Hamilton v. Christensen

Christopher Hamilton’s review of Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen’s Moral Philosophy and Moral Life is provoking, and not just of thought. It feels like violence. Thinking about what he means and why I disagree is therapeutic, though, so I keep doing it. And it might be useful to me in other ways, since Christensen’s project (if that’s the word) seems so close to my own. If she is badly wrong then so am I, so I’d better pay attention to criticisms of her work. Hamilton’s criticisms are strange ones though: that Christensen is too right, and .... nothing. Let me explain.

She is too right in the sense that “Most of the positions for which [her book] argues [are] so obvious that they hardly seem worth arguing for.” They are worth arguing for, however, Hamilton concedes, because so many moral philosophers take a very different view. “To that extent, Christensen’s book assembles a set of helpful reminders.” So, what she says is certainly correct (according to Hamilton) and yet underappreciated. What she offers are helpful reminders, and in this she is successful. This all suggests that her book was after all well worth writing.

Her work is largely one of synthesis, Hamilton suggests, of the work of people such as Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and Wittgenstein. But it isn’t only that (as I have tried to show in my review of the book) and this isn’t such an easy feat to achieve, as Christensen’s critical discussions of authors she only mostly agrees with shows.

Her work might not persuade the unsympathetic, Hamilton notes, but this is very rare anyway, as Hamilton also notes. So can Christensen be criticized for this? She still might persuade some people, and her work is anyway useful to the rest of us (as a set of reminders, for instance) if we pay attention to it in the right way.

Having criticized the book for being, in effect, too right, Hamilton goes on to say that Christensen’s correct views bring up two big problems. One of these is obscure and has several parts, so I will start with the other: Christensen’s style. Hamilton’s complaint is that “her style is that of mainstream analytic philosophy.” This is, allegedly, bourgeois and conventional. Would it be better if Christensen wrote in some unique style of her own? Well, maybe. It’s impossible to judge without knowing what the style in question might be. More to the point, if her goal is to try to persuade other analytic philosophers to be more receptive to the kind of ideas that she is promoting, then it makes sense to try to speak to them in their own language. And if her goal is to remind analytic philosophers of a certain persuasion of things they already believe about moral life and moral philosophy then, again, the language of analytic philosophy seems apt. It seems as though Christensen is being criticized for not having written a different book, rather than for having written the one she has written. “I don’t wish to be unfair,” Hamilton writes, but I think he is being so. Its not being something else is not really a criticism of Christensen’s book at all.

What of the other criticism, which I think also amounts to nothing? Hamilton begins to explain the problem he sees by mentioning egoism, but his concern is a bit obscure to me. Here is part of what he says:

Christensen’s writing expresses her own moral outlook, as she grants. Fine. But the issue is what that outlook is. Christensen follows thinkers such as Nussbaum, Murdoch and others in telling us that we have to develop our faculties of moral discernment, overcome our egoism, avoid wishful thinking etc. (88-9). This is all very well, but…

The problem, I take it, is that egoism is good, actually. Hamilton writes: “I doubt that anyone would fall in love without a big dose of wishful thinking, and you certainly revel in your own self when you do fall in love.” What is the wishful thinking here? That the person one loves will love one back? Unrequited love still happens. Or is it that the person one loves is better, more lovable, than a neutral observer might recognize? But then that doesn’t seem egoistic. Or perhaps the wishful thinking is optimism about the future of the relationship, but (as the case of unrequited love shows) falling in love is not the same thing as being in a relationship. Maybe marriage involves wishful thinking, but it needn’t involve the kind of fantasy that people reject when they reject wishful thinking. People joke that second marriages are a triumph of hope over experience, but surely one can enter a second marriage knowing quite well what some of the dangers are and what it might take to make the marriage work. So I disagree with Hamilton about wishful thinking here. I also disagree with him about egoism.

Murdoch’s view of love is that it is the opposite of egoistic:

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. (“The Sublime and the Good” p. 51)

This seems true to me, although of course one could argue about it. It seems much more plausible than Hamilton’s counterclaim, which he seems to think is simply obvious. (Although, to be fair, he has limited room to defend his claims in a book review.)

Do you revel in your self when you fall in love? I don’t think you do if the love is unrequited. And if it’s requited, don’t you revel more in the object of your love or the love that you share itself? The word ‘certainly’ certainly does not belong in that claim (“you certainly revel in your own self when you fall in love”), which I think is more likely to be false than true.

Perhaps there is egoism in love of one’s children, but I think, if there is, it is largely unconscious. My immediate reaction to his reference to the “obvious egoism that attaches parents to their children” is: you’ve obviously never had children! I don’t intend to check whether this gut reaction matches the facts. The point is rather that Hamilton’s claim about an allegedly obvious truth strikes me as obviously, or at least apparently, false. Raising young children is largely a matter of dealing with sleeplessness, excretion, and tedium. There is also something else, but rather than egoism I would say it is a sense of amazement that what started as a quantum of slime is slowly exploding in visible stages, achieving its own being. Wonder at this is tattooed into you (if you are lucky) over the years, and can spread into a sense of wonder at every living creature. (Although in the case of human beings, the delight is often more potential than actual.)

Hamilton is probably right that egoism is involved in writing books, but is this enough to show that egoism is not so bad? I would think that books written out of mere vanity are likely to be much worse than those written by people who feel that they have something to say and cannot resist saying it.

In the course of this discussion Hamilton brings up Christensen’s reference to twin dangers involved in moral philosophy, namely those of deflecting from unacceptable or uncomfortable thoughts and reshaping them into something more bearable. He agrees, but thinks that a relevant (and problematic for Christensen?) example is the unpalatable truth that you can’t have virtue without vice. I don’t think this is a problem for Christensen, though, because I don’t think she denies it, and, more to the point, I don’t think it’s true. Obviously, it’s at least rare for anyone to have no vice, but must we think it is impossible? And even if it is impossible in practice, can’t perfect virtue be a reasonable or useful goal? When raising children, for instance, can’t we aim to encourage the development of as much virtue as possible, without trying to develop any vice? Even if we accept that they are bound to end up at least a bit vicious. And can’t we try to minimize the vice in our own character? And aren’t some people clearly more virtuous than others? I see no reason at all to believe that everyone must for some reason have an equal balance of virtue and vice (if that is the idea) so that every apparent improvement brings some hidden decline with it. But this also seems almost entirely irrelevant to what Christensen talks about in her book.

Something seems to be eating at Hamilton, but I haven’t yet put my finger on what it is, so let’s keep looking. It’s clear, he says,

that what Christensen has in mind is a world of denizens of materially comfortable, politically stable social worlds whose main concern is with family, career etc. – in other words, the bourgeois world she and her readers inhabit. In such a context, where we all care a lot about what we think of others and what they think of us, and where we are mainly absorbed in a limited circle of concern, such a view of morality perhaps makes sense. But we are all limited in our sensitivity and it’s just as well: if I were now truly morally discerning of the world, I’d be utterly overwhelmed by the monstrous stupidity, evil and suffering of it all. Of course, this is not what Christensen has in mind. But that’s my point.

Is it really so clear that the “world of denizens” of comfortable worlds is what Christensen has in mind? If so, why? I don’t think she explicitly says that this is what she is talking about. If it’s obvious nevertheless that she is doing so, I would think that this is because the context in which she is writing and we are reading makes it clear that she is thinking primarily of the “world she and her readers inhabit.” But what’s wrong with writing about the world we live in? It doesn’t preclude others writing about other actual or possible worlds. 

In this context, a view of morality such as Christensen’s “perhaps makes sense,” Hamilton says. He blesses with faint criticism (or praises with faint damnation). After all, this is our context. Indeed, I find it hard to imagine any other type of context for human life than one in which “we all care a lot about what we think of others and what they think of us, and where we are mainly absorbed in a limited circle of concern.” People close to death might not care much about what others think of them, but children in school care about this sort of thing, adults in prison care about it too, and so does just about anyone who lives in a society. So to concede that in almost any situation other than a desert island, a death camp, or a hospice “such a view of morality perhaps makes sense” is to concede much more than the grudgingness of the concession lets on. 

“We are all limited in our sensitivity” Hamilton rightly says. But some are more limited than others. And it is because of this limitation that all of us “are mainly absorbed in a limited circle of concern.” In other words, the world Christensen writes about (allegedly) is the one we all (or almost all) live in, for reasons that Hamilton well recognizes. So what is his complaint? That she doesn’t also address the “monstrous stupidity, evil and suffering” of the world? Or that she doesn’t address the difficulty of acknowledging all this? It seems reasonable not to address every issue in one book. It also seems to me that the only way to become more sensitive to the evils of the world is to do so in just the kind of way that Christensen recommends and to do so gradually (which is probably inevitable anyway, if it happens at all), so as not to be overwhelmed in the way that Hamilton seemingly has in mind. UPDATE: On second thoughts, presumably Hamilton is concerned about people who would be better off becoming, if anything, less sensitive to the evils of the world. I think they might benefit from becoming more sensitive to other, better things. Reduced sensitivity in general seems like a recipe for evil, unhappiness, or boredom.   

So far I cannot see what the criticism of something other than her allegedly too normal writing style is meant to be. Here, perhaps, is a better idea of what Hamilton is trying to get at. This, he says, is “a problem with Christensen’s book: she sees only people. Where is there discussion of the man who needs to become less sensitive so that he can lead his own life?” Some well known and obviously terrible men come to mind, but Hamilton gives the following examples:

the man who stakes his all on being a musician of the first rank and, failing this, finds his life empty and pointless and breaks his own hands (Larry Malik)? Or the person who needs conflict with others to feel that he is alive (Thomas Bernhard)? Or the woman who wants constantly to test herself in extreme situations (Elise Wortley)? Or the man who needs to consume others so that he can paint (Francis Bacon)?

The fact that Christensen does not say much about such cases doesn’t seem like a big problem to me. Her book does not tell us how to live, so it does not tell us not to be like any of these people. It’s about the relation between philosophy and life. It doesn’t say “Don’t be a tortured artist” or “Don’t read Nietzsche.” It certainly doesn’t say “Have no passion!” or “Conform!” One thing it does suggest is, in the spirit of Murdoch, paying attention to the reality of individual people. I think this would best be done in the case of the people named by Hamilton by considering each one individually rather than trying, as I am almost tempted to do, to say something about the value of passion or individuality. In that way what is good and what is bad in each of these lives could be brought out without damage or falsification. But that isn’t something that Christensen could be expected to do in her book, and it isn’t something that the book suggests in any way ought not to be done. 

Hamilton’s remaining criticism concerns the value of reading literature. Having complained that her agreement with Murdoch (among others, such as Cora Diamond) is too obviously correct, only to then reject utterly Murdoch’s very well known views on love, Hamilton now rejects Christensen’s agreement with Diamond on the potential value of literature for moral life. Literature doesn’t always promote morality, and people often fail to learn anything at all from it. But this does not contradict the claim of people such as Diamond that we can learn from it and can become better people as a result. And this is what Christensen says. So, as I have hinted already, I think Hamilton’s second criticism is a complaint that the book talks about its own subject matter and not something else. But that is to criticize it for nothing at all.

I began by mentioning my anger, but I don’t mean only to bash what Hamilton says. I strongly disagree with him, but I would read a book on the issues he brings up. That just wouldn’t be Christensen’s book (which, of course, is Hamilton’s point, but I think this point is irrelevant as criticism of Christensen).