writing about because I never considered myself qualified enough to write about. But so long as I exercise caution and self-awareness, I can deal with that; and besides, the idea isn't that we all need to be Ph.Ds, but rather that we should think more about parts of our life we did not before, which was my goal in the first place.

So, should I take this seriously enough to start on it, expect some sort of regularity in posting on these subjects. Either once a week or once every two weeks, depending on how things work out and whether I can come up with enough material. I may actually try to get my name out there, too; who knows.

(Disclaimer: I am still Snurp, so let's not hold our breath on this one, though I feel it's quite in my range of ability and time.)

How Hegel's Dialectic Works

2010-02-10T21:45:00.003-05:00

Imagine that there was a baby who was born without an arm. In this story, medical science has perfected the growth of limbs, and so creates an artificial arm, mechanical on the inside, but upon which her own flesh takes hold and grows.

At first, the child grows up thinking that the arm is nothing but a part of her. She and her arm are of the same person; there's no distinction between them, and no reason to suspect anything. This thinking is true on her part, but not understood, because she only thinks that her arm is such immediately, that is, nonreflectively; she hasn't reasoned out the reason why the arm is hers. This is the Hegelian thesis.

Then, one day, the child, now an adolescent stumbles upon the medical records of the procedure that gave her her arm. She finds out that this arm is actually a special thing, something that is separate from her. She repels from it, calls it "the robot arm," and no longer considers it a part of her. This is the rejection and distinction of the Other as Other, the antithesis.

Eventually, the child, who is now a young adult, realizes that, whatever may be the case about the machinery in her arm, it's still her arm; it's the arm that moves when she wants it to, can move on mere intention without command, and which her own flesh has grown onto. While the arm still has its particularity, its Otherness, it is also reconciled back to the person; the arm is a part of the one again. This is the synthesis.

If you're Hegel, life, the universe, and everything works the same way.

Palinhand

2010-02-07T16:47:00.005-05:00

There are few things these days that interrupt my normal schedule of almost never blogging my readings of old books. Sarah Palin, however, is one of those things.

This is Sarah Palin, speaking at a Tea Party convention the other night. Among other things, she spoke of energy, tax cuts, lifting America's speaking, and how Obama is a "Teleprompter President:"

This is Sarah Palin's hand during said speech:

The general sentiment I've seen in the internet is that Sarah was too stupid to remember her own positions, and so had to write them down on her palm, something that would get you a zero on your test in the fourth grade. I don't think this is why she wrote them. I think those particular things are there because, when being given pre-screened questions in a virulently friendly environment, she knew that she would nevertheless be at a loss for what to say at all at times. For this reason, she had three immediate go-to answers prepared, so that she could get started on what to say. So it's not that she couldn't remember what to say, it's that she just wouldn't be able to come up with the answers when asked.

One might wonder whether, in that case, the vaguest generalities ("energy, tax cuts, lifting America's spirit;" the addition of teleprompter discussion in the list above, which she did indeed speak about, was added mainly because the hypocrisy makes my brain dissolve) would be sufficient. Two things: when it comes to memory, often the slightest reminder can bring a whole piece of things seemingly forgotten back into focus. Second, Sarah Palin was never one to make points based on details anyway.

Current Plans

2010-01-17T20:08:00.002-05:00

The semester has started again, and Hegel was a real slog. I don't think I'll be writing on him quite yet. Instead, I have different plans in mind, plans of the sort that might actually be practicable, given the usual nature of my schedules during a semester. We shall see . . . .

Camus: The Stranger

2010-01-04T18:08:00.002-05:00

Camus, Albert. The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Random House, Inc. 1988.

I

There’s something strange about The Stranger. Not simply the stranger himself, a man named Mersault living in French Algeria, though he is certainly strange, as we’ll see. There’s something off about the book itself. Instead of starting with an explanation of what I mean, I’ll start with a piece of the text itself, which I think will show that there’s something off, though it may not be clear what. This is from the fourth page, where Mersault is at the home where his mother lived her last days:

Just then the caretaker came in behind me. He must have been running. He stuttered a little. “We put the cover on, but I’m supposed to unscrew the casket so you can look at her.” He was moving toward the casket when I stopped him. He said, “You don’t want to?” I answered, “No.” He was quiet, and I was embarrassed because I felt I shouldn’t have said that. (Camus, The Stranger 6)

The conversation here, where Mersault refuses to look at his mother who has just died, is of course important for figuring out the main character of the story, and this snippet in particular is one that is relevant later. However, that Mersault is a character who says such odd things isn’t quite what’s off about this text. This next piece comes two pages later:

Darkness had gathered, quickly, above the skylight. The caretaker turned the switch and I was blinded by the sudden flash of light. He suggested I go to the dining hall for dinner. But I wasn’t hungry. Then he offered to bring me a cup of coffee with milk. I like milk in my coffee, so I said yes, and he came back a few minutes later with a tray. I drank the coffee. (8)

There’s something off about these passages, about the way they are written. And the rest of the book is written in the same style. What’s more, the style isn’t a peculiarity of Camus, the author. He could write long-winded, classical sentences with the best of them. Rather, in this case, the style is demonstrative of something else, which is an essential part of what makes The Stranger a unique and significant novel.

II

To understand what that is, first we have to figure out just what is off about what we’ve read. As I mentioned above, Camus was capable of writing classical, elegant “literary” prose when he wanted to. What that means, of course, and what seems to be unique here, is that such prose is absent in The Stranger. The prose is, if anything, incredibly simple and short. The sentences are literally brief and immediate; they state exactly what is the case, just like a student in school might list off facts about a setting for an English assignment. Each sentence corresponds to a fact or a state; there is no excess, and each sentence gives a new, independent fact. In terms of word choice, what is unique is the blatant lack of anything that is unique; Camus never goes into expressive side-routes or wanders through metaphors; expression is as literal and, again, straightforward as can be, stating exactly what is the case with, significantly, virtually no inflection.

What results is a novel that is written from a seemingly anti-literary perspective. Events are given to us as sets of facts that meshed in a certain way. A thing is its physical description, in this lexicon; nothing, for instance, is ever evoked, except in the most literal way in which one impression causes another to come to mind. In a sense it seems simplistic, even amateurish, to write in such a way. How is this supposed to draw the reader? What is interesting about it? What is literary about it?

III

To explain this oddity, and thereby show that Camus is anything but an amateur, one fact needs to be taken into consideration; the narrator, the one who tells us all the facts and, ultimately, expresses the sentences in the novel, is not an intangible third person (i.e. the author, Camus); it is Mersault himself. This is a first person novel, which means that all of the sentences, and therefore the style of the novel itself, is Mersault’s doing. The way events are explained, then, is not just an explanation of events; it is an expression of the way Mersault saw them; that is, it is a window into who he is. This is an interesting fact about narration that one should pay attention to, and that an author ignores at her peril. For if the story is given by a narrator who exist within the story, that means that those words are that character’s words, the expressions used and literary devices employed a part of the character. In that case, a “literary style” full of colorful metaphors would make sense if the character narrating was a literary story (or, perhaps, was explicitly narrating in order to write such a story).

But what of Mersault? Or, more generally, what of non-literary characters explaining events in a literary world? It’s something I don’t think one often thinks about while reading a novel, but there is a certain incongruousness when the only change that a character narrator brings to the perspective is the use of the word “I” instead of “he/she.” A character is supposed to be a person, with all the complexities that involves, including an entire worldview that shapes how every moment of experience is registered. Different people, of course, see the world differently; thus, when they are describing events, they will notice different things, or describe them differently, or draw different connections (a fact any lawyer would have to know in order to make sense out of vastly disparate eye-witness accounts of the same events). The narrator could even lie, a novelist’s trick we are a bit more familiar with because it is generally more explicit (that is, when it is there a big deal is made of it, as though it’s some vital feature; it’s taken for granted that, in the normal case, the character narrator will tell you exactly what you need to know). This simple fact, along with the fact that the narrator’s tale is the only way through which we know the story, gives the nature of the narrator a status of absolute importance; the narrator is the window to the world and everything that happens within the pages of the novel. If the narrator is the author, an impartial voice speaking from the heavens, then there is no problem; description can be absolute, all views understood, because the view is that of God, basically, and can be anything and everything. But when the role of narrator is given to a human, all-too-human, all bets are (or should be) off.

This finally leads us back to our man, Mersault, and the story. What kind of person is he, and, given that he is the narrator, how does this impact the story? For that, I think, is what makes The Stranger significant; Camus found an extraordinary type of person, one so far distanced from anything we usually experienced, and, through the device of character narration, gave it flesh. Mersault, it becomes very clear, is an unusual man. He spends his days mostly lounging around his home. Occasionally he visits neighbors, watches movies, and so on. But, by and large, he seems to lack any motivation in life. It’s not simply that he lacks a great and final goal towards which he strives; there seems to be no, so to speak, moral motivation; that is, nothing grabs him. He just doesn’t care about much; he remains detached from everything, even in a sense from his very real emotions. How detached? This is a conversation with the woman he supposedly loves, or at least who he seems, by all outward appearances (by what would be given us by the impartial narrator), to love:

That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t love her. “So why marry me, then?” she said. I explained to her that it didn’t really matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married. (41)

I think that most of us would find it extremely difficult to believe that a human being could talk this way. What kind of human being could honestly say to a woman who he spent time each week with and who clearly loved him that he probably didn’t love her? And do it so matter-of-factly, as if it was meant as a purely statistical explanation? What kind of person is this, who says that he could marry her “if she wanted to,” as though there are no other implications that come from marriage, as though it’s just a thing some people do?

Later on, Mersault finds himself in another difficult position: on trial for murder. He watches what appears to be a circus before him as prosecution and defense go through the motions, calling him devil and saint in alternation, ultimately hinging their case on his visit to his dead mother (remember that?). Mersault’s fate is on the line; he’d already been in prison nearly a year awaiting his trial, and at the very least a guilty verdict would send him there much longer. Yet for all that he just doesn’t appear to care. He follows almost none of the concluding arguments of both defense and prosecution, catching only the gist of what they were saying (though, notably, he takes impartial notice of “a glaring omission” in the summary argument of his own lawyer, counting it up as a flaw but reading no more into what that means). He doesn’t seem to understand what is going on at all. Yet he’s not stupid; he knows what he’s there for, and how a court system works. He is even gripped by the odd moment of emotion every now and again during the trial: “Céleste then turned toward me. It looked to me as if his eyes were glistening and his lips were trembling. He seemed to be asking me what else he could do. I said nothing; I made no gesture of any kind, but it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to kiss a man.” (92-3) But what is strange about these moments is the incongruous nature in Mersault; it’s been well-established at this point that they don’t fit him at all.

So who is Mersault, exactly? What kind of person is it that can do this? Can such a person exist? The novel doesn’t answer these questions. But it does give us a complete character, a person of some sort who we might hesitate to call a person at all. In fact, if anyone gives us something approaching an answer to this character, it’s Mersault himself:

I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all. He looked upset and told me that I never gave him a straight answer, that I had no ambition, and that that was disastrous in business . . . . Looking back on it, I wasn’t unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered. (41)

Yet this only seems part of the story, for, though we all have something of a reality check when we leave college, it’s never like this. People don’t just quit like Mersault apparently did; they may quite many of their ambitions, but he appears to have left off on the idea of living for anything at all. Something said much later, when the prosecutor at the trial has finished calling him a cold murder, fills in a bit more of the story:

Of course, I couldn’t help admitting that he was right. I didn’t feel much remorse for what I’d done. But I was surprised by how relentless he was. I would have liked to have tried explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never been able to truly feel remorse for everything. My mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow. (100)

IV

We started with a discussion of the writing style in The Stranger. Then we look at the idea of a character narrator, and at one narrator in particular, Mersault. Although, as noted above, we cannot answer the important questions about Mersault himself, we can answer the question we started with: what is it that’s strange about The Stranger? The answer is simply that it is an account of a strange man; not simply that, but it is an account told by a strange man. A man with no particular attachment to anything. A man for whom emotions are like events in his psyche, simple pushes, that seem to be no more or less significant than anything else. A man for whom what is is, by and large, what it appears to be. He is not a naïve man, nor stupid, nor uneducated, nor an enemy of society; he has friends, relationships, and, by outward appearances, a regular life. However, that life lacks vitality. Mersault simply doesn’t get involved in anything. What is worse, there doesn’t seem to be a reason for this. There’s no traumatic childhood that we know of. His life isn’t a shambles. He has human relationships, and participates in everyday life. There’s no explanation for Mersault being this shockingly callous man (not evil in any sense, but not genuinely moral either); it’s just who he is, and for him that’s the way the world is.

And since this story is told by Mersault himself, the story as told reflects the man who tells it. It is a series of facts, of appearances, that hold together in some relationships, and the meaning of it all is no more than the sum of that. Things happen. When Mersault was in school, he tells us, he had ambitions. But then he discovered that they didn’t really matter. This doesn’t hold special significance for him. He doesn’t reflect on it as an element of growing up, a part of the human experience, nor does he think it an individual event, something he was subjected to for some special reason. It holds no significance at all; it’s just the way things are. This is also why he can be confused by the way the prosecutor acts. He doesn’t understand why people would get so worked up over something, why they would fabricate such a vast story. He also can’t understand his own stake in it, thus allowing him to casually compare the relative merits of the summary arguments by prosecution and defense.

This is how the man is reflected in practice, and the style of the novel is the same. There are no unique or special events. There is no special significance to anything. Mesault’s narration is the most blithely straightforward, no-frills narration simply because frills are meaningless to him. Why stretch a metaphor when a minimal description will do? Why wind a long, curvaceous sentence full of exposition and wordplay? It’s a waste of time. The narration of the book is how Mersault actually sees the world; thus, perhaps without realizing it, you get a more precise, more personal, more complete demonstration of this most unbelievable person simply through what is and isn’t said, and how it is said, than could possibly be offered by the impartial narrator Camus telling you about a stranger to humanity named Mersault.

2009-12-24T14:46:00.003-05:00

I never did mention what I was planning on doing next, since the semester has ended (and thus I have time to do things). So up next: Hegel.

Edit 01/01: You're not getting Hegel next, you're getting Camus. And you're getting it tomorrow. If you don't like it, tough.

Clarity Contra Simplicity

2009-12-19T15:43:00.004-05:00

In the previous piece I said that “our power with language reflects our mental clarity and organization.” This thesis was given a general expression there, and it brought up the usual sort of questions, such as: why does our thinking in general these days seem unclear? and what can we do about it? This is a legitimate reading (and is, of course, the one I used in that case). But what I have in mind here is something more specific, which might get some indirect elaboration here.

-----

I would like to start with a distinction. There are two terms that are not always used in unique senses, but which I think should be. These two terms are “clarity” and “simplicity.” The standard use of these is one that often conflates the two. If something is simple, it’s most likely clear. And if it’s clear, it’s usually (relatively speaking) simple. This is true for language as it’s true for life. To make a problem clear is, at the very least, to make things simpler than they were before. To make things simpler usually involves making them clear. Likewise, simplifying language makes it clearer, and clarifying one’s expressions and words makes language simpler to understand.

This, I think, represents a mostly standard, if unstated, understanding of these two terms. I think that this understanding is flawed. True, it does not say that the two terms are the exact same, which would be obviously flawed. But that they are conflated at all (from here on out I will be speaking of the realm of language in particular) is a problem. The two terms, it seems to me, are very different, and refer to very different virtues. It’s even questionable whether both are actually virtues.

I

To start with, let us complicate the picture a bit by giving definitions. In everyday communication, there is not a clear definition for either of these words; we just know what they mean. However (and this is my not-yet-proven thesis in action), this understanding is incomplete at best. We supposedly know what we mean (after all, that’s exactly what one would say when asked: “You know what I mean.”). But in that case, what is it that we know? We need to make this clear.

An expression is clear when all of its elements are explicit; that is, when the meanings of all members (words) are explicitly laid out and understood, and when the relationships between the members (grammar, structure) are understood. Not only does each piece make sense, the way the pieces fit into a whole makes sense, and thus the whole makes sense in terms of everything that makes it up.

An expression is simple when it has an economical minimum of members and relationships; that is, when all unnecessary members and relationships are removed, and when those that are left have a minimum of additional meanings, connections, and so on; like architecture, a sentence is simple when there’s nothing more than what is needed.

What interests me is the fact that these two are not only different. They can be, and, I think, usually are opposed, at least in the realm of language. And if my previous piece is right, then this opposition in language is connected to an opposition in the human understanding.

II

One of my old professors always said that the philosopher strives, above all, for clarity. I have a professor now who says much the same. Indeed, both enforce it to the utmost; if a particular word hasn’t been made absolutely clear in terms of its meaning and purpose, then they will let you know. Despite this, philosophy has a reputation as being rather difficult, and not just the philosophers of centuries long past; it’s a simple classroom fact that a philosophical paper is difficult for new students to understand. It takes a long adjustment period to learn to “speak the language.” This is admittedly in part because people aren’t taught much philosophy in high school.

But again, I think there’s something more fundamental at work here. As I said, the philosopher strives at clarity. I think this is a mostly universal goal among philosophers (besides, perhaps, some strange fellows who are unfortunately in parts of philosophical studies close to my own). People like to complain that it’s not clear what philosophers are talking about. But how can this be? Is it because philosophers are bad at their jobs? I don’t think so; rather, I think it’s because philosophers and the non-philosophers who read them mean two different things by “clear,” “difficult,” and other terms. By “clarity,” philosophers mean clarity in the technical sense I gave above. Non-philosophers, on the other hand, actually mean simplicity in the technical sense when they refer to clarity. What people normally mean when they say that a work of philosophy is too difficult or unclear isn’t that it isn’t technically clear; as noted above, they don’t usually have in mind a clear definition of “clear.” Rather, they mean that there’s too much going on; there is a staggering lack of simplicity in philosophical work, and they are not trained for that.

Nor are they trained to expect it. People are trained to write “clearly,” but clarity is usually a somewhat warped version of what Strunk and White meant in Elements of Style: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” People expect that language is supposed to be pared down to a minimum, a place where the words used are words of common use and the connections easily made. This is what “clear” means to them: something is clear when I and others can easily understand it, which is when it has, as with the machine, the fewest moving parts. In other words, this is a call for simplicity: stop using all the big -unnecessary- words, and just tell me what you mean.

III

Question: in that case, why don’t philosophers write simply? The answer should not be too surprising, if the previous piece was taken into account. The reason philosophers prefer clarity over simplicity is that, simply put, reality may not be simple. Or at least, reality may not be as simple as we want our language to be. And, if we want our language to actually reflect reality, then we had better not simplify it more than can be justified.

Anyone can say something such as (to take examples from a theme which non-philosophers discuss with some frequency) “There is no God,” “There is no such thing as objective morality,” or, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” and mean something by it. The problem is that they may not actually know for sure what they really mean. What do you mean, there is no God? What is God? A physically manifest being (there have definitely been cultures that have believed this)? Something non-dimensional? (In which case, what dimensions are there and what in the hell does it mean for something to “exist,” but not in any dimension? What does “exist” mean?) Something that exists insofar as it has the power to move people, or to explain the unexplainable? These are all lumped together in most debates, yet they are definitions for completely different beings. The usual answer to a question about what is meant would be . . . what, exactly? A physical being? Not even many theists accept that definition anymore. There is no non-dimensional being? How does one even explain the concept, if the only way we really come into contact with anything is through the dimensions? Come to think of it, how does one come into contact with God? Physically? Through “expressions of his presence/love/might?” Through a voice, or a feeling? What God is speaking in such an experience?

We can ask the similar questions about morality, about reality, about truth: there is usually some meaning that is assumed: morality (to use an instance that Scott brought up recently) is some sort of code of right and wrong. Everyone knows this. What is “right?” What you’re supposed to do. What is obligation, that is, “supposed?” What is reality? Dreams are real, in some sense; which one? Are our supposed experiences while dreaming real? It depends on what “reality” actually means. A whole host of problems emerges when we ask these questions.

The philosopher is the arbiter of clarity, if you will. The first step in any professional philosophical debate is to accurately portray the views of the opposition. It is already assumed that, unless the debate is specifically about the use of language, the meanings of terms either have already been clarified or will be clearly defined when they are used. This is meant to establish a perfectly equal understanding for any issue. Contrast this with normal, bar stool philosopher debate; usually a claim is made, and then opposed. Arguments are given, but they often “go past” each other, which is to say miss what the other means. This happens on all sides, since the speakers usually mean different things, yet either don’t realize it or simply don’t accept the other definition. In non-argumentative situations, what happens is simply that a “definition” (these are scare-quotes) is assumed, one not explicitly, which is to say clearly, grasped. Then there is complaint that the philosopher’s views are “too complicated,” because there are too many technical terms.

Yet the philosopher has a different goal from the layman. The philosophers first goal is, broadly speaking, to make sense of things as they really are, to clearly demarcate “reality” when understood as everything that really is. This means that simplicity is nice, but only to the degree that it does not interfere with clarity, which by definition is a reflection of things as they really are. (Hence I started by creating two explicit definitions for the main terms, because they actually do reflect that meaning, however they may be used in non-explicit senses.) The philosopher must make sense of things as they are; that includes the degree of complexity. And as it turns out, reality is usually seen as far more complex than the typical understanding allows. Ordinary understanding, that understanding which even the philosophers operate under when grocery shopping, takes some givens that have been given to it by common usage and accepts them as being the way things are. There’s nothing malicious or intentionally deceptive about this; it’s simply a reflection of the fact that the examined life is a very inefficient, difficult, and oftentimes very harsh way to live, one that many never reach and virtually none remain in. I have no quarrel with common sense. What I do have a quarrel with is when someone accuses philosophy of being “too complicated,” as though that were an epithet; when someone says “that stuff’s too hard for me,” and then uses that as an excuse to not even attempt engage. For if reality is complicated, and the ordinary drive is a drive towards simplicity, then it would as a consequence be a deceptive drive, intentionally or not (I assume not). Simplicity is not a virtue; at most it’s very pragmatic, and sufficient to allow one a full life, assuming one is not interested in seeing things exactly as they are. But that doesn’t give one the right to accuse the philosopher of any failing, or to reject the seriousness of her task. Philosophy isn’t simple because life isn’t simple; what philosophy must do is show things as they are, however complicated they may be. As it turns out, things are much more complicated than our language allows. And if I was right before, that our control over language is directly connected to our own ability to understand, then philosophers, it seems, have a duty to be complicated, provided that that complexity reflects the matter at hand.

Quick Note

2009-12-14T12:29:00.004-05:00

The second of the two parts mentioned below should come within the next week. In the last few days I've written one paper and revised another, and will be grading thirty exams and driving ten hours in the next couple days, so that should help to explain the absence; it is the end of the semester, when all is said and done. (Really I have had time to write regardless, so this is no excuse, but I am just unproductive like that; don't hate on me.)

On Writing

2009-12-02T19:14:00.003-05:00

What follows is the first of two parts that center in some sense on language and thought. The first is more of an opinion piece about the way things seem to be today. The second, to come, will be a more formal piece about the philosophical employment of language and its relation to common speech.

-----

If people approves that torture does make it as a moral law, people would perform torture because the actions when it is a natural law would have some massive problems and immorality does spread.

-A Student (who shall remain anonymous)

The purpose of this post is not to make fun of this student (or the one previously quoted). One reason for that is, of course, because it's not nice. But there's another reason: the sort of writing seen above is not uncommon, not at all. After recently grading about thirty papers that discussed current controversies, there were many examples of writing that exhibited errors that can be seen above; subject/verb agreement ('people approves), poor choice of verbs ('torture does make it' how?), lack of structure (the clauses in the sentence are amazing), grammar (lack of commas where they are desperately needed), unclear explanation/missing words (what actions? what sort of actions?), tense issues ('would have' and 'does'), and those are probably not all. The overall result is that, on careful analysis, the sentence almost becomes meaningless: the argument made is literally that, if someone named 'people' approves that torture 'makes it' as a moral law, then, because the actions that would happen when it is made into a natural law would lead to problems, and because torture does spread (not would, but does), then people would torture. That's barely a sentence.

Of course, the sentence isn't that hard to understand in real life. We can tell roughly what it means: If people were to accept torture as a moral law, then people would torture (the second half I can't even guess at). So is it really that bad?

Furthermore, why do I pick on this person? It's more likely that the student just wrote a poor sentence and didn't bother to revise it than anything else. Besides, why should everyone have perfect writing? As said above, it makes enough sense, and most of the time we don't need to be that literate.

Now my first response is to the second claim, that the student didn't revise. If so, then it's the student's fault. You don't not revise papers you hand in. The rest gets into more serious issues. It's true that, typically, we don't need to write (or speak; the two can, for purposes of this essay, be considered interchangeable) that clearly, just clearly enough to be understood. The sentence I picked is a particularly poor example, but there were plenty of example where the meaning could at least be inferred with accuracy. Isn't that good enough?

My answer is no, and here's why. We can take the student's sentence at face value, and say that it's good enough. But, first of all, good enough for what? For everyday speech, goes the answer. In the middle of a conversation, or the kind of debate you have over drinks, it doesn't really matter if you get everything you say grammatically correct; so goes the claim. But if so, then the actual understanding reached depends upon inference. The listener has to infer what the speaker is saying. I'll admit, when the problem is subject/verb agreement that's not too big of a crisis. But word choice is. Tense is. Even grammar is, when it tells us what the relations are between several subjects. In the student's sentence, I don't know how torture is supposed to fit in with the moral law. What does it 'make it' to? How? What 'actions' would result? Would immorality spread in that case, or is it being taken as a sort of universal fact that immorality spreads? For at least these reasons, the sentence either omits or disguises critical information. I can't be sure what the student is actually trying to say. If this sentence were used in conversation, or one with similar problems were used, the same problem would arise: I wouldn't actually know what is being said, because of incredible ambiguities in the structure and word choice.

Yet common sense is able to interpret this sentence, is it not? I say that it is not; it only thinks it can, because common sense is just as unclear as the sentence. Here is the concern I am getting at, the real reason I am writing: why would a student write a sentence like the one quoted? The sheer number of mistakes seems to be too much for just rushing; you would expect the student to get something right. The student's not trying to mess with me, either. No, I think that the student writes like this because this writing is just at the student's level; the ambiguous words are ambiguous for the student as well, the missing words reflect incomplete thoughts, the tense issues reflect real issues with tense, that is, with determining timeframes and situational reference (such as hypotheticals). The language used, in other words, reflects the student's ability.

This is my thesis: our power with language reflects our mental clarity and organization. One who can speak or write clearly, whose words have clearly defined and consistent meanings, and who can apply rules of logic and sentential structure (this latter part may be more controversial, but I hold to it), can literally think more clearly than those whose words are jumbled. This claim may initially seem off, because we all seem to have an easy enough time getting around in the world; it's just when we write philosophy papers that we are left with a mess. I answer that that is simply because the everyday world doesn't require clarity, or much thought for that matter; our own lack of understanding is not posed as an issue to us most of the time. Furthermore, our own everyday conversation trades on this obscurity; we assume that we have common understanding of language, when many words are either understood with equal confusion, or simply not understood equally at all; we only assume that they are.

I think we can find evidence for this in our own experience. There are times when we are looking for the right word or expression for a situation. We sort of know what we want to say; No, we know what we want to say. But what is it, then? Without the right word, we can't say. But, the response goes, we still know what we want to say. It's on the tip of our tongue. Yet, I claim, it's still not quite there. Without the right word, we tend to talk around the phenomenon, offering descriptions related to it, but we can't quite define the thing itself in most cases. It's on the tip of our tongue, but we don't have it. There's still an uncertainty, an indefiniteness about it. Then, when the right word is found, we welcome it into our minds like it has a place in our home. It fits right in, and the thing becomes clear in a way it was not before the word was found.

One can also take another phenomenon I see as a grader: people using words they don't know how to use (and boy, do they do it often). It is always instantly clear when someone uses a word they don't actually understand, because it always stands out. It doesn't complete the thought; it is like a sudden rough patch on a smooth object. When asked what they mean, the answer is universal; the student thinks she has an explanation, but in fact does not know. She only assumed she knew.

This latter example is the much greater problem, because, I assert, there are many more of these mystery words than we recognize. Not just words such as 'subtle' or 'incongruous,' but words like 'nature,' 'moral,' 'making it,' and so on. What does it mean for something to 'make it' as a 'moral' law? People all know what it means. But when you actually get into what the content of the sentence is, it's not clear at all. What is being made? What is the standard for morality? (The latter is particularly problematic in the essays I've graded: there were frequent arguments to the effect that one philosopher was wrong because his standard of morality wasn't moral, without further elaboration) We think we understand such an expression, but we don't; in other words, we fool ourselves into thinking we have knowledge. Heidegger says it better than I: “Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own.” (Heidegger, Being and Time 212 (HarperCollins hardcover edition)) One understands, but because there's not much there to understand; just a bunch of half-finished meanings glued together by context and circumstance.

In other words, I'm saying that, in a very real way, language -is- knowledge. We think in words, and when we imagine, the images and sounds are ones that we can describe in words, or else they are something 'beyond us.' Where our words are vague and unclear, so is our understanding, our ability to conceptualize and organize knowledge. Where we don't understand the words of another, we don't know that other; and where we speak the same language, but one filled with ambiguity, then we think we know the other, but know nothing.

And this form of talk is standard. It's standard in part because, indeed, it's sufficient to get us through life. But being sufficient to get us through life doesn't tell us much about whether it's actually good or not. If we want to make any assertions about the way things really are, if we ever want the 'truth' of the matter, if we ever want real answers and real understanding between people, this sort of half-truth language isn't sufficient. We can't trade on ambiguities and expect everything to work out, because sometimes we want real answers, and that's when our laziness with language turns against us.

What should we do, then? We should improve language use, obviously. I doubt there's a single target I can conveniently point to, but I would imagine that the duty should be heavily upon (1) parents, who teach their children, willingly or not, how to speak in the first place, and (2) primary and secondary schools, who are supposed to help children move from basic language to clear expression. This latter, in particular, is where the problem lies. Something should be done; our minds in no small manner depend upon it.

If Only They'd been Graced by My Presence

2009-11-30T19:56:00.005-05:00

The latest set of papers I have to grade (I instruct and grade for an introductory ethics course) comes from a different section of students then the one I've actually been instructing. I'm still grading the first paper from the mystery group, and I see things like this:

"Of course Kant does not believe in causality"

I have to forgive the student, since he or she does not know any better; this is no metaphysics class, after all. Still, the way it's said combined with the content forms a combination that makes me twitch. Oh, dear.

EDIT: A more representative sample from the same student (who will continue to be anonymous):

"Personally, both of these philosophers have very strong arguments that seem to be convincing in their own ways and yet both lacking."

Mastery of Interpretation

2009-10-06T17:17:00.011-04:00

Hi. I've been busy. Very busy. I've never been more busy.

However, there are some things one needs to pause and reflect upon.

This is thanks to Scott and Sid.

What is it about? It's about interpretation of the Bible. I do interpretation on occasion, so I thought I would take a look.

Link

My personal favorites, you ask?

6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story.

And, of course:

10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities.

Ahhhhhhhhahahahahahaha.

And then I cried.

EDIT: Wow. This just keeps getting better. The site itself is here.

Why, one may ask, is this a good idea?

Benefits include:

* mastery of the Bible, which is priceless
* mastery of the English language, which is valuable
* thorough understanding of the differences in Bible translations, particularly the historically important King James Version
* benefiting from activity that no public school would ever allow; a Conservative Bible could become a text for public school courses
* liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds

Aaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha

EDIT 2:

First Example - Liberal Falsehood

The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34:[7]

Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.

I feel no need to comment on this.

EDIT 3: How far does the rabbit hole go?

Advantages to a Conservative Bible Online

There are several striking advantages to a conservative approach to translating the Bible online:

* participants learn enormously from the process
* liberal bias - and lack of authenticity - become easier to recognize and address
* by translating online, this utilizes the growing online resources that improve accuracy
* supported by conservative principles, the project can be bolder in uprooting and excluding liberal distortions
* the project can adapt quickly to future threats from liberals to biblical integrity
* access is free and immediate to the growing internet audience, for their benefit
* the ensuing debate would flesh out -- and stop -- the infiltration of churches by liberals pretending to be Christian, much as a vote by legislators exposes the liberals
* this would bring the Bible to a new audience of political types, for their benefit; Bible courses in college Politics Departments would be welcome
* this would debunk the pervasive and hurtful myth that Jesus would be a political liberal today

Yeah, can't bring myself to comment on this stuff, really. Partially because, as said before, I don't have the time. But seriously; I think enough can be seen by just reading this.

Grad School

2009-09-04T22:32:00.004-04:00

I've actually stepped into the institution enough now where I can actually call myself a grad student, I suppose. I've gone two weeks without getting thrown out or outright rejected (though I had a decidedly stern talking to at one point, but that's off the record and neither here nor there), and all signs point to my financial aid actually pulling through (though I remain suspicious, given how much the system has fought me, until everything checks out), so I should be around for a while (nine years, anyone?).

The school is a large (and I mean large) state school, with a philosophy department of more than twenty professors of differing ranks, a few rather well established and many with strong research histories as well as promising ones, and several dozen grad students. Into this exact situation I fit amazingly fortuitously; for, you see, when it comes down to it, despite my research interests, I'm in it for the teaching. This school is exactly the right size, established and highly competent but not in any way mistakable for a top-ten school. The students at high-level schools are always targeted by prestigious research institutions and those looking for a researching name to add to their roster; and since that's what many are in it for, they take those jobs. High-level teaching institutions, on the other hand, know they won't get those students, and so actually tend not to seek them. Instead, they scope out the echelon just below top-ten and top-twenty schools - which is where this institution comfortably sits. And a high-level teaching school is where I want to be. Add to this the fact that, finally, as in as of this year, this school has realized its position in terms of producing teachers versus researchers, and so has finally begun heavily emphasizing the teaching aspects of the job with this batch of students (three, including myself), and I end up exactly where I would have hoped to be, even though I never planned on it. Funny how that works out.

Furthermore, talking to others and hearing their experiences as well as thinking about my own over the past three weeks has led to the conclusions that this is one of the friendliest, least-competitive (at least amongst the grad students) departments of its kind. Hell, any philosophy department with a grad student happy hour is worth it.

As a result of this situation, there are special steps being taken to assist with teaching, grading, etc. for the new grads. I much like this. The university itself has a teaching certification program I'm aiming at as well.

So, how is the teaching? Given I am who I am, and what my experience is, there is no fear. I would go so far as to say that I don't think just anyone could improvise a Ministry of Silly Walks imitation their second session and pull it off, but I did. Since the first week was largely initiation to college writing, we actually got to discuss today, and I was proud as hell afterward.

There's colloquia almost weekly, and I'm slowly familiarizing myself with the grad students and the professors, who are an exceptional bunch for the most part. It just so different from my undergrad, where there was really no motivation to support philosophy, on the part of the students and (perhaps causally reciprocally) the professors to a lesser degree. Everyone here is more motivated, and that makes a hell of a difference.

Fall 2009

2009-08-23T22:40:00.006-04:00

Classes begin at this university tomorrow. It's nice to be in a situation where all you have to take, and all you are expected to take, are courses in your area of interest. It's also nice when there isn't a single textbook in the list. Included in this semester's reading are such things as

Heidegger: Being and Time
Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception
Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral
Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals
Plato: Gorgias
De Beauvoir: The Second Sex

and so on. I don't know for sure which and how many will be read to completion, so I can't say what I might cover on here. I'm also taking a survey in contemporary analytic metaphysics, but the articles are smaller and it's not really my area, so we'll see if I do anything with that.

In other news, I did what an English professor friend told me to do and read a novel called The Shack. It's essentially a Christian novel heavy on the theodicy. The professor is well-meaning, but I don't think she realizes how completely godless I am; only a Tillich could give me credit for faith. To keep myself interested I was planning to write something up for it here, and have notes for such a purpose. However, I think that will be a no-go, partly this is because I really don't have the time to do what I would consider a substantial enough write up and then revise it. It's low on my priority list, I guess because it didn't "change my life" as it did for others. Suffice to say I wasn't converted. It's well done for its purpose, and I can see the effect it would have on those who aren't interested in analysis, but if anything that would put me off. Besides, unless your theodicy can explain how human sin is the sole reason for the existence of war, autism, sudden infant death syndrome, ignorance, and the mosquito (especially the mosquito), among other things, I'm not buying it.

New Semester

2009-08-13T18:07:00.003-04:00

Other things being equal, I'm leaving for graduate school tomorrow. This will, of course, have a substantial effect on my usual reading. My topics of study will include Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Ethics, and something else not yet determined (perhaps the Pre-Socratics). I also begin some teaching. Hopefully I'll be able to incorporate some of this into the blog, but given that things are just starting for me, nothing is set in stone. Rest assured (if there's anyone out there waiting with bated breath), the blog will continue, as always. Auf wiedersehen.

Kant: Critique of Practical Reason

2009-08-02T21:54:00.006-04:00

I

In any introductory class on ethical theory one always finds two philosophers in particular who are placed against each other as polar opposites: John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. They are portrayed as the archetypes of two great strains of thought in ethics. Mill’s utilitarianism represents a refined form of consequentialism. According to consequentialism, what decides the moral worth of an action rests solely in the consequences that result from the act (in Mill’s theory, good actions result in greater overall happiness, and bad actions result in more overall pain). In this broad sense, Mill can be grouped with people such as Ayn Rand or ethical pragmatists, all of whom look to what results in the world to determine if an action is ethically right or wrong.

Kant, on the other hand, is the perfect nonconsequentialist. Moral worth, according to the nonconsequentialist, comes not at all from consequences, but from something else (in Kant’s case, the intention of the doer and whether, in the doer’s act, everyone is “used never merely as a means but as at the same time an end.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 74)). In this broad sense Kant is grouped with those who hold that justice is something that exists in nature or metaphysically, such as Plato, and those who take their ethical doctrines from religions which gives them as something “holy” and beyond reproach based on worldly circumstances.

Kant and Mill are thus set up as the two sides of a championship bout, where those who argue that we need to focus on the consequences of our actions, and those who argue that we need to do what is right no matter the consequences, argue back and forth with no end. Certainly this conflict is often found in ethical debate. Further, for the most part I think this sort of depiction is faithful to Mill. He counts the ethical as defined solely by a certain type of circumstances, and what is ethical is what brings that about. He is not ambiguous about this point: “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals ‘utility’ or the ‘greatest happiness principle’ holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” (Mill, Utilitarianism 7) What matters are the consequences, plain and simple.

But while a perfunctory reading of Mill works fine here, because he is rarely ambiguous and does not stray far beyond an ‘ordinary’ understanding of ethics (so that one can understand his discussion and arguments well enough without a philosophical background), the treatment of Kant typically found in this discussion is misleading at best and downright wrong at worst. Kantian ethics is made to be synonymous with “duty,” as though his view of ethics is simply based on the goodness of an action being that you do it because you have to. His terminology is understood in the ordinary sense, and so it appears as though Kant’s ethics can be detached from and addressed apart from the rest of his philosophy. Thus Mill and Kant become two generalized views, consequentialism versus inconsequentialism, and the two men are thought of as being the same as the respective views they represent.

In fact, this sort of discussion fundamentally misconstrues not only the goal of Kantian ethics but the entire place of ethics for Kant. Kant does not leave ethics in a separate domain from philosophical areas such as metaphysics and epistemology. For him it is all part of one philosophical system, and his particular ethical positions must be understood as necessary extensions of this system. Kant’s ethics, in other words, has a place in the whole, and so, if one wants to talk not simply about ‘duty ethics’ in some vague sense but about Kantian ethics, one must understand where he’s coming from.

This is not to say that Kant isn’t a nonconsequentialist; he most certainly is. “[P]ractical laws,” by which he means those laws which direct the will, thus moral laws, “refer only to the will, without regard to what is attained by its causality, and one may abstract from this latter (as belonging to the world of sense) so as to have them pure.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 19) In other words, moral laws are defined by being separate from the empirical (and thus consequential) world. Kant’s argument against the consequentialist position is that, ultimately, it refers to the senses and thus to experience, and that it is thus subject to individual discretion instead of what is ethical and just. In the essay on Mill’s Utilitarianism I asked what the happiness is that Mill seeks. Kant’s criticism of consequentialism differs from mine in that he does not dispute that, when it comes to consequences, people ultimately pursue happiness: “all material principles, which place the determining ground of choice in the pleasure or displeasure to be felt in the reality of some object, are wholly of the same kind insofar as they belong without exception to the principle of self-love or one’s own happiness.” (20) However, he follows a route similar to mine when he attacks Mill’s greatest-happiness principle (though, of course, before Mill was born) as being unfit to be a moral law, that is, a universal guideline to follow:

where each has to put his happiness comes down to the particular feeling of pleasure and displeasure in each and, even within one and the same subject, to needs that differ as this feeling changes . . . and hence can never yield a law because, in the desire for happiness, it is not the form of lawfulness that counts but simply the matter, namely whether I am to expect satisfaction from following the law, and how much. (23)

Even if everyone really does pursue happiness, Kant says (and according to him, they do), that does us no good in formulating an ethical theory that can we can actually apply as a law, because everyone’s idea of happiness is different, not only between different individuals but within individuals themselves over time. Consequentialism, in other words, is an empiricist ethics, based upon experience and experiment rather than reason and argument, following what is understood by the senses rather than the mind in its deduction.

Mill is in complete agreement with this claim of Kant’s; for him, ethics is a matter of what happens in reality, of experience in life, not what is understood through argumentation. There are no rationalistic laws, only the question of what we want and how we get it. It is for this reason that he refers to the collective vote of society as a way to figure out what is the best to choose: “Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.” (Mill, Utilitarianism 8) But, as Kant argues, this seems to allow any widely-held opinion to become moral law; morality becomes mob rule. Thus Mill cannot refer to just anyone, but to competent judges who have a wide range of experience in order to solve ethical problems. Yet how can we guarantee the judgment of the judges? What if they are misguided, deceived, or, perhaps, immoral? “From this verdict of the only competent judges, I apprehend there can be no appeal.” (11) So we must give the opinions of men (even if they are experienced opinions) the power of ethical law?

Of course not. Ethics is not simply a matter of opinions. Ethics is about what is right, not what people feel like. Thus Kant is right when he criticizes consequentialism, saying that “here, if one wanted to give the maxim the universality of a law, the most extreme opposite of harmony would follow, the worst conflict, and the complete annihilation of the maxim itself and its purpose.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 25) If we allowed happiness to be the standard of morality, then right and justice would be ultimately determined by what people think will make them happy. As the times change, justice itself would change. The moral law becomes nothing but a widely-accepted subjective standard; majority rule becomes the center of ethics. Any feeling otherwise will just be the result of stubborn habits, as Mill himself pointed out: “Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit.” (Mill 60) Justice, in other words, is a desire that became habit and thus is no longer moral even on consequentialist grounds if it has outlasted its time. In a word, there is no justice.

II

This is the way Kant is usually read against Mill. And I suppose that, in a very general sense (so general, in fact, that it is no longer Kantian) it is correct. Certainly, as has been pointed out, Kant agreed with this line of reasoning and even used it himself. But to act as though Kant’s real argument operates at this level is to miss Kant’s fundamental point, his true nemesis in ethical theory, and thus the entire drive and purpose of his theory.

Let us start again with Kant. One of his treatises in moral theory is called “Critique of Practical Reason.” Practical reason is practical because it “is concerned with the determining grounds of the will, which is a faculty either of producing objects corresponding to representations or of determining itself to effect such objects (whether physical power is sufficient or not), that is, of determining its causality.” (12) That is, practical reason centers around the will in its capacity of causing a person’s actions. For this reason, it makes sense that Kant’s discussion of morality would fall under the critique of practical reason; the critique will focus on that which determines what actions we choose, and so the ethical options of “right” and “wrong” will fall under this form of reason.

So what are the determining grounds of the will? Certainly, physical phenomena can cause our actions. I see something that looks tasty, so I will to reach for it. In this sense, my desire has been affected by the presence of an object. Physical phenomena of the same sort (sensual) can also affect my desire in what choices it will make in a future decision; for example, the stimuli produced by a certain food item lead me to want to pursue it as often as I can, so that, when I see an object that appears to be the of the same sort as the one which caused the initial stimulus, I will want to reach for it. Thus the physical world determines what I will in the first place.

This chain can be continued, of course, going further and further back with older and older causes. In fact, in the first critique Kant designed his third antimony of pure reason around the problem of causality. In the empirical world, we not only do but must assume that everything has a cause. Without this necessary rule “the connection of phenomena reciprocally determining and determined according to general laws, which is termed nature, and along with it the criteria of empirical truth, which enable us to distinguish experience from mere visionary dreaming, would almost entirely disappear.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 255) If we include our own will in the empirical world, it must be no different; in other words, our wills must necessarily follow their own pre-determined empirical inclinations in the pursuit of happiness:

in actual nature, insofar as it is an object of experience, the free will is not of itself determined to such maxims as could of themselves establish a nature in accordance with universal laws, or even to such maxims as could of themselves fit into a nature arranged in accordance with them; they are, instead, private inclinations which do constitute a natural whole in accordance with pathological (physical) laws but not a nature that would be possible only through our will in accordance with pure practical laws. (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 39)

Yet there is another side to this problem, which forms the issue of the antimony. “If . . . everything happens solely in accordance with the laws of nature, there cannot be any real first beginning of things, but only a subaltern or comparative beginning. There cannot, therefore, be a completeness of series on the side of the causes which originate the one from the other. But the law of nature is, that nothing can happen without a sufficient a priori determined cause.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 252) The causal chain, in other words, can never be finished, and so nothing is explained. Despite this argument of reason, in experience the “fact” of causation remains and is something we always encounter. Everything that is experienced has a cause. That, of course, includes the will. The will, in other words, is experienced as something being determined by something other than itself. The will, in other words, is controlled by something else. In other words, the will is not free. Thus there is no choice. Thus morality is impossible.

Kant’s concern about consequentialism isn’t a simple matter happiness versus justice. It’s about the possibility of ethics itself. If consequentialism is the only possible path in ethics, if we really do everything only because of outside of inclinations as Mill argues (since, for him, we should pursue happiness, and happiness is empirical, that is, based upon what affects us in a certain way), then that means that we are controlled by those empirical circumstances that decide what good and bad consequences, pleasure and pain, are. Admitting that ethics only happens in the empirical world is admitting that there is no ethics, because it surrenders the absolute necessity for ethics, free will. “In fact, if a human being’s actions insofar as they belong to his determinations in time were not merely determinations of him as appearance but as thing in itself, freedom could not be saved . . . .” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 85) Kant doesn’t just want to push a theory; he wants to save ethics. Thus when he says that “only rationalism of judgment is suitable for the use of moral concepts . . . ,” (61) he is not just taking a shot against empiricism on the grounds of not being universal; he is attacking it on the grounds of assuming something which renders ethics impossible.

But if, as Kant believes, our own experience is necessarily subject to the laws of nature, and thus to causality, can the denial of consequentialism really save ethics? Kant admits that, since natural law

unavoidably concerns all causality of things insofar as their existence in time is determinable, if this were the way in which one had to represent also the existence of these things in themselves then freedom would have to be rejected as a null and impossible concept. Consequently, if one still wants to save it, no other path remains than to ascribe the existence of a thing so far as it is determinable in time, and so to its causality in accordance with the law of natural necessity, only to appearance, and to ascribe freedom to the same being as a thing in itself. (80)

III

Kant’s best known work on ethics, and the one always compared against Mill’s Utilitarianism, is Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. It offers his earliest and most concise work on ethical theory. In it he follows a method that appears closer to Mill’s. Rather than high theory, he begins from the simpler and moves up to the more complex. Thus his first section is titled, “Transition from Common Sense Knowledge of Morals to the Philosophical.” The following sections transition from philosophy to metaphysics, and from metaphysics to practical reason. Yet even there he cautions that “metaphysics must lead the way, and without it there can be no moral philosophy.” (Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals 6) Only later, in the Critique of Practical Reason, is the importance of this statement realized. For, according to Kant, the possibility of moral philosophy depends upon whether we can prove the freedom of the will, and so we must look to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason before we know if ethics is possible.

In short, in the Critique Kant divides the world of knowledge, and of metaphysics, in two. The phenomenal world is the world of experience. It depends upon intuitions (sense-data), but also follows necessary a priori rules of reason, such as time and space (which do not exist as objects do, but only in reason and with intuitions of objects) as well as causality. The noumenal world, the world of reason free of intuition, is the world where the rules themselves exist in abstracto. This form of reason is the one subjected to scrutiny in the Critique of Pure Reason.

In the world of experience, which is guided by the law of time and thus causality (“insofar as their existence in time is determinable . . . .”), ethics is impossible. If that is the only world, if the only laws are the laws of nature, than ethics is impossible. However, for Kant there still remains the noumenal world. The world of experience is only the world of appearance, of things as they appear to us after we add our own a priori intuitions onto them (and so not as they are in themselves), even if we do so necessarily The noumenal world, on the other hand, is free of intuition, and thus free of the necessary laws that regulate intuition and make it possible. Where there is no experience, there are no laws of experience; thus, time, space, and causality do not apply (“to ascribe the existence of a thing so far as it is determinable in time, and so to its causality in accordance with the law of natural necessity, only to appearance, and to ascribe freedom to the same being as a thing in itself.”). If Kant, in other words, can ascribe the will’s nature, its driving force or ‘cause,’ to the noumenal world, the world free of natural law, then he can save ethics.

What is in this noumenal world, exactly? The noumenal world is free of intuition, thus of sense-objects. It is the world of pure reason, which “is found, when examined, to contain nothing but regulative principles.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 393) These principles are the necessary preliminaries for experience and thus have the status of laws. Thus pure reason, free of intuition, contains universal laws and nothing else. Thus, if that which determines the will is to be found in the noumenal world, it must be a universal practical law. Such practical laws

must sufficiently determine the will as will even before I ask whether I have the ability required for a desired effect or what I am to do in order to produce it, and must thus be categorical; otherwise they are not laws because they lack the necessity which, if it is to be practical, must be independent of conditions that are pathological and therefore only contingently connected with the will. (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 18)

Any morality that is a possible morality, that is, is premised upon the freedom of the will, must be free of empirical conditions, that is, must be nonconsequentialist. Not because good consequences aren’t morally good and bad consequences aren’t morally bad, but because basing ethics upon consequences is basing them upon empirical conditions, and so upon the world subject to the law of causality, and so upon a world where ethical choice of any kind is impossible. Only a universal law, found in pure reason and completely free of empirical determinants, can generate a possible ethical law. Only following that right can be of ethical import; any and all ‘real-world’ consequences must be completely immaterial to the ethical value of an action. “[T]he sole principle of morality consists in independence from all matter of the law (namely, from a desired object) and at the same time in the determination of choice through the mere form of giving universal law that a maxim must be capable of.” (26) Anything that can be called moral must be a universal law; thus, the rule of morality is this: “So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law.” (28) This is the moral principle from which the rest follows. The idea of treating everyone as ends is the necessary result of accepting only those principles that are universal, that is, that apply equally to every rational being capable of the use of reason. And “[a]n action that is objectively practical in accordance with this law, with the exclusion of every determining ground of inclination, is called duty . . . .” (68) The only sort of motivation that can be completely free of empirical determining grounds is that of duty. Duty follows the law simply because it is the law. Not because other people say it’s right, or because good things will happen to those who follow it, or because it makes one a good person. One follows the law because it is the only law worthy of the name.

IV

There is one question that remains. Kant shows in his critique that any ethics based in the phenomenal world, the world of experience, is impossible. Freedom, if it can be found, can only be found in the noumenal world. Yet anyone who’s read the Critique of Pure Reason knows that, if anything, the noumenal world was found sorely lacking in general. Does Kant solve this problem? Can he actually prove that we are, as he says, “transcendentally free?”

No. At least, not theoretically. “I could not realize this thought, that is, could not convert it into cognition of a being acting in this way, not even of its mere possibility.” (43) In the antimony of causality, the idea a cause at the beginning, a truly free cause, is comprehensible only in the sphere of pure reason free of experience. The moment intuition is brought in, the rules of nature, including causality, are necessarily dragged along. That means there can be no actual concrete cognition of free causality, because cognition requires intuition. Thus, if asked, I could not give you one ‘real-world’ example of something without a cause. Yet, Kant argues, reason requires this sort of cause, for otherwise we reach a logical impossibility in the lack of a completeness of series. Thus, while one cannot prove free will as something which really exists, one also cannot disprove it, for “such a causality must be presupposed, although we are quite incapable of comprehending how the being of one thing is possible through the being of another, but must for this information look entirely to experience.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 252) That is the nature of an antimony; both sides end in a philosophical draw. It appears, then, that if one can find another ground for assuming free will, one that gives it an edge in some other area, free will can then at least be assumed over the alternative.

It is here that pure speculative reason gives way to pure practical reason in order to push free will over the edge.

it was also found in the Dialectic of pure speculative reason that . . . the same action which, belonging to the sensible world, is always sensibly conditioned – that is, mechanically necessary – can at the same time, as belonging to the causality of an acting being so far as it belongs to the intelligible world, have as its basis a sensibly unconditioned causality and so be thought as free. Then, the only point at issue was whether this can be changed into is, that is, whether one could show in an actual case, as it were by a fact, that certain actions presuppose such a causality (intellectual, sensibly unconditioned causality), whether such actions are actual or only commanded, that is, objectively practically necessary . . . . Now, this principle does not need to be searched for or devised; it has long been present in the reason of all human beings and incorporated in their being, and is the principle of morality. (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 87-88)

The idea of the moral law is a universal law which determines our conduct in all actions, having the force as a law guiding the will the same amount of power as the laws of space and time have as laws of theoretical reason. The moral law, which Kant labels “a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori conscious and which is apodictically certain,” (41) certain as such because a moral law must as law necessarily have the description it does, requires free will to be conceivable. That is, in the practical sphere (the sphere of the determination of the will) freedom of the will is just as necessary as space and time are in experience. In the speculative sphere, space and time do not in themselves exist but exist still as necessary parts of experience, and thus as completely universal and completely valid, being necessary for objects of experience to exist at all. For there to be thought of an object at all, there must be time and space. Likewise, in practical thought of the will, for there to even be a conception of right and wrong, of morality, there must be the possibility of actions that can act in conformity with right actions and with wrong actions. The mere concept of morality as law, free of intuition and following only the rule prescribed by reason, requires a will equally free of intuition and thus of causality, and therefore free in the transcendental sense. “In the concept of a will . . . the concept of causality is already contained, and thus in the concept of a pure will there is contained the concept of a causality with freedom, that is, a causality that is not determinable in accordance with laws of nature . . . .” (48) Freedom, in the practical sense, gains reality in our minds. “It is therefore the moral law . . . [which] leads directly to the concept of freedom.” (27)

It is easy to err and misunderstand Kant at this point. It must be remembered he is not claiming that we have actually proven that we have free will, that we can act independently of all intuition. Rather, we have argued for the practical (practical, as in, regarding the action of the will instead of actual knowledge) necessity of something that we find in the noumenal world. “[T]hese are without exception to be counted not as knowledge but only as a warrant (for practical purposes, however, a necessity) to admit and presuppose them . . . .” (49) We cannot prove that the will is free theoretically, for that would require an intuition, which necessarily assumes causality and thus the non-existence of free will. But if one follows Kant’s philosophical system, where the world is split into appearance and the “things in themselves,” one sees that the possibility is opened up of going beyond “appearance” to a world where, if something is not provable to us with certainty, the possibility is at least present, and with it the chance is given to create a place for ethics in a world where such a thing should be impossible. “One can therefore grant that if it were possible for us to have such deep insight into a human being’s cast of mind, as shown by inner as well as outer actions, that we would know every incentive to action . . . , [we] could nevertheless maintain that the human being’s conduct is free.” (83) If you are a Kantian, the world of unlimited causes need not stop all ethics; you just have to be willing to go to another world, one we (literally) never see, in order to preserve it.

Fifteen Books

2009-07-30T21:16:00.002-04:00

Scott at Spiritual Tramp started it, and Sid followed along. Reading books is sort of my thing, so I thought, why not?

In no particular order:

1. Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My kind of humor.

2. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings. Because I like epic stories, and it's hard to beat this. (I also love his essay On Fairy-Stories. It adds new layers of meaning to your next reading of LotR)

3. Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov. His last, his best.

4. Bram Stoker: Dracula. Better than any movie adaptation.

5. Desiderius Erasmus: Praise of Folly. Humanism as it should be: light-hearted but probing.

6. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury's dystopia hit me closer than Huxley's or Orwell's, though each one has its own important features.

7. Voltaire: Candide. Because philosophy can be funny even if you don't know what it's addressing, exactly.

8. Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus. My introduction to existentialism.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science. As far as I'm concerned, this contains the single most important page in all of Nietzsche's works, aphorism 125.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. My first encounter with Nietzsche, and still the most inviting/imposing of all his works.

11. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason. Reading this was basically a crash course in philosophy as seriousness.

12. Martin Heidegger: Introduction to Metaphysics. I prefer it to Being and Time, and unrepentantly so.

13. Plato: Lots of Stuff. Because more philosophy should be done like this.

14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception. When I want a more "standardized" version of Heidegger.

15. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Lord knows why.

-----

If I had more space, I would include more Heidegger. And perhaps Milton.

Also, updates. When? Tomorrow. What? Critique of Practical Reason. And perhaps a second essay that I would at least like to start. I've worked the last ten days, so I haven't really had the chance to do much.

Mill: Utilitarianism

2009-07-13T21:36:00.004-04:00

This is, I think, the fifth time in three days I've tried to write this essay. I knew what it was I wanted to write, but just couldn't get it on paper in a way I wanted. The current iteration seems satisfactory enough, and so I'm going to say hell with it and throw it on here.

-----

That which we know as ethics is about the ‘ought’ of humanity. Ethics asks what it is right and wrong for human beings to do in their lives. It tells us that there is a way of living that is itself somehow better than another, and tries to determine which way of life is the best, the “good life.” To find this way of life, ethical theories posit a source of right and wrong, a standard or rule by which one can judge an action or a person according to its moral rightness (or wrongness). Before one can choose the right path, one must know what is right and what wrong.

Yet, unlike the earlier ages of philosophy, the modern distrust of broad ontologies and metanarratives means that one must not only attempt to justify a moral theory (say, that one should value honor above all else) against other moral theories, but against the idea that there is no morality at all. Today the question is asked whether there is any such thing as ‘morality’ to be discovered, whether the idea of morality reflects something real in our nature or the world’s, or is rather purely subjective, a concept born of psychology and defended by stubbornness in the face of modern critique. It must not only be asked whether honor, for instance, is the highest value, but whether it is a value at all, or if it is really something made up by an animal species in the course of history, and whether all moral concepts are not like this.

In fact, what is it that we mean when we talk about “honor?” What is honor, exactly? We can all talk about instances of people being honorable, and often enough we agree. But when it comes to saying what honor itself is, we find ourselves at a loss for words. Honor itself, like virtue, fairness, or justice, is a moral concept that we have grown up with but rarely try to explain in its core. We grow up familiar with exemplars and examples, but the concept itself remains vague. As long as this is the case, it is difficult, if not impossible, to defend the claim that our ideas about morality have a real backing. After all, how can we defend that which we barely understand ourselves?

Utilitarianism is an ethic that appears to open a path around these questions. While values such as “honor” or “justice” sound good on paper but on reflection are vague and subjective, utilitarianism appears to offer as straightforward an ethical base as you can get: “The utilitarian doctrine is that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as a means to that end,” (35) according to John Stuart Mill in his treatise of the same name. Happiness is should be sought; everything else is good in proportion as it promotes happiness. While honor and virtue sound nice, they should only be of concern insofar as they make us happier as a whole.

Challenges from other moral theories aside, utilitarianism seems to have quite an edge in terms of providing a clear, consistent, believable foundation for the development of a universal morality. While individuals and cultures can disagree fiercely on what honor, virtue, or justice are, and disagree even further as to what amongst them takes priority, utilitarianism gives us a very straightforward guideline. People like to be happy; in fact, I would say that everyone likes to be happy. Happiness is good, unhappiness bad. The best world would be one where everyone is happy (who would disagree?). Therefore, let us choose the moral theory tells us to increase overall happiness.

But does utilitarianism really offer us a solution? True, everyone is a fan of being happy. But everyone is also a fan of being, for example, just. What makes happiness (thus utilitarianism) different? Mill argues that what separates happiness is its universal power, something which he thinks is lacking in every other ethic. For example, ask people about what is just. Everyone could tell you about just people and the traits they have. But these people come to very different answers when asked about the virtue they know. “Justice is the will of the stronger,” in the words of Thrasymachus. (Plato, Republic Book I) Or justice is fairness (John Rawls). The opinions of non-philosophers often come back to, “Justice is doing what’s right,” which does nothing but take us back a level, for what is right? Justice, concept that appears to be straightforward, that everyone understands, quickly, upon analysis, falls into a mess on intuitions and instincts about what should be done, with many of those intuitions having no middle ground.

One would suppose . . . that on questions of justice there could be no controversy; that, if we take that for our rule, its application to any given case could levae us in as little doubt as a mathematical demonstration. So far is this from being the fact that there is as much difference of opinion, and as much discussion, about what is just as about what is useful to society. Not only have different nations and individuals different notions of justice, but in the mind of one and the same individual, justice is not some one rule, principle, or maxim, but many which do not always coincide in their dictates, and, in choosing between which, he is guided either by some extraneous standard or by his own personal predilections. (55)

While justice has great intuitive power, one cannot claim truth based upon unscrutinized opinions. One needs a coherent defense for one’s principles and why they are held, a demonstration that will show people that the end suggested really is good and worth pursuing. According to Mill, only utilitarianism supplies this need. “Each, from his own point of view, is unanswerable; and any choice between them, on grounds of justice, must be perfectly arbitrary. Social utility alone can decide the preference,” (58) he says. When we justify our ethic of choice, on what grounds do we justify it? What makes justice and virtue worth following? Is it some intangible value that emanates them like the Platonic Forms? Such a defense no longer works in this day and age. Rather, we tend to say that following a given path is the best way, that it makes for the best world where humanity can live to its fullest. When we don’t resort to divine sanction or to circles of words (justice is fair, fairness defends freedom, freedom is just . . .), we find ourselves falling back to the argument that justice, fairness, etc. make for the best world to live in. What is the best world? The one where everyone can be happy. In other words, ideals such as justice are in reality chosen because of their utility, because of their ability to promote happiness. People believe that their particular conceptions of justice and the like are those through which the world will be the best, the one worth living in, the one people would want to live in if they understood. But this is the world with the most happiness. In other words, the other ethical theories are in reality already utilitarian; “all cases of justice are also cases of expediency . . . .” (64)

What lies hidden behind our moral values, according to Mill, is happiness, the idea that humanity will get the most enjoyment out of life if it follows a certain set of moral principles. The pursuit of justice, we believe, or of virtue, makes the world happier overall, and in practice seeing justice or virtue pursued makes us happy. Because of these facts, all ethics really boils down to questions about happiness. Such an argument is one that tends to repel, if not lead to outright rebellion. Not everyone pursues happiness; some still have honor! Mill accepts this. It is true, he says, that we don’t always consciously choose actions because they will make everyone as happy as possible. “This, however, is but an instance of that familiar fact, the power of habit, and is nowise confined to the case of virtuous actions.” (40) Habit, as we all know, causes us to do things that often make no sense in particular cases, simply because we do the same thing so often that we come to do it without thinking. We prefer a certain range of acts (for example, giving everyone privacy and free reign to do what they want) in the first case because it seems to lead to the most happiness. Yet, we can become so used to the idea that we stubbornly defend it even when it no longer makes sense (when, for example, it seems likely that someone is murdering people, and “invading” their privacy could find evidence to arrest him or her). “What was once desired as an instrument for the attainment of happiness has come to be desired for its own sake.” (37) Thus do we lose sight of our own goal and become caught up in habit.

If Mill is right, if it really is happiness that we are pursuing at the core of it all, then it not only makes sense to argue that happiness should be our real goal; it basically must be so. As the saying goes in ethics, “ought implies can;” that is, if you ought to do something, then it is necessary that you are actually able to do it, that you can. If, as Mill says, all we can pursue is happiness, if that’s the only thing that we can all agree is the goal worth pursuing, then pursuing happiness is what we ought to do.

While this sounds sensible, there is, I think, a problem that remains unaddressed, indeed unrecognized. People, Mill says, should pursue happiness. But what is happiness? It’s a bit of an odd question. On the face of it, knowing what happiness is seems like the easiest thing in the world. We all know what happiness is; we experience it ourselves. There’s certainly no question that everyone thinks happiness is a good thing, if not the best thing (those who think otherwise are, as Mill said, just victims of habit and forgetfulness). So why is there need for further discussion?

There is a need for more discussion because, like we all know what happiness is, we also ‘know’ what justice is. As we’ve discovered, what that really means is that we have intuitions about justice which developed in our upbringing and have stuck with us ever since. In reality, our ideas about justice, virtue, and so on, according to Mill, have another source outside of themselves, namely, happiness. Happiness apparently stands above the rest as a true universal. But is it really exempt from this critique?

If happiness it really is the hidden universal guiding our ethical decisions, then it must stand across the borders of individuals as the single, uniting idea. It must do what subjective values such as justice cannot; that is, speak a universal name. Everyone should, upon reflection, be able to reach an agreement about what is pursued in happiness. In fact, they do not. Mill himself admits this, though not explicitly; “there is as much difference of opinion, and as much discussion, about what is just as about what is useful to society.” At first glance, this does not appear to be about happiness, but about utility. People differ, Mill agrees, about what most useful for society. But he also says that what people really want, whether they acknowledge it or not, is happiness. Justice, fairness, and the rest are used by people because of their supposed positive effect on happiness. Utility is no different here. For example: some people think that what is most “useful” to society is to provide people with material wants (the welfare, socialistic, and communist states). Some people think that people should be allowed maximum freedom (libertarian, anarchist, and related theories). Some people think the best way is security and control (police states). These ways have their supposed “utility,” but for what? By Mill’s argumentation, for happiness.

But do they all reach towards the same thing? Does security give one the same happiness that freedom does? What about cultivation of the arts versus material wants? Are they pushing towards the same happiness? Is happiness found in the individual, or the group? Is there a real thing such as ‘group happiness?’ What these questions show us is the fact that there is indeed a great controversy about what happiness actually is. A different sort of happiness corresponds to each of these conceptions; the happiness that comes from reading a book is very different than that which comes from scratching one’s itches. Even biologically speaking, the happiness of repose is different from adrenaline-induced happiness, which is different from happiness inspired by vicodin, all of which fall under the general heading of happiness. But are they all the same phenomenon, the single source which grounds our ethics? As long as this is still a problem, we have not solved our problem of giving ethics a single, universal ground.

Mill might respond that these differences are just products of psychology, as he did when addressing theories opposed to utilitarianism. But even Mill himself makes an untenable distinction in defining happiness. Mill defines happiness as (1) pleasure and (2) the absence of pain: “By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure.” (7) He then further distinguishes between higher and lower pleasures, between which there is not a quantitative, but a qualitative difference. Higher pleasures are those which come from such nice things as philanthropy, reading books, and being a nice guy all around; the ‘intellectual’ virtues. Lower pleasures are, as Mill puts it, the pleasures of pigs; scratching one’s itches. Between these, the choice is (for Mill) obvious: “Human beings have faculties more elevated the animal appetites and, when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification.” (8) It already was obvious with the names given to them. Pleasures of the mind are better than those of the body.

Happiness, says Mill, is pleasure (and the absence of pain), plain and simple. Yet it is not so simple, because some pleasures are less “happy” than others. The pleasures of the mind take priority. This, of course, makes sense for Mill the philosopher, the man of cultivated mind. But is he justified? How can we be sure he is not, like those he accuses, just using his intuitions to make moral judgments, rather than finding a real source for morality? According to Mill, the answer is that higher pleasures are better because those who have experienced them both choose the higher pleasures: “Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties.” (9) Those who have lived lives of hedonism and sin, as well as lives spent cultivating themselves and living in stability, always go back to what is stable and secure, what gives them better reason to live, the pleasures of the mind. “And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.” (10) When the two choices are understood, the right path is obvious. Thus we not only allows us a proof of the promotion of happiness, it also allows us to find judges to resolve our conflicts: “the test of quality and the rule of measuring it against quantity being the preference felt by those who, in their opportunities of experience, to which must be added habits of self-consciousness and self-observation, are best furnished with the means of comparison.” (12)

This accords well with what we think of conventionally. We consider ‘recovered’ those who have dropped their lives of sin and put themselves in a position to move up in society. The church helps those who live for nothing but the body, and returns them to a good, stable living. We trust these people to be the judges of what is right. They tell us how we should act, since they are wise and know the best ways to secure a satisfying life. Yet this is again, I think, only our intuitions talking. For there are times when people “who know better” don’t make the right choice. Mill uses psychologically-based arguments to refute them. “Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance.” (10) “[T]hey addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.” (10) There are wise, aged, learned people who prefer the pleasures of the body, but we call them weak-willed or foolish. Are we justified in doing so? Might they not have a point? They certainly do pursue happiness. Further, it is not in total ignorance; they are aware of the other side, yet somehow “fall into temptation.” Can we just call them foolish and move on?

We must, if we are to follow Mill’s argument for utilitarian ethics. He depends upon it, both for his ought and his can. For while the ‘can’ is fulfilled by his claim that people pursue nothing but happiness, upon which his arguments against other moralities depends, his ‘ought’ depends upon happiness being what he describes it as being, something which has its higher and lower side, not merely a psychological fact but something ethical that allows for judgments of right and wrong. It is here that I think Mill runs into difficulty. He uses psychology well to explain human behavior, and indeed, he may be right. Even if there is disagreement about what exactly is entailed, it may be the case that people really do pursue only happiness, provided that we understand “happiness” on an individual basis. But that alone does not give us an ethic, because it does not tell us what happiness really is. All it tells us is that people pursue what they think want, without telling us what that is. In order to provide an ought, and with it an ethics, we have to know what that thing is, so that we know how to increase it as much as possible. But Mill does not do this, because he does not think there is any dispute about what ‘happiness’ is. In fact, happiness is such a vague idea that we are able to get almost nothing from it, besides (I think) letting people do what they want to be happy, insofar as it also allows others to be happy. (This is, of course, close to Mill’s argument in On Liberty; I do actually agree with Mill on a number of things in practice.) But as it stands, we can only say that

whether there be any other ground of moral obligation than the general happiness or not, men do desire happiness; and however imperfect may be their own practice, they desire and commend all conduct in others toward themselves by which they think their happiness is promoted. (28)

And if this is all we can say, than utilitarianism has no provided any better ground than the theories it claims to stand beyond.

Religion and Its Extremes: An Essay

2009-07-07T19:50:00.004-04:00

This was written in late February of this year for a campus-wide essay contest in which I placed second last year. This essay, though I entered, I discovered was never included in the selection process. Presumably, this is because I had placed in the past; however, there was no explicit rule against applying again, and they never told me the actual reason why they didn't include it (I only found out because of my unique position in the university at the time, which allowed me access to things not all students could access). Nevertheless, it was lost to the abyss. Not one to let a good essay go to waste, however (given my competition, and how much I'd improved in the last year, I'm quite sure I would've placed first this time), I think it should go here. Also, I haven't updated in a month.

Speaking of which, I'm back on track after spending the last four days writing on Heidegger. Who's next? It's a surprise.

One final note: when I wrote this, I had no idea whether I actually agreed with the ideas I was writing down, or whether I just liked the way it sounded on paper. Thinking about it now, I'm still not quite sure. I have yet to decide exactly what 'religion' means to me with definiteness, and until then, the question of how religion relates to subjects such as violence and extremism must remain unanswered. Nevertheless, I find the things I wrote here interesting, not in direct contradiction with my general outlook, and worthy of development in the future.

-----

Though the question has arisen in one form or another throughout the centuries, the relationship between religion and tolerance has become a very pressing issue since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. A group of people, motivated by religious fervor, took their own lives and thousands of others as well. The shock of this event soon gave way to questions. What, people ask, causes other to do such things? As information about the terrorists rose the question appeared: what role did religion play in this event? And what role does it play in similar events elsewhere? For it can be said that the attacks of September 11th are only one extreme case of religious fervor leading to intolerance, repression, and destruction. Repression, we hear, has existed throughout religious history and continues in many forms to this day.

True enough. Yet to inquire as to the “role” of religion in such a manner, looking only at its worst adherents and most destructive events, is not merely one-sided but dishonest. History teaches us better. Christian churches sponsor countless charities, working to help the poor and struggling. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, and Mahatma Gandhi fought for the rights of human beings under religious banners. Islamic empires and Christian universities were the houses of education throughout the Middle Ages. Religion has saved and improved countless lives, just as it has been linked to repression, killings, and destruction. Thus given anecdotes on both sides of the question, one must try to get to the heart of the matter and ask: what is in religion that leads to aid and repression, tolerance and repression? And how is this power used, for good and for evil? Is one or the other the true face of religion? Or is it something else?

To understand how religion can be used for good and evil, we must first answer a far more difficult question: what is religion? There are several ways of answering this core question, which I will divide into three broadly defined strains. The first I call the doctrinal definition: a religion is a set of codes or laws which prescribes a way of life for a group of people, as well as a belief structure which undergirds the identity of the group (“doctrinal” being a word that can include both rules and beliefs). The second I call the mystical definition: a religion is a means through which one contacts “ultimate reality,” be it a higher plane of existence, a new way of experiencing the world which is, or something similar. The third I call the spiritual definition (with “spiritual” used in its most general sense): a religion is defined by a certain way of living, not in a solely legal (doctrine-based) sense, but as a way of living with: with one’s fellow man, with nature, with all of existence. This third definition is not as legalistic as the doctrinal definition, nor as vague as the mystical definition; it is something of a middle ground, where doctrine and lived experience are necessarily related in lived experience.

Next, let us point out some known religions and examine our definitions with reference to them to see what definition (if any) fits. Familiar religions include Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism (going all the way from Mahayana to Zen), Hinduism, Native American religions, Jainism, and countless tribal religions. What do these religions share that makes them religions? What common characteristic(s) do we find? And to help us narrow our search further, let us ask: which definitions include things that are obviously not religions?

At first the doctrinal definition appears tempting. Each religion distinguishes itself with a certain code by which to define its members. Christians have specific rules which they are to follow through life, as do Muslims, Hindus, etc. Yet I think that the doctrinal definition alone is far from sufficient. Certainly the Zen Buddhist would laugh at the claim that Enlightenment is simply the consequence of following a set of rules, as would a Native American, many Christian groups, and others. Within religions themselves one finds countless different codes: Catholicism, for example, is not Greek Orthodox, is not Mennonite. Further, to call a set of doctrines alone a religion includes purely secular ethical codes as well as religions. Thus, rules alone prove insufficient to make a religion a religion.

Next we turn to the mystical definition. At first, the mystical definition appears to get us close to our goal: religions give us a sense of meaning and higher purpose through which to understand our existence. Religions allow one to understand life as more than just “avoiding death,” and have motivated some of the most inspiring men in history in a way difficult to comprehend if one assumes only a transitory life where all comes to an end. Yet I argue that we can cross this definition out as well. Religions are not necessarily defined by some “other reality.” Again, Zen Buddhism stands out here: the goal in Zen is not to separate oneself from the world, but to become an unobtrusive, purely “natural” part of it. Even religions which do look to another world do not do so in such a vague sense as is given in the mystical definition: Christianity, for example, has its heaven, but it spends just as much of its time thinking about this world as well: how to act, what rules to live by, and how this world relates to that one. Thus this world has a role of importance, no matter how otherworldly an adherent might be. Besides, if reaching “another plane of experience” were the only goal, then surely there would be a unique religion for every new psychotropic drug that came out.

This brings us to the third definition, religion as spiritual living. In a way, the spiritual definition is the combination of the other two. On the mystical side, religion as spiritual living provides one with a special way of looking at the world and one’s place in it, over and beyond “mere existing.” On the doctrinal side, religion as spiritual living provides a structured way of understanding that experience and an ideal way of life with which to align it. Thus spiritual living provides both the deeply felt sense of connection that the mystical side offers and the understood way of living and purposefulness that the doctrinal side offers. The weaknesses of both sides are resolved in the synthesis; the mystical acquires an aim, and the doctrine becomes meaningful. Further, only religions can meet the conditions of the spiritual definition: ethical and legal codes alone are insufficient to instill a sense of connection with the world, and certain hallucinatory substances do not give us any actual direction when it comes to living. Religion, thus, is spiritual living; that is, an understanding of the world, developed by way of doctrines and beliefs, through which the individual comes to feel a deep sense of connection with the world and all within it. Religion is connected, directed living.

Now that we have defined religion (and in two pages, no less!), we must return to our original question: what role does religion play in tolerance and intolerance? What is it in religion that can lead people to acts of both creation and destruction?

Let us first explicitly note that, given the examples we used in the beginning of this essay and the definition of religion we have arrived at, religion itself can be used for both good and evil, and remains religion in both cases. Completely abstracted from particular doctrines, belief systems, and experiences, religion as spiritual living is simply and precisely a spiritually involved, directed way of living in the world. Whether that is used for creative or destructive purposes depends upon what particular doctrines are subscribed to, and what exactly the relation between self and world is. Thus, both Mother Teresa and the September 11th terrorists can be said to have acted “religiously.”

That being said, Mother Teresa (along with Gandhi, Jesus, and others) and the September 11th hijackers (along with other oppressive religious forces) do not understand religion in the same way. The oppressive, destructive forces in religion are distinguishable in that they always focus upon the extreme ends of the doctrinal-mystical spectrum. On one end, radical interpreters of Islam (or any other religion) may say that the laws prescribed in the Qu’ran (or any other holy code) must be followed to the very word, or else one faces damnation. This is not restricted to religions with “holy books:” in this manner cult leaders use their own doctrines to completely control the lives of their victims through the force of “religious” law. Doctrine is no longer connected with the world as experienced; rather, existence itself is subjected to a singular interpretation of law from which all else follows. Religion in this sense becomes slavery.

Paradoxically enough, this is often combined with the opposite extreme, extreme mysticism. Believers are whipped into absolute frenzy at rallies; powerful speakers use the force of speech to elicit powerful emotional response. For the person experiencing them, these extremes of emotion can be indecipherable from genuine religious ecstasy, where one feels a sense of “oneness” with the world or a connection with the divine. Emotionally weak and vulnerable people and those in repressed societies are especially vulnerable to this form of persuasion, and thus form the rank and file of extremist and cult movements. Terrorists rarely grow up in middle-class neighborhoods for a reason.

This literal extremism in religion can be contrasted with the approach of the positive forces in religion, exemplified by many of its most devout practitioners. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a shining example, because he wrote so lucidly on the subject. For Dr. King, the doctrinal aspects of religion are directly connected to the mystical aspects. Rather than one extreme enforcing the other, as in the example of the cult, the two sides co-exist peacefully and constructively, creating a positive worldview that allows one to actively participate in the world in a constructive and fulfilling manner. Dr. King calls the synthesis agape, a Greek word for a type of love which Dr. King describes as “understanding, creative, redemptive, good will to all men.”(1) Thus agape is not merely doctrinal, but neither is it purely emotional, as Dr. King explains in a line both amusing and troubling: “I think this (agape) is what Jesus meant when he said ‘love your enemies.’ I’m very happy that he didn’t say like your enemies, because it is pretty difficult to like some people. Like is sentimental, and it is pretty difficult to like someone bombing your home . . . .”(2) Thus Dr. King’s “brotherhood of all men” is a sense of familyhood with the entire world, one reinforced by the doctrines of religion rather than hindered by it.

In hindsight, we now see that the battle over the “good” or “evil” nature of religion is really a battle over its application to the human life. Those who push the extremes of religious experience and law perpetuate a self-destructive form of religion, one where wars of belief are fought and this world is unflinchingly sacrificed for some greater reward. The continuing existence of such self-destructive religions is a testament to the power extreme emotions and absolute beliefs have over the human soul. The balanced form, on the other hand, has in it the means to create a peaceful and long-lasting path for human life to tread. It works to maintain stability, for its emphasis is on how one coexists within the world rather than against it. As Dr. King understood, religion as the unity of the doctrinal and mystical is brotherhood.

Now that we have come to understand what is in the nature of religion that leads both to balance and to extremism, creation and destruction, tolerance and intolerance, we must ask one final question: how can we create a world where the religious life is one of balance? This question is easily answered, though putting that answer into practice is far from easy. Human beings, by their nature, seek balance. In the extreme forms of religion it is the promise of a permanent peace and a lasting salvation that draws adherents; in cults, it is the promise of a safe and secure life that draws followers. People seek to leave oppression, anarchy, and war, and the extreme forms of religion offer an escape, but in seeking this religion these people unknowingly pursue their own destruction. If we are to establish religion as a force of peace and tolerance, we must take our fight to these people. Bring balance to their lives and they will no longer look for instant solutions and overpowering experiences. Balance seeks balance; thus, balance in the secular world will help to bring balance in the religious world. And as we noted in the very beginning, one of the greatest forces in bringing balance in the secular world has been religion. Likewise, extremism breeds extremism and destruction breeds destruction in a cycle that perpetuates indefinitely until it is stopped. Thus we must take the battle to the hungry and oppressed, those without family or shelter, providing them liberation from the oppression of circumstance. We must fight the forces of extremism with patience and reserve, as Gandhi and Dr. King did. Only through a restorative effort on both sides, the religious and the secular, can religion as spiritual life bring about a world of balance and a brotherhood of mankind.

Footnotes:

(1) Martin Luther King, Jr. “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (Harper & Row), 46.
(2) King, “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” 47.

Change of Plans

2009-06-11T15:50:00.003-04:00

My plan for this point was to go through books that would prove useful for my first semester courses in grad school. The books are: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment, and St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica questions 1-26. This has changed, since I've decided I want to do a large work on Heidegger, something beyond the scope of this blog. I would like to discuss Being in Heidegger, and its implications for his philosophy as a whole and his practice (the essay just posted is one dimension of that discussion). Thus I'm going to spend some time going back through his works and writing that essay. After that, I intend to follow business as usual, as listed above.

Heidegger: Introduction to Metaphysics

2009-06-11T15:38:00.003-04:00

(Yale University Press, 2000)

In any book or lecture by Heidegger, it usually appears as though he not only discusses issues in a way that’s unnecessarily difficult; sometimes you’d almost swear that he’s doing it on purpose. There are plenty of people (including philosophers) who would say that this is the case. The reasons they give are often not very kind; the reason Heidegger does what he does, it is said, is because he has nothing to say. Heidegger is obscure for the same reason that Hegel, Sartre, and the lot of them are obscure: because what they’re talking about has no standard, no sense of form or consistency, and so it’s just a lot of talking without anything being said. Who, after all, can figure out what they’re actually saying?

At the current time, I think it strange that philosophers, anyway, might feel this way about Heidegger. By comparison, in the case of Nietzsche, while he was mocked or rejected for some time, the direction in his philosophy and his importance have come to be by and large acknowledged by the philosophical establishment, including by those who disagree with him utterly. It is true that there are those who dismiss Nietzsche off-handedly, but the perception of those people is generally that it is they, and not Nietzsche, who are acting foolish. With Heidegger things have not advanced up to this point. Heidegger’s influence during and after his life to the present has been huge, yet one can still simply ignore or dismiss him, and it is acceptable. The argument given in a case like this is the “common knowledge” argument: it’s Heidegger, so apparently it’s okay to dismiss him, not just as having bad arguments, but as being a bad philosopher. He makes no sense, it would be best if we left him behind.

To go back to Nietzsche for a moment, if one had asked him what he thought about people at large rejecting him . . . well, we already know the answer, since it happened in his lifetime (at its most intense, for that matter). Nietzsche decided to stand on his own, despite what others said, and perhaps in part because of that he’s had a life extending far beyond his lived one. One is tempted to wonder how Heidegger would answer the same question, and how we should take his answer. In fact, he was aware of the question of the relevance of his philosophy, and was so by 1935, when he gave the lectures that comprised Introduction to Metaphysics. At the point I’m referring to, he’s in the middle of a hundred-plus page interpretation of Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, and he’s doing the usual thing. Nowhere will you find an interpretation (or a translation of Greek, for that matter) that matches up to what Heidegger says. Is he aware of this? He is. In something of an aside, he says:

From the point of view of the customary and dominant definitions . . . our interpretation of the saying must appear as a willful interpretation, as one that reads into the saying what an ‘exact exegesis’ can never ascertain. That is correct. According to the usual opinion of today, what we have said is in fact just a result of that violent character and one-sidedness, which has already become proverbial, of the Heideggerian mode of interpretation. (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics 187)

He is certainly aware, and early on, of the general opinion of his work (and this is some time before Rudolph Carnap singles him out for attack in The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language). Amongst the students of his lectures, as well, he saw frequent misunderstanding, as he refers to in this work (which itself was a lecture course). One then feels compelled to ask: couldn’t Heidegger try a bit harder to make himself understood? Did he really feel the need to be so difficult.

The answer is yes, he did. In fact, Heidegger felt that philosophy must precisely not be something refined and clear-cut, straightforward and easy to put together. It must always be new and difficult, for “whenever a philosophy becomes fashion, either there is no actual philosophy or else philosophy is misinterpreted and, according to some intentions alien to it, misused for the needs of the day.” (9) Easy philosophy is not philosophy at all.

Why is this? The answer one might want to call out is, “To protect the jobs of the philosophers,” for of course philosophy would serve no purpose if everybody saw their bullshit for what it was. Philosophy does not produce anything, it does not give us a knowledge which improves the material conditions of life, and as a pastime it’s a whole lot of effort for no tangible payoff outside of smugness. This view is not lost on Heidegger, and in fact he thinks it technically correct. “It is entirely correct and completely in order to say, ‘You can’t do anything with philosophy . . . .’” (13) So why bother? He continues: “The only mistake is to believe that with this, the judgment concerning philosophy is at an end. For a little epilogue arises in the form of a counterquestion: even if we can’t do anything with it, may not philosophy in the end do something with us, provided that we engage ourselves with it?”

Heidegger’s response to the question of the point of philosophy is not simply a matter of justification. His claim comes from a view of history, of human nature, and from Heidegger’s understanding of Being itself. For Heidegger, our answer to the fundamental question of metaphysics, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” is not the speculation of an idle mind. It is human destiny. To say “It is human destiny” is not to make out some grand human destiny in the cosmos; to say that the understanding of Being is human destiny is to say that our understanding of Being is what decides our understanding of and relationship to the world. Our metaphysics is the ground of our physics, our ethics, and our world itself. But to see this why this is, and to see why the question of metaphysics must necessarily be a difficult one according to Heidegger, we must first know something about Being.

When he wants to make a statement about something, for example, Being, Heidegger can be very straightforward if he feels so inclined. “Being means: to appear in emerging, to step forth out of concealment . . . .” (121) is one of many formulations of the definition of what Being is. Specifically, says Heidegger, Being as emergence/unconcealment is the ancient Greek definition of Being, one which we have taken over and transmuted into simple “presence.” If, as Heidegger says, “this conception, though entirely flattened out and rendered unrecognizable, is the conception that still rules even today in the West – not only in the doctrines of philosophy but in the most everyday routines,” (62) then we must understand our own understanding of Being as, in a word, emergence and unconcealment. That is, a being is such in the act of revealing itself; it emerges; it step forth; it is the unity of the “it” that appears in conflict (that is, distinction and separating the self) from the total. The Being of a being is its emergence.

Yet athough Heidegger offers such definitions in various ways throughout the course of any of his works, he never begins with such a definition nor goes straight to it through argument or inference. Instead he develops interpretations and reevealuations. He takes simple concepts and, before even explaining what they are, goes to great lengths to make them complicated. The reason he does this (for it is certainly intentional) is actually implicit in his definition of Being, properly understood. Being is emergence; that is, a being appears when it reveals itself, when it comes to the fore of our apprehension and, in a manner of speaking, announces its presence (the tie between Being as emergence and Being as presence can be seen here). I can state this in so many words. So can Heidegger. But, given what is to be understood in the very definition of Being given, it absolutely must be understood that Being itself, nor the Being of any being, can never be given by a definition. To understand something by its definition is basically to understand it by the structure of the sentence, which is to say, by the relationship of subject and predicate. ‘Being is . . .’ emergence. The thing, Being, has this trait, emergence. Thus we have a thing that has this act imputed to it. But is Being a thing? It cannot be, for then it would be a being, and Being is what makes beings beings. Rather, Being is emergence itself, the emerging of a being. The problem here is that Being and emergence are not in a relationship of subject and predicate. We can answer questions about Being with definitions, but they don’t actually give the sense of emergence that Heidegger is seeking. We want emergence itself. When something emerges, what does it do? It arises from depths unseen. From an abyss, an object suddenly surfaces. The space around it has to deal with this new thing, which establishes its own rules. The world, in a sense, shifts. Being is the raw experience of an event, one where something is revealed, taken out of concealment and non-presence and revealed as a being – not through definition, not by deduction, but by emergence. This event cannot possibly be given in a definition; “[T]he best professional ability will never replace the authentic strength of seeing and questioning and saying.” (22) Being is only experienced, for the same reason that one can only understand the definition of emergence when one forms in one’s mind the image of something emerging, such as the submarine from water, arising from the depths unseen, and for the same reason that the definitions of “running,” “seeing,” and “eating,” are all empty before one is aware of a runner, a seer, an eater. Being is not a thing to be defined; it happens.

So if Being is emergence (and unconcealment), then it is still legitimate and necessary to ask in greater detail what exactly emergence (and unconcealment) is. My room is full of beings; the door, the desk, the chair. When I look around, according to Heidegger, I see them emerge. I guess they do so, in some sense. When I walk into the room, beings are automatically and without my guidance unconcealed from the chaos of raw existence. But it would have to be an awfully weak conception of emergence if one was to say with truth that my chair “emerges” when I look at what I am sitting on. It certainly doesn’t arise from the depths; at most it floats in a still pond. Heidegger is aware of this, and calls it the fallen sense of Being. Specifically, the causal, uninterested view of objects as just being there, as “constant presence” (216), is Being set into stone and placed in an equally stone world. It is Being when the phenomena that actually constitute Being are ignored, and only “the fact” remains, the fact being the presence of some being. For Heidegger, the problem isn’t that Beings don’t exist in this way: “[T]he subsistence of the building does not depend on this scent [of its Being] that is hovering around somewhere.” (36) The problem, which simply must to be understood in order to understand Heidegger, is that the idea of Being as mere presence, as static, fails to give Being’s fundamental nature as emergence; the emergence, the revelation of Being disappears, and only as this phenomena of emergence, as this actual, flesh-and-blood phenomena, can one know Being.

This state of affairs has consequences. For example: writing books, even difficult ones, is alone insufficient to reveal Being. One cannot offer definitions and deductions that get at Being, because through direct words one is only given a concept, an objectified relation between things in presence. Relations, concepts, and actions are the same: they are given as impersonal events that happen to things, and nothing more. Being is understood in all these cases, but left stilted. Thus the fallacy of the definition gives a building, for example, as a structure with walls and a floor, not as that building, the structure that was built at the height of city expansion and shows signs of lost grandeur, the building that has seen thousands of tenants and one bombing, that has seen the feet of the famous and the bottom of the barrel. One can say that it has seen those things, but of course, that is not the same as having the Being felt first-hand. And Being lies in the latter, not the former. A being’s Being is not its objective, static characteristics, according to Heidegger. It is what is revealed to us in unconcealing emergence:

It is simply a matter of not being seduced by overhasty theories, but instead experiencing things as they are in whatever may be nearest. This piece of chalk here is an extended, relatively stable, definitely formed, grayish-white thing, and, furthermore, a thing for writing . . . . The possibility of being drawn along the blackboard and being used up is not something that we merely add onto the thing with our thought. The chalk itself, as this being, is in this possibility; otherwise it would not be chalk as a writing implement. (32)

If Heidegger wants to give the reader or the listener a genuine understanding of Being, and not a stale scholastic understanding, it would be pointless to give a definition, delineate its characteristics, and give an argument for that definition. To be sure, he actually does that. He defines Being several times, discusses its characteristics and history, and gives reasons that other definitions of Being fail. But that is not all he does. In fact, in his lectures and writings Heidegger has two goals: to delineate what Being is, and, in order to do that properly, to engender the sense for Being within those to whom he speaks. This second mission requires a different sense of education; as he says twenty years later, “what teaching calls for is this: to let learn.” (Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 15) In simple lectures and books, nothing but facts are transmitted. The name Heidegger gives to this phenomenon, where “how things stand” is given in terms of words that are supposed to link up with a totality of facts, with the world being nothing but the totality of all totalities, the fact of all facts, is idle talk. Idle talk, which Heidegger discusses at length in Being and Time, is a threat to philosophy not because it is impractical (it is eminently practical, of that one can be sure), but because it is static, definite, dull, un-emergent and un-unconcealing. It is the mind as machine, as cog, and thus torn from its humanity as a revealer of beings. Thence emerges Heidegger’s critique of modern society and instrumental thought, which we will not go into here.

Heidegger wants to re-introduce Being as emergence to the world. Is there really anything he can do to bring this about, if we assume that Being is something only experienced? Absolutely. If Being is emergence, then, no matter how far we drift from Being, it is simply impossible that we can lose it altogether, or never have it in the first place. Emergence is the field in which beings first arise in their Being; we simply cannot have beings without Being. Emergence, Being, is not only present, but necessarily at the fore in any act whereby something presents itself to us anew, be it a new being or an old one. The problem is that Being as emergence is stifled in favor of Being as presence; the phenomena, the revelatory manner of Being is ignored in favor of demonstrations or propositions. The new is understood in terms of the old; nothing is given as emergence, but rather everything is explained in terms of causes and impersonal events. The wonder at the world is killed off, basically, and the question of Being ignored. To return to Being as emergence, we must return to where Being emerges in its strongest form, which happens in two cases: (1) When something emerges for the first time, and (2) when something previously “known” emerges as something new. In reality the second is the first; the re-emergence of something in a new light is the emergence of something new. In both cases emergence shatters our old world with the power of its presence. This type of emergence, that which reaches into Being in its greatest conflict and openness, is appropriately called originary. An originary interpretation of a being brings it forth anew and as it emerges, not as a given, not as the definition in idle talk, but in its self-revelatory emergence into unconcealment, and therefore in its Being. Only an originary thinking has the power to break our inauthentic, pre-established world for the sake of genuine emergence, one which is our own and thus not limited to the words which are given to us by a stale history. Thus, for example, “The misinterpretation of thinking and the misuse of misinterpreted thinking can be overcome only by a genuine and originary thinking, and by nothing else.” (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics 129) When we live in a world where all the questions of metaphysics are, if not answered, placed in a framework that already determines the form of the answer, where the explicit goal is to establish the law of the universe and thus render everything simple and therefore impotent, the only way to reestablish the sense of Being is through a questioning that breaks into new territory. When we call something into question, we look closely at it. We ask what it really is, what is revealed as being the thing itself. From a vague and impersonal Being, questioning drags forth a strong sense of emergent Being, of what is actually before ourselves. Therefore we must avoid “the crippling of all passion for questioning, a crippling that has already held us back too long.” (152) The silencing of questioning is not only a tyranny over the mind; it suppresses emergence, and thus a genuine understanding of Being. “This question has today been forgotten.” (Heidegger, Being and Time 3) The only way to respond is to reopen the questioning. One must recall Being, and must do so in a questioning way.

Why does Heidegger make understanding his work so difficult? Because only by forcing us to wretch our minds, by making us step away from what are given uncritically as already finished and see it in its essential being-ness, its emergence. We cannot just say that Being is emergence; Being must emerge. Thus, in Being and Time, “Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the meaning of Being and to do so correctly.” (1) Yet it is not a question we will ever answer, for recall: “[W]henever a philosophy becomes fashion, either there is no actual philosophy or else philosophy is misinterpreted and, according to some intentions alien to it, misused for the needs of the day.” No, our goal is to ask the question, for only with the question and the search will Being emerge.

Richard Rorty: Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume II

2009-06-03T22:35:00.004-04:00

(Cambridge University Press, 1991)

At the end of the day, there comes a point for many who listen to philosophers when one finally feel compelled to say, “What difference does it make?” The point where one starts to come to the conclusion that, rather than solving problems, philosophy is either useless or itself becomes the problem. This usually comes at one of two points: the former, when the discussion seems to have no relevance or impact, and the latter when a decision has to be made and there is not time to consider the options. In the former case, arguments about whether all experiences are directly intentional, or whether some are based upon intentional experiences but are not themselves intentional, and what that means about intentionality, seems pointless. Who cares about intentionality? In the latter, more pressing case, sometimes one doesn’t have time to draw out all the minute potentialities of an argument about ethical action. One has to act now, or else the hostage dies. What do you do?

Of course, philosophy responds to the two questions above. To the first, it says that these questions very much matter. Without them, we cannot be aware of our own limits. Am I to concede the quest of truth just because I don’t care about the answers, or think that they don’t matter? But don’t I myself believe I have truths, and don’t I want them defended? To the latter argument, philosophy has a simple response: what if you are wrong? An action rushed is always a foolish action, and creates disaster as often (if not more so) than it generates heroes. In both cases one sees that philosophy’s value is not utilitarian or pragmatic, but based upon its quest for truth.

When we took a look at Merleau-Ponty and embodied phenomenology, we saw a new type of response to the first of the above responses from classical philosophy. Merleau-Ponty did not claim that he could answer the questions of classical epistemology to their standards. But, he said, this was because they had bad standards; to ask for certainty about an “objective” world was an error brought about by a particular metaphysical theory. Drop the assumptions and a more sensible view (and one, he thought, that concurs with actual experience) develops. Thus the response to philosophy wasn’t to answer its questions, but to reject the questions as bogus.

Richard Rorty, writing after and about the attacks of Heidegger and post-modernism on conventional philosophy, agrees in spirit with this sort of response. Having been raised in the analytic tradition, Rorty eventually found himself questioning what that tradition could accomplish in a world that was no longer the land of essences that philosophy had thought it to be. Everyone was asking the same old questions and assuming the same standards for answers. As a result, philosophers never found themselves in a position to challenge the enterprise as a whole: “The scientistic approach to philosophy which Husserl shared with Carnap lives on, forming a tacit presupposition of the work of analytic philosophers . . . . However, there is little explicit metaphilosophical defense or development of this . . . .” (Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume II 21) Problems such as that of the external world, of the “essence” of language, of discovering the way in which one can link up with reality, were questions from an ancient time (Plato, specifically). They formed the central issues about which one argued. They were also based on a hope: the hope of the philosopher that there existed a “truth” discoverable in its very selfhood and discernable by the probing philosopher: “All we philosophers have at least a bit of the ascetic priest in us. We all hanker after essence and share a taste for theory as opposed to narrative.” (71) It was this hope that Rorty understood and felt the need to distance himself from.

But if he sought to distance himself from the analytic tradition and its simplistic search for “truth,” Rorty was no more interested in what was happening in the continental tradition. His questioning after the value of truth and consideration of the social and historical context of philosophical arguments seem to give Rorty a post-modernist twinge. Perhaps he wanted to challenge the scheme of things, to advocate a sharp rejection of the system and its eventual overcoming. After all, one should not worship false permanence, when the real is the transitory and the transitory real. And he says, “I have sometimes used ‘postmodern’ myself, in the rather narrow sense defined by Lyotard as ‘distrust of metanarratives.’” Yet, “I now wish that I had not. The term has been so over-used that it is causing more trouble than it is worth.” (1) Rorty declaimed the title of post-modernist. Nor was he a phenomenologist. Though he took a great interest in Heidegger, he was quite critical of Heidegger at times. For Rorty, these individuals and movements fell short of their own principles: upon finding that there is no “essence” to be found, they take their attacks and render them as doctrine. “The post-modern condition” or “intentionality” becomes a new dogma to be distinguished and defended. Against this, Rorty argues that

The trouble with making a big deal out of language, meaning, intentionality, the play of signifiers or différance is that one . . . takes the irreducibility of the intentional – the irreducibility of descriptions of sentential attitudes such as beliefs and desires to the descriptions of the motion of elementary particles – as somehow more philosophically significant than the irreducibility of house descriptions to timber descriptions, or of animal descriptions to cell descriptions. (4)

To criticize universal doctrines by way of a universal doctrine of non-universality does not solve the problem of universals, argues Rorty. The problem of seeking after essences continues so long as one declares that one has found the real story. The only way to get around this is to stop the search.

If one follows Rorty’s argument through, one can’t help but feel that one has arrived at total relativism, if not nihilism itself. The answer appears to be to give up all hope of finding any sort of truth. The last two and a half thousand years of argument have been for nothing, then, not only because there was no Form of the Good to find, but because the very question itself is pointless. In that case, why do philosophy at all?

The problem with the question just posed is that it assumes that philosophy is pointless if it doesn’t search for truth. In other words, it assumes that the only good thing to ever come out of philosophy is truth. Given the conventional understanding of philosophy and its mission, this seems obvious. But when historically considered, it also seems perfectly reasonable to say that philosophy has had and can still have good consequences that have little or nothing at all to do with the truth. Did philosophy not give us the detailed study of ethics? Didn’t logic help us develop the first conceptual computer? Doesn’t philosophy continue to drive societies, direct leaders, and create new worldviews? Certainly, then, philosophy doesn’t do nothing, and this holds true even if philosophy itself has never found a single truth about the world.

It is from this perspective that Rorty engages the philosophical tradition, by way of an rarely considered (within the traditions, anyway) type of philosophy called pragmatism. Pragmatism appeared in the mid-1800s with C.S. Peirce as a different way to think about problems within philosophy. Certainly pragmatism existed before that: who doesn’t think about the best consequences as being the deciders of a course of action more often than not? But to turn it into a complete philosophical position was novel. After the early 1900s, however, not much was heard about it. Instead people moved on with their arguments about language and reality, and about criticisms of that view. But as metaphysico-lingustic theories started to fall apart, Rorty argues, pragmatism started creeping its way back in: “The context in which my essays put post-Nietzschean philosophy, is, predictably enough, pragmatism.” (2) By the latter half of the 1900s, he think, pragmatism became quite fashionable, even if no one admitted to it.

Not only is this what happened to some philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson. According to Rorty, this is how it should be: “The big esoteric problem common to Heidegger and Derrida of how to ‘overcome’ or escape from the ontotheological tradition is an artificial one and needs to be replaced by lots of little pragmatic questions about which bits of that tradition might be used for some current purpose.” (87) On these grounds he criticizes the post-modernists (and Heidegger) for taking a metaphysical stance based on their anti-metaphysical arguments. Instead one should support “a postmodernist form of social life, in which society as a whole asserts itself without bothering to ground itself.” (176) What we decide is right should be pragmatic, based on what works. After all, we have yet to find the philosopher’s thing-in-itself: “[I]t has turned out that the only thing we can be certain about is our own desires.” (29) So why not follow pragmatism?

In order to be accepted by anyone, however, Rorty’s pragmatism will have to respond to the same two questions we posed at the beginning (here stated generally): What will we do without the truth? And how do we decide what is the best way to live? Can Rorty give a sufficient answer to these questions?

In response to the first question, Rorty wants to dispel the universal illusion among philosophers, the idea that, without philosophy, the world wouldn’t know what to do with itself. Where can one go when all truth has disappeared? the philosophers asks. When even the attack on truth seems useless, and one can only resort to a shallow pragmatism, can any human being actually live with herself? Well yes, actually, says Rorty. And not simply, as one might object, because they “don’t know any better.” Even the intellectuals in society, and even the ones among those who accept post-modernist ideas, seem to do quite well. For “most contemporary intellectuals live in a culture which is self-consciously without archai, without telos, without theology, teleology, or ontology.” (100) I know, says the intellectual, that my own “truths” are challenged by other societies, even at their most basic levels. But so what? Does that require me to run around like a chicken with my head cut off? Should I no longer be able to get out of bed in the morning, due to the oppressive weight of the terrible truth crushing my very soul?

This question, “So what?” is Rorty’s challenge to the classical philosophy. It’s a challenge he shares with Nietzsche, Peirce, James, and Dewey. Why should we care so much about truth? Why shouldn’t we change that emphasis, which is itself a historical product? If we can stop obsessing about truth so much, says Rorty, perhaps we can find a better way to spend our energies.

If we ever have the courage to drop the scientistic model of philosophy without falling back into a desire for holiness (as Heidegger did), then, no matter how dark the time, we shall no longer turn to the philosophers for the rescue as our ancestors turned to the priests. We shall turn instead to the poets and engineers, to the people who produce startling new projects for achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number. (26)

The problem with philosophy, for Rorty, is that it tends to create problems that aren’t there. It talks about “truth” as though it’s somewhere out there, waiting for us. It talks about “the good” and “the just” as though they are real metaphysical entities, and we are more or less moral according to how closely we align ourselves to the entities. Such things have since been refuted. Science doesn’t pierce “true” objects, Quine argued. Nor does language, said Wittgenstein. Philosophy, nor science, nor anything else gets to “the bottom” of things. Yet even in refutation, the principles of philosophers betray their intentions: they want the right method, the right standard, in which to reach the way things should be. Today, in the form of post-modernism, philosophers think they’ve gotten to the bottom of something (namely, the lack of bottoms), and in so doing transcended time and space. In thinking thus they betray their own principles.

But even if one drops the question of a real truth, how can one decide how to live? Can’t I separate the dictator from the democrat? For Rorty the pragmatist, this is a simple question. Let us aim for the best society, where people are treated the best, and are freest to do what they want. This answer sounds simple and unreflective, but is not. If there is no truth, there is certainly no good reason to impose upon others in the name of what is “right.” And if we’re not sure who’s got the right idea, it seems best to let people figure it out on their own, insofar as they are able. People are often quite good at finding a place in life that works for them. If not, we can offer assistance, but have no right to control them; at least so long as they don’t harm others. Humans are already social animals; they won’t fall apart the moment you tell them there’s no metaphysics of morals.

Letting us see the narratives of our own lives as episodes within . . . larger historical narratives is, I think, as much as the intellectuals are able to do in aid of morality. The attempt of religion and metaphysics to do more – to supply a backup for moral intuitions by providing them with ahistorical ‘authority’ – will always be self-defeating. (163)

In allowing the free pursuit of ideas as a way to find the best solutions to problems, Rorty also answers another question, the one we began with: what good is philosophy? For the Rorty philosophy has always been a powerful means of new expression. The greater the experience of the individual and the broader the range of his expression, the greater his abilities to analyze his world and decide what to do with it. With knowledge come options; with options comes power: “it was only the false lead which Descartes gave us (and the resulting overvaluation of scientific theory which, in Kant, produces ‘the philosophy of subjectivity’) that made us think truth and power were separable.” (175) Few things have the power that philosophy does for creating new language and new descriptions of the human experience. Those things that do compete with philosophy in expanding the human experience, such as the novel, might be seen with alarm by philosophers. Frankly, says Rorty, philosophers are just going to have to deal with it, because philosophy long ago lost the right to be as important as it claimed itself to be. Philosophy needs to understand what it does right, which is finding new ways of thinking. We need to remember how deliberation and philosophizing has helped us to become acutely aware of the ethical world: “The availability of a richer vocabulary of moral deliberation is what one chiefly has in mind when one says that we are, morally speaking, more sensitive and sophisticated than our ancestors or than our younger selves.” (155) We need to recall that, even if humans don’t have a “perfect language,” a computer, working within an artificial world, can, and does use its perfect language to great effect. By this standard it is the great creators, those who develop entirely new ways of thinking about the world, who have made the greatest contributions to philosophy. It is they who have a real impact and, by the pragmatist’s standards, have done the most for the world. That none of those thinkers proved to be right doesn’t matter, for philosophy’s contribution to society was never a matter of its being correct; if philosophy has proven anything at all, it is that such correctness doesn’t exist. And for that reason, because it has not failed its mission, but rather has a mission that never ends, it still has the right, even the duty, to exist, to expand our world, just as does the poet. “One of these privileges [that of the poets] is to rejoin ‘What has universal validity to do with me?’ I think that philosophers are as entitled to this privilege as poets, so I think this rejoinder sufficient.” (198)

Sidebar

2009-05-29T18:04:00.003-04:00

Turns out that other day was sooner than I thought. The essays on works are listed alphabetically by author, and then chronologically by work (so, from the author's earliest works to his or her latest). For this reason you find essays from very different dates next to each other. Seeing them side by side, you notice a rapid change in how I write. Interesting, considering I only started this phase of writing about a year and a half ago.

Update

2009-05-25T21:28:00.002-04:00

Finished Phenomenology of Perception, as you can see below. I also did a bit of work on the blog, so that I don't have full posts on the front page anymore (although as I type this, it's only in effect for the most recent essay). This is definitely for the best, though it was a hell of a lot of work fighting with the Blogger template to allow it to work without screwing up all the formatting. Nevertheless, it's all good. All future essays will be like this, only showing the first paragraph, and eventually I'd like to edit past essays to fit (that would allow me to reduce the essay on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics to one post). Eventually, I'd even like to create a sidebar that has links to the essays, sorted alphabetically by author. But that's a project for another day.

Also, in terms of projects, next is Richard Rorty. I'm reading a set of published essays, so there's no strict unity, but, like Margins of Philosophy, I can still likely develop enough of a theme to at least write about Rorty himself. Time will tell.

Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception

2009-05-25T20:25:00.010-04:00

Epistemology, the philosophical theory of knowledge, is in its broadest sense centered on two questions: What can I know? And how can I come to know it? While these questions look simple enough, hidden within them is a form, a specific direction and background from which they have been conceived: the metaphysics of Descartes. The question, “What can I know?” following the skepticism of Descartes, has been the question of knowledge of the world: is it possible to have knowledge of the things of the world? Can I understand its laws? Can I determine my own nature? The question of the knowledge of these things implies a separation, a reaching outwards towards things other than the self, perhaps part of a different sphere altogether. In this view, when one says, “I don’t know the price of tea in China,” it is because one is blocked off from that state of affairs in the world. One is separated from such knowledge. Thus it has been epistemology’s task to ask precisely what one can achieve knowledge of (which question hinges on a definition of what qualifies as knowledge, an issue that is generally left unnoticed).

The second question, “How can I come to know what it is I can know?” is an extension of the first, not only in subject matter but, so to speak, in worldview as well. Asking how one can come to know some fact which one does not have access to is basically asking how one can bridge the gap implied by the first question: how do I arrive from a total separation to the facts of tea prices in China, to a relation to their state which is one of truth? How can I cross the void? (This question, like the last one, hinges upon what the object of knowledge is, and how one relates to it and its content, a subject rarely noticed.)

The image of human existence which this view of epistemology thus generates is one of the self standing alone in a vast space, with “facts” floating somewhere outside. It is the task of truth-seeking to find these facts and bring them into the light; the ultimate goal is to have all of the facts brought forth. Since the time of Descartes, this form of epistemology has been prominent, not only in those who affirm it and seek to bridge the gap (Descartes himself, for example), but in those who deny it and proclaim skepticism as well (Hume, for instance), since they thereby share the same assumptions, only denying the result. Even as problems with the Cartesian worldview emerged, the epistemological model has survived in some form or another; for example, in the “correspondence theory of truth” and both its heralds and detractors. In the most general sense, epistemology has been about finding “the truth” somewhere out there and bringing the self to awareness of it, and in this sense it has remained Cartesian. Dualism of the self may be no longer taken for granted like it used to be, but dualism of truth, where the truth is in its realm, and the self is separated from it when in error, and connected to it when in truth, has been much more stubborn.

Enter phenomenology. Phenomenology, in a few words, is the philosophical study of experience. But more than just a field of study; it is a movement. Phenomenology has a specific viewpoint from which it addresses its questions, one that has its own assumptions and direction. This direction is fundamentally opposed to dualism. In order to give an appropriate account of experience, phenomenology describes the self not as a bare existent who must reach out into a something else in order to establish connections, but as a being connected with what it experiences. The self is not an abstract system of connections tied together, but a whole greater than its parts. The self and the world, therefore, are not distinct existents; in fact, one cannot exist without the other. The thread that ties the self and the world is experience, and thus does phenomenology gain its orientation.

In re-orientating the relationship between the self and the world, phenomenology opens up a new possibility for knowledge; not just a new way of establishing a connection between subject and fact, but an entirely different understanding of what it means to be “in the truth.” In the 500+ page Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the phenomenological method, through his special emphasis on the body as the place of lived experience, to determine, among other things, a new sense of epistemology. He directly confronts the Cartesian perspective and all of its spiritual successors, including those that continue to the present day, arguing that they miss the true structure of knowledge. In exchange, he offers what can be called an “embodied” view of knowledge, one that redefines truth itself and how one relates to it.

Merleau-Ponty is part of an evolution of phenomenological thought that began with the “first” phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl. Husserl used phenomenology as a method to get to the essences of things, which he thought could be done through proper analysis of experience. Pure experience, he argued, free of our base assumption, allows us access to things themselves. This was supposed to be possible because of what he termed “intentionality:” our thoughts, Husserl argued, are always about something. If we “bracket” the world of assumptions and interfering thoughts, and get to the bare experience, we would find the thing as it really is, as perceived by us. Martin Heidegger, his student, shifted phenomenology’s purpose while maintaining most of its central ideas: the center of experience, for Heidegger, is not found in a bracketing of the world that isolates the self, but rather in “being-in-the-world.” Our basic experience is anything but pure; it is, rather, of ourselves enveloped in the world and its influences. We are tied into it at our most basic level, and any claim otherwise is unjustified abstraction. It is the concept of being-in-the-world that directs Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and with it his epistemology. “Phenomenology is the study of essences,” he says. “But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity.’” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception vii) The study of experience cannot possibly be a study of a “pure experience,” abstracted from the world, as Husserl had claimed, for we are factical; that is, we are in a factual situation. We are in the world, and our intentionality is essentially worldly. Experience, which is the core of the self, comes from the world, which “is there before any possible analysis of mine” (x) and guiding experience. The world is the source of all of my thoughts, directly or indirectly: “man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.” (xii)

Just taken to this point, phenomenology might not seem particularly interesting. Of course man is in the world; where else could he be? But it is not this simple sense of facticity that Merleau-Ponty has in mind. For, though one readily admits that we are in a world, one also says that we can take ourselves out of it easily enough. We can stop paying attention to what is going on around us. We can space out. Or, like philosophers, we can abstract ourselves out of the world of sensations and enter a world of pure thought, allowing us to go beyond appearances and reach the essences of thing. But when Merleau-Ponty says that we are “worldly,” he is not merely saying that we live in a world: he is saying that we never, ever leave it, and that all of our thoughts are in it and are directly or indirectly affected by it. There is no leaving the world’s influence.

Before we continue, it needs to be clarified what is meant by “world.” The world, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a physical place in the universe. One has a world; one is already in it. A “world” is essentially a world of meaning, that place where we are where everything has significance and can be identified in relation to the rest. That there is one world, the world and not just a world, means that there is one system within which things fit, rather than a hodge-podge of metaphysical systems in which things have irreconcilable meanings. In this sense “the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins – as ‘an inalienable presence’” (vii) In terms of experience, this sort of world is always verifiable; things always have a meaning to me, whether it be the purpose to which we put them in a task, their presence as objects in my sphere of sensation, or merely their lack of clearly discernable meaning in a system of useful things or of objects, in which case their meaning is their conspicuousness. Everything has a meaning, and this meaning is “always ‘already there.’” It is from this base that phenomenological study is conducted.

So one is always in a world where things are given to us with meanings. Fine. What consequences does this have? What difference does it make? After all, it’s not as though people assume there are things that exist completely void of any and all meaning. Objects always mean something. But once again, this statement has to be taken in its full import. For the truth is, people for the most part believe that they can and do see things without meaning; it is called objectivity. When one sees an object, like a chair, one assumes that one is seeing a thing, plain and simple. This “plain and simple” is in fact a claim of purity: one believes oneself to be seeing the chair free of interference from meaning or theory; one just sees what’s there. And what, exactly, is there? Well, a thing made of wood, fabric, and cotton padding, with dimensions x by y by z, and with a weight of such and such. Yet this understanding of the chair is, according to Merleau-Ponty, exactly what one does not experience in the initial (and thus original, grounding) perception. What one experiences is a place in the vision, a feeling when one sits there – further, perhaps the memory of a similar chair seen yesterday, or someone who owns a similar chair, and how they always sat in it at certain times, and so on. This experience, recalling, and so on is the actual perceptual experience of the chair, which is anything but objective: according to Merleau-Ponty, “there is a significance of the percept which has no equivalent in the universe of the understanding, a perceptual domain which is not yet the objective world, a perceptual being which is not yet determinate being.” (54) The perceptual chair, the chair of experience and memory, exists for us before the determinate chair, that is, before the chair of measurements. We do not, in other words, experience the chair with such and such measurements, but, in fact, a chair that exists before its measurements.

Which sounds pretty dumb. Nevertheless this is actually what Merleau-Ponty is saying. The “chair” is not, according to him, something which is determined by its objective properties. In real experience, he argues, we do not see things which have objective properties; what actually happens is that the things we see are understood to have objective properties when seen in such and such fashion, as part of an act of reflection and objectification. But given that reflection, by definition, comes afterwards, the chair we see is not the chair with reflective qualities such as a determinate height, weight, and so on. It is the chair as perceived that we see. Reflection, and with it objectivity, is taken from its pedestal and thereby loses its primacy. Objectivity, it is argued, is one way of viewing the world, but not the only way. Further, it is not the original way, the way from which other forms of experience and perception derive. Nonobjective perception comes first, and determines the subject of the objective, scientific view of the chair, not the other way around. To think otherwise is to hold as an axiom something, the objective nature of the world, which is not axiomatic. In so far as one maintains this axiom, and believes that one is perceiving things that have objective qualities, that they exist with a determinate size, shape, color, etc. one is in error. “We shall no longer hold that perception is incipient science, but conversely that classical science is a form of perception which loses sight of its origins and believes itself complete.” (71)

It should be noted at this point that Merleau-Ponty published Phenomenology of Perception in 1946, and not 1800. How can he defend such a position? His basis is psychology. As he was writing, science had long provided plenty of good answers about the way things are, answers that stood up to scrutiny and observation. It offered answers, and even better, predictions. However, there have always been oddball phenomena, places where the explanations don’t quite fit. How does someone develop a phantom limb, for example, feeling pain in a limb that is no longer there? Is it to be explained by saying that the nerve that formerly went to that location is acting up? Perhaps. But then why does this happen in some patients and not others? Why does the phantom limb often go through the feelings that were felt when the patient lost the limb? Why can some patients “lose” the phantom limb and stop feeling anything? In this last case, certainly the cut nerve doesn’t just “turn off” one day. Rather, the phenomena surrounding the phantom limb suggest that the experience of what seems to the patient to be physically there is tied to the patient’s mental states. The patient’s “world,” defined as a world of significance, influences what is there for the patient. What happened in the past influences what is felt in the present, in spite of the testimony of objective reality. The mind affects the objective body, and vice versa. The two are united through meaning, which is the world.

The case of the phantom limb and other phenomena are used to make the case that the world that is experienced is far from objective. It is a world of meaning in which we do not simply take part, but which determines what exists for us, and how it exists. It is there first and foremost, because it is the baseline for all other thought. In psychology, specifically in the cases where the connection between self and world go awry, the depth of this connection and its “subjectivity” present themselves. “To concern oneself with psychology is necessarily to encounter, beneath objective thought which moves among ready-made things, a first opening upon things without which there would be no objective knowledge.” (111) The world of perception, one already infused with meaning, is what we wake up to and go to sleep to. It is the one in which we make our measurements. It cannot be avoided, and it is there before the world ever becomes objective.

But, the question will (and should) immediately be asked: so what? When we measure things, their measurements reveal their objective nature. Just because I don’t know the measurements before hand, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I can measure the dimensions of the object and it will have a measurement, and that measurement will not change if I am one foot or one hundred feet away. The chair is red, and it will always be so, no matter what the lighting conditions are. Merleau-Ponty denies these claims. We say the chair is red; under what lighting conditions is this so? If I use natural light as my baseline, it will appear slightly different than when I use an indoor light. What if the chair is half in light and half in shadow? We may maintain that the chair is one color, but in terms of pure perception, of what we actually experience, it literally is not one color. It is half red and half a darker red. Even if you want to go down to physical terms, the light reaching our eyes really is different; if it was the same, we would see only one color, after all. Why, then, are we always instantly certain, before even judgment comes in, that it is one color? Because we infer it. We infer it instantaneously, but infer it nonetheless. We have a color which is determined by us as “the real color,” whether because that’s the color we see it in a certain lighting condition we usually see it in, or because it is the color we are told it is, or any other reason. Differences are explained away by the mind immediately by the context: the two reds are there because of the lighting; it’s still red, though perception says otherwise. The same goes for size. When I say the chair is three feet tall, what is that height? If I take a yardstick and hold it directly before my eyes, my vision cannot possibly span such a gap. When it is twenty feet away, the yardstick looks tiny. What is, in fact, for me a “yard” is a general measure in a general situation of my choosing. “I run through appearances and reach the real colour or the real shape when my experience is at its maximum of clarity . . . these different appearances are for me appearances of a certain true spectacle, that in which the perceived configuration, for a sufficient degree of clarity, reaches its maximum richness.” (370) What one pictures is not a literal red or a literal yard, but one’s baseline perception of it. It can be replied quite quickly that this is nonsense, and that they are all the same: one yard is one yard is one yard, it’s just under different conditions. But that’s conceding the point. The conditions change, the “yard” is interpreted into a new set of conditions based on the position of a yardstick in the world relative to our point of view. We see the yardstick and the chair from different distances, and the world assigns their significance based on their relationship in the world and relative to myself, not based on a measure that exists in eternity. ‘The yardstick is four feet away, the chair is twelve, so I can infer a relation between them where the one is perceived bigger than the other but is not really so:’ what this concedes is that the definition of a yard is not “pure,” but based upon situation. A yard is not a measurement, but a set of circumstances: I can look there, and there, and there, and measure out a yard with my mind in a thousand different places, because I take the situation, the distance I am looking, the apparent size of the objects, the size I know them as when seen close up, and understand them within a total situation. If I took the distances isolated, outside of the situation, I would run into problems: “is not a man smaller at two hundred yards than at five yards away? He becomes so if I isolate him from the perceived context and measure his apparent size. Otherwise he is neither smaller nor indeed equal in size: he is anterior to equality and inequality; he is the same man seen from farther away.” (304) Everything, the whole situation as well as its relation to the rest of the world and my experience, is already there before I measure a thing. Everything is there, I see this and it is far away, I see the color of the chair and it is half in shadow, with these relationships being based upon my omnipresent place in and interaction with the world. Red is red, even when the perception is not red, because the total meaning of the world includes with light and shadow, and a chair split between the two.

We now begin to see a deeper meaning in the organization of a field: it is not only colours, but also geometrical forms, all sense-data and the significance of objects which go to form a system. Our perception in its entirety is animated by a logic which assigns to each object its determinate features in virtue of those of the rest, and which ‘cancel out’ as unreal all stray data; it is entirely sustained by the certainty of the world . . . . The constancy of colour is only an abstract component of the constancy of things, which in turn is grounded on the primordial constancy of the world as the horizon of all our experiences. (365)

Objectivity is determined after the fact, and can only be made sense of in terms of its relationship to a world of meaning. And, to push the point further, objectivity is, as a simple matter of experience, not our originating perspective of the world: “the perceived circle,” that most perfect shape, “does not have equal diameters because it has no diameter at all: it is conveyed to me, and is recognizable and distinguishable from any other figure by its circular physiognomy, and not by any of the ‘properties’ which positing thought may subsequently discover in it.” (319) The only circle is the worldly circle, the circle as perceived. We do not see the abstract geometrical circle even when we do geometry: it is only understood through the image of the circle, that perfect roundness whose exemplar is the sun.

So much for the defense of Merleau-Ponty, at least without going too far into details (of which the book has plenty). The essential point is this: the objective world is secondary to the perceived world, the noumenon to the phenomenon, to the point that the former relies upon the latter for its existence. If, from here, we return to our original topic, epistemology, we see that the phenomenological viewpoint begs a rather serious question: does this mean that everything is subjective, and that thus there is no knowledge? We have lost, it appears, our means of determining the nature of anything. We cannot even say when red is red anymore, because we already judge it according to the context of a world of meaning in which we find it! Isn’t all pretense to knowledge gone forever, then?

If we take time to understand the problem from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, we will see why he argues that not only is the problem not as bad as one would think it is, but in fact there is no problem at all. Here we must find our way back to the Cartesian model of epistemology. The first question epistemology asks is what one can know. But, as mentioned at the beginning, this question must assume a specific idea of what constitutes knowledge. For Descartes and early modern philosophy, one sought to “know” objects existing outside the self. The great problem for Descartes was not confirming the cogito, but getting outside of that cogito and into the world. Knowledge, for him, required access to something completely separate from the self. If one continues to assume this view of knowledge, then certainly phenomenological subjectivity will lead to total skepticism. But Merleau-Ponty does not follow the Cartesian view. For him there is no outside world to understand; the world is already given, and we are already interacting with it before we can even state the fact. The world, as a horizon of meaning, is what’s always there. The “objective” world with which Descartes wanted to make contact is a purely secondary phenomenon, and one unperceived at that. It is inferred from the original objects of experience, which are those objects that make up the perceived world. What Descartes sought was reality. The problem is that he got reality wrong. “Reality” is not a bunch of timeless things, but the world as perceived; there is no other world to refer to, besides secondarily. In fact, reality is not some other-worldly sphere (for that’s exactly how it is presented in Descartes), but a whole, a world. “The ‘real’ is that environment in which each moment is not only inseparable from the rest, but in some way synonymous with them, in which the ‘aspects’ are mutually significatory and absolutely equivalent . . . . The thing is that manner of being for which the complete definition of one of its attributes demands that of the subject in its entirety.” (376) To most of us today, who are raised on objective science that aims for the concrete and eternal (though the more theoretical areas seem to be moving away from this, interestingly enough), this view appears preposterous. But a simply survey of epistemology, viewed from a new perspective, reveals just how odd the standard view actually is. Descartes separated himself from everything that existed, and then tried to find it all again, all in the name of “certainty.” Even though he admitted that thought remained directed, that he was “that same person who now doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands and conceives certain things, who is sure of and affirms the truth of this one thing alone,” (Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations 85), he denied the worth of those thoughts until he could find a second sphere that was equal with that, and only then would his experiences be justified. For hundreds of years people followed him in either chasing that world or denying we could reach it, and those who denied we could reach it were skeptics, people who said we could have no knowledge. But if we have no knowledge of this second world, why chase after it in the first place? Why believe it could be there: alternatively, why say that one can have no knowledge if one cannot reach such an imaginary (for that is precisely what it is, if we cannot directly experience it) world? That I exist, Descartes said, there can be no doubt. However, he refused to grant such high status to the world, because he had already decided that it was outside of himself, that he was seeing only his own mental states. But if we are embodied, if our experience requires a world, this problem vanishes completely. Instead of the self, the cogito, being the basis of knowledge, the whole world appears as well. Thus the cogito is replaced with: “There is the absolute certainty of the world in general, but not of any one thing in particular.” (Phenomenology of Perception 347) For it is true that everything within the world is viewed only within a perspective and a meaning, and thus not “objectively,” and so not with total certainty (which will be addressed presently). But that that world exists, that there is significance, and that I not only think but think of something, in other words, that I think intentionally, is certain. And in that sense the world is already here with me. I am not invalidated if I cannot find the mythical realm of truth. I am already in truth, insofar as I am in a world.

Thus we have solved part of our epistemological problem, namely, the problem of reaching truth. However, there is one towering issue we have not confronted: the total subjectivity of the world, and with it of truth. People do not simply want experience, they want experience of real things. Are we not left, if we follow phenomenology, with nothing but a subjective world and, even worse, solipsism? In all of Merleau-Ponty’s railing against objective thought, it is easy to make this jump if one does not read carefully, despite the fact that Merleau-Ponty goes to great lengths to separate himself from it. The problem with ascribing solipsism to him is that it posits nothing but the self, and the world then becomes a creation of it. But a question then arises, which Descartes himself asked: if I think, doubt, and judge various things, and if there is not a world that gave them to me, is it then the case that I made all these things up myself? How can I make things up that I am unaware of? How do I decide what I will see in the morning, when it is unexpected? Am I God? “If the cogito reveals to me a new mode of existence owing nothing to time, and if I discover myself as the universal constituent of all being accessible to me, and as a transcendental field with no hidden corners and no outside . . . [i]t must then be said, with no qualification, that my mind is God.” (433) But then how would we be mistaken? For it is certainly true that we can be wrong about things, even within our own thoughts. We hallucinate and have dreams. Some go mad. Are all of these equal realities, instituted by me? If not, how do I create these layers of reality while simultaneously deceiving myself until the last minute, when my head clears and I see I was wrong (or at least, that things are not what they appeared to be)? Can I fool myself, if I am what constitutes everything that is there?

What leads to the above concerns is the forgetting of Merleau-Ponty’s greatest contribution to phenomenology, the concept of embodiment, something which I have neglected up until now but that is central to his work. Saying that “we are in the world,” and that by “world” is meant a world of meaning, is not just saying that we are in a scenario where stuff means stuff, and where we designate that stuff as stuff. Such a view is pure intellectualism, which says that the mind dictates the world. The problem is, the world thereby becomes objective in the sense of submitting to the absolute rule of the mind. In fact, we lack that power, and perception teaches us this. “The mistake of intellectualism is to make it [consciousness] self-subsistent, to remove it from the stuff in which it is realized . . . . [E]verything that separates us from the real world – error, sickness, madness, in short incarnation – is reduced to the status of mere appearance.” (143) If Merleau-Ponty were an intellectualist, then it would be true, for him, that one creates one’s own madness. But being-in-the-world is being completely within that world, not just making a world and living in it. We do not stand above it and dictate its contents; it is simply there, as we said before, before we ever think about it. The real position of the individual is a “third term between the psychic and the physiological, between the for itself and the in itself . . . which we call existence.” (140) Perception and experience are existential, which is to say, irrevocably tied up with concrete existence. Anyone who told you that “existentialism” is talking about French guys in coffee shops brooding about life doesn’t actually know much about philosophy. “Existential,” which received its significance from Heidegger, places us not in a purely objective world nor an idealistic world of our making, but simply in the world: we are in a world where we perceive things from our own perspective, where we cannot control what comes to us but can control what we think of it, where we are free, but not too much. I am not God who creates the world; I am just a member of it. I live in a world which actually exists and from which I receive my experiences, not one which is created by them; that would be impossible, since the world must first be there in order to give me experiences at all. How, one can ask, could I create a world of my own, a solipsistic universe, from scratch? Certainly I would have to be God. Yet, if I am God, I seem to have an annoying tendency to create boulders which I cannot lift, and I can’t seem to get myself to stop doing it. But if I can’t make my world alone, then it must be there; there must be a world. The truth is that there is a natural world, though it is not the world of science. “The natural world is the horizon of all horizons, the style of all possible styles, which guarantees for my experiences a given, not a willed, unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life.” (385) When I walk around the red chair, I don’t find an empty space behind it which is empty because nothing was posited by me; I find the continuation of the chair. When I back away from it, the chair shrinks in proportion to the rest of the environment. The world doesn’t throw out pits of non-existence or senseless miracles of physics: it remains the same world, lasting through my perspectives, even when (as often happens) I acquire new beliefs or concepts which alter my view. The background remains, but new details jump out. It is this world that I am in, through the existence of my body. Thus the mind-body connection, though not merely objective, is not intellectual, either; it is, if anything, incarnation into the world. I act, and my body acts; the two are one and the same. But I can lose a fingernail or a leg and still be myself. Because of my embodiment in the world, I can’t let go of the world. I am in it.

Against the charge of solipsism, one of the most dangerous charges set against him, Merleau-Ponty employs his explanation of the embodied self. Solipsism argues that there no others because we see only bodies, not people. Yet that assumes that a body is not a self; in other words, that the self is separate from the world. Against this Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we are embodied, and when we see ourselves in the world, we see bodies. I am not a floating consciousness, but one which exists in a world and is defined by my interactions with it. My presence is revealed to the world only by my embodied activity. But this does not mean I exist; I am distinguished by my worldliness, by my acting out of meanings. Others are given in exactly the same way: “if another’s body is not an object for me, nor mine an object for him, if both are manifestations of behaviour, the positing of the other does not reduce me to the status of an object in his field, nor does my perception of the other reduce him to the status of an object in mine.” (411) The other and myself are placed equally in the world, and even though “[i]t is true that the other will never exist for us as we exist ourselves” (503), when one looks to experience, one sees not objects, but others, actors dealing with a world and its meanings. These are people in the same sense that I am a person in the world, and I treat them as such. I could not think otherwise, no matter how hard I might try:

Solipsism would be strictly true only of someone who managed to be tacitly aware of his existence without being or doing anything, which is impossible, since existing is being in and of the world. The philosopher cannot fail to draw others with him into his reflective retreat, because in the uncertainty of the world, he has for ever learned to treat them as consorts, and because all his knowledge is built on this datum of opinion. (421)

There is one final question we must answer, and it relates directly to the second basic question of epistemology, which is how we can know. As we mentioned when asking it, this question depends upon the first, as well as upon a conception of how one relates to truth. If we accept the embodied mind thesis, an answer emerges. Merleau-Ponty answers it through the engagement of some of the classic anti-knowledge arguments in epistemology: the dream, the madman, the hallucination. These questions appear to be forcefully begged against a phenomenological epistemology: if experience is shaped by meaning, how is my experience any more valid than the madman’s? How can I tell I’m not dreaming? When is my perception of the world real? These questions appear damning, because we have just spent seventeen pages arguing that there is no objective world. If there is no world from which our experiences come, then aren’t all perspectives equal?

The answer is a flat no. To make this argument is once again to mistake an embodied phenomenology for a pure intellectualism which independently posits its world. It must be remembered that we do not, we cannot posit the world, because it is already there. Once again, we don’t make the world and then live in it; we find ourselves already in it. We don’t exercise godlike control over the nature of our world; no matter how hard I try, I can’t lift my car. I can decide it’s because I’m not trying, and that if I tried tomorrow I could do it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t lift my car right now. When I walk around the chair, its completed structure presents itself, even if I’m unsure what to expect, because I’ve never seen the back of it before. In fact, it may surprise me: there may be a child’s toy behind it that I didn’t expect to see. But surprises like that happen while still maintaining the integrity of the world itself; what won’t happen is that I look behind the chair and suddenly see my first-grade class, and everyone laughing at me.

The perceived world is not only my world, but the one in which I see the behaviour of other people take shape, for their behaviour equally aims at this world, which is correlative not only of my consciousness, but of any conscious which I can possibly encounter . . . . [O]ther spectacles are implied in mine at this moment, just as the reverse or underneath side of objects is perceived simultaneously with their visible aspect, or as the next room pre-exists in relation to the perception which I should actually have if I walked into it . . . . My perception brings into co-existence an indefinite number of perceptual chains which, if followed up, would confirm it in all respects and accord with it. (394)

Being embodied, we exist as part of a world just as much as we exist as selves; therefore, as we have said, we are subject to the natural world as well as the world of our self-made meanings. Try as we might to over-step the world and create our own meanings, there remains a natural world to remind us of our limits. The problem with dreams, illusions, and madness is that they overstep these boundaries: I find myself talking with my mom as she looks today, and with my old grade-school friends as they looked back then, all the while on a reality TV show. I step off the stage, through a door, and into the Wild West. These events break the rules of the natural world, and when we return from our dreams, we recognize it immediately. We cannot find a coherent world-structure in a dream or hallucination, because the dream-world or hallucination-world is made up by ourselves from the scattered fragments of our experience: “the hallucinatory phenomenon is no part of the world, that is to say, it is not accessible, there is no definite path leading from it to all the remaining experiences of the deluded subject, or to the experience of the same.” (395) Thus there is a difference between the two, and we experience that difference when we switch between dream and reality, between hallucinations and normalcy.

But what if we don’t switch? What if we have a dream where the characters are all from my grade school, as is the environment, and when I open the door of the classroom, I enter the hall? What if I never wake from this dream? Am I not fooled then? Absolutely. Even Merleau-Ponty admits that “[t]he all-important point is that the patients, most of the time, discriminate between their hallucinations and their perceptions.” (389, emphasis mine) But let us take the argument further. Let us say that, instead of being a phenomenologist, you only base your world on what exists objectively. What difference is there in the application of the argument? If you never wake up, when will you be able to detect your illusions? Let us go even further, for the form of the argument allows it. What if the evil genius of Descartes exists, and he corrupts even your most basic knowledge? What if two plus two really equals five? What can you know then, huh? As is shown here, the problem with using the example of a “total illusion” is that all epistemological theories that do not guarantee total certitude are equally subject to it. It has been a long time since epistemology has claimed to have Cartesian certitude, and this is the consequence. Even Descartes required God to prove that he could know he wasn’t dreaming, for at the start he had only the cogito. Thus the criticism fails, for (1) it does not reveal a weakness of phenomenological epistemology which is not a weakness to any other epistemology, and (2) the only epistemology that survives such a criticism is one which promises certitude, which is a difficult, if not indefensible, epistemology. Phenomenology, then, leaves us no worse off than standard modern epistemologies do in terms of arguments from illusion.

When I look at my desk, what do I see? I see a desk, I say, with a computer, speakers, and an external hard drive on it. The desk is brown, the speakers black, the hard drive silver. Yet the desk I’m seeing is in fact all shades of brown, and appears at parts nearly white. The hard drive is bright silver on the top, where it catches the light, and a dark, subdued silver on the side. Yet I call the desk “brown” and the hard drive “black” because I do not simply see a world of objective colors which are them composed into objects. What I see first is a world full of things and phenomena in virtue of which the colors are organized and matched with the conditions of the environment. This brown and this brown and this brown are all the same desk; they appear different colors because of the shadows cast by the speakers and the scratches from wear over time. The size, I say, never changes, because, no matter how big or small the desk appears, I see it as part of a world (my room) where the objects remain in the same evolving context with it, and form a situation that maintains the desk’s size. This is the way we experience the world, according to phenomenology. We experience a world loaded with significance, not one composed of scientifically measurable units. This is not to say that science is not deriving bad numbers; it has done much, and gone far. (Note: Merleau-Ponty does not actually spend any time explaining what science gets right in Phenomenology of Perception, though he whole-heartedly believes in its importance, and so has to spend a great amount of time explaining this in The Primacy of Perception, a lecture given in 1948.) But the world of science is different than the world we perceive. We do not perceive this color, and this smell, and this feeling, and put them together; we recognize a chair, and infer that this color belongs to it, but that this smell is wrong, because it smells like a dog has been laying on it, and so on. Our world, for Merleau-Ponty, is the world of perception, and if we are to explain and understand that world, we need to get it right: “I am a psychological and historical structure, and have received, with existence, a manner of existing, a style. All my actions and thoughts stand in a relationship to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold on the world, and what he is.” (529)

More on the Cogito

2009-05-05T20:36:00.004-04:00

To be read after the previous essay.

I am now three pages into the preface of Phenomenology of Perception, and I see this:

Descartes's [sic] methodical doubt does not deprive us of anything, since the whole world, at least in so far as we experience it, is reinstated in the Cogito, enjoying equal certainty, and simply labelled 'thought of . . .'

You can see Mr. Merleau-Ponty and I are on the same level in terms of Descartes.

On the Cogito

2009-05-05T19:42:00.003-04:00

“I think, therefore I am.” This sentence, the most famous of Descartes’, is technically not in his Meditations on First Philosophy, but rather in his later work, Principles of Philosophy. The Principles is in effect a later revision of the Meditations, and as such expresses its major ideas intact but refined and explained in greater detail. As such, it is a vital companion to the Meditations and helps to clarify much that was written in it.

Today what I will seek after is the nature of that statement, “I think, therefore I am.” There is no dispute that it was Descartes who gave epistemology its modern turn, and, through the influence his questions had, dominated it for at least the next 150 years. Even after Kant, who was a unique event in more than one sense, that most basic idea of philosophy, dualism, the idea that mind and body are essentially separate, has lived on. For the budding philosophy student it is the initial question that has to be overcome; what is the relation of myself and the world? Through this question, dualism maintains itself as something of a default position. I, being the avid reader of Nietzsche that I am, have a problem with any position that acquires the position of “default.” Too much is left to tradition and habit in such a position. So let’s discuss the cogito, that most famous and deeply rooted of philosophical doctrines, from a different standpoint, that of phenomenology. Phenomenology will be discussed at length later, when I get to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception. For now, a good way to introduce phenomenology is to describe and address that which it most stringently opposes: Cartesian dualism.

As is commonly known, Descartes’ program is an attempt to overcome skepticism and achieve certainty in one’s knowledge, for, according to Descartes, only what is absolutely beyond any and all doubts can count as knowledge (another view which philosophy inherited for a long time, and which still positions itself as something of a default which needs to be addressed). One can easily doubt, according to Descartes, that the external world exists. Certainly we have illusions from time to time, or it is possible that we are merely dreaming without realizing it. Yet even in the act of doubting, one must already believe, nay, is absolutely compelled to believe, that one’s self exists as that which doubts.

[H]e who strives to doubt of all is unable nevertheless to doubt that he is while he doubts, and . . . what reasons thus, in not being able to doubt of itself and doubting nevertheless of everything else, is not that which we call our body, but what we name our mind or thought . . . . (Descartes, Principles of Philosophy xxv)

“I think, therefore I am.” What am I, that is? Something that thinks, and nothing more. How is this demonstrated? By the fact that anything else which I consider to be myself – namely, my physical body – can be doubted, while the mind cannot. That part of the self which thinks is the part, the only part, which cannot be doubted; it is unconditional, and always there, playing the part of essence. It is the thinking self which confirms my existence, not the body; which is only there some of the time at best. Thus, the self has to be thinking in its essence; there is an impenetrable wall, established by the difference between the indubitable and the doubtful, which separates mind and body. One is certain, the other is not. One is the product of dreams, the other creates them. One is subject to the senses, the other is that to which senses defer.

The above are the general ways in which we, along with Descartes, are wont to separate mind (which is to say, thinking mind) and body. The mind is not physically present, or subject to the sense, according to the Cartesian view, whereas the body is an object in space. Those who today do not accept the existence of “mind” as a sort of spirit still have to at least deal with the question of what exactly consciousness is. I know a very smart pre-med student who, no matter what his scientific and philosophical convictions argue, cannot persuade, much less convince, himself that consciousness is only a series of chemical reactions, or, more philosophically important, that the mind is of the same nature as the body. In light of the last hundred years of psychology, we are getting less dogmatic on this score. But the fact remains that the temptation towards dualism is still there. It exists not merely in the dividing line between mind-self and body-self; the whole classical epistemological problem, the problem of the existence of the external world, is built on another dualism of the same type, and another one that was given impetus by Descartes. It is, after all, because the body is ultimately considered of the same class as the external world that it is subject to the same doubts. So, as long as we are in a position where the external world as a whole is an epistemological problem, we are still subject to dualism.

In order to consider this problem at its source, which could provide us with a solution, we must first get back to the sources from which the problem springs. There is one source, one doctrine which allies with dualism, which interests us here: representationalism. “When we further reflect on the various ideas that are in us, it is easy to perceive that there is not much difference among them, when we consider them certain modes of thinking, but that they are widely different, considered in reference to the objects they represent.” (Principles 7, emphasis mine) Representationalism is never discussed explicitly by Descartes, namely because he assumes it from the beginning. It is an essential assumption in his quest; the reason he can doubt the external world is because it is separate from him, and so it must be accessible through representation if it is to be perceived at all. Certainly Descartes experiences things, even without knowledge of an external world; “the sensation itself, or consciousness of seeing or walking, the knowledge is manifestly certain . . . .” (Principles 3) But, for him, this is something altogether different from the experience of a thing itself. The whole section just quoted reads: “and if I understand[, for example,] by vision or walking . . . the work of the body, the conclusion is not absolutely certain . . . . if I mean the sensation itself, or consciousness of seeing or walking, the knowledge is manifestly certain . . . .” (Principles 3) Were Descartes seeking to prove merely the existence of a perceived world, there would be no issue here, and he could stop after having proved the cogito; for, as Descartes knew (and it is a vital point which will be touched upon later), our thinking is often, if not always, tied to something sensed or perceived; he could not, and would not, deny that we think about places, people, and things. Yet he went to all that trouble to prove God’s existence, and to prove that God was not a deceiver, so that he could thereby show that what we perceive must come from an external world. Why? Because it was assumed by him that the only world worth having was an external one; that, because everything has a cause, including ideas, we must show conclusively that our ideas have a cause outside of ourselves; and, because we perceive a world of real objects, for such a world not to exist itself would show God to be a deceiver (since certainly, we think we perceive an external world) and thus imperfect, which cannot be the case. Thus representationalism runs deeply in Descartes’ thought, which is no shock given that he was a dualist; after all, it would be pointless to be a dualist if there was a complete wall between the worlds, and only one was known, the other remaining completely sealed off from any kind of knowledge; this is the reason Kant is not a dualist, though he spoke of noumena and phenomena.

Why the concern over representationalism? After all, everyone assumes that there should be an external world to which our senses correspond. The alternative, it seems, would be solipsism, a self alone, a monad. No one wants that. And if you accept Descartes’ framing of the problem, representationalism does seem to make sense. It is certainly cause for concern if everything is just our thoughts, out there, alone. Yet within Descartes’ thought there is something of a (unintentional) deception, thanks to this representationalism. Descartes affirms that thinking is not just bare thought; “By the word thought, I understand all that which takes place in us that we ourselves are immediately conscious of it . . . even to perceive . . . here the same as to think.” (Principles 3) But at the same time, the image presented of the self doubting everything is that of a thinking self in the most abstract sense. When one tries to picture the self as doubting cogito, one pictures a completely isolated individual, completely free of the senses (because, of course, thinking beings don’t sense). But there’s a problem in the parentheses. Thinking beings do sense; they always sense. In the Meditations, Descartes talks about the experience of liberating the self from the senses, and yet this is literally impossible. The mind is always working through senses, always reaching out, never existing as a static thing isolated from all existence. This is not insignificant; in fact, it is, in a general sense, the basis of the cogito. Merleau-Ponty draws this out of Descartes in his lecture, The Primacy of Perception:

[T]here is a third meaning [of three] of the cogito, the only solid one: the act of doubting in which I put in question all possible objects of my experience. This act grasps itself in its own operation and thus cannot doubt itself . . . . I grasp myself, not as a constituting subject which is transparent to itself [that is, not as a abstract thing], and which constitutes the totality of every possible object of thought and experience, but as a particular thought, as a thought engaged with certain objects, as a thought in act . . . . In this sense I am certain that I am thinking this or that as well as being certain that I am thinking . . . . This thought, which feels itself rather than sees itself, which searches after clarity rather than possess it . . . . (Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences,” in Dermot Moran, The Phenomenology Reader 443-444)

In the Meditations, despite the image that we generate of the cogito, Descartes confirms Merleau-Ponty’s view:

But what then am I? A thinking being. What is a thinking being? It is a being which doubts, which understands, which conceives, which affirms . . . . Am I not that same person who now doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands and conceives certain things, who is sure of and affirms the truth of this one thing alone . . . . (Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations 85)

If we are not careful, all of our attention is paid to the image of the isolated self thinking undefined thoughts. In fact, as Descartes himself states, these thoughts are all completely specific, and are about all the things we concern ourselves with. One who doubts can still imagine the tree, the house, the body. In other words, the world is still already there in its fullness. None of our experiences have changed that fact the slightest; this is why Descartes recommends a “provisional morality” to live by while one doubts everything. One can doubt that what one is experiencing is representing something real, but that does not make the experience itself less real. The only problem here is presented by representationalism; what are we to make of the world to which our experiences are supposed to correspond?

Well, if you want a world, outside the self, to which all of our thoughts are supposed to correspond, so long as they are “clear and distinct,” I don’t think Descartes will provide you with one. Later philosophers won’t do much better, either; Kant’s solution to the problem was to deny there was basically to call knowledge of the “external world” a contradiction in terms. What I am advocating is that the problem seen here is a problem generated by dualism and representationalism, one that may not be necessary. Our experience of a world of some sort is not to be denied; for even Descartes, it simply cannot be rejected as it is, by arguments or anything else. Through the thinking self, the world is already there as a brute fact. It is present by way of the cogito, which is itself not an argument, and thus not in need of justification, because it is self-evident. For even when he doubts the ability of reason to prove his own existence, the evil genius “can never make me be nothing as long as I think that I am something.” (Meditations 82) The cogito is thereby affirmed through the act, for Descartes. In the Principles he attacks those who debate the meaning of the terms in the cogito as an argument, saying they miss the point:

And when I said that the proposition, I think, therefore I am, is of all others the first and most certain which occurs to one philosophizing properly, I did not therefore deny that it was necessary to know what thought, existence, and certitude are, and the truth that, in order to think it is necessary to be, and the like; but, because these are the most simple notions, and such as of themselves afford the knowledge of nothing existing, I did not judge it proper there to enumerate them. (Principles, 4)

There is no need to explain all the connections; for Descartes, they are so basic that one simply assents of necessity. And with necessary affirmation of the cogito, the thinking self, comes the content of thought, which is the whole world as experienced.

Thus, with the self, the world is already implied. But is it justified? The answer to this question depends upon whether you accept Cartesian dualism and representationalism. As we have seen, the picture of the mind present in Descartes’ projection of the cogito is a bleak and lonely picture. But in the subtext of Descartes’ philosophy, and even explicit in some cases, is the fact that the mind is neither empty not “worldless.” Because of the nature of the cogito, we experience a world all the same whether there are external objects or not. Our thoughts are always tied to that world; even the cogito is one who “doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands and conceives certain things, who is sure of and affirms the truth of this one thing alone . . . .” These are specific propositions, referring to content of experience, content which is necessarily concrete and worldly. If we understand this as our interface with the world (For is it not? The challenge, for Descartes, is to prove that there is a world to correspond to it), if we reject dualism and representationalism as Descartes understood it, the skeptical doubts about the world completely disappear. Immediately many people, including many philosophers, would cry foul here. But the fact remains that, according to the assumptions of Cartesian dualism, whether or not the external world exists, the world we experience is the same. If, from here, one chooses to base one’s view of knowledge on experience, on what is actually experienced instead of some outside world that we don’t actually contact except from a distance, the existence of an external world makes no difference. What matters is the world of experience, which is, according to Descartes, indubitable.

What has all of this to do with phenomenology? What I have just proposed is, in essence, a phenomenological epistemology as an alternative to Cartesian epistemology. Descartes based his epistemology on the certainty of what existed. Things could not merely to be present, and thus to at least some degree dependent upon our finite minds, but had to have a real, independent existence, apart from thought, particularly sensation, and its limitations. That is why Descartes needed to prove that God existed and was not a deceiver; only then could he argue that our ideas were caused by an external world, and thus justified. The alternative, which it was the explicit purpose of the Meditations to reject, was that there was no external world outside of our perception. Thus our knowledge had to be based in a concrete world outside of ourselves.

Phenomenology rejects that subject-object distinction. Phenomenology is concerned not with things apart, but with the experience of them. The phenomenon, according to Kant, is the thing as it appears to us, as opposed to the noumenon, that which exists “in itself,” apart from all perception. Descartes and those who followed him focused all their energy on the latter, eventually resulting in Hume, who attacked the noumenon in all its forms and tore down knowledge with it. Kant eliminated knowledge of the noumenon, in a senses siding with Hume. But at the same time he rejected skepticism; not because he thought that there was nothing to know (one cannot confirm or deny the existence of noumenon, according to Kant), but because human knowledge simply doesn’t work that way. Knowledge, for Kant, is dependent upon experience. Not experience of an external world, but experience as understood through the mind and its processes. In this sense, Kant gave phenomenology its first form; what matters is the act of experience, and it is from that that knowledge follows, not from a “real” world, but because experience of the world, influenced as it is by reason, is our only way of understanding it. Kant saw experience as shaped by rules, and the rules were the domain of metaphysics; again, here he predicts a phenomenological viewpoint. Phenomenology is interested in the structure of our experience, how it is we come to perceive things. It does not start with a self isolated from the world and trying to reach it, for such a position is pointless. For this reason the old questions of epistemology are simply thrown out, because they start with bad assumptions. The question of the meaning of the world has to be raised anew, and phenomenology will attempt to do it.

-----

Next: we make that attempt. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. It’s nearly 550 pages, so expect it to take some time.

The Snurp Ascendancy

2009-04-26T22:54:00.004-04:00

I recall a time long ago, in the darker ages, when this blog was just a lone voice calling out mournfully from the vast depths of the google search engine. A plea for companionship was but a soliloquy of solitude.

However, those times are changing. The Snurp ascendancy is on its way.

Coming This Summer...

2009-04-24T21:52:00.005-04:00

Technically, finals week begins next week, but I am for all intents and purposes done. The last seven weeks were the busiest of my life. As of today, at about 12:30, that immediately and completely ended. 100%. From everything to do, to nothing. I took the rest of today off, but tomorrow I begin what I consider the real work. Undergraduate is over. This summer (that is, starting tomorrow), I improve my German, re-learn logic, and read. Expect Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Merleau-Ponty, among others. Unlike in the past, my choices have a specific direction, namely, post-Kantian Continential philosophy. Many of those books are very long, but they will be read and discussed. They are also, for the most part, very hard. But that's the choice I've made. I intend to become the best I can possibly be.

The time is 9:52 pm, April 24, 2009. There is thunder outside, and a new period begins.

My Mission Statement

2009-03-24T21:47:00.005-04:00

Why study philosophy?

Actually, why do I study philosophy? Why the interest? I've just found an answer to this question. I wasn't quite able to figure it out before, but I've got it now.

Context: I just finished up a meeting of our university's philosophy club. By "Philosophy Club" I mean basically three people (our school isn't too big into philosophy). The topic for this semester is Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. The nice thing about our philosophy club, despite its size, is that a former professor of this school (now retired) shows up. He's the kind of person I want to be: brilliant, inquisitive, serious and silly when needed, and, according to one student, "He understands ham sandwiches in layers deeper than any of the other philosophy professors understand anything."

So he came to talk about Nietzsche, and talk we did. We started with how I would present Nietzsche to a class. Given his decidedly non-formal style, how do you teach him to a room full of good analytical undergrads? My answer, vague as the situation left it (this professor is good at taking you off guard), was to present it as a problem: Nietzsche is someone who challenges those basic assumptions good undergrads make. What is truth? one might ask. For a philosopher, it is the goal, of course. Easy. Why is that? Nietzsche asks. He's serious. "What really is it in us that wants 'the truth?'" (BG&E 1) This, I said, is how you teach Nietzsche. Only thus can you get after what Nietzsche really wanted to do, which is to upset your frame of mind, to break a thousand years of assumptions and dogmas that are so embedded no one even knew they were there.

Again, we got to Nietzsche's perspectivism. The professor threw out the idea of perspectivism as a good tool. I agree with him, and said as much. But then he challenged me on it. "Okay, be Dick Cheney for the moment. Defend the torture of terror suspects. What would he say?" After giving a disclaimer that it was not my opinion, I made my (Cheney's) defense. He basically called my argument a cop-out on the grounds of the disclaimer. I don't really think so, but I think I know what he was getting at. Then again, I agree with what I think he was getting at, which is how difficult it is to really put the effort, the full self, into seeing a completely different perspective. This is very hard. Can you will it so much that you can make yourself believe it, if even for a moment?

For me, reading Nietzsche has been a way to do this. Nietzsche represents the first and only time I've ever been close to morally offended by a writer. The book was Beyond Good and Evil, this very same. There was a point in the last section, "What is Noble?" where I had difficulty getting myself through it. But I persevered, and I've read the book several times now. I understand Nietzsche's position better now, I believe. Had I just left it at my first reaction I never would have exposed myself to Nietzsche in a deeper light, and would have remained more ignorant for it.

This is the challenge that presents itself often when you read Nietzsche. He writes often to sound excessive, nonsensical, incoherent, and even evil. He does this intentionally. But his writing is infinitely more complex, more nuanced, and deeper than what you see at first. You have to be willing to go with Nietzsche into the depths. You have to go where few want to look, even to places no one remembers exist. You have to find problems where none were thought to be. This is how I would teach Nietzsche. I would ask about truth. Then I would ask, why truth? "why not rather untruth?" (BG&E 1)

And, would you believe it, it has finally almost come to seem to us that this problem has never before been posed - that we have been the first to see it, to fix our eye on it, to hazard it?

The idea is to take the student who has perhaps read some philosophy, has heard about Nietzsche and dismissed him as a writer of aphorisms and a poet (but not a philosopher, of course), and to show that there's more to it. Far more. That Nietzsche touched on something, something that required a different mindset, a different form and tempo. He required new thinkers. "[T]hese philosophers of the future might rightly, but perhaps also wrongly, be described as attempters" (BG&E 42) If we are to understand, we must be willing to do something new, really new, that few if any are willing to do.

When I was in my second semester of college, I was in an Intro to Applied Ethics class. Though I may not take too much from the class in the future, I can say now that there was one lecture that may in one hour have set my course for the future. It was a discussion about gender identity. There was an experiment. A couple near a nursery is given a baby to hold. The baby is wearing either a pink or blue one-piece outfit. The results were always the same. If the outfit was blue, the child was lifted up and down, moved, and generally played with actively; that is, "like a boy." If it was pink, it was held close, cradled, and treated "like a girl." But then they give couples a baby with a brown outfit. The couple is confused. Different couples would do the same thing: they looked into the baby's diaper to determine its gender. When they found it out, they acted appropriately. The researchers were surprised. They designed new outfits that couldn't be torn open. The couples tried to force the outfits open to determine the baby's gender. When they couldn't, what did they do? They decided what gender they thought the baby was, and then went right into the specific activity pattern. It was as though they couldn't possibly act outside of those norms. You can't treat a baby like a boy if it's a girl. This was serious; they were tearing at those clothes to figure out the gender.

This (and related studies that were discussed) stuck with me, that day and after. From the very beginning we have these identities grilled into us. But why? What's behind them? Why is this necessary? Should we do otherwise?

This is the moment that defined my philosophical mission. As a philosopher I seek problems. Not just, "Prove to me this table exists." I seek deep, absolute problems. Why should I be proving the existence of tables? What kind of framework requires this, when the table is right before my eyes? What is already assumed in the issuing of such a challenge? My mission as a philosopher is to discover the basic conceptual structures that define human understanding. What grounds everything? Not just the world; what grounds our talk of the grounding of the world? What structures lead to the problems of grounding the world? What is the basic method of consciousness that frames my problems, and is there a way to see it as it fully is? Is there a way to get outside, to a new framework? What does it force us into? I want to get behind all biases, even the most essential ones, and drag them out into the open. I want to know if it's possible to surpass them. I'm not asking to know the truth; where I'm headed, such a concept might not even make sense. But I want to find the fetters that trap human thought, natural and created, and reveal them.

This explains my interests. I read, above all, Nietzsche and Heidegger. The reasoning behind Nietzsche has been sufficiently explained above. What of Heidegger?

Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word 'being?' Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being. But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression 'Being?' Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question." (Being and Time, 1)

For Heidegger, two thousand plus years of hidden dogma have totally cemented our metaphysics in place. No matter how had they have tried, the most brilliant minds have been unable to escape from their assumptions. It was Heidegger's goal in Being and Time to escape this by revealing a problem that no one had found problematic since Aristotle. He wanted to go somewhere no one could even comprehend due to the control of metaphysics commonly perceived. Whether he succeeded is not what I'm primarily interested in. What I'm interested in is in the implications about us. Is he right about us? What can we do? What should we do?

Recently I have picked up Derrida as well. Derrida read his Nietzsche and Heidegger thoroughly, and tried to push the envelop even further. What is his goal in Margins of Philosophy?

[T]hese ten writings . . . interrogate philosophy beyond its meaning, treating it not only as a discourse but as a determined text inscribed in a general text, enclosed in the representation of its own margin . . . . [W]hich is doubtless to recall that beyond the philosophical text there is not a blank, virgin, empty margin, but another text, a weave of differences of forces without any present center of reference (everything - 'history,' 'politics,' 'economy,' 'sexuality,' etc. - said not to be written in books) . . . ; and also to recall that the written text of philosophy (this time in its books) overflows and cracks its meaning. (Margins of Philosophy, xxiii)

This is what drives my philosophical interests and influences. Going where angels fear to tread, to the background and shadow of truth itself, to reveal whatever demons may be lurking.

This is what drives me as a teacher. At the graduate school I'm going to, there are three classes typically taught by grad students: Intro to Philosophy, Critical Thinking, and Intro to Ethics. Critical Thinking is the least popular. When I discovered this I couldn't help but think, "Why?" For me it would be far and above the most fun. Together with a group of unsuspecting freshmen, ready to force them to re-think their whole way of viewing the world. I once told someone I would begin the class thus: "This is an introductory level philosophy course. Some of you may not be philosophy majors, and you may wonder why philosophy matters. I'll tell you why. It's because none of you know how to think. This is nothing personal; rather, it's a consequence of the fact that, in general, no one knows how to think. Fortunately, you need not worry; I'm a philosopher, and I'm here to help you."

This approach is quintessentially me. It reflects my ironic, multi-layered manner of speaking with those I'm most familiar with. It's how I like to instruct. It's off-putting and confusing because I do that on purpose, not just in the classroom, but in everyday speech. It's because I like to twist words, their common connotations and meanings, as well as the ideas and beliefs that are tied in with their use. I've been told my sense of humor is "hidden:" that is, one has to pay careful attention. It requires going beyond what one normally has to. This is intentional on my part, yet even not consciously so. It's just how I roll. I want people to think in ways they've never done so before. I want people to see new problems, not because I've weaved sophistries, but because I've revealed real problems where formerly none were seen. That's why I look forward to teaching Critical Thinking: I can help people to see the same things in a new light, literally differently than before. Where once a statement was, now one sees an argument, a structure, and a world of assumptions. A history is hidden behind every claim; I want to help people find it.

And that, ultimately, is what I want my contribution to the world to be. I want to make knowledge harder. Why? Because I think that, in fact, knowledge is harder, much harder, than any of us are willing to realize. I want to help others to see new ways of seeing things, and in turn for them to instruct me. I want silly surface-level biases to be erased by sensibilities that become even more intuitive than intuition itself. I want people thinking, and thinking well. That is my mission; whatever the odds, I intend to fulfill it.

Snurp

Heidegger: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics

2009-03-14T01:05:00.003-04:00

What do we know about Heidegger thus far in our journeys? It can be difficult to say, thanks in no small part to Heidegger. He seems to want to take the millennia of work spent creating a refined philosophical language and throw it out the window in favor of some fancy metaphysics about Being-in-the-world and some such. He only gets worse with time; by the time the second half of the twentieth century begins, he had left “philosophy” behind all together, and many philosophers were just as glad to be rid of him.

However, the confusion he created and the strange nature of his concepts should not lead us to think that his views are nonsense, at least not out of hand. Heidegger was not speaking from out of nowhere, nor was he a weirdo with no idea what “philosophy” is. He is not without precedent (though he no doubt represents quite a leap), nor without predecessors (though they may be difficult to see at first). More importantly, Heidegger is aware of both of these facts. They are elaborated in his first work post-Being and Time, which is Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (I am using the Churchill translation, which I am telling you now never to use should you have the choice. In fact, I felt forced to alter an extremely important technical term that the translation uses: essent. I have replaced it with either being or Being, depending upon the context). Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics was not meant by Heidegger to be a completely independent work, but rather became one “in the course of the elaboration of the second part of Sein und Zeit,” (xiii) which was supposed to constitute a destruction of the history of ontology (and which was never finished by Heidegger, so far as is known).

Heidegger calls Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics an “interpretation” of the Critique of Pure Reason, and its arguments throughout focus on the Critique. However, like other of Heidegger’s “interpretations,” scholars have found much to disagree with. Again, Heidegger was not unaware of this.

My critics have constantly reproached me for the violence of my interpretations, and the grounds for this reproach can easily be found in this work. From the point of view of an inquiry which is both historical and philosophical, this reproach is always justified when directed against attempts to set in motion a thoughtful dialogue between thinkers. In contrast to the methods of historical philology, which has its own problems, a dialogue between thinkers is bound by other laws. (xxv)

It becomes obvious that we must expect something more than “just a commentary.” Accordingly, we will add to our objectives that of understanding what Heidegger means by “interpretation” and “a dialogue between thinkers.” Our goals here are threefold: understand Heidegger’s method of “interpretation,” understand how Heidegger saw Kant in his Critique as a predecessor to himself, and, of course, understand what Heidegger’s interpretation of the Critique actually amounts to.

I

Fortunately, we can start with a preliminary answer to all of our questions right from the start: “The task of the following investigation is to explicate Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as the laying of the foundation of metaphysics in order thus to present the problem of metaphysics as the problem of fundamental ontology.” (3) Thus, Heidegger is looking at the Critique through a specifically “Heideggerian” perspective, one that looks towards a “fundamental ontology” as it is understood in Being and Time. For Heidegger, the Critique was attempting to accomplish a goal similar to his own; the establishment of the most primordial ground for ontology, to put it in Heidegger’s terms. Like Heidegger, Kant is supposedly attempting to find a place before even metaphysics upon which he can build a philosophical foundation for all philosophy thereafter.

The goal, then, of these two thinkers is what Heidegger calls Being. As we know, Heidegger himself attempted to engage Being through an analytic of Dasein. Unfortunately for Kant, Being and Time wasn’t around then, so he had to find his own way onto the path to Being. To Heidegger, Kant is a continuation of the millennia-old understanding of metaphysics that began with Aristotle. The tradition that ultimately developed from Aristotle and his Metaphysics came to understand Being in two senses: “knowledge of the being qua being as well as knowledge of the highest sphere of beings through which Being in totality is defined.” (12) The former involves the most general study of Being, that which Heidegger calls ontology. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics it is referred to as metaphysica generalis, the most general of metaphysical subjects. The latter is the study of the essence of particular beings in their utmost generality, but not Being itself. This is typical metaphysics, or metaphysica specialis.

If one has knowledge of the world, it is, of course, knowledge of things. Those things in their essence are the subject of metaphysica specialis. According to Heidegger, it is this area of interest that Kant thinks to be of real importance. However, should one attempt to study the essence of beings, the question immediately arises: What does one mean by “essence?” What exactly are we looking for? It is certainly not just individual objects, for essence is more inclusive than that. Thus, if one is to establish a metaphysics of anything, the question of the nature of the essence of beings itself presents itself. In other words, “The question of the projection of metaphysica specialis has been led back beyond the question of the possibility of ontic knowledge to the question of that which makes this ontic knowledge possible . . . . The attempt to provide a foundation for metaphysics is thus centered in the question of the essence of metaphysica generalis.” (16) If one is to uncover beings, one must first uncover Being.

Unfortunately, we have not solved our problem by simply pointing to a more general idea of Being in order to explain the beings. One can still ask what is meant by “Being.” Yet what is interesting for Heidegger here is that Kant was the first one to genuinely ask this question. Descartes never asked about the essence of essences, nor did Aquinas. They were just interested in the nature of things, in metaphysica specialis. With Kant, “for the first time, ontology becomes a problem.” (16) If this perhaps sounds a bit familiar, it should. “[A] dogma has been developed which not only declares the question about the meaning of Being to be superfluous, but sanctions its complete neglect.” (Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, 21) Before Kant, Being was always just assumed to be understood. It wasn’t even a problem. Kant, however, sees that there is a very real problem here. (It is very important to note here that, as Heidegger wrote those words in Being and Time, the Critique had been available for over 140 years. Why did Kant not succeed in bringing the problem to light? Why was Being still neglected? There is a reason for this, which we shall discuss later.)

So, where must Kant start? It seems rather difficult to know where your footholds are when you’re in a place no one has ever thought to venture. Kant does what he must, starting with the understanding of philosophy present at his time. As taught in history of philosophy courses today (though not so simple), the Enlightenment of Kant’s time was a battle between two great forces: empiricism, represented by the empirical, a posteriori method, and rationalism, represented by reason and the a priori. In this sense, knowledge of Being undoubtedly does not come from a posteriori knowledge, so we cannot seek fundamental ontology there. Yet for Kant, “[t]hat all knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt.” (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. By J. M. D. Meiklejohn (another translation in need of improvement) 1) Reason alone is only able to understand logical, analytic truths, what Hume called “relations of ideas,” and not new facts. That reason on its own could uncover knowledge of Being was a great mystery. But without that basic knowledge of Being in some form, experience would not exist (for raw intuition (sense data) is incoherent on its own). Thus, there must exist synthetic judgments (judgments that lead to new knowledge) that exist through reason alone. “[T]he question of the possibility of ontological knowledge turns out to be the problem of the essence of synthetic judgments a priori.” (18) And since these judgments must be centered in reason, “the revelation of the possibility of ontological knowledge must become an elucidation of the essence of pure reason.” (19) Thus, we need an analysis of reason and an elucidation of its powers; in other words, a Critique of Pure Reason.

II

“The objective is the determination of the essence of ontological knowledge through the elucidation of its origin in the sources which make it possible.” (26) In other words, Kant’s goal is to determine the nature of Being through that which makes Being manifest; namely, pure reason. Implicit in this statement is a most interesting assumption; we must understand “the essence of ontological knowledge” through an elucidation not of a super-abstract metaphysics, one more general than any before, but through “the sources which make it possible.” The sources that make ontological knowledge (synthetic a priori judgments) possible are located in pure reason. What has pure reason? Only one thing: man. Or, to use a more neutral German term, Dasein. This is not a casual connection, but a necessary one, as Heidegger will point out much later: “Kant was fully and immediately conscious of the problems inherent in metaphysics as such. In a laying of the foundation of metaphysics, therefore, the problem is the ‘specific’ finitude of human subjectivity.” (177) Human reason alone is that through which we can come to understand ontological knowledge, i.e. synthetic a priori judgments, i.e. Being.

So let us talk now about human nature, and thus about the Critique itself. “In order to gain an understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason, the following must, as it were, be hammered in: Cognition is primarily intuition.” (28) Intuition is the means by which one “takes in” that which is experienced, for example, sense data. Heidegger calls this intuition finite. Finite intuition is most easily explained by a comparison with infinite tuition, which is that tuition which belongs (or would belong) to God. God, in the Judeo-Christian conception and in Medieval philosophy, is all-powerful. This includes the sense of creativity. God creates something just by thinking of it; he made the world ex nihilo, after all. Further, no created thing can impose itself on God. Humans, on the other hand, are the exact opposite: they lack all creative power, and things not created by them always impose themselves into the field of human perception. Thus, our finitude is the same as the fact of our intuition and our ability to sense things. God just knows; we, on the other hand, must discover, and this requires sensibility. “Finite intuition . . . is not able by itself to give itself an object . . . . Hence, the finitude of intuition lies in its receptivity.” (31) Humans, in their finitude, are essentially receptive beings. Things simply “present themselves” to us. As Heidegger himself put it, “Being-in is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which has Being-in-the-World as its essential state.” (Being and Time, 80)

Finitude receptivity is insufficient to constitute knowledge, however. “[I]f finite intuition is to be knowledge, it must be able to make the being itself, insofar as it is manifest, accessible with respect to how and what it is to everyone and at any time.” (32) In other words, in order for raw intuition to be knowledge, it must be in some sense “determined” as something which can be known. To use Heidegger’s example, one does not know “chalk,” one knows that something is chalk. This requires something beyond intuition, which for Kant is the understanding. (Let us note that the understanding, being itself dependent on intuition, is also finite.) The understanding takes what was absorbed “raw” in intuition and defines it, makes it stands out. The intuited becomes that which projects, an “ob-ject.” In this process that raw percept is necessarily lost in its true form; “finite knowledge as finite necessarily conceals . . . .” (38) “[A] phenomenon can be buried over . . . . This covering up as a ‘disguising’ is both the most frequent and the most dangerous, for here the possibilities of deceiving and misleading are especially stubborn.” (Being and Time, 60) Heidegger, as you can see, put it in darker terms. What is significant here for Kant is that something seems to be on the other end of our intuition. Something is there which becomes an object in the understanding. This something is our mythical “thing in itself.” However, one must remember that in Heidegger’s interpretation, things in themselves are not Kant’s actual goal. His goal in the Critique is not metaphysica specialis, but rather that which undergirds it, metaphysica generalis. In this light our observation on the existence of the not-yet-objectified presents us with a clue: “If finite knowledge is to be possible, it must be based on a comprehension of the Being of the [particular] being that precedes every receptive act.” (42) For any experience this is necessary; on those grounds Heidegger can conclude that “[u]nderstanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being.” (Being and Time, 32)

Let us review. Man, being finite, is dependent upon other things, other beings for knowledge. These other beings are perceived through intuition. Intuition occurs through sensory perception, but not through perception alone. Understanding must determine that which is perceived in order for it to be knowledge, that is, to be communicable (“In language, as a way things have been expressed or spoken out, there is hidden a way in which the understanding of Dasein has been interpreted . . . .” (Being and Time, 211).) But behind that we must have some way in which we connect with that which is objectified before it is objectified. We must have some knowledge of that which is outside, which is novel to us, but which still precedes experience.

Thus, the question as to the possibility of the a priori synthesis narrows down to this: how can a finite being which as such is delivered up to a being and dependent on its reception have knowledge of, i.e. intuit, the being before it is given without being its creator . . . ? [W]ithout the aid of experience, it is able to bring forth the ontological structure of a being . . . . (43)

Let us explore the synthetic a priori in greater depth.

III

In order to come into a new intuition of something, it appears we must have something in the “pure mind” which provides the possibility for such intuition. For Kant this is the role of pure intuition. Kant gives us two forms of pure intuition: space and time. Space and time, of course, are not “seen;” instead, they function as the background for what is seen. Without space and time, there would be no objects. Without much consideration we could easily enough say that without them there would be no place for an object to be and no time in which it could exist. Thus space and time, the two things which are present before any particular things are intuited, are “pure representation, i.e. that which is necessarily represented in advance in finite human cognition.” (49) They create the space (is there, after all, really a better term?) in which beings are intuited.

What is emphasized by Heidegger at this point is not merely the necessity of space and time, but rather their place in pure reason: they act as unifying agents through which one goes from mere intuition to knowledge, a process which necessarily involves a synthesis (a vital word throughout Heidegger’s analysis): “The finitude of knowledge manifests an original and intrinsic dependence of thought on intuition or, conversely, a need for the latter to be determined by the former.” (61) Intuition alone is nothing. Combined with understanding it creates knowledge. Knowledge is absolutely dependent upon this synthesis for its existence, as intuition and understanding are absolutely dependent upon each other in order to be understood. At this point a new question arises: it may be admitted that intuition and understanding must synthesize in order to form knowledge. However, knowledge isn’t a “place” where this synthesis occurs. So, where does the synthesis happen? More precisely, upon what grounds do intuition and thought synthesize?

“[E]verything in the essence of pure knowledge that has a synthetic structure is brought about by the imagination,” (66) Heidegger tells us, quoting from Kant: “Synthesis in general . . . is the mere result of the power of the imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever . . . .” (Critique of Pure Reason, 112 in the Norman Kemp Smith translation (which is that edition referenced by the translator of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) The very important role of the imagination we will discuss later.

At this point we must also take note of something else I have so far ignored: the role of the infamous categories. For Heidegger, the particular categories themselves are worth much discussion: “we must remain uncertain as to the character of this table of judgments [categories]. Kant himself seemed unsure of the nature of this table . . . .” (59) Rather, we must look at the categories in general, in other words, at what role they have in pure reason and the purpose they serve. A category, in the general sense, is the means by which something is asserted of something. It offers up predicates for objects through which the object is determined. Thus, categories serve as essential functions of knowledge and, more importantly, of the unity of objects. They are unifiers in the pure sense, as they are understood prior to any particular objects (which, by definition, are subject to categories). Thus these categories are ontological, not ontic; they are the system of ontological predicates. A category, then, “must not function merely as an ‘element’ of pure knowledge; on the contrary, in it must lie the knowledge of the Being of a being.” (69) Because the prior knowledge of beings, the synthetic a priori, is knowledge of the essence of Being, the categories function as part of the knowledge of Being located in the understanding, though we cannot say more about them yet.

Let us return to the imagination, for now its full role can be revealed. We must summarize our developments thus far: the categories, as well as the pure intuitions of space and time, generate knowledge from finite intuition. This same move requires pre-ontic, that is, ontological knowledge, which is “is the condition of the possibility that a being as such can, in general, become an ob-ject for a finite being” (74) That is, the synthetic a priori, time, space and the categories, that which allows an object to become object through synthesis, are where ontological knowledge lies. Given Kant’s statement that imagination is that place where the synthesis in general is located, we can conclude that our knowledge of Being, that from which we can open up the doors to metaphysica specialis, the foundation of all knowledge, is the imagination. Q.E.D.

IV

“The intrinsic possibility of ontological knowledge is revealed through the specific totality of the constitution of transcendence. Its binding medium is the pure imagination.” (93) Through the imagination the synthesis which creates knowledge takes place. The name which is given by Kant to this process of synthesis (in all its forms) is transcendence. In this manner Kant can call his establishment of the foundation of metaphysics “transcendental philosophy,” which is to say, philosophy which comprehends the transcendental synthesis necessary for knowledge and thus metaphysics (at this point we can also label the imagination transcendental imagination, something which Heidegger and Kant began doing earlier in the process). Transcendence is synthesis, which is brought about by means of the pure concepts. “[B]eyond the representation of this regulative unity the concept is nothing.” (103) Space, time, and the categories stand essentially as rules, and “[t]he representation of the rule is the schema.” (103) Thus we have defined synthesis in somewhat greater detail: in order to make intuition knowledge, that which is received through pure intuition (space and time) is made subject to the understanding. The understanding applies categories, that is, rules, to intuition; in other words, intuition is schematized. The possibility for this must necessarily exist before any and all experience, because “experience” itself depends upon it. Thus, in order to find ontological knowledge, that knowledge of Being which makes knowledge of beings possible, one must go to the schematism. And this is exactly what Heidegger does: “these eleven pages of the Critique of Pure Reason form the heart of the whole work.” (94)

“The formation of schemata is the sensibilization of concepts.” (102) The schemata make raw intuition determined and thus sensible. Before the understanding, raw intuition must be made perceptible. “It follows . . . that the pure understanding must be based upon a pure intuition that sustains and guides it.” (95) In other words, pure understanding must wait upon the two pure intuitions, space and time. According to Kant, space is only the external form of pure intuition, while time is the internal and thus more important form. Space is the external condition of intuition, time the internal condition, which must support both ends: thus, time is primordial pure intuition. As primordial, pure intuition, time creates the space in which beings can be encountered and thus become objects. This space Heidegger calls the horizon, in which beings “come out of this (openness of the horizon) to meet us.” (Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking 64) Time is ultimately that through which beings intuited can be acted upon by understanding and thereby known. “The use of pure concepts as transcendental determinations of time a priori, i.e., the achievement of pure knowledge, is what takes place in schematism.” (114) Time is the pure intuition, categories the pure understanding, and together they synthesize knowledge in the pure schematism of the imagination. All three are equally necessary, though of all things the imagination, as source of general synthesis and thus the support of the other two, takes prominence of place. And, if we recall, all of this comes from an initial problem, that man is not God and thus requires intuition of things not of his creation; that man is finite. To put it all together, “the ‘possibility of experience’ denotes primarily the unified totality of that which makes finite knowledge essentially possible . . . the possibility of experience is identical with transcendence. To delimit the latter in its full essence means to determine ‘the conditions of the possibility of experience.’” (122)

With the schematism we have arrived at ontological knowledge. Let us take a moment to survey the consequences of this. “What is known in ontological knowledge?” (125) Heidegger asks? What, in other words, are space, time, categories, etc.? “A Nothing.” Thus “if by ‘knowledge’ we mean the apprehension of a being, ontological knowledge is not knowledge.” (128) Those pure “powers” we have just described are not themselves known in the sense of things known, because they are the preliminaries to any such things. The ingredients of facts, by definition, cannot themselves be facts; an uncomfortable paradox. Ontological knowledge, the Nothing, is by definition “the complete negation of the totality of beings.” (Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings 98) If this is the case, if ontological knowledge is really what we have just claimed it to be, and if the processes which constitute knowledge are nothing more than schematism, then it is true that “the proud name of an Ontology . . . must give place to the modest title of an analytic of the pure understanding.” (Critique of Pure Reason 161) The problem first detected by Kant is revealed in all its grandeur: “By this transformation of metaphysica generalis, the foundation of traditional metaphysics is shaken and the edifice of metaphysica specialis begins to totter.” (129) The old metaphysics is thrown out, and ontology can now be born anew.

V

Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason in the year 1781, and in it he spelled the doom of conventional metaphysics. No doubt metaphysics suffered a mortal blow, and philosophers focused their studies on the activity of pure reason, yes?

Well actually, instead of the end of metaphysics, what did we really get? We got German Idealism. German Idealism! Hegel! How in the hell did that happen? How does one go from Kant to Hegel? It makes no sense at all.

Or it should not. Had Kant settled matters at this point, there would be no more to say. But the situation is, unsurprisingly, more complex than it appears. In order to understand this we must return again to the role of the imagination, and where Kant places it in his system.

“The transcendental imagination is . . . the foundation on which the intrinsic possibility of ontological knowledge, and hence of metaphysica generalis as well, is constructed.” (134) Our discovery of the schematism has placed ontological knowledge squarely in the hands of the transcendental imagination. It is there that that which is received through pure intuition is determined by the understanding and thus “[i]t is pure productive imagination . . . which first renders experience possible.” (140) Imagination, it must be emphasized, is not one aspect among others, although all three (intuition through time, understanding through concepts, and imagination through the schematic synthesis) are necessary, as was said before. “[T]he transcendental imagination is not merely an external bond which fastens two extremities together. It is originally unifying . . . .” (144, italics mine) Here imagination is not simply a matter of making things up in your head, or picturing things that are not there. Imagination is the core of knowledge.

We can go even further, since imagination has yet to be clearly defined. “‘Imagining’ . . . denotes all non-perceptive representation in the broadest sense of the term . . . .” (136) The imagination has the power to form images; that is, as the place of schematism, the imagination has “the ability to intuit without a concrete presence.” (138) In a certain sense, then, it is creative, with all the pregnant meaning that the discussion of finitude implies. A consequence of this is that pure understanding and pure intuition themselves are not merely parts that cooperate in the transcendental imagination. Imagination is their root. “[T]ranscendence (the function of the transcendental imagination) . . . is not merely the simple sum of pure intuition and pure thought but constitutes a unique and primordial unity within which intuition and thought function only as elements.” (143) What, for example, provides the foundation for pure intuition? What is the source of the primordial generation of horizons? “[I]f, in the modality of its act, pure intuition manifests the specific essence of the transcendental imagination, is it not then true that what is pre-formed therein must also be imaginative, since it is formed by the imagination?” (150) Pure intuition is thus imaginative in character. And understanding? “The apparently independent act of the understanding in thinking the unities is, as a spontaneously formative act of representation, a fundamental act of the transcendental imagination.” (158) The imagination, in its formative power, is that primordial unifying power which allows pure understanding to define unities (i.e. categories) of its own. Thus, both intuition and understanding, and with them synthetic a priori knowledge itself, operate within the transcendental imagination.

What is one to think of this? Surely our deduction before, and our further elaborations, led squarely to this conclusion. But what does it mean, that the imagination of all things is the center of pure reason? “[T]he transcendental imagination manifests itself more and more . . . as that which makes transcendence as the essence of the finite self possible.” (162) Perhaps we are just being scared by terminology. We call it “imagination,” but we cannot think of it simply in those terms. “What is formed by the transcendental imagination can never be ‘merely imaginary’ in the usual sense of that term. On the contrary, it is the horizon of objectivity formed by the transcendental imagination – the comprehension of Being – which makes possible all distinction between ontic truth and ontic appearance (the ‘merely imaginary’ – Heidegger’s note).” (145) But nevertheless, we must think from Kant’s perspective, one which stands at the apex of Enlightenment. Reason, after all, is that which has brought us this far. Reason will reveal truths not only of metaphysics, but of ethics (Critique of Practical Reason) and aesthetics (Critique of Judgment). And what is reason now? What is the answer to all of our philosophical questions? “By his radical interrogation, Kant brought the ‘possibility’ of metaphysics before this abyss. He saw the unknown; he had to draw back.” (173)

Who wouldn’t do what Kant did? The idea that our understanding is not the center of our knowledge, that in fact, knowledge itself is centered, as is the understanding, in the imagination, is the death of Enlightenment. That the unifying power of our mind is imaginary in character, that understanding is submissive to it, is simply too much to bear. Yet by force of argument Kant was drawn to this point. He was drawn there, but there he did not remain. “In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason the transcendental imagination, as it was described in the vigorous language of the first edition, is thrust aside and transformed – to the benefit of the understanding.” (167) In the second edition drastic changes are made. The essential role of synthesis is given to understanding; “[i]magination is now only the name of the empirical synthesis, i.e., the synthesis as relative to intuition.” (170) Imagination returns to its typical role as a basically sensory faculty; it is that thing that makes up goofy animals and sees things that aren’t really there, just like everyone likes to believe. It is separated from reason, whose center under which knowledge is generated is now the understanding. Otherwise, “[w]hat is to happen to the honorable tradition according to which, in the long history of metaphysics, ratio and the logos have laid claim to the central role? Can the primacy of logic disappear?” (173) Apparently not. And so, Kant, after going to places no philosopher had gone before, steps away from the truth and settles back into the tradition which had nurtured him.

VI

There are several questions I have not even begun to answer, and several issues in the text I have not discussed. The relation of time to the transcendental imagination and transcendence itself has been completely bypassed, and Heidegger’s “repetition” is not being discussed either.

However, now we have enough information to meet the three goals posed at the beginning of our investigation. Our first was the question, what does Heidegger mean by an “interpretation?” Had Heidegger meant “interpretation” in the sense of a simple repeating of Kant’s work with a clarification and a thesis about its objective, there would have been no need to distinguish between the first and second edition, besides perhaps to remark that the position of the transcendental imagination had changed drastically. No, what “interpretation” became was not simply a discussion of the Critique, but a discussion that placed Kant within the history of metaphysical thought. “[A] specific laying of the foundation of metaphysics never arises out of nothing but out of the strength and weakness of a tradition which designates in advance its possible points of departure.” (5) Kant is significant because he marks the point where the tradition that had defined philosophy for two thousand years looked back upon itself and questioned its most basic of foundations. Thus, Heidegger’s interpretation does not simply look at what Kant said in the Critique, but also at the “environment” of the Critique. Kant is seen in a position in history, at the forefront of a tradition, and how he both exemplifies and resists that tradition are what interest Heidegger. “[A]n interpretation limited to a recapitulation of what Kant explicitly said can never be a real explication, if the business of the latter is to bring to light what Kant . . . uncovered in the course of his laying of the foundation . . . . [W]hat is essential in philosophical discourse is not found in the specific propositions of which it is composed but in that which, although unstated as such, is made evident through these propositions.” (206) The history, the tradition, and the thoughts hidden in the arguments and behind them must be brought to the surface (the “margins” must be read, if you will). A work is not simply words on paper: it is mission, it is conflict, it is a statement of history, and must be read as such.

It in this “living” mode of interpretation that Heidegger sees a predecessor to himself in Kant. As we said in the beginning, “for the first time, ontology becomes a problem” with Kant. For 2,000 years after Aristotle philosophy operated in the same vein, which is to say, incorrectly: “Post-Aristotelian metaphysics owes its development not to the adoption and elaboration of an allegedly pre-existent Aristotelian system but to the failure to understand the doubtful and unsettled state in which Plato and Aristotle left the central problems.” (12) Assuming one can even make well-defined theories based on Aristotle’s written notes and Plato’s dialogues, a metaphysics whose parameters is set by their systems would remain based off of uncertain readings by uncertain men in an increasing unfamiliar language. And, by and large, “Kant remained faithful to the purpose of this metaphysics.” (13) But that is not what is interesting. What is interesting is that Kant had the perceptive power to reach towards the very limits of the “Aristotelian” system, and to find a place where few (if any) had treaded. He located a problem where there had been assumed to be none; indeed, where no one knew even to ask a question. “[W]e have made plain not only that the question of Being lacks an answer, but that the question itself is obscure and without direction.” (Being and Time 24) Kant was the first who tried to ask the question. He made the problem real. Without Kant there could have been no Heidegger.

The third question, that of what Heidegger’s interpretation of the Critique really amounts to, stands as an interpretation of the Critique as the potential beginning of something truly new in metaphysics. “We have undertaken the present interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason in order to bring to light the necessity, insofar as a laying of the foundation of metaphysics is concerned, of posing the fundamental problem of the finitude in man.” (226) Heidegger places Kant’s arguments in his own terms in order to demonstrate the problematic at work underneath the old terms and the old arguments. Having come from a tradition 2,000 years old, and himself no minor philosopher by the time of writing the Critique, Kant sought to find the real foundation of metaphysics where others had stopped. He did so through seeking that source in which our knowledge of anything, including the metaphysical, arises (just as Heidegger does in Being and Time). He looks to the conditions under which experience arises, and sees that, in order to have experience at all, we must have preliminary knowledge of something not experienced. With this, the synthetic a priori as his guide, he follows the synthesis of knowledge all the way to its source, the transcendental imagination. Ontology was thus found within the subject. But then, “with the revelation of the subjectivity of the subject (imagination), Kant recoiled from the ground which he himself had established.” (221) In the second edition of the Critique he ran from the truths he had uncovered in the name of Reason and the Enlightenment. In the end, all he had accomplished was lost in the wave of “metaphysical lunacy” we call German Idealism. Yet even in the second edition, the truths he unearthed were still there, dormant. Heidegger rediscovered them, and, with phenomenological training from the best and a determination to reach the core of Being despite the cost, he began his work.

Kant's Seit Problem

2009-03-11T23:29:00.003-04:00

I am currently writing a commentary on Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Compared to the standard blog post, and even to what I have typically come to post as of late, it is going to be a God-damned epic. I don't know if I will publish it in parts, but I'll get it all up at the same time, and will do so before the weekend ends. It probably won't be single-session reading material.

A Conclusion of Sorts

2009-02-16T15:07:00.005-05:00

Remember that whole thing about me not having time to do anything here because I was so focused on graduate applications and departmental work and all that?

Well it paid off.

The first step has been trod. Now I watch and wait. And maybe a bit of a party is in order. I'm off to a philosophy conference tomorrow, and along the way I'm stopping at a different university for a tour/interview. This week has become rather exciting.

Here's to the future.

Post-Post-Modernism

2009-01-25T21:52:00.003-05:00

It would appear that my schedule has become rather occupied in recent days. I've taken on a directed study on phenomenology in addition to my prior courses. My reading of Nishitani will start within a couple weeks, and I now have another job grading papers for the head of the philosophy department here. I won't get much outside reading done, in other words. And that which I will get done, I may not write on. However, that is because I have something else in mind, which I may put up here at some point. Time will tell.