One issue that the review focuses on is how to define torture. I have wondered about this myself, specifically with regard to punching or slapping people. Hitting people inflicts pain, of course, and so can count as torture. But it seems to me that there is a significant difference, one that might have moral significance, between hitting someone, perhaps out of frustration with their refusal to reveal potentially life-saving information, and coldly doing something designed specifically to inflict pain, such as sticking needles under a person's fingernails. Hitting someone, however wrong it might be, does not (usually) seem as inhuman as less expressive forms of torture. There are potential dangers in any suggestion that hitting prisoners is OK, of course, but I do think that there is some kind of difference that might be worth exploring between acts that inflict pain while still, in some sense, recognizing the humanity of one's victim and, on the other hand, ways of inflicting pain that treat the body as something like a means to extract something (information, surrender, whatever) from the mind within. (The mind-body problem seems relevant here, and the special badness of the second kind of torture seems related to the error of Cartesianism.)
Anscombe's writing on capital punishment might be helpful in understanding this issue. In her essay "The Dignity of the Human Being" she writes:
When capital punishment takes grisly forms [...] then it takes on a character which means that the victim's human dignity is being violated. The ancient Hebrew Law, the Torah, shews us why in an expression restricting punishments: a man was not to be given more than forty stripes 'lest thy brother become vile in thy sight'. [Deuteronomy 25:3]
She goes on to suggest that methods of execution that lead people to place a hood over the victim's head violate this commandment. The hood is there precisely because the executed person would otherwise be vile in our sight. The hood does not change what is happening or its wrongness, and removing it would only reveal the wrongness, not remove it. I wonder whether we really have any methods of execution that would pass Anscombe's test (although she mentions the Athenian hemlock cup as one method that seems OK in this regard, so I suppose we could go back to that). I'm not saying that capital punishment is OK--I don't think it is--but I'm interested in the question whether the question of vileness (regardless of other considerations) rules out all contemporary execution methods. Jeffrie Murphy has some similar thoughts in his essay on "Cruel and Unusual Punishments." See also the first 30 minutes or so of Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., in which Mr. Leuchter misses the point memorably by trying to make execution dignified by hanging paintings on the wall of the execution chamber.
The central issue here appears to be respect for human dignity, for the dignity inherent in human being and human beings. Not only (at least some) capital punishment seems to be an assault on this dignity, but all "Cartesian" torture, and, indeed, Cartesianism itself too.
It is sometimes claimed that we have reasons to enjoy, or be thrilled or in other ways moved by, great artistic works. In many cases, I believe, this claim is false. We can have reasons to want to enjoy, or be thrilled or moved by, these artistic works. But these are not reasons to enjoy, or to be thrilled or moved by, these works. We do have reasons to admire some novels, plays or poems, given the importance of some of the ideas that they express. But poetry is what gets lost in the translation, even if this translation expresses the same ideas. And we never have reasons to enjoy, or be moved by, great music. If we ask what makes some musical passage so marvellous, the answer might be ‘Three modulations to distant keys’. This answer describes a cause of our response to this music, not a reason. Modulations to distant keys are like the herbs, spices, or other ingredients that can make food delicious. When someone neither enjoys nor is moved by some great musical work, this person is not in any way less than fully rational, by failing to respond to certain reasons.
This seems an odd way to talk about literature. Let's say a novel expresses the idea that racism is evil. Is that a reason to admire the novel? If the book is badly written then I think it might be a reason to it, or at least not to be too harsh in our criticism of it. "Although the author plainly means well, I'm afraid that I cannot recommend..." Is that admiration? I think that what I admire in a case like this is the author's intention or sentiments, not the novel itself.
It's also an odd way to talk about music. We never have reasons to enjoy great music? I imagine that Parfit would agree we have reasons to listen to great music. What would a reason to enjoy it be? Maybe that is Parfit's point. But I think a reason might be "this bit" or "the bit with the flute" or "the way the guitar sounds like a bagpipe." Then Parfit might say that those are the reasons why someone likes the music, they are what someone likes in it, but they are not reasons for liking it or to like it. The bit with the flute, or the flute playing, is the bit you like best, just as someone might like the cilantro most in a dish of food. So "it's got cilantro in it" might be one's reason for liking a dish, but it is not a reason to like it. It is more like a cause than a reason in the relevant sense. I wonder though. Can I know what causes me to like things, necessarily? Or rather, is my knowing what I like about something the same as knowing what causes me to like it? It doesn't seem like it to me. You can know what you like without having a clue why you like it.
The important idea for Parfit, I think, is that it is not irrational to dislike cilantro or the flutey bit or whatever. But I'm not sure it is as simple as that. Is it rational to admire great ideas? Is it more rational to do so than it is to admire great musicianship or composition or cooking or any kind of artistry? Anyone who does not enjoy or feel moved by these things is missing something. If they are, say, deaf then this has nothing to do with their rationality, but otherwise I think it does. What the connection is, exactly, I am deliberately leaving vague. But I think there is one.
I was reminded of all this by Alex Rosenberg's piece in The Stone, in which he suggests that neither literary criticism nor fiction (nor history!) provides knowledge. He ends with an interesting use of what I will call the second-person 'we':
What naturalists really fear is not becoming dogmatic or giving up the scientific spirit. It’s the threat that the science will end up showing that much of what we cherish as meaningful in human life is illusory.
It is clear enough that Rosenberg does not exactly cherish the work he describes as "fun, but not knowledge." At least this is clear to anyone who reads the post and comments on this at New APPS. As Jon Cogburn says there:
Has Rosenberg ever even read the Times Literary Supplement or the New York or London Reviews of Books? When did this casual philistinism combined with such unjustified, blanket dismissals of the life works of others become acceptable enough for one of our brethren to manifest it in the New York Times of all places? Has he even ever seriously read an issue of the Sunday Times, which includes its fair share of literary criticism? How could, barring radical skepticism which would entail that science doesn’t deliver knowledge, one possibly say that the epistemic standards of these publications don’t deliver knowledge? And the same holds for the parade of intellectual bogeymen that precedes his idiotic statement about literary criticism. Shame!
My suspicion is that behind Rosenberg's apparent philistinism and Parfit's obscure thoughts (obscure to me, not having read his very long book in which, perhaps, he explains them very well) is a vestige of the old distinction between the cognitive and the emotive. So poetry, as Parfit seems to see it, can contain ideas, but these are expressible in prose and what gets lots in the translation is only the poetry, not the ideas. (He doesn't quite say that, but that's what I suspect he means.) And Rosenberg distinguishes science, which gives us knowledge, from the cherished fun of literature or rather what sounds an awful lot like continental philosophy (frighteningly referring to all the liberal arts while having the emotive meaning: Boooo!!!).
Here, as elsewhere, we seem to me to have the phenomenon of one group looking at the ends of the spaghetti (or the heads of the hydra) and seeing their obvious distinctness while another group looks further down, perhaps missing the ends or heads completely, and insisting that the distinction is illusory. Less metaphorically, there is an obvious difference between straightforward expressions of facts, on the one hand, and music or highly poetic language on the other, but seeing this difference should not blind us to the similarities and connections that might nevertheless exist and even matter. It might not even be possible to separate the two completely without killing the beast we want to understand.
Not getting a fact or not seeing is truth is missing something about the world. So is not seeing what is good about a piece of music. (And so is thinking you're hearing a flute when perhaps it's just a man going "woo woo".)
Thinking about what motivates us (desire, moral beliefs, etc.) led me to think of a more or less restless sea inside each person, a bit like the surface of the planet Solaris. We can call the whole sea "desire" if we want to, was my thought, but why would we want to do that, when there is so much we want to be able to say about different kinds of motivation?
I've also been wondering whether the kestrel in Kes is a reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins' windhover. And looking into that led me to discover Hopkins' idea of inscape. According to The Victorian Web, Hopkins wrote: "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/ . . myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came." Tolkein expressed Hopkins' idea by saying that, "Each being in the universe 'selves,' that is, enacts its identity." This is not exactly "The Nothing noths," but it isn't a million miles away from "The World worlds," it seems to me.
Apparently the idea comes from Duns Scotus, and I don't have much to say except that I like it. Here's Hopkins on a tree:
There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.
This is quite different from Sartre. If Anthony Rudd ever wanted to write about more people looking at a tree he might do well to include Hopkins.
The Windhover To Christ Our Lord
I caught this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
