Into (and out of) the woods

I have wanted to write some kind of review of Tal Brewer's The Retrieval of Ethics, but I can't think of much to say about it except that I like it. If you want a very short summary of it it would be something like this: Aristotle. For a longer account see here. It's certainly a book that anyone interested in virtue ethics should read. The part I liked best comes at the beginning (i.e. the first hundred pages or so). Here he attacks the view of action as necessarily aiming at making the world a certain way and introduces the idea of dialectical activity. If I'm working in a factory then I might know exactly what my actions are intended to bring about (a paper-knife just like all these others, say), but not all activity is like this. If I am writing a novel or painting a picture, or trying to get to know someone through conversation, or living my life the best way I can, for instance, then I don't have a clear view of what I am after going in to the project. If I already knew what I wanted to write, Brewer points out, then all I would have to do is type the novel up. If I already understood you fully then I wouldn't need to have the heart-to-heart conversation that I am now engaged in. What I want is understanding, but I don't yet know what that will consist in, what it will mean. Instead we begin with a dim or sketchy idea and then feel our way forward, correcting ourselves when we take a false step and letting new discoveries guide our progress. But it's not as if we keep stopping and starting. The end is continuously adjusted, as are the means.

I was reminded of this by Kelly Dean Jolley's post on the structure of the Philosophical Investigations and Tractatus. As he writes there:

In TLP and PI, the concentration of metaphilosophical remarks occurs in the dialectical middle (a middle not necessarily the same as its paginal middle): the 4s in the TLP and in 89-133 in PI. Rhetorically, each of the books is a large epanados, a chiasmus. That is, each of the books is organized spatially around a center or middle. Each book has the structure, roughly, of a large ‘x’, with the metaphilosophical remarks stationed at the crux of the ‘x’.  

The 'x' makes me think of cross-stitch, although sewing has a more tangible product than philosophy. But the movement of stitching, going in and out and back and forth, seems apt. Wittgenstein's books are made to be read dialectically. At the very least the meta-philosophical remarks ought to make you want to go back to the beginning and start again, if only to make sure that you haven't misunderstood anything as a result of coming to the book with a different idea of what philosophy is than Wittgenstein's. So you go into the text, then return to the beginning, and then (maybe) read through till the end. Like an h written backwards. But the more you retrace your steps or explore different paths the more your route will resemble an X or a figure 8. You have to find your way around by exploring. Wittgenstein provides sketches of landscapes and you have to go criss-cross through them. This seems to be the kind of activity that Brewer describes as dialectical.

I was also reminded of this by thinking of the song "Accept Yourself" when I was writing about being yourself.  "Others conquered love but I ran. I sat in my room and I drew up a plan," Morrissey sings. Of course, making a plan and then enacting it (the model of action rejected by Brewer) is not the usual way to success in such matters. Indeed, it might well be regarded as a form of evasion. Not all problems are technical, as Morrissey also makes clear in the joke "I need advice, I need advice....nobody ever looks at me twice" (from "Miserable Lie"). (It's a joke because no advice will make him better looking.) What people need is to engage and find their way, however clumsily, not a better plan or sounder advice.

And then there's Dante:

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.

Ah how hard to say what a harsh
thing was that wood savage and rough and hard
that to think about it renews the fear!

Not all activities are dialectical, and not all problems are like this, but the big ones seem to be. And this is surely related to Wittgenstein's idea that the answers to life's problems will not be provided by science or philosophy as traditionally conceived.

Is meat murder?

Gaita says that some people say that meat is murder, but they don't really believe it. They don't, that is, regard butchers the way they would regard a murderer, or meat-eaters the way they would regard cannibals. (This is one of the ideas in the book that I had thought was mine, but might well come from Cora Diamond. Or maybe it's just obvious.) But what does "meat is murder" mean? Is it something so obviously false? I don't think so.

As far as I know the phrase was coined by Morrissey, who took it from the slogan "meat means murder," which is a song by the punk group Conflict. I don't trust my memory very much, but I believe someone painted "meat means murder" in big letters on a wall in Manchester that I drove by several times. Maybe Morrissey saw the same graffiti. "Meat is murder" is punchier but also more obviously false. How could a substance be an act? I think it's fair to say that we aren't meant to take it literally. How we are supposed to take it ought to be made clear in the words of the song. So here are some of them:

Heifer whines could be human cries
Closer comes the screaming knife
This beautiful creature must die
This beautiful creature must die
A death for no reason
And death for no reason is murder

I'm not sure about the first line: do heifers whine? Nor do I know enough about abattoirs to know whether the "screaming knife" part is accurate. But the idea is clear enough: think of the similarities between animals and humans, think of their beauty, think of the fact that you don't have to eat meat. Now, isn't it terrible that they should be killed for their meat? The word 'murder' is meant to express this (alleged) terribleness. I really don't think that a definition of murder as death for no reason is being seriously proposed. This is propaganda, not conceptual analysis. I'll skip a bit, but the song continues:

Kitchen aromas aren't very homely
It's not comforting, cheery, or kind
It's sizzling blood and the unholy stench of murder.

It's not natural, normal, or kind
The flesh you so fancifully fry
The meat in your mouth
As you savour the flavour of murder

This is a not very subtle attempt at forcing an aspect shift. Kitchen aromas, of course, are homely and normal. The denial of this obvious truth is meant to make us reconsider, to think of them differently. Don't think of them in that way. Think of them as the smell of blood, the smell of flesh. Now, does buying, cooking, and serving meat seem so kind? That's the idea. You can reject it as sentimental, hysterical, or crass (Conflict recorded on Crass Records, so some of these people had a sense of how they were likely to be perceived, I think), but it's a mistake to say simply that it is false, or not really what anyone believes. It isn't meant to be a statement of belief.

Debunking myths

Finally, the epilogue to The Myth of Morality. It begins with an interesting account of Bronislaw Malinowski's tripartite classification of narratives. The first class, folk tales, are "not believed for a moment" (p. 232). The second class, historical legends, are taken to be true, even if they are acknowledged to contain some embellishment and exaggeration. The third class is myths, and these are taken by their believers to be true in a higher sense. Being sacred they are certainly true, but they are not at all true in the ordinary, down-to-earth sense.

Joyce doubts whether myths like this should be counted as items of belief. Instead, he suggests, they are (more like) practices (see p. 236). Here, I think, he is closer to Wittgenstein than he is for most of the book. In the penultimate paragraph of the book he writes:

When appealing to myths is a well-defined practice -- as in the Trobriand lili'u, for example [Malinowski's example of narratives of the third class] -- then all participants are aware that they are "special" ("sacred," is Malinowski's preferred term. All parties know that the telling of a lili'u is a serious and distinct kind of appeal, and they are not likely to mistake it for the telling of a fairy tale or for the communication of "ordinary" information. But if a culture diversifies and fragments, or mis-comprehends its own traditions, or for whatever reasons impoverishes its own categories of assent to the extent that the only recognized kind of important positive attitude is belief, then this understanding may be lost. Fictionalism is predicated on the assumption that encouraging a habit of false belief has inevitable deleterious consequences. Its fragility is that a fiction that is presented as being of central practical weight, as something demanding allegiance, is likely to be read by the careless as something demanding belief. (p. 240)

Shades of MacIntyre here. I wonder how much our culture is in the kind of mess suggested here and, if so, how much philosophers are to blame. But I wonder also why Joyce excludes myths from the class of things that can genuinely be believed or, put another way, why he takes such a narrow view of belief. Surely some religious belief lies, as it were, between what he would count as belief and the attitude that Malinowski describes toward myths. That is, some believers in the Day of Judgment insist that they believe this in the ordinary way that I believe that the sun will go down this evening, but others regard that as a misunderstanding (perhaps even a sinful one) of such matters. Of these others, some might say that their beliefs are very much like Malinowski's myths, but others will insist that that too is a mis-characterization. And I think one could say the same, more or less, about ethical judgments. Wittgenstein's distinction in the Lecture on Ethics between relative value (value in the ordinary, down-to-earth sense) and absolute value (value of an ultimately mysterious, other kind) would be accepted by many people, I think. But absolute value is not a myth in the way that an atheist's talk of hell might be. For instance, a non-religious person, i.e. someone who freely accepts that they do not really believe in hell, the sacred, etc., might still find that they want to refer to hell, the sacred, and so on in order to express their beliefs. (Ronald Dworkin talks about the sacred in Life's Dominion, e.g., as does Morrissey in "Suffer Little Children," and I don't think either one of them is religious.) Such people might say that their words are not true in the ordinary sense but do express a higher truth, or something of the sort. This would be at least close to using words in what Wittgenstein calls a secondary sense.

If I say that murder is absolutely wrong, or a non-fundamentalist religious believer says that the Day of Judgment will come, is this the same kind of thing? It seems like a bad idea to lump these two things (ethics and religion) together, and obvious that a believer's use of religious language is not the same as a non-believer's. But it might also be helpful to see some similarities. Ethics and religion are surely pretty well entangled for the believer. And seeing both as lying somewhere between ordinary truth and myth (to each of which, after all, they are connected, I think) might help us avoid an overly literalistic understanding (which might make ethics seem to be mere nonsense) or an overly fictionalist one. 

Reading back over that I think I know what I mean, but suspect it might be all a little too obscure for anyone else. Maybe some examples will help. Let's say I am outraged by someone's behavior and find that the best way I can find to express my attitude is to scream "You will burn in hell for this!" at them. If I am, say, a Christian, then I might well mean this literally (what this means will vary among Christians, but never mind that for now). If I am not a Christian then I certainly won't mean it literally. I might be able to find (or be given) some other form of words that say what I mean just as well, or even better, in which case my reference to hell will have been merely metaphorical. But if no other words will capture my meaning (and I don't mean them literally), then I have used them in a secondary sense which, though not metaphorical, is related to literary uses of language and hence to fiction, myth, "higher" truth, etc. (For more on the concept of secondary sense see MKR's helpful comments here).     

If I am in that position, the position of having no language but that of a religion to which I do not subscribe, then clearly my beliefs and/or attitudes are connected to that religion (whether I like it or not). This hardly means that Christianity is reducible to questions of attitude and language, but it does show that it is related to such questions, perhaps importantly so. It is also connected, of course, to various historical ("ordinary") facts, but this does not show that it is reducible to that kind of thing either. But I'm trying to talk about ethics rather than religion.

What about "slavery is wrong," "genocide is wrong," or "murder is wrong"? Each of these sentences sounds trivially true and hopelessly inadequate to the truth and so inadequate as to be (if only very slightly) funny. They are (at least somewhat) like "eating people is wrong," which (as the title of this novel) is an actual joke. Of course they wouldn't be equally funny in all contexts. Bewildered and despairing at an actual act of genocide, saying "Genocide is ... wrong!" would not be funny at all. But neither would it hit the nail on the head. It is an inarticulate sentence. (Of course inarticulacy is entirely understandable in some situations, and might communicate your emotion or attitude very well. But showing that you are upset by being inarticulate is not saying that you are upset.) Thankfully (is that the word?) there is a lot more that we can say about the evils of genocide, slavery, and murder than this. Some of this might involve secondary uses of language, but much of it need not. So I don't think we need to regard moral discourse as a kind of fiction or pretense (or mistake).

Another thing to say about such evils is that for most of us they are unthinkable in a pretty literal way. They are not options we are capable of taking seriously (which is surely related to the comic aspect of "Eating people is wrong," etc.). And this is not a truth about the words we use but about thoughts that we don't have. Part -- not all -- of the horror of such things is the discovery that we live among beings for whom such things are thinkable. (Hume sort of suggests that this horror is moral disapproval, the feeling we get when we wonder what kind of person could do such a thing. But moral disapproval is a judgment, not a feeling.) This negative and psychological aspect of moral discourse is something that Joyce does not really address. But what we don't say, and why, seems important to me.

Political nonsense and secondary sense

People's thinking about political matters often seems tangled. For instance, Morrissey's rejection of David Cameron's being a fan of The Smiths seems to combine opposition to animal cruelty with opposition to monarchy and the general socio-economic system that goes with it. This isn't necessarily a mistake, but it might partly explain why some people in Britain are so opposed to fox hunting, while no one in the United States seems to care about it at all. I'm sure some defenders of hunting rights in the US are also motivated in part by their dislike of "Yankees," or "liberal elites," or "do-gooder hippies," etc. So there's the hunting itself, which people might support or oppose for various reasons, and then also the symbolic value or social meaning of hunting, which also stirs emotions for and against it. I'm not sure how far we can separate the two, since it's hard to see how we can understand a practice without understanding its role or place in our lives. But it seems a good idea to try to keep the two apart (as much as we can without distorting the facts) in thinking about the issues.

I wonder whether something similar is involved in understanding the strange beliefs many people seem to have about evolution, global climate change, Obama's "real" country of birth, and so on. There's a good post about these shibboleths of the Republican Party by John Quiggin at Crooked Timber. He writes:

My feeling (derived largely from observations on climate change and creationism, which raise similar questions) is that we can distinguish numerous different belief states that go along with birtherist answers to opinion poll questions. There are lots of nuances, but most are combinations of the following

• A conspiracy-theoretic view of the world in which liberal elites (a term encompassing Democrats, unions, schoolteachers, scientists, academics and many others) are plotting to undermine the American way of life and replace it with some unspecified, but awful alternative. In this case, answers to these questions reflect actual beliefs
• Partisanship as suggested by Weigel in which Republicans choose to give the most negative answer possible about Obama as an affirmation of tribal identity.
• Doublethink in which people are aware that in some mundane sense Obama was born in Hawaii, but also believe that Republican ideology is true and implies the birtherist answer
• Conformism, in which people know the truth but give the culturally preferred answer, or choose some evasive form of words, as with John Boehner recently.

The four possibilities listed here might be characterized as (in order) stupidity, lying, nonsense, and something like quibbling. But I wonder whether the last two might also, in some cases, be understood as cases of what Wittgenstein calls secondary uses of words. So the sentences "Obama was born in Kenya" and "Obama is a Muslim" are not believed in their literal sense, but are regarded as having a kind of symbolic value, and perhaps even as expressing a kind of truth other than the literal kind.

I am not suggesting that this justifies nonsense of this kind. I'm just trying to understand how so much bull is taken in and spouted by so many people. Perhaps we can understand the phenomenon better if we think of it as a (bad) kind of religious belief. And I think Wittgenstein's thinking is often helpful when trying to understand religious language and belief. But maybe 'doublethink' is a better term after all.

I might also need to do more to distinguish symbolic thinking from thinking that uses words in a secondary sense. They aren't the same thing. Morrissey might be failing to analyze the issues as much as he might, but he doesn't seem to be in the shibboleth business exactly. But I still feel as though there is a connection here that might be usefully articulated.

Or is this feeling an illusion?

Is Morrissey racist?

Yes.

You could read his remark that "You can't help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies" as a description of unwanted feelings that arise when you think about the abuse of animals in China (his remark came after these words: "Did you see the thing on the news about their treatment of animals and animal welfare? Absolutely horrific"), but he has refused to distance himself from the feeling he described, and he has a history of this sort of thing. There's not much else to say except a) we probably all have racial prejudices of some kind, at some level, b) at least he denies being a racist rather than proudly or defiantly insisting on it, and c) the whole thing reminded me of "Curtain" by Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, which consists of "400kg lobsters, 30kg bullfrogs, 30kg snakes, 20kg eels, and iron wire." The animals were impaled live on the wire and left to die. But, of course, this is two people, not the whole nation of China, and other artists, from other countries, have done similar things. Yuck.

The postmodern threat

Jon Cogburn links to some discussion of Derrida. Among these is this from k-punk (who has some interesting thoughts on Morrissey, about whom more below, here). Cogburn seems to agree with k-punk's claims that Derrida always treats everything he writes about as if it were a text (while refusing to ignore the form in which it is "written") and that deconstruction is a kind of pathology that refuses to say Yes or No except, as it were, accidentally.

I don't see anything wrong with treating things as texts, as long as their form is taken into account (including whether they take the form of a text or not). Of course, doing so might be unproductive sometimes, but every attempt to do something risks failure.

It's the second claim that interests me. Or rather, the two claims taken together seem close to getting at some of the worry I have about philosophy done as Stephen Mulhall might be interpreted as doing it. There is a lot to be said for not trying to say anything, it seems to me, especially about the ultimate nature of reality. But then why write books? And, perhaps more to the point, why read books or papers by someone who is trying not to say anything? The complaint about Derrida, I take it, is that there really is no point at all in reading his work, or his later work at any rate, precisely for this reason.

If this is true of Derrida it is not true of Mulhall. At the very least, his work sheds light on the meaning and value of other people's work. But I still wonder whether that's all it does, or whether something of Mulhall himself is there too. And if it is, what exactly is it? And is it good, bad, or indifferent? I have wondered, for instance, whether his work is a kind of Christian propaganda. Perhaps some is. But is all of it? And is an element of propaganda inevitable in work like his (i.e, roughly, reading)? If so, is that necessarily a bad thing?

I once wanted to write a paper about Rorty on feminism called "Sister I'm a Strong Poet," but all I had was a title. In "Sister I'm a Poet" Morrissey sings that he has "no reason to talk about the books I read, but still I do" and that's because he's a poet, i.e. (in part) a poseur. Rorty always struck me (perhaps I was very wrong about this) as having a hard time explaining why he was talking about the books he read. Somehow the point, as I understood it, was meant to be pragmatic and political, but I don't see philosophy changing the world. Perhaps his goal was to divert the philosophically-minded away from useless philosophy (which is not all philosophy) and toward useful political action. Certainly he preferred feminists who wanted action to those who seemed to want only more deconstruction. So I'm not saying that he was a poseur. But there is a danger of mere posing or what k-punk calls "grey vampirism" in talking about books.

I think I'm rambling/erring now (but part of the point of this blog is for me to think out loud, so caveat lector), but one last point. Larkin once said that there are two types of poetry: the kind that tries to say something new and the kind that tries to find a new way to say something old. He preferred the latter type. So do I. This is why I don't much like the idea of trying to say something, because the something in question is meant to be something both new and important. I don't see anything really new in ethics being good. And I don't see anything really new in metaphysics being important. But that's begging the question I suppose.