Post-truth

The Nordic Wittgenstein Review has a special issue out now on the idea that we live in a post-truth world. The idea of post-truth is, I think, a bit like Nietzsche's idea that God is dead: large numbers of people have stopped really believing in something that used to make a big difference in our lives. It's a problematic idea because it's hard to imagine life without some sort of belief in, or commitment in practice to the value of, truth. Nevertheless, there does seem to be something in the suggestion that we do, in some sense, live in a post-truth world. The question is what is there in this idea, why, and what can we do about it?

Lorna Finlayson doubts that there is really anything new that ought to be called 'post-truth', rejecting claims that there has been a rise in bullshit or relativism in recent years on the basis of lack of evidence. As Rupert Read points out in his response, it would be hard, if not impossible, to prove an increase in bullshit (how do we measure sincerity, for instance?). But I do think there are more grounds for plausible speculation than Finlayson acknowledges. Read's conclusion is, in part, this:

I claim, contra Lorna Finlayson, that what has grown over the past generation or more is a trend toward a lack of interest in the claim of truth among some/many voters, and toward a rank contempt for truth among those (some in the academic world, some in thinktanks, some in business, some in politics) who have deliberately promoted a ‘consumeristic’ attitude toward truth. This lack of interest and this contempt are absurd: but I submit that we live in absurd times.

Do we therefore literally live in post-truth times? Of course not: but it is nevertheless as if we do. Much like we used to live in times in which it was as if there was a God.

Well, how did we get here? No doubt the story is complicated, but I think part of it does have to do with the bullshit and relativism that Finlayson downplays. Harry Frankfurt claims, with little supporting evidence, that:

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit [...] has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry.

I think he has a point. Skepticism has an ancient history, of course, so it is not new. And, as Finlayson points out, lying and propaganda are not new either. But I think there has been a renewal in recent decades of the idea that one need not be ashamed of lies, bullshit, and propaganda. One need not be ashamed, the idea is, because bias is inevitable. It is naive even to try to discover or speak the truth. The main supporters of this view seem to be on the left, but its most successful exploiters are on the right.

Since 1996 Fox News has been hitting the American public with right-wing propaganda. Opinions vary as to whether watching it actually makes you more ignorant, but it is certainly, and demonstrably, a very inefficient way to become more informed, and it does push people to the right politically. These facts are sufficiently well known that there is little excuse for watching Fox News, but I'll leave questions of whether to blame viewers or the network aside. The important point is that there is a significant new possible cause of false beliefs.

OK, you might say, but this is only in the US. True (as far as I know), but the Murdoch media empire is global. OK, then, you might continue, this explains some false beliefs, but not something new that needs its own name ('post-truth'). True again, but Fox News openly mocks the idea of objective reporting with its slogan "Fair and Balanced". Arguably it sees itself, or its viewers see it, as genuinely fair and balanced, in contrast to the allegedly leftish mainstream media, but this is prima facie implausible (why would all other news sources have a leftish bias, especially when so many are owned by large corporations?) and utterly implausible when taken together with the facts about bias and ignorance mentioned above. So Fox News not only keeps its viewers ignorant and pushes them to the right, it also undermines their faith in the value of truth and objectivity. Biased reporting is nothing new, but before cable news channels like Fox News did not exist. And its open contempt for the ideal of objectivity is, if not new, at least not as familiar a phenomenon as old-fashioned lies, bias, and propaganda.

Another thing that is new is certain trends in the teaching of English. The fight between descriptivists and prescriptivists seems to have been won by the descriptivists. (For more on this fight see David Foster Wallace and me.) That is, people who teach languages, including English, appear (overwhelmingly, from what I can tell) to prefer descriptivism. A common belief among them seems to be that it is elitist at best, and racist at worst, to regard some ways of using language as correct and others as incorrect, because the "correct" uses are so often those of the privileged while the "incorrect" ones are those of the working class, the less educated, and members of ethnic minorities. The feeling behind this belief is good, but there are some obvious problems with having no standards of correctness. Perhaps a sophisticated descriptivist would take the most common usage to be correct, or would have some other way of distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable usage. In practice, though, I think a lot of teachers are reluctant to call anything wrong.

A colleague of mine says she was taught in graduate school never to tell a student that what they have said is wrong. I don't know whether this is related to descriptivism or whether it's meant to be a kinder or more effective teaching technique, but in practice it's easy to imagine how teaching this way combined with a fuzzy version of descriptivism could lead students to think that anything goes. (And this applies not only to grammar but to ethics as well. More than one person (i.e., two) with a PhD in English has told me either that relativism is fundamental to their discipline or that it is politically preferable to the alternative, which they see as inherently conservative.)

I suspect that this leftish concern with students' feelings, which of course goes very well with the rightish idea of students as consumers that schools should aim to please, is what produces this kind of thing. It's worth clicking on the link and reading the whole thread, but here's a summary. A woman in her twenties was apparently reduced to tears by being told that she had spelled 'hamster' incorrectly. She was not used to being told that anything she had written could be improved in any way, and did not accept that a dictionary was authoritative on spelling. This one case proves nothing, of course, and might not be the result of the preferred teaching styles or ideology of English teachers. But it is exactly what one might expect from people taught English by relativists who don't believe in telling students they are wrong.

Then there's also the problematic teaching that all beliefs are either matters of fact or mere, arbitrary, opinion. Joel Backström is good on the idea that 'everyone is entitled to their opinion' (as is Agnes Callard). This commonly repeated idea is more a result of scientism, or just crude thinking, than anything politically motivated, I suspect. But it surely encourages the belief that anything political is free from legitimate criticism. 

In other words, I do think that there is a real problem in the form of a recently increased lack of shame about lying. Or perhaps in the form of confusion about how to respond to relatively sophisticated defenses of shameless lying (and possibly sincere repetitions of lies). And 'post-truth' seems like a reasonable name for this problem, since no one will say that they think lying is OK. What they might say is that there is no such thing as objectivity or the ability to know the truth ("truth with a capital T" is likely to get mentioned at this point), or that everyone has their biases. And then the conclusion is that bias and non-true statements are fine because they are inevitable. Indeed, not only are they inevitable, they are protected by the universal right to one's own opinion. So how dare you attack what I think! No doubt this kind of thing is very often said in bad faith, but if you were brought up to believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion, that all that is not science is mere opinion, that we all have our biases, and that it is cruel to tell people they are wrong, then you are likely to struggle to respond well to this kind of argument.     

Which is why I think that the problematic term 'post-truth' gets at something real and bad, and I think that the origin, apart from basic problems like greed and dishonesty, is a combination of neo-liberalism (which gave us both the idea of students as consumers, who must be kept happy, and the 'freedom' to air propaganda as news--perhaps the First Amendment does this, but it seems that the fairness doctrine could have been applied to cable news if it hadn't been dropped) and a well-meaning but sloppy kind of relativism that has been adopted by many teachers (from elementary level up). 

What to do about all this, assuming I'm right, is an interesting question. To a large extent much of the problem is driven by money. Murdoch and Sinclair have the power, because they have the money, to push their political views. It's hard to fight that. But another source of trouble is bad philosophy, much of which might be called degenerate Wittgensteinianism. Think of a sort of bluffer's guide to Wittgenstein-influenced thought, including logical positivism, fideism, Lyotard, Rorty, and Kuhn, and then imagine people who understand this guide imperfectly, but who believe it implicitly, teaching children at all levels of education. Very roughly speaking I think that something like this has happened. (Although the possibly excessive concern with students' self-esteem is partly Ayn Rand's fault, so we're back to libertarianism there.) If so then part of the solution might be better Wittgenstein scholarship. Or rather, Wittgenstein scholarship that trickles down better. Which might be Wittgenstein scholarship that doesn't trickle down at all. Or some new fashion for graduate programs in English, journalism, etc. that is more committed to the value of truth.      

Seeing the world aright

[What follows is little more than a bunch of quotes strung together. But they are good quotes.]

The desirability of seeing what is under our noses and thereby becoming free is a bit of a theme in 19th century European thought.

Here's Father Zossima, a favorite of Wittgenstein's, in The Brothers Karamazov (emphasis added):

Brothers, have no fear of men's sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you—alas, it is true of almost every one of us! Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and as it were to guide us. Woe to him who offends a child! Father Anfim taught me to love children. The kind, silent man used often on our wanderings to spend the farthings given us on sweets and cakes for the children. He could not pass by a child without emotion. That's the nature of the man.

This advice (there is more in the surrounding pages) is given as an alternative to the (allegedly) false wisdom of the day, which sounds very similar to today's dominant ideology:

The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says:

“You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants. They maintain that the world is getting more and more united, more and more bound together in brotherly community, as it overcomes distance and sets thoughts flying through the air.

Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. 

Plato might have agreed with this, too, so perhaps the 19th century has nothing to do with it, although the emphasis on perception seems very post-Kantian. Speaking of Plato, here's Schopenhauer:

Plato often says that men live only in a dream; the philosopher alone strives to awake himself.

And here is Schopenhauer again, sounding a bit Zossima-ish:

[W]hen some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, delivers knowledge from the slavery of the will, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once the peace which we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us. It is the painless state which Epicurus prized as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free from the miserable striving of the will; we keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.

But this is just the state which I described above as necessary for the knowledge of the Idea, as pure contemplation, as sinking oneself in perception, losing oneself in the object, forgetting all individuality, surrendering that kind of knowledge which follows the principle of sufficient reason, and comprehends only relations; the state by means of which at once and inseparably the perceived particular thing is raised to the Idea of its whole species, and the knowing individual to the pure subject of will-less knowledge, and as such they are both taken out of the stream of time and all other relations. It is then all one whether we see the sun set from the prison or from the palace. 

Forgetting all individuality also sounds a bit like Zossima, who says:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side—a little happier, anyway—and children and 
all animals, if you were nobler than you are now. It's all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love, in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men.

Nietzsche, too, believed in something like objective perception of reality, although he seems to deny the possibility of any such thing. Nevertheless, he opposed the "narcotics" of alcohol and Christianity. Marx wanted to replace false consciousness with (true) consciousness. But that's all fairly familiar. Less familiar to me until recently is Tolstoy on a similar theme, talking about causes in history. The whole chapter (Book Nine: 1812, Chapter 1) is worth reading (along with the first chapters of the next two books, not to mention the whole novel), but here is one highlight:

To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolénsk and Moscow and were killed by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence—apart from the cooperation of all the other coincident causes—to occasion the event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third, and a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have been so many less men in Napoleon’s army and the war could not have occurred.

Tolstoy suggests that there is no one right way to understand what caused what, but he also raises the possibility of seemingly inevitable (and bad) events being prevented by ordinary people's refusing to go along with them. If we just realized this, and acted accordingly, how much better the world might be.

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.)    

Chickening out

I haven't been blogging much lately, one reason for which is that I haven't had much that I wanted to blog about. I have a draft of a post written about one of our students who appears to have committed suicide but it's a sensitive subject and I'm reluctant to say anything controversial publicly about it (and there's no point in saying something uncontroversial about it). That's one kind of chickening out: you see a cost to behaving a certain way and so choose not to do it.

Another kind is much less conscious. I tried to eat a tarantula once and dropped it as soon as I felt its leg hairs on my lip. I didn't decide or choose to drop it, I just chickened out. I failed to go through with what I had begun. More through disgust than fear, I suppose, but the two are pretty close in a case like this. Fear of creepy crawlies is in large part fear of what disgusts us.

And there's something analogous in cases of intellectual chickening out. For instance, take Nietzsche's "There are no facts, only interpretations." It doesn't take much thought to see that he cannot have meant this as a statement of fact. But how often is it presented as if it were a fact, and how often is it quoted in the problematic sense that it surely requires? I don't know, I have to admit, but I strongly suspect that it is most often treated unthinkingly as a bit of dogma. The alternative (for those who might want to quote it) is too unfamiliar, too uncomfortable. The difficult thing to do in cases like this is to go all the way, to follow through on the initial idea. And it's not difficult because of a consciously perceived problem but because it goes against intellectual habits. But if you're going to eat the spider you have to eat it hairs and all.    

Cynicism plus

Two pieces on cynicism remind me of a theory I vaguely started to bake (I'm not sure I got as much as halfway) recently. The first is Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster on self-help and New Age spirituality. The second is Julian Baggini praising cynicism. Critchley and Webster make a lot of unsupported claims, or claims for which they provide no evidence (perhaps because this is The Stone and not anything more scholarly), such as this:

With the rise of corporations like Google, the workplace has increasingly been colonized by nonwork experiences to the extent that we are not even allowed to feel alienation or discontent at the office because we can play Ping-Pong, ride a Segway, and eat  organic lunches from a menu designed by celebrity chefs. 

This is probably true in the sense that the amount of Segway-riding at work has increased from none to some, but surely the kind of work environment described here is still extremely rare. Most of what they say feels true, albeit not entirely surprising. Does New Age spirituality need any more bashing? But there's some better stuff in there too:

A naïve belief in authenticity eventually gives way to a deep cynicism. A conviction in personal success that must always hold failure at bay becomes a corrupt stubbornness that insists on success at any cost. Cynicism, in this mode, is not the expression of a critical stance toward authenticity but is rather the runoff of this failure of belief. 

Cynicism, they imply, has at least two modes, one good one bad. It can express a critical stance toward the cult of authenticity (good) or be the mere runoff of a failure of belief (bad). The bad kind of cynicism is complacent, dishonest, and uncharitable. The good kind asks questions and evaluates, but is not purely negative.

Baggini focuses on what is good about cynicism. As he says: "The cynic, after all, is inclined to question people's motives and assume that they are acting self-servingly unless proven otherwise," and "They [i.e. cynics] are realists who know that the world is not the sun-kissed fantasy peddled by positive-thinking gurus and shysters." He acknowledges that one can take this too far, but defends the tendency of cynicism to help us avoid cons and fantasy. Fair enough.

I see cynicism as coming in many forms. The whole of economic theory seems basically cynical: people are all basically self-interested and motivated by desire for profit. That's a cynical view. And if it turns out that people don't behave so as to maximize their profits, then profit is reinterpreted as utility, and it is posited that whatever they did must have been done in an attempt to maximize their utility. That's a pretty cynical move. Marx is cynical about religion (among other things). Schopenhauer is cynical about love. Nietzsche is cynical about morality. Freud is cynical about motivation generally. All reductionism is a form of cynicism. And all of these forms of cynicism appeal to us (including me) partly because there seems to be so much truth in them.

But none of them seems wholly true. And it's the exceptions that are interesting. Human life would scarcely be worth thinking about if the cynics were completely right. We have to acknowledge the truth in what they say if we are to avoid naivete and fantasy. But everything really valuable and interesting seems to me to belong to the extra part of life, the part that resists reduction, the non-self-interested, the non-rational, the non-consequentialist, the non-biological or mechanical. And I suppose it's just that kind of gooey sentiment that is perhaps most likely of all to breed cynicism. Oh well.     

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.

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.

Mounce on Winch and Anscombe

I had a feeling I wasn't going to agree entirely with Howard Mounce's paper in the latest Philosophical Investigations. The paper is mostly about Winch on the Good Samaritan story. Winch says that the Samaritan sees something different from what the Levite and the priest see. Mounce raises doubts about this, which is fair enough. But he says some more questionable things too.

He claims (on p. 244) that Anscombe thinks that the idea of an absolute or unconditional ought depends on the idea of divine law for its sense. I'm not sure that this is what she says though. Does she talk about an absolute ought at all? (In what follows I'm relying on my memory, but you can check what she says here.) She talks about the special moral sense of ought, and suggests that this makes no sense outside a divine law context, but she also discusses the possibility of moral oughts based on social norms or on nature. Her objection to these seems to be that they would be bad, not that the idea makes no sense. Mounce goes on to say that the unconditional "use of ought depends on the idea of divine law for its very sense." But I'm not sure that Anscombe thinks it makes any sense at all. Mounce doesn't say what he means by 'unconditional,' although it seems to be interchangeable with 'absolute.'

If he means 'absolute' in the sense of having no possible exceptions, then Anscombe might disagree. Take the rule against murder. Like the rest of us, Anscombe regards murder as out of the question. So this might look like an exceptionless rule. But what if you're Abraham and God tells you to murder Isaac? Anscombe objects to those who think in advance that murder might be something we should not rule out, but I don't think she would necessarily insist that Abraham tell God to take a hike.

If Mounce means 'absolute' in the sense of having no possible foundation or justification then, again, I think Anscombe might disagree. There are things that a theist can say to someone who asks why we should obey God. These include things about God's nature, things about the relationship between God and humanity described in the Bible, and things about the specific things that God is said to have commanded.

On pp. 244-45 Mounce claims that "many philosophers" (he mentions Mackie, Rorty, Williams, and Nietzsche) "have agreed with Anscombe" that "without the idea of God, our values must be seen as relative." Where does she say this? Where does Rorty agree with Anscombe? What, to get to the point, does Mounce mean by 'relative' here? "Not absolute," perhaps, but he hasn't explained that term ('absolute') either, as far as I can see. If Mounce thinks that Anscombe is a sort of deontologist who regards the only coherent alternative as relativism (in the PH 101 sense of 'relativism') then he is way off, it seems to me. Her objection to consequentialism is not that it is incoherent or a form of relativism. Her objection is that it is corrupt. And if she thought that only divine law theories of ethics made sense then she surely would not have recommended Aristotelianism as she did. This seems so obvious that I think it cannot be a relevant objection to what Mounce means. But it looks like a relevant objection to what he says.

Two last objections. One: on p. 247 Mounce claims that "the attitude exemplified by the parable" of the good Samaritan is "hardly discernible in the species before the existence of Christianity." One wonders how anyone understood Jesus' parable if that were so. Also, see Leviticus 19:34: “The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”      


Two: in the last footnote Mounce writes that "it is obviously absurd to judge Him in terms of good and evil, since He is the source of that very distinction." Judging God seems more wrong than absurd, but what about the time when God was supposedly put on trial? There is a play based on this event, which I think was reported by Primo Levi. Supposedly a group of rabbis in a concentration camp tried God, found Him guilty, and then went off to pray. This is an interesting story, but is it absurd? Maybe, but I suspect not quite in the sense that Mounce means. And certainly many believers think it makes perfect sense to judge God to be good. Maybe they are confused. But I don't think it's obvious that Mounce is right about this.  

More angry atheists

Or more about them anyway. This interview with Anthony Grayling is interesting, partly because in it Grayling says that he is angry about religion and offers an analysis of types of atheist:

Atheists, according to Grayling, divide into three broad categories. There are those for whom this secular objection to the privileged status of religion in public life is the driving force of their concern. Then there are those, "like my chum Richard Dawkins", who are principally concerned with the metaphysical question of God's existence. "And I would certainly say there is an intrinsic problem about belief in falsehood." In other words, even if a person's faith did no harm to anybody, Grayling still wouldn't like it. "But the third point is about our ethics – how we live, how we treat one another, what the good life is. And that's the question that really concerns me the most."

The secular objection referred to here is this:

The British Humanist Society has just conducted a poll that asked those surveyed if they were religious – to which 65% said no. But when asked, "What is your religion?" 61% of the very same people answered Christian. "You see, they say, 'Oh well, nominally I suppose I'm Christian.' But two-thirds of the population don't regard themselves as religious! So we have to try to persuade society as a whole to recognise that religious groups are self-constituted interest groups; they exist to promote their point of view. Now, in a liberal democracy they have every right to do so. But they have no greater right than anybody else, any political party or Women's Institute or trade union. But for historical reasons they have massively overinflated influence – faith-based schools, religious broadcasting, bishops in the House of Lords, the presence of religion at every public event. We've got to push it back to its right size."

So one reason for "atheism" (on the face of it a metaphysical position) is this political issue, which plays out in the United States in different ways than in Britain. Here there are no bishops in the House of Lords (if only because there is no House of Lords), but very few openly atheist politicians get elected, and there is a religious presence at many public events.

But Grayling's main concern is ethical. Nietzsche's main complaint about Christianity in The Antichrist, as I remember it, is with Christian ethics, or what so-called Christians have promoted as ethics. For instance, in section 38 he writes:

What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now call themselves Christians and go to the communion table? . . . A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his people--and yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a Christian! . . . Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what does it call "the world"? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one`s self; to be careful of one`s honour; to desire one`s own advantage; to be proud . . . every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a deed, is now anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!-

Jesus opposes pride, greed, aggression, and so on, and yet there is little sign of his having had any influence at all on the most visible "Christians" around (i.e., basically, conservative politicians, whether openly political or presenting themselves primarily as religious leaders). So again we have atheism as opposition to a political phenomenon. And there are certainly ethical issues related to this. The Bible says little about abortion, for instance, but for some Christians issues like this and gay marriage are the most important issues of all. (I don't mean that it is crazy for Christians to think that their religion should make them oppose abortion. Only that such opposition: a) is not explicitly a big part of what the Bible says, and b) feeds the idea that others have that Christianity is a cultural or political movement rather than something more spiritual.) Or, at least, so it seems. People with more liberal views might be inclined to identify religion, and hence theism, with conservative moral beliefs.

But this leaves what Nietzsche thought of as true Christianity untouched (not that he was a huge fan of that either, but he saw it as being a very different animal). And his thoughts on the nature of Christianity are not a million miles away from Dostoevsky's (see The Idiot especially, which I believe Nietzsche read), whose thoughts on the subject, in turn, are not far from those of many of Christianity's admirers. So the angry opposition seems to be more to what might be thought of as sham Christianity, not the real thing.  God has little to do with it, except perhaps as a kind of symbol associated with the moral and political right-wing.

Part of what the angry atheists do not (appear to) object to, and what they therefore often seem to miss in their attacks on "religion," is explained in this passage from Charles Guignon's introduction to The Grand Inquisitor (pp. xxxvii-xxxviii):

What is the cure for pride and egoism? We can understand Dostoevsky's answer only if we try to understand one of the deepest strands of Russian spirituality--the immense importance accorded to "kenoticism" as a way of life. Kenosis refers to Christ's act of self-emptying--his submission to the most extreme humiliation and suffering in order to do the will of the Father. In Russian belief, this self-abasement and self-abnegation has set a model for all humanity. To live the kenotic way of life is to follow the example of Christ, accepting suffering in meekness and humility.   

Like Nirvana, kenosis has a rather negative sound to it. But this could partly be the fact that we hear it from a misguided position. Compare Schopenhauer (the last words of Book Four of Volume I of The World as Will and Representation):

by contemplation of the life and conduct of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written history, and with the stamp of inner truth, by art, we must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark; we must not even evade it like the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as re-absorption in Brahma or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is, for all those who are still full of will, certainly nothing; but conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world which is so real, with all its suns and Milky Ways, is nothing.  

And we should also remember the more obviously positive aspect of Russian Christianity, such as this teaching of Farther Zosima:

Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light.  Love animals, love plants, love each thing.  If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things.  Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day.  And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.

According to Guignon (p. xli) "there is no personal salvation in the Eastern faith, but only salvation for creation as a whole," which is not exactly what Schopenhauer believes but which fits his anti-egoism nicely.

In short, there seems to be a kind of religion (or just philosophy or ethics, if we think of Schopenhauer and, perhaps, Wittgenstein) that is not what atheists oppose. What they do oppose, judging by Grayling, is mostly a set of political and moral issues, combined (in Dawkins' case at least) with the fundamentalist version of theism. Many believers also reject this kind of theism as a form of idolatry. It's tempting to say that what they really oppose is idolatry. And that what they offer instead is idolatrous worship of the absence of idols (as Wittgenstein almost said in The Big Typescript). And that what the rest of us want (it could be just me, but I don't think so) is no idolatry at all.  

UPDATE: Leiter on Grayling (with added Nietzsche) here.

Unconditional love

This post over at Practical Ethics brought to mind a few ideas that have been loitering without much intent in my mind lately. One is that there is something to be said for G. K. Chesterton's idea of cosmic patriotism, which I think is very similar to an idea of Nietzsche's. The other is that quite a bit of conservative thinking (or talking or bumper stickers) can be understood best if one thinks of it as an expression of a kind of love. This is often the jingoism of "my country right or wrong," but it is sometimes narrower than that, being limited to a region or demographic (the South, the military, Christians, etc.).

There are two dangers that go with this kind of love. One is that it will have the wrong focus (white people, e.g.). The other is that it is too extreme, too indiscriminate, too unconditional. At least some partial love has to be all right, I think, since it's very difficult to love without specificity. How can it be wrong to love my family more than others? If I cannot love my wife more than other women, then I cannot really love my wife at all. "Love" means different things in "I love my wife" and "I love all people." I suppose this isn't quite the same thing, but love of one's home town and/or country seems like a good thing to me. What kind of person doesn't love their home? But this love needs to be free of any contaminating hatred or contempt for others. It has no place for comparison. It is love of this, not love of this but not that or this as opposed to that. So it's OK (and even good) to love this place or these people, but not qua these-people-rather-than-those.

What about unconditional love, love of my country right or wrong? This too can be OK, I think, depending on what exactly is meant. Marriage vows talk about loving through thick and thin but not, as far as I can remember, with get-out clauses in case of serious wrong-doing. And it would be weird to want to insert such clauses. There should be more optimism and trust going in to a marriage than that. In that sense, love should be unconditional: there should be no need felt for reservations. If I were a lawyer I would disagree, but as a believer in marriage (whether same-sex or other-sex) I would say there should be no pre-nups. It's maybe slightly weird to think of love of one's children as unconditional, but that's surely better than being conscious of its conditionality. As I understand it, love involves a certain kind of commitment, similar to the commitment one might have to, or feel for, some moral principles, such as never framing an innocent person, never torturing someone, etc.

Must such commitment be unconditional in fact, objectively rather than subjectively, so to speak? No. It's important that we not frame innocent people. It's important that we feel absolutely committed to this principle. Is it conceivable that there might be a situation in which framing someone was the least bad thing one could do? Yes it is. Just as it is conceivable that the next cute baby you see might grow up to be a serial killer. But it does no good to conceive of this possibility and it is probably unhealthy to do so. Absent reason to think that you might need to change your attitude, your attitude should be one of unconditional, unreserved commitment to and love of what is good (this person, that place, that principle).

It's this same kind of health that's involved in the Nietzschean/Chestertonian love of the world. This love is not rational, since we can never evaluate the world objectively, but a patriotic, loving attitude is surely more conducive to well-being and good behavior than a jaundiced view.

But what if there is reason to think you might need to change your attitude? Well, then it's time for a re-think.

But if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind. (G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy, 1958, p. 17)

This is easy to misunderstand. What Anscombe means, I take it, is that some things are rightly out of the question for decent people. Framing someone in a capital case would be one such thing. Not loving one's child might be another (this is my example, not hers). But even these things can come into the question in the right (i.e. very bad) circumstances. That is not to say that they should ever be done, only to recognize that they might have to be considered if things got bad enough. What's wrong with bad forms of right-wing politics (the forms based on love anyway) is that they either love in the wrong, contrastive way, or else they love in a way that is willfully blind to some bad aspects of reality (or both, of course). This is the difference that Wittgenstein refers to in part II of the Philosophical Investigations (on p. 236 of the new edition) when he contrasts shutting one's eyes in the face of doubt (bad) with having them closed (OK). Love is blind, that's why I see this as an issue, but sometimes to be stubbornly blind is a crime. Determining when those times are, though, is certainly tricky.

Perhaps what I mean is that love of good principles and good places and good people should be unconditional, but not unconditionally unconditional. This sounds ridiculous, but the part about "absent reason to think otherwise" is important. Do I doubt the ground outside my building? No. And to do so would be crazy. In saying this, though, am I denying that people make mistakes, that natural disasters can happen, etc? No. But to have doubts constantly about such things would be insane. So in normal circumstances such doubts are out of the question. They only come into question when we do philosophy (or when an earthquake strikes, e.g.).

And I want to turn this into a sort of conservative principle: if it ain't disastrous, don't doubt it. Combined with a healthy primal loyalty to the world, this gives us something like an account of why McMahan is wrong. But perhaps we've had enough and better of those already.

Et tu?

In section 98 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche refers to Julius Caesar as Shakespeare's "best tragedy" and sings the praises of Brutus for having the courage to kill his friend for the sake of a higher ideal: political freedom--"Or," Nietzsche asks, "was political freedom only a symbol for something inexpressible?"

But it's hard to feel this admiration for Brutus while Caesar is being stabbed, or while Mark Anthony is making his famous speech, or when we see Rome collapse into civil war. Brutus has good intentions, but is Caesar's pride really such a big deal? The play is generally considered to be political, partly for obvious (and undeniable) reasons, and partly because of the historical circumstances in England when it was written. But it seems to have a religious aspect too, if we think of Caesar as the Pope. Has he (or his office) become too proud or ambitious? If so, what should we do about it?

Brutus reasons that we should rebel, but in this he is influenced by Cassius, and the power of the human mind to reason well is questioned by Shakespeare. Caesar, one character says, prides himself on hating flattery, so to flatter him you just have to tell him that he hates flatterers, and he laps it up. No one, we might infer, is immune from this kind of thing. Nor can we know the future. See Cassius in Act I scene iii: "I know not what may fall [i.e. what may happen in the future as a result of the proposed course of action]; I like it not." This is a sort of nutshell version of anti-consequentialism. Caesar's assassination is done with the intention of bringing about a better Rome, but it appears to fail. (But appearances can be deceptive, as Cassius' committing suicide because he mistakenly thinks his friend Titinius has been captured shows.)

The lesson appears to me to be that noble intentions are not enough. We cannot use reason to know what is right but must instead go by such things as faith and feeling. This is why Brutus is a tragic hero, not just a hero. Like Cassius (and Hamlet?) "He thinks too much: such men are dangerous," as Caesar puts it (speaking of Cassius). Ambition is bad, as Macbeth shows, but the best response might be forbearance. We cannot know the future (see Macbeth), or elsewhere in space (see Othello), or what happened in the past (see Hamlet), so we have too little knowledge to be able to act wisely on the basis of our own reason. If the Pope gets ideas above his station, we should patiently let him get on with it, not rebel. Or so Shakespeare can be interpreted as implying.

But what if the clash is not between faith/feeling (which tell us not to kill) and reason, but between acting and not acting? In Hamlet, Hamlet's faith that his father has risen and told him to kill (which reminds me of another Father or Lord who is believed to have risen from the dead and given commandments to the living) allies with his sense that things in Denmark are going badly, so that he must choose between mental suffering and taking arms against a sea of troubles. Once he has some proof that his father's ghost was not merely a hallucination he acts, with tragic results. It seems to me that it is not the delay that causes the tragedy so much as it is the path of bloody action that he decides to take. Mental suffering might drive him insane, but then he isn't exactly better off taking the other course. Hamlet studied at Wittenberg, Luther's university, and, like Cassius and Brutus, was something of a philosopher. Shakespeare seems to admire intelligence and thinking, but to emphasize the downside of both.

Perhaps he was anti-Lutheran. Or perhaps he just saw humanity as caught in a tragic position.

The world as will

In chapter 28 of volume II of The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer writes:

Every glance at the world, to explain which is the task of the philosopher, confirms and proves that will to live, far from being an arbitrary hypostasis or an empty word, is the only true expression of its inmost nature. Every thing presses and strives towards existence, if possible organised existence, i.e., life, and after that to the highest possible grade of it. In animal nature it then becomes apparent that will to live is the keynote of its being, its one unchangeable and unconditioned quality. Let any one consider this universal desire for life, let him see the infinite willingness, facility, and exuberance with which the will to live presses impetuously into existence under a million forms everywhere and at every moment, by means of fructification and of germs, nay, when these are wanting, by means of generatio aequivoca, seizing every opportunity, eagerly grasping for itself every material capable of life : and then again let him cast a glance at its fearful alarm and wild rebellion when in any particular phenomenon it must pass out of existence; especially when this takes place with distinct consciousness. Then it is precisely the same as if in this single phenomenon the whole world would be annihilated for ever, and the whole being of this threatened living thing is at once transformed into the most desperate struggle against death and resistance to it.

Nietzsche, at various times, seemingly rejects the idea that we can know the inmost nature of the world and insists that this inmost nature is will to power. (People who read Nietzsche tend to believe that he contains multitudes or else that we should carefully exclude remarks he probably did not mean so that a consistent Nietzsche emerges.)

Bernard Reginster argues that Nietzsche wants to improve on Schopenhauer's theory. Schopenhauer, he says, identifies suffering with resistance to the will, sees suffering as an inescapable feature of life, and thinks the best we can do is resign ourselves to it. He thinks that Nietzsche, in contrast, wills (or advocates the willing of) suffering so that the will has some resistance to overcome. So both see suffering as inevitable but Schopenhauer pessimistically regards this as bad and unavoidable, while Nietzsche optimistically regards it as good and embraceable. He sounds a a bit like Camus on Sisyphus.

Reginster knows much more about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than I do, so I'm probably wrong, but I wonder whether maybe Nietzsche is misreading Schopenhauer if this is what he really thinks. For one thing, willing endless suffering does not sound like the most optimistic thing one could do. For another, as Iris Murdoch has pointed out, Schopenhauer isn't really that pessimistic. He recommends not mere resignation but an enlightened love of the world. Life, after all, will go on after my death, and so will the matter I am made of. Some people find no comfort in this idea, but Schopenhauer praises dust:

Oh! Do you know this dust then? Do you know what it is and what it can do? Learn to know it before you despise it. This matter, now lying there as dust and ashes, will soon form into crystals when dissolved in water. It will shine as metal; it will then emit electric sparks; It will, indeed, of its own accord, form itself into plant and animal; and from its mysterious womb it will develop that life, about the loss of which you in your narrowness of mind are so nervous and anxious.

(WWR, Volume 2, p. 472)

Since we are mostly water I imagine we will evaporate and then fall as rain, like the newlyweds and others on the train at the end of Larkin's "The Whitsun Weddings." Perhaps most importantly, Schopenhauer writes that it would be just as accurate to call the world embodied music as embodied will. This is not a resigned, pessimistic idea. Nor does it suggest that we should be too literal about interpreting his ideas about the will to live. Suffering, finally, belongs to the rather illusory world of maya. Enlightenment releases us from it.

In fact, since suffering helps us find enlightenment, Schopenhauer claims that it is desirable. He gives the example of the satisfaction people take in hard physical work. At this point, the contrast with Nietzsche's position is hard for me to see.