Mulhall's magic

I talked a bit about Stephen Mulhall's The Great Riddle here and here. This is the last post I intend to write about it, and it's about the part of the book I like the most. Near the end, Mulhall refers to "the sheer wild particularity [...] of each individual thing harbouring a refusal to conform to or be exhausted by any of our orderings of things." He quotes Chesterton saying that, "A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree"

(Cf. Tolstoy:

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? 

Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.") More respectably, Chesterton writes that, "The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact, and its mystery.")  

Mulhall connects this with Wittgenstein on the two different kinds of plant whose seeds look identical but which reliably produce plants of the type from which each came. In such a case, Wittgenstein remarks, to insist that there must be a difference in the seeds, even though we cannot detect one, "only shows what a powerful urge we have to see everything in terms of cause and effect." The beauty of Wittgenstein's story is that it never goes beyond the observable (imaginary) facts, which makes it undeniable, and yet it is hugely discomfiting to the mindset it takes aim at. It's like Kant without the metaphysics (Kant aimed, as I see it, to show the Dawkinses of his day that science can never show religion to be false), or attacking positivism by being more positivist than the positivists. Basically, by actually sticking to the undisputed facts it reveals how much metaphysics there is in the view of many people who proudly think of themselves as sticking to the facts. 

And when we do stick to the facts in this way (cf. also Tractatus 6.53) we are freed from unjustified assumptions about the laws of nature and cause and effect. Focusing on the thing itself means bracketing the principle of sufficient reason, which means seeing things how Schopenhauer says we should see things if we are to perceive objectively and achieve peace.

Punching Nazis

My (not fully formed, merely intuitive) view on the ethics of punching neo-Nazis used to be roughly that it ought to be done but that you ought not to do it. This doesn't sound very coherent. I used to think that no one should punch anyone but that there is always likely to be someone who wants to fight and that these people, if they must punch someone--which they shouldn't, should be punching neo-Nazis rather than anyone else. That is, although no one deserves to be punched, the least undeserving are neo-Nazis (and maybe some child abusers, etc.). Now I'm not so sure.

Speaking of Nazis, here's Orwell's review of Mein Kampf, in which he echoes Nietzsche on utilitarianism. Here's Orwell:

Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,’’ Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner.

And here's Nietzsche:  "If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does." (Maxim 12 from Twilight of the Idols).

The dominant economic theory, of course, is based on utilitarianism, although these days it's based more (as far as I can tell) on the ideal of maximizing preference-satisfaction than maximizing pleasure as such. (And this is mixed with the fantasy that some version of libertarianism will in fact produce such a maximization.) But, as Michael Thompson has pointed out, it makes sense to say, "I don't want to do what I want to do." People want a why, a reason to do things. Hence the appeal of ideologies that offer something other than pleasure or the even emptier satisfaction of preferences. But speaking of reasons and getting back on topic, is there reason to punch neo-Nazis? 

Here's J.S. Mill:

It would always give us pleasure, and chime in with our feelings of fitness, that acts which we deem unjust should be punished, though we do not always think it expedient that this should be done by the tribunals. [...] We should be glad to see [...] injustice repressed, even in the minutest details, if we were not, with reason, afraid of trusting the magistrate with so unlimited an amount of power over individuals. (Utilitarianism, Chapter V)

A state Nazi-puncher would be a bad thing. And perhaps being a neo-Nazi doesn't count as an unjust act, but perhaps in order to be correctly identified as a neo-Nazi one would have to have committed unjust acts. I think it does chime in at least somewhat with our feelings of fitness when a neo-Nazi gets punched. Which is not to say, however, that it chimes in with our feelings of fitness when someone punches a neo-Nazi. My reaction, at any rate, is that the neo-Nazi got what he deserved, but not that the puncher necessarily did a good thing.

And here's Kant:

If a man who delights in annoying and vexing peaceable people at last receives a right good beating, this is no doubt a bad thing; but everyone approves it and regards it as a good thing, even though nothing else resulted from it; nay, even the man who receives it must in his reason acknowledge that he has met justice, because he sees the proportion between good conduct and good fortune, which reason inevitably places before him, here put into practice. (The Critique of Practical Reason, Chapter II)

"[T]his is no doubt a bad thing; but everyone approves it and regards it as a good thing" sounds a bit like "It's raining but I don't believe it." Which part does Kant not really mean? I think he means roughly what I've been saying (and I think this on the grounds that surely everyone would agree with me): that the beaten person in this case got what he deserved, which is good, but that it is bad that the beating was done. It would have been better if he had somehow been hoist with his own petard (as long as no one else was hoisted with it).

I wonder though. For one thing I wonder how good it is that people get what they deserve--if what they, in some sense, deserve is really terrible, is it really good that this terrible thing should happen to them? And for another thing, I wonder whether all (people who might reasonably be called) Nazis deserve the same fate. Is merely having Nazi beliefs, perhaps for a short time, as bad as spreading such beliefs? And is that as bad as committing hate crimes on the basis of those beliefs? Surely not, in both cases.

In general I think that what people deserve, in the sense that they could hardly complain if these things happened to them since they have inflicted much the same on someone else or supported its being done (if only in thought), is not what should happen to them. If I were God I'd be more forgiving than that. (Although I'd also be wiser and so might have other ideas.)    

The Last Days of Kant

I had forgotten what a pleasure it is to read De Quincey:

On this occasion, whilst illustrating Kant's notions of the animal economy, it may be as well to add one other particular, which is, that for fear of obstructing the circulation of the blood, he never would wear garters; yet, as he found it difficult to keep up his stockings without them, he had invented for himself a most elaborate substitute, which I shall describe. In a little pocket, somewhat smaller than a watch-pocket, but occupying pretty nearly the same situation as a watch-pocket on each thigh, there was placed a small box, something like a watch-case, but smaller; into this box was introduced a watch-spring in a wheel, round about which wheel was wound an elastic cord, for regulating the force of which there was a separate contrivance. To the two ends of this cord were attached hooks, which hooks were carried through a small aperture in the pockets, and so passing down the inner and the outer side of the thigh, caught hold of two loops which were fixed on the off side and the near side of each stocking. As might be expected, so complex an apparatus was liable, like the Ptolemaic system of the heavens, to occasional derangements; however, by good luck, I was able to apply an easy remedy to these disorders which sometimes threatened to disturb the comfort, and even the serenity, of the great man.

My gambling problem

This isn't going to be a confession, sorry. The problem is this: is gambling rational?

Very often people say that it is not rational to buy lottery tickets, even going so far as to call lotteries a tax on stupidity. I dislike that joke partly because I think it's more accurate to call it a tax on desperation, and jokes at the expense of the desperately poor aren't funny. Partly, also, because I buy lottery tickets from time to time (despite not being desperately poor), and jokes at the expense of me are never funny. There's also the fact that it is rational to buy a $1 lottery ticket if you get $1 worth of pleasure from it. And fantasizing about what you would do if you won can be very pleasant (much more pleasant if you have a ticket than if you don't). Or at least as pleasant as about a third of a latte. But, here's the problem, is that fantasizing rational? It isn't realistic. It's not like fantasizing about what you might do with money you know you are going to inherit or get from selling your business, say. It's not like fantasizing about spending money you know you have a realistic chance of getting either. It's sheer fantasy. It's not taking pleasure in an aspect of reality but in a kind of escape, or looking away, from reality. And 'irrational' might not be the right word for that kind of pleasure, but it's in the ballpark.

A related issue is the rationality of voting. It's often said that voting is irrational because the cost outweighs the likely benefits, much like gambling. Max Black, as I recall, argues that it can be rational if the stakes are high enough. He's right that the likely benefits need to be taken into account, and not just the odds of one vote being the decider, but I don't think this is enough. In many elections the good candidate is not so much better than the bad candidate that voting is rational on some kind of cost-benefit model. But the idea that voting is irrational immediately raises the question: what if everyone thought that way (and acted accordingly)? It would, most people agree, be bad. Can it really be rational to behave in a way that would be bad if universalized?

It depends, of course, on your conception of rationality. The dominant one is roughly Humean and the alternative I'm groping towards is roughly Kantian. The Humean one counts as rational any act that is an effective means to whatever your ends may be. The more effective, the more rational. So buying lottery tickets is irrational if your end is maximizing your expected wealth, but it might be rational if your end is maximizing your expected pleasure. There is no question, though, whether it is rational to have this or that end.

It is slightly amazing that that conception of rationality has caught on, given how counterintuitive it is. As Anscombe points out, it is irrational to want a cup of mud or to put all your green books on the roof (in the absence of something that makes it rational after all, of course). It is irrational--insane--to want to be killed and eaten. If we are going to distinguish the sane from the insane then I think we need this sense of rationality. The mentally ill are not just inefficient or wrong about the facts. Sometimes their ends make no sense. So I think we need something like the Kantian notion of rationality, and if we use this instead of the Humean one then problems about the rationality of voting go away, while the idea that buying lottery tickets is rational (except perhaps in odd circumstances) also goes away. This also speaks in favour of the Kantian notion.

The problem, of course, is that this notion is obscure. It is closely connected with a notion of humanity, of what it means to be human, and that is difficult terrain. It is also essentially normative, which complicates things. Those aren't reasons to give up on it though.        

Wonder and science

In the 1929 Lecture on Ethics Wittgenstein says:

Let me first consider, again, our first experience of wondering at the existence of the world and let me describe it in a slightly different way; we all know what in ordinary life would be called a miracle. It obviously is simply an event the like of which we have never yet seen. Now suppose such an event happened. Take the case that one of you suddenly grew a lion's head and began to roar. Certainly that would be as extraordinary a thing as I can imagine. Now whenever we should have recovered from our surprise, what I would suggest would be to fetch a doctor and have the case scientifically investigated and if it were not for hurting him I would have him vivisected. And where would the miracle have got to? For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say 'Science has proved that there are no miracles.' The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. For imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term. For we see now that we have been using the word 'miracle' in a relative and an absolute sense. And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.

The miraculous is, so to speak, a way of looking at things, looking with surprise and wonder. The scientific way of looking at a fact is different.

This is a misleading way to put things, I think, because it is not as if scientists are immune to surprise and wonder. Michael Faraday's The Chemical History of a Candle (a favorite of Wittgenstein's, as I remember) contains the words 'wonderful' and 'wonderfully' a total of 21 times, for instance. But obviously the attitude of someone who is amazed by the transformation of someone's head is not the same as that of someone who has recovered from such surprise and now wants to understand and perhaps reverse the change. Or both people might want to understand, but one does so in a "What the...!?" kind of way and the other is much more practical. One says "Wow!" and the other rolls up their sleeves. I don't think it's insulting to science to use its name as a label for the second kind of attitude, as long as this caveat is kept in mind. But Wittgenstein comes close to identifying ethics with the former and science with the latter, thus contrasting ethics with science, which does sound a bit insulting.

He makes a similar contrast in 1930 in remarks collected in Culture and Value:

In order to marvel human beings--and perhaps peoples--have to wake up. Science is a way of sending them off to sleep again.

I.e. it is simply false to say: of course, these primitive peoples had to marvel at everything. But perhaps right that these people did marvel at everything around them.--To think they had to marvel at them is a primitive superstition. (Like that of thinking that they had to fear all the forces of nature & that we of course do not have to fear. On the other hand experience may show that certain primitive tribes are very strongly inclined to fear natural phenomena.--But we cannot exclude the possibility that highly civilized peoples will become liable to this very same fear again & their civilization and the knowledge of science will not protect them from this. All the same it is true that the spirit in which science is carried on nowadays is not compatible with fear of this kind.)

Here Wittgenstein is not talking about wondering at the existence of the world but wondering or marveling at this or that phenomenon in the world. But he does contrast both marveling and fear with the spirit and the effect of contemporary science. Knowledge of science, he explicitly says, does not rule out fear of natural phenomena, and I think it's reasonable to add that it doesn't rule out wonderment either.

Right after this he writes:

What Renan calls the bon sens précoce of the semitic races (an idea that I already entertained a long time ago) is their unpoetic mentality, which heads straight for what is concrete. Which is characteristic of my philosophy.

Things are right before our eyes, not covered by any veil.--This is where religion & art part company.

He was talking about Renan on the (ancient) Semitic people when he talked about primitive people and marveling, etc. Heading straight for the concrete sounds not only unpoetic but scientific in the non-ethical sense, but perhaps one can head for the concrete while still marveling at it. Facts are not miraculous in the absolute sense, but they might not be absolutely non-miraculous either. That is, something like lightning can be regarded as a natural phenomenon to be understood and perhaps exploited or as wonderful or frightening. Neither is the absolutely correct way to regard it. Not because something else is the absolutely correct way but because there is no such way, or perhaps because the only meaning that "the absolutely correct way to regard things" has is as a personal endorsement, but the words "absolutely correct" were meant to head off that meaning.

I don't know where religion and art are supposed to part company. Does religion cover things with a veil? Not Semitic religion, apparently. So presumably it is art that Wittgenstein thinks veils things.

The work of art compels us--as one might say--to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object is a piece of nature like any other & the fact that we may exalt it through our enthusiasm does not give anyone the right to display it to us. (I am always reminded of one of those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experienced something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness; insofar as it is ever justifiable to look at something with coldness.)

This last qualification is important, because "every life & everything whatever" is worth contemplating qua  "God's work of art" (also Culture & Value 1930). So justifiable coldness is only relative coldness. Still, apparently art is unjust, perhaps even dishonest. Thankfully there is an alternative:

But now it seems to me too that besides the work of the artist there is another through which the world may be captured sub specie æterni. It is--as I believe--the way of thought which as it were flies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight.

The way of thought that leaves the world the way it is sounds like a reference to Wittgenstein's later idea of philosophy, but contemplating the world from above does not sound at all like that. So I'm not sure what he has in mind here. Maybe just literally a kind of thinking about things, contemplating the world.

Speaking of the world, we cannot marvel at the very existence of the world because the world just is whatever there is, the set of all that is the case. Someone who has the experience described as wondering at the existence of the world does not wonder that there is this rather than that, but at there being something at all. Even if what there is is an empty set? Or is that inconceivable? If it's inconceivable, why is that? Is it because there is always at least possibility? Which is to say something like logic or meaning, not as a necessary being  but as something presupposed or given by any question or thought. Its 'non-existence' is unimaginable or inconceivable because to imagine and to conceive is to already be in its realm. But I'm not sure how much sense that makes. Kant seems to think we need to go back further than this:

The supreme concept with which it is customary to begin a transcendental philosophy is the division into the possible and the impossible. But since all division presupposes a concept to be divided, a still higher one is required, and this is the concept of an object in general, taken problematically, without its having been decided whether it is something or nothing. (CPR A 290/B 346)

I don't know whether this is really thinkable either.

What about "The world is all that is the case"? We can't conceive of that's not being the case either, can we? So by Wittgenstein's lights, which are not particularly technical (I'm going by the Lecture on Ethics), we can't think this either. "I wonder at the existence of the world" was meant to be nonsense because the world is all that is the case. But now "The world is all that is the case" looks like nonsense too. Indeed, sentences of the form "... therefore x is nonsense" look like trouble. Nonsense is not a product of facts, or an empirical matter. Nothing turns out to be nonsense. There is nonsense and there is sense, there is no border between them. And in fact there isn't really nonsense either, any more than the world can be divided into the things that are and the things that aren't. But if the world cannot be divided like that, then it is inconceivable that it could be. I didn't mean that it just so happens that the world cannot be divided that way, after all. So saying that it can't be is nonsense too. The only thing to do is to shut up about all this metaphysical stuff (which isn't actually stuff or metaphysical at all).

Does this mean that we can only talk science all the time, facts facts and facts but no ethics? No. Because science (in the sense I'm using the word here) is not a language but an attitude. The attitude of ethics won't be killed off by sticking to factual language, i.e. language that makes sense. In fact the opposite might well be the case. If we have only one language instead of two (the language of value and the language of facts) then maybe the spirit of value will live in all our talk. The existence of an ethical vocabulary invites the non-use of this vocabulary in scientific work, which invites the keeping at bay of the ethical attitude during any serious business. We might be more ethical if we talked less about ethics. The proposal that we stop talking about it might sound risky, but actually, if Wittgenstein is right, there is no it to talk about in the first place. There are no rights, duties, obligations, persons, evils, and so on. (Which is not to say that there are no people or that there is no such thing as murder, for instance.) So not using those words deprives us of nothing that we need. And it might do us a lot of good.

At least it's possible that this might be a Wittgensteinian/Anscombean position that could be worth exploring. If there's anything both good and original in all this I suspect I stole it from Ed Dain, but of course if I've made a mess of it then that's not his fault.

The Confusions of Young Törless

One book I took to read on holiday was Robert Musil's The Confusions of Young Törless, which I recommend. I always like novels that discuss Kant explicitly, as this one does. It has been compared to Lord of the Flies, but it's at least as much like The Brothers Karamazov, with the crime being (extreme) bullying rather than murder. The root of the problem, as it seemed to me, is not the absence of adult authority figures but the absence of any reason to believe in conventional, traditional ideas about how to behave. It is pretty much taken for granted that Christianity is out of the question, and the uninspiring figures of the teachers at the military academy where the novel is set are like the opposite of an advertisement for conventional morality. These are the people you are supposed to look up to, this is what it is promised you will become if you do as you are told. And they are weak, dull, and rather poor. (Musil doesn't go into this, but part of the problem here might have to do with capitalism as much as it has to do with the death of God.) So the boys look for something else to believe in.

Törless is bothered by the limits of reason. He has a longish and disappointing conversation with his mathematics teacher about imaginary numbers, how much we don't know or understand, and how much students are asked to take on trust from their teachers (who, he finds out, themselves do not know all the answers). If reason is limited then not only is there room for faith, as Kant says, but there is a need for faith. But faith in what? Here's where writing about a book that you read two weeks ago in an airport becomes a problem. I don't remember which character is which, and even at the time I found myself forgetting who was being described. So I'll just speak vaguely. One of his friends, I think, has a roughly Schopenhauerian belief in some sort of Indian mysticism. For this mysticism he will overstep the bounds of conventional morality, and because of this mysticism he sees no reason not to do so. Life is little more than a dream, after all, as Schopenhauer sees it. The other one (again: I think) is more 'Nietzschean,' in the crude, will-to-power, master morality sense. He's a bully, in short. The result is bullying, of course. The all-male environment of the military school perhaps encourages the kind of contempt for weakness that goes with this, and the sexual desires of the boys have no outlet except with an understandably cynical prostitute or else with each other. So the bullying takes on a sexual aspect, although it's not really clear (to anyone, I think) how much of it is really gay and how much is merely sensual. One of Musil's points seems to be that this kind of distinction is inherently vague. In fact he suggests at times that everything is inherently vague, which I suppose is a more or less Kantian or post-Kantian thing to think. 

If a story has an ending (happy or sad) then there isn't much of a story to the novel. The victim of the bullying goes away and Törless learns nothing much. All that is definite, determinate, fixed, intelligible is concrete things, things with names. But all that really matters exists in a different, psychological (I'm not sure that's the right word) realm, which can never really be understood or articulated. So the twin temptations are into nonsensical mysticism, or something like it, some kind of irrationality, on the one hand, and into a desperately conventional materialism, on the other. (Between the two is the skin, and a third option would be to focus on one's own physical sensations in an infantile and masturbatory way, like Leo Wojtys in Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos.) Musil offers no solution.

Perhaps Wittgenstein offers a kind of solution, insofar as his work is a response to Kant or the post-Kantian condition. I don't know how to articulate what this solution might be though. Something like the gradual disappearing of the apparent problem, perhaps. Apparent dilemmas cease to be apparent, not once you apply the conceptual scheme of phenomena and noumena, but when you think out the supposed problem and its terms.

Another kind of solution might be provided by art, to the extent that it can give some expression to the inarticulate chaos of the psyche. The other book I read on vacation was Geoff Dyer's Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, in which Dyer suggests that although poetry might be impossible after Auschwitz, photography might take its place. If this is true then the best advice might be don't speak (or think) but look. This also, of course, has a Wittgensteinian flavor.

More Haidt

OK, I've finished the first part (roughly the first third) of Haidt's book, and it's more of the same. He writes very clearly and uses lots of neat examples from psychology and philosophy. It would be interesting to try to use it as a textbook, except I think you would have to work to get students to believe the good bits and doubt the bad bits. Mostly he's arguing that people are not all that rational, that we tend to rationalize non-rational feelings rather than think things through on the basis of pure reason, and we rarely change our minds as a result of reasoning, although we do as a result of peer pressure. We are social animals, believing overwhelmingly what we have evolved to believe or what our social groups tell us to believe. Reason is not the slave of the passions, but it mostly does what they ask and only rarely steers the elephant in a direction it does not want to go.

None of this really strikes me as being anything like as new as Haidt seems to think it is, although his confirming evidence is certainly up to date. That most people are not very rational is something Plato believed, after all. That no living person is completely rational is also a platonic belief. And that wise decisions are more likely to come from a group of people than from an individual is also something Plato would be likely to accept (although, of course, it depends on the people, as I assume Haidt would accept too). That moral philosophy will not make a bad person good was known to Aristotle. And Haidt's general view is very much a Humean one, with the twist that reason is not quite the slave of the passions, at least not all the time. And I imagine most philosophers would agree with that (otherwise why be a philosopher?).

[UPDATE: Perhaps I should qualify this. When Hume says that reason is the slave of the passions he means that reason sets no goals, it can at most tell us how to achieve those goals. When Haidt agrees with Hume, what he means is that people make moral judgments and decisions on the basis of things like feeling, instinct, and peer pressure, not reason. When Haidt suggests that people sometimes use reason to come to conclusions about morality and politics he may or may not be saying something that Hume would agree with, depending on exactly what he means. When I say that most philosophers would probably agree with Haidt I mean that they probably value reason and see it as something more than a way to rationalize non-rational feelings. They still might be subjectivists about ethics.]

Haidt's position is pretty orthodox philosophically, but he keeps bashing philosophy all the same, either out of ignorance or to keep up the appearance that his message is more explosive than it really is.

Thus:

Deontologists [apparently the only thing moral philosophers can be other than utilitarians] talk about high moral principles derived and justified by careful reasoning; they would never agree that these principles are merely post hoc rationalizations of gut feelings. [p. 65]

Taken literally this might be true, but I think Leon Kass and Elizabeth Anscombe might be exactly the kind of people he wants to deny exist. We aren't all caricatures of Kant. Maybe no one is.

On p. 67 Haidt quotes Joshua Greene's conclusion of a study of people's moral judging and reasoning, to the effect that we have strong feelings about what must be done or not done, and then try to rationalize these feelings. Haidt sees it as a "stunning example of consilience" (p. 67). The "action" in ethics is supposedly shown to be in emotion, not reasoning. Ethics has been "biologized."

The problem here, as I see it, is that Haidt treats everyone as if they are doing moral psychology, just (sometimes) really badly. The low point is perhaps on pp. 73-74, where Haidt writes:

As is often the case in moral philosophy, arguments about what we ought to do depend upon assumptions--often unstated--about human nature and human psychology.

Then there's a footnote:

At least Plato stated his assumptions at great length. Many other moral philosophers, such as Kant and Rawls, simply make assertions about how minds work, what people want, or what seems "reasonable." These assertions seem to be based on little more than introspection about their own rather unusual personalities or value systems.

He goes on to say that Rawls is wrong because it has been found that most people would not care more about raising the standard of living of the least well-off person than about raising that of the average person  if designing a society from behind a veil of ignorance.

Kant's value system is basically Christian. Rawls's is liberal. Neither is exactly unusual, and the idea that their moral views are based on unstated assumptions about psychology is odd. What assumptions does Haidt have in mind? He leaves this unstated. How, in what way, are they assumed? He doesn't say. Anyone who says that Kant simply makes assertions about how minds work has not read the first Critique. And anyone who thinks we can test empirically what people behind the veil of ignorance would think (bearing in mind that such people would be ignorant of their own race and sex, for instance, i.e. they would not be real people) has seemingly not read even the Wikipedia entry on Rawls. I don't blame Haidt for not having read Kant or Rawls. But why bash them in that case?

Kant and Rawls are not doing psychology. Their concern is not primarily with what or how people think about ethics or politics but with what and how people should think. The categorical imperative is a justification (or rationalization, if you prefer) of certain values, and a tool for solving moral dilemmas. If Kant thinks it is rational that's because he thinks it's good (in a particular kind of way), not because he thinks that is how people actually do reason. And the same kind of thing goes for Rawls. If people were rational, he claims, they would draw the conclusions he draws concerning the basic principles of justice. I haven't read the study that Haidt cites, but Rawls is not making the kind of claim that could be empirically confirmed or refuted. So either the study is misconceived or else Haidt has misrepresented it. The abstract of the paper says that:

Overwhelmingly, the chosen principle is maximizing the average income with a floor constraint: a principle which is a compromise between those proposed by Rawls and Harsanyi. It takes into account not only the position of the worst-off individual but also the potential expected gain for the rest of society.

But, of course, the people in this study were not in the original position. So Rawls is not proved wrong, however suggestive or curious the findings might be.

Simply put, moral philosophy cannot be biologized because of the fact/value distinction. (However much of a continuum there might be linking the factual with the evaluative, it is still important to be able to see the difference between the factual, positive end and the normative, evaluative end.)

Another curiosity:

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. (p. 89)

Over the page he expands:

I'm not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut feelings. Gut feelings are sometimes better guides than reasoning for making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments, but they are often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law. Rather, what I'm saying is that we must be wary of any individual's ability to reason.

[...]

We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.

So reasoning should be carried out dialectically, with exchange of ideas and peer review. (Maybe we should even have government by a group of intelligent and ethical people who pool their wisdom for the good of the state. You wouldn't get Plato thinking of anything like that!) Thank goodness for modern science!

Haidt ends every chapter with an "In Sum" section. Here's mine:

• Haidt writes engagingly and lucidly about matters of great interest and importance, citing lots of recent empirical studies to support his conclusions
• These conclusions are largely in line with what most philosophers would tell you about people's moral thinking, and indeed are at least mostly in line with what I think of as common sense  
• Yet Haidt, who clearly does not understand philosophy, presents his findings as a mighty blow to philosophy, as if it were a powerful giant that needs to be defeated because it is nothing more than bad science. The plucky David who slays this evil Goliath is none other than that lovable underdog, modern science. Hurrah!  

Taste without flavor

Mohan Matthen says a couple of interesting things about judgments of taste here. First there's this:

there is nothing universalizable or normative in lustful contemplation. There is nothing in it that supports the idea that others should take the same kind of pleasure, or any kind of pleasure, in the contemplation of this [person’s] naked form.

I'm not sure that I agree with this, but then how would the matter be decided? (And that is what I find most interesting about the claim.) How do we know, or how could we know, what is or is not in lustful contemplation? Getting into a lustful (but merely contemplative) state can't be the way to do philosophy, and whatever I might find in my lustful contemplation might not be in lustful contemplation as such or in general. In other words, the empirical approach might conflict in practice with the philosophical aim of the experiment, and its results might not generalize even assuming one can analyze well while genuinely in the required state. If we try some lust-free armchair analysis then Matthen seems right--there is nothing about the concept of lust that implies any universalizability or normativity. To lust is not to judge lust-worthy. Lust is animal, and animals don't judge.

Still, this seems not quite right, perhaps because it makes too sharp a distinction between us and animals, or between lust and aesthetic appreciation. Are they really so distinct? Is it possible to desire without regarding as desirable? And how different are a) desire and lust, and b) regarding as and judging to be? I recently ate some tasty wasabi trail mix, the kind of thing it is hard to stop eating. I didn't think of it as tasty-to-me or merely desired (but not necessarily desirable). Nor did I think of it as something that every rational or normal eater would like. I just liked it. And, it seems to me, the judgment (or experience) that something is tasty is quite similar to the judgment/feeling that someone is hot (to keep the wasabi theme going). It isn't normative, but it isn't non-normative either. That is, there is nothing about the contingency of my feeling this way in the experience, just as there is nothing about other people's having to feel the same way in it.

That's obscure. What I mean is that, like Homer Simpson, when I eat or lustfully contemplate a doughnut my thought is something like, "Mmmm...doughnut." It isn't, "Well, that doughnut looks good to me, but I realize that others might quite reasonably not feel the same way." Nor is it, "What a doughnut! All must want it on pain of irrationality." But if anything I think it's closer to the latter than it is to the former. And lust is like hunger.

Some experiences do have a sense of contingency about them, especially when we're not quite sure what we think or how we feel. I like marmite, but I can see how other people might not. And this is related to (but not the same thing as) the fact that I don't like it very much. When I really like something a lot I do tend to think that you would have to be mad not to like it. So that is normative, although of course I can understand that tastes differ, especially when it comes to sexuality (less so with food, I think). Most obviously, if you don't share my view of someone's attractiveness I will be less likely to think you insane if your sex or sexual orientation is not the same as mine. But there is still something theoretical or intellectual about such recognition (or acceptance) of other's rationality. My mouth tells me the trail mix tastes good. My brain tells me your mileage may vary.

Then Matthen says this:

Enjoying food is not enough for the application of aesthetic epithets; indeed it is irrelevant. To make a “judgement of taste”about food, you have to judge that it has qualities, which might be related to the flavour experience, that ought to give anybody pleasure independently of enjoying the flavour.  

I can make no sense of this. So here's the same thing with more context:

it is certainly possible that persons are beautiful, but only if the pleasure of contemplating them transcends sexual preference and desire.

Similarly for food and wine. Enjoying food is not enough for the application of aesthetic epithets; indeed it is irrelevant. To make a “judgement of taste”about food, you have to judge that it has qualities, which might be related to the flavour experience, that ought to give anybody pleasure independently of enjoying the flavour. It’s certainly possible that terms like beautiful (or their domain-specific counterparts) can be attributed to food, but it requires considerations quite different to the sort that food critics usually employ. 

Now food can look nice or have an appealing texture without tasting good. But I take Matthen to be saying that, or wanting to say something like, food can taste beautiful without this having anything to do with the enjoyability of its flavor. That's got to be wrong. If this is what he or Kant (Matthen says he has "adopted Kant's notion of beauty") thinks then it looks like a reductio of that position. Maybe I've got it wrong. Let's see.

Here is Matthen on Kant on judgments of beauty:

Kant said that you attribute beauty to something when you judge that it is, i.e., ought to be, an object of disinterested pleasure for everybody. His example is that of a palace. You can judge that it would give you pleasure if you lived in it. Or you may think it represents the kind of extravagance that greatly pains your socialist soul, and you judge that others should share your disapproval. But these pleasures and pains are not “disinterested.” Disinterested pleasure is independent of the palace existing. It attaches to the “mere representation.”

I (think I) understand the first part of this, the idea that you can take pleasure in something's appearance without anticipating any personal benefit from it. The socialism part makes less sense to me, because surely the socialist in this case is trying to be disinterested. She judges that others ought not to approve of the palace. Perhaps the idea is that the socialist sees that the palace is beautiful but disapproves of the causal chain by which it was produced, or the effects its production is likely to have. The palace considered just in itself, as it were, might be fine from her point of view. It's the socio-economic context that makes such a palace objectionable, not anything about the palace's matter or shape. So how does this apply to people and food?

I can judge, or simply see, that someone is beautiful without wanting to have sex with them. I agree with that. So if food can be beautiful then perhaps I should be able to appreciate this without wanting to eat the food. Indeed, I might be too full to eat. But I think Matthen wants to exclude that kind of consideration. Other things being equal, considered only as food (and not as, say, poison to someone with your allergies), could you judge this food to have a beautiful flavor without at all wanting to eat it? That makes no sense to me.

But, having worked on this post on and off for several days, I think I'll leave it there. The comments thread at New APPS has some good stuff in it, but also more mystery. In comment 30 Matthen says this:

I am sure you don't think (all/any of) the following count as experiences of beauty: sexual arousal by somebody very attractive, the taste of chocolate, the soothing sound of a waterfall or surf on a beach, a warm bath. How do you think that these differ from the sight of a magnificent mountain range, the taste of coq au vin, the sound of a nightingale? I take each of the last three to be examples of beauty as opposed to mere pleasure. 

Most of the time I just see no difference at all between the first examples and the last ones. Sexual arousal could be different, but when you specify that this is arousal "by somebody very attractive" then I don't see how that could not include an experience of beauty, even if it also includes other things too, such as love or lust. How is chocolate different from coq au vin, unless the flavor of one is assumed to be simpler than that of the other? Why do waterfalls give mere pleasure with their sound but nightingales sound beautiful? Complexity seems to be the difference again, since waterfalls make a kind of noise whereas nightingales sing a kind of tune. But I don't accept that beauty requires complexity or order.

Then again, perhaps I'm forgetting what beauty is. How could I think that getting into a warm bath is experiencing beauty rather than mere pleasure? One problem here is that we don't have a good account of what pleasure is, which makes it hard to distinguish between it and beauty. Another problem, as Wittgenstein is reported to have said in the lectures on aesthetics, is that we actually use the word 'beauty' very little in discussing aesthetic matters. At least, I imagine that professional critics try to avoid using it. It doesn't seem to have a very clear or precise meaning.

I'm getting suspicious of the whole idea. Matthen talks about "the sight of a magnificent mountain range" as an example of beauty. I do and don't know what he means. On the one hand, this is a standard kind of idea of beauty, the kind of scene people used to put on boxes of chocolates. But does anyone look at such pictures and think "Magnificent!" or "How beautiful!"? Don't they just look cheesy? I live in a valley surrounded by mountains, and I certainly think of them as beautiful. But they aren't what I would call magnificent. Emperors are magnificent (doesn't it mean great-doing, or something along those lines?), while the Blue Ridge mountains are firry (to coin a word) and green. The Alps might be magnificent, or the Rockies. But to see something as magnificent seems to me to involve being a little bit afraid of it, while seeing it as beautiful involves a kind of love. (And then the sublime somehow combines these two, as I understand it.)

In the end I'm not sure that 'beautiful' means much more than nice to look at. And 'nice' means neither nice-for-me nor nice-for-all-right-minded-people. It means nice. The nice is good and worth protecting, of course, but should others like it? I don't really know what it would mean to say such a thing. Other things being equal, it seems good to like things. And, as lucky Jim says, nice things are nicer than nasty things. As I said a few paragraphs ago, I think I'll leave it there.

Relative and absolute value

In the Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein distinguishes between relative and absolute good, identifies the absolute sense of value with the sense used in ethics, and labels this use of 'good' nonsensical. This is often associated with Kant's distinction between hypothetical imperatives, which are indeed similar to Wittgenstein's idea of relative 'oughts', and the categorical imperative. But there are echoes of Schopenhauer too. As I say here, according to Schopenhauer:

Wrong is what we call one will’s encroaching on another, seen at its extreme in cannibalism. Right is a negative term, meaning only the opposite of this. What is on the side of our will we call ‘good’, and what is opposed to it we call ‘bad’ or, rarely, ‘evil’. “[T]hus every good is essentially relative, for it has its essential nature only in its relation to a desiring will. Absolute good is, therefore, a contradiction in terms …” The highest or ultimate good would be something that so satisfies the will that it never wanted again, but it is the nature of the will always to desire more, never to be satisfied. So there can be no such thing: the concept is self-contradictory.

Presumably Wittgenstein was influenced, directly or indirectly, by both Kant and Schopenhauer in making his distinction. But he puts his own stamp on it too. He has a much broader sense of his subject than Kant does, for instance, covering not only which acts are permissible but also a lot that might ordinarily be classed as belonging to religion or aesthetics rather than ethics. And he says that absolute good makes no sense, but not because of the nature of the will. It is simply that a non-relative sense of 'good' cannot be found. (Roughly because if it could be found then it could only be found in the world, and what is meant by 'absolute good' is precisely something above and beyond the world.)

I don't have any larger point at the moment to make about this. Mostly I just want to note the apparent connection to Schopenhauer in Wittgenstein's absolute-relative distinction, which I don't remember having  read much about in the literature (although that might say more about my memory or my reading habits than it does about the literature itself).

I could have been wild and I could have been free, but nature played this trick on me

This is part III of an irregular series of posts in which I take a famous passage from a work of philosophy and talk about it without taking its context much into account or doing more than glance at a tiny fraction of the secondary literature on it. That's pretty inexcusable, but I enjoy it and the results have been OK so far. (This is the kind of thing people say before a terrible crash.)

Today my victim is Hume. He is famously a compatibilist, believing that free will is compatible with determinism. But is this really what he believes? It isn't clear to me that he believes in either free will or determinism, and 'neither...nor' is not 'both...and.' If we define determinism, as I believe Tommi Uschanov once did, as the theory that every event has a cause, then Hume would not be a determinist if he did not believe that any event has a cause. And surely some people read him this way. Certainly some people read him as denying that we have free will, since he talks about the liberty of not being in chains rather than freedom of the will, and this (our not being in chains) is not what defenders of free will typically have in mind.

So, what does he actually say? This sounds pretty deterministic:

Everyone agrees that matter in all its operations is driven by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so exactly settled by the energy of its cause that in those particular circumstances no other effect could possibly have resulted from that cause.

But he also says this:

The necessity of any physical or mental action is not, strictly speaking, a quality in the agent; rather, it resides in the thinking or intelligent onlooker, and consists chiefly in the determination of the onlooker's thoughts to infer the occurrence of that action from some preceding events

Which sounds as though he is denying that there is any necessary force in any matter that drives its operations. The necessity is in the mind of the beholder, much as the badness of murder lies not in the act, according to Hume, but is a kind of function of the heart of those who contemplate the act. Because we all have much the same minds we all agree that murder is bad and that determinism is true. But it isn't really. (Kant then tries to solve this problem by claiming that the matter in question also exists only in the mind.)

And what of liberty or free will? Everyone knows that Hume says this:

By ‘liberty’, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will; i.e. if we choose to stay still we may do so, and if we choose to move we may do that. This hypothetical liberty—·‘hypothetical’ because it concerns what we may do if we so choose·—is universally agreed to belong to everyone who isn’t a prisoner and in chains. There’s nothing to disagree about here.

I think less attention is paid to this passage:

liberty, when opposed to necessity, is nothing but the absence of that determination ·in the onlooker’s thought· and a certain looseness or indifference which the onlooker feels in passing or not passing from the idea of one event to the idea of a following event. 

Liberty, too, is in the mind of the beholder, according to this. Hume seems to think it is rather illusory, but that is what he says it is. If this is right then liberty is not compatible with necessity at all. The onlooker's thoughts either have the determination in question or they don't. If they do, the agent's actions are necessary. If they don't, they are free.

I'm sure this has all been said before unless it is just badly wrong. But I wonder whether it relates to why (as I recall) Wittgenstein, in writing about free will, focuses so much on predictability.  

Most of all you've got to hide it from the kids

It can be tempting to be skeptical, to believe that all the best things in life are little more than fairy tales we tell to children or, as Lou Reed put it, that "everything is just dirt." Kant's response to this kind of thing is epistemological humility. How could you know that villains always blink their eyes? How could you know that life is just to die? In a similar vein, William James argues that an optimistic faith is justified by its beneficial effects, given our ignorance about the ultimate nature of reality.

This is too convenient for the likes of Nietzsche. If we don't know, we don't know, and we shouldn't help ourselves to any cozy faith. Instead we should boldly face the uncomforting reality, such as it is and so far as we can.

But this kind of thing can be a fantasy, and childish, too. At least the rugged cowboy fantasy part of this piece by John Holbo is right:

When Americans dream about something ideal, politically, that they kind of know they aren’t going to get, they dream a conservative dream. Since conservatism is, officially, an anti-utopian philosophy, this creates the odd situation of collective dreams of anti-utopian utopianism. But people are funny that way. (It’s sort of the opposite of the famous ‘and a pony’ strategy for wishes. Namely, since wishes are free, you might as well ask for absolutely everything. But, then again, sometimes it’s more appealing to think of being a rugged cowboy, with nothing but your pony, riding off into the Western sunset. Something like that.)

And the fantasy that it takes courage to face reality or the truth or life, boldly going into the known unknown, isn't only an American fantasy, as Michael Moorcock's sci-fi poem "The Black Corridor" shows. (That's pretty obscure. Here's what I'm thinking: the Starship Enterprise goes "where no man has gone before," so its crew knows that it is heading into the unknown, like Vikings heading across the Atlantic. They have already sailed on part of that ocean, and now they are heading for more. What Nietzsche has in mind is not quite clear to me, but I think he means something completely unknown and perhaps even unknowable, yet he uses images of something much less uncanny than that.) Anyway, here's the poem:

This poem embodies a mistake, it seems to me. Space is remorseless, but only because it would make no sense to attribute remorse to it. It isn't heartless in any but the literal sense. And maybe Nietzsche makes a similar mistake when he talks about the daring lover of knowledge who sets out to face any danger on the open sea. When voyaging into the completely unknown and unknowable isn't it a fantasy to talk of "our sea" and to characterize oneself as daring rather than, say, insane? If God is dead and the old values we have grown up with no longer have any value, no longer make any sense, then why do we need daring? A world without values in this sense is not an evil or especially dangerous world (even though such a world might also be described as being without values). Nietzsche seems to be putting a heroic spin on something that is barely conceivable (the revaluation of all values) let alone plainly heroic. Perhaps positive thinking is healthy, but then what makes Nietzsche's optimism better than James's or Kant's?

Kant might offer a fantasy of what is 'out there', but Nietzsche offers a fantasy of the philosopher as Jason or Captain Kirk. The fantasy-free philosopher, it seems to me, retains Kant's humility but refuses his particular faith. She has a positive attitude, like Nietzsche, but not because she has such a high opinion of herself. Rather she is impressed by the very unknown quality of the world. Her 'Why?' and her 'How?' are not so much questions as intakes of breath. And of course she has no answers. Least of all those of the cynic. Or, at any rate, no more those of the cynic than those of the worst dogmatist. In a way, the philosopher is like a child in a fairy tale, but not naively so. She is the least deceived of all, because she is not fantasizing about what might be out there, nor about her heroic relation to it. She focuses instead on what she knows, namely what she does not know or understand. 

(This is probably too twee and the real work, if I am right, is actually doing philosophy, not talking in admiring terms about what philosophers do. But I think it might be one way of getting at what the greatest philosophers of the last century tried to do. And what they do, on this account, is find things to wonder at and then fight the urge to explain or reduce them. Finding might be only a matter of noticing, but that isn't always easy. You don't notice anything when you're asleep, and waking oneself up is not a simple matter. And the urge to explain or reduce probably needs to be felt and fought, not simply ignored or shrugged off.)  

     

The possibility of an island

Kelly Jolley reminds us of Kant's island of truth in an ocean of illusion:

We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place.  This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits.  It is the land of truth–enchanting name!–surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion. (Critique of Pure Reason, A235/B294)

Similar images occur elsewhere. Nietzsche, as j. reminds us, uses related language:

…Indeed, at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation – finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’ (The Gay Science §343, ed. Williams).

Then there is Wittgenstein on Heidegger:

Anyone who speaks of the opposition of being and the nothing, and of the nothing as something primary in contrast to negation, has in mind, I think, a picture of an island of being which is being washed by an infinite ocean of the nothing.  Whatever we throw into this ocean will be dissolved in its water and annihilated.  But the ocean itself is endlessly restless like the waves on the sea.  It exists, it is, and we say: ‘it noths.’  (The Voices of Wittgenstein, pp. 69-71)

And H. P. Lovecraft:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

I'm not sure that the Wittgenstein passage belongs here, but it's hard to think that it wasn't somewhat influenced by Kant's image, however indirectly or unimportantly. That is, I'm not claiming that he is referring to Kant here. Mostly I just want to bring these passages together, but I intend to return to some of their themes in a future post.