That was the semester that was

I don't know about you but I always wonder what other people do all day, how they spend their time. I won't inflict that on you, but this blog is sort of my diary and this has been an unusually eventful semester. So here's what happened.

The unusual busyness began when I found out I was going to be team-teaching a course on poverty on top of my usual teaching load. I have neither taught nor studied poverty before, nor team-taught anything, so this was an interesting experience and a lot of work. (In case you're curious I taught mostly material from Martha Nussbaum's Creating Capabilities, some material from John Iceland's Poverty in America, and selections on distributive justice from Solomon and Murphy's What is Justice?. I also tried out a game based on Rawls called "Assume the Position." I will do things differently next time, but it went pretty well.)

Then there was the job search, which ended with our hiring Reshef Agam-Segal. I am amazed at our good fortune. I also found out that Reshef and I will be moving to the English Department, which is to have a new major into which Philosophy is to be integrated (in ways still to be determined). This is involving some interesting encounters with what I imagine someone has called "English Department Philosophy" and could lead to something good. Watch this space.

I also applied for a Chair at VMI (didn't get it), for the Stakes of Speech seminar (didn't get in, but was rejected so graciously that it almost felt good), and submitted a paper for the "In Wittgenstein's Footsteps" conference in Iceland (unsuccessfully, by the looks of things, although I have a suspicion my electronic submission never got through). Also, Man United were within minutes of winning the Premier League only to be pipped at the post by hated rivals Manchester City. Oh well. On the positive side, though, I think I'm going to get to revise my Wittgenstein dictionary, which I've wanted to do almost since it first came out. So that's good. I've also had a really good time with the blog. Thanks very much to everyone who has visited.

This summer I'm going to Italy and to Arkansas for a poverty-related meeting. Blogging will occasionally be light.

Uncalm seas

Stephen Mulhall has a strong paper available online at the Nordic Wittgenstein Review. Calling it (merely) strong might make it sound weak, but I want to avoid calling it fine or wonderful, words I'm in danger of overusing. It's as strong as a large, bald man with an impressive moustache wearing a leopard skin. If I can work my questions about the paper into something coherent I might post that something as a comment on the journal's website. My questions all concern the last part of the paper, "The sea was dark green with shades of yellow, and not nearly as calm as before..." (Mulhall is quoting from a different translation of this story by the Grimm brothers).

To give some context, Mulhall means to defend Cora Diamond's reading of Wittgenstein. This involves such a commitment to the realistic spirit (roughly speaking, a commitment to seeing things as they really are, without imposing any kind of preconceived ideas or framework for thinking on reality) that it is prepared to eschew the usual Wittgensteinian talk of language-games, grammar, forms of life, and so on. The realistic spirit wants the world as we find it, not as it allegedly must be. Mulhall argues also that it involves something like the conception of ethics that we find in Wittgenstein's early work. With that minimal introduction, here is the part of the paper that I want to try to think through (I hope it's all right for me to quote these paragraphs here.):

But is it really credible to regard the realistic spirit with which Wittgenstein works in the Investigations as essentially a further expression of such a transcendental conception of ethical value, as one way in which the orientation of the happy man towards the world as such might find expression (just as that of the unhappy man might find expression in resisting it)? The suggestion might seem less outrageous if we imagine reaching it in two steps. The first is to recall that part of what the realistic spirit – with its absolute or unconditional refusal to impose conditions on reality – requires is a willingness to acknowledge such phenomena as great riddles and difficulties of reality, and so a willingness to suffer a kind of philosophical wound – to be shouldered out of our most familiar ways of making philosophical sense of our rich and varied ways of thinking and speaking. For doing so involves drawing on a capacity imaginatively to enter into these ways in which we might intelligibly refuse assignments of meaning or sense to our words, which means finding within ourselves the possibility of (as it were) becoming the person who finds these kinds of satisfaction in nonsense. But to find it possible to mean such refusals just is to discover that we are the kind of person who can find such satisfaction in nonsense; so realizing the realistic spirit in philosophy in these domains is only possible for those who can find in themselves the capacity to make sense of such phenomena as the transcendental conception of ethics that pervades the Tractatus.

Of course, even this initial, local connection between method and vision is contestable. For anyone incapable of making sense of such linguistic techniques will for that reason be incapable of seeing Diamond’s willingness to look with a clear eye even on the kinds of phenomena that manifest it as anything other than an incomprehensible attraction to mysticism and mystery-mongering. The very phrase “aspiring to an absolutely unconditional refusal to impose conditions on reality” is after all, itself nonsense, being constructed on the model of refusals that are context-specific, hence conditioned and relative; so if we can’t make any sense of these difficult realities of our life with words, then the philosophical practice of acknowledging them with a clear eye will inherit exactly the same riddling resistance to intelligibility that the phenomena themselves exemplify. Choosing to acknowledge rather than to deny such phenomena in philosophy is thus as capable of isolating us from one another, rendering us mutually incomprehensible, as are the phenomena themselves.

Let's start with the first of these paragraphs. I wonder whether it might help to go backwards through this, treating it as an exercise in formal logic, and mapping the argument out. It is a dense piece of reasoning. But I'll try to go through it forwards, starting with a simple summary and quotation of some key parts: One thing that the realistic spirit requires is a willingness to acknowledge phenomena of a certain kind. And this means or requires a willingness to suffer a kind of wound. The words "For doing so..." make me stop and think (doing what--recalling, requiring, acknowledging, being shouldered out, making philosophical sense, thinking, speaking?), but I take it that this refers to acknowledging the phenomena in question, and the "for" means to connect this acknowledgement with the willingness to suffer. The one involves the other, Mulhall is saying, because it "involves drawing on a capacity imaginatively to enter into [...] ways in which we might intelligibly refuse assignments of meaning or sense to our words." And this means "finding within ourselves the possibility of (as it were) becoming the person who finds these kinds of satisfaction in nonsense." Which in turn "just is to discover that we are the kind of person who can find such satisfaction in nonsense." And "so realizing the realistic spirit in philosophy in these domains is only possible for those who can find in themselves the capacity to make sense of such phenomena as the transcendental conception of ethics that pervades the Tractatus."

One thing I wonder about is whether a willingness to acknowledge certain kinds of phenomena should they arise involves drawing on an imaginative capacity. An absolute or unconditional refusal to impose conditions on reality sounds, in itself, easy enough. As if you could just check the 'No' box on the form when it asks you whether you want to impose such conditions. That sounds too passive, though, and too formal. The realistic spirit is surely more active, or requires something more active, than that. At least realizing the realistic spirit will surely be active.

So what does it require us to do? Willingness to acknowledge phenomena is surely not the same thing as the acknowledgement of those phenomena. But if we don't acknowledge these phenomena, what does it mean to say that we are willing to do so? The claim seems a bit hollow. Mulhall ends his essay with the recognition that where one person sees "a matter of fathomless significance, another sees only banality." Let's say I belong in the second camp, seeing only banality. It might be the easiest thing in the world for me to say, quite sincerely, that I am willing to acknowledge phenomena of fathomless significance. I still don't see any. And this does not mean that I am not sincere after all, or that I am sincere but deluded. The other side of this coin is that I might be too willing to see matters of fathomless significance. Charges of "an incomprehensible attraction to mysticism and mystery-mongering" are not always false. One of the difficulties of reality, or one kind of difficulty, is the difficulty of knowing whether you are sane, or the difficulty of dealing with uncertainty about this. Am I experiencing a matter of great significance which others are too blind to see? Or am I crazy? Or not crazy but exaggerating or otherwise distorting the truth? How do I know that my spirit is realistic? And how do I know what the realistic spirit requires here and now? I think that the answer to these questions is that you really cannot know. At least not in any circumstances where it would be reasonable to have doubts, where it is reasonable to imagine someone having doubts.

Finding satisfaction in nonsense is a difficult notion too. I (think I) understand wanting to say something and having this something turn out to be nonsense. But can I then understand realizing that it is nonsense and being satisfied? Without, that is, indulging in complacent mysticism or something of the sort. Say I want to describe a voice as dark brown, or a theme in Brahms as Shakespearean. I do so, and then realize that what I have said makes no sense. But I'm satisfied. It's OK with me. -- I don't think this makes sense. I cannot simultaneously want to say something and see that something as nonsense (in any resolute sense of nonsense, anyway). Of course I can see that I have flaws, one of which might be a tendency to be satisfied with or by nonsense. But the (part of) me that judges myself flawed in this way is not the same (part of) me that is satisfied. UPDATE: After a little more thought I'm pretty sure that Mulhall is just talking about this realization that one is susceptible to this kind of flaw, and nothing more paradoxical than that. The successful reader of the Tractatus does throw the ladder away, after all, after having imagined that its sentences make sense. I don't think this would have to involve a difficulty of reality in Diamond's sense, but I suppose it might. So I have no objection here, just some temporary confusion, which has now passed.

The other thing that bothers me here is this sentence: "The very phrase “aspiring to an absolutely unconditional refusal to impose conditions on reality” is after all, itself nonsense, being constructed on the model of refusals that are context-specific, hence conditioned and relative; so if we can’t make any sense of these difficult realities of our life with words, then the philosophical practice of acknowledging them with a clear eye will inherit exactly the same riddling resistance to intelligibility that the phenomena themselves exemplify." Is "aspiring to an absolutely unconditional refusal to impose conditions on reality" really nonsense? Perhaps it is, but don't we have to do something like look at its use in order to decide the matter? (Or is that backsliding into the kind of unrealistic Wittgensteinianism (Mulhall's) Diamond wants to get away from?) If it is nonsense, can we tell this just by noting that it is constructed on the model of refusals that are context-specific? And is it so modeled?

"Absolutely unconditional refusal" sounds like a normal bit of English to me. "I absolutely, unconditionally refuse to let you in without a warrant." What's wrong with that? Nothing, but this is not what Mulhall is talking about. It's absolute refusal in the sense of not being context-specific that he has in mind. And, it seems worth adding, we are talking about imposing conditions not on any person but on reality. What can that mean? Well, it has to be taken as something like a metaphor. Does that make it nonsense? I wouldn't say so. But I agree with Mulhall that this kind of language (be it metaphor or nonsense) is capable of isolating us from one another, rendering us mutually incomprehensible.  I also agree with him that "the realistic spirit with which Wittgenstein works in the Investigations" is "one way in which the orientation of the happy man towards the world as such might find expression." So I don't think I have any serious disagreement with him ultimately. Perhaps all I have any difficulty with is how he gets from the beginning of these two paragraphs to their end. And that might not be worth commenting on.

The Iron Lady

I was surprised how much I liked this finely ambiguous film. Meryl Streep is famous for her ability to do accents, of course, but this is far more than a clever impersonation of Margaret Thatcher. It's somewhat sympathetic, showing Thatcher as a woman standing up to snobbish and sexist men, and a strongly pro-American woman at that, which is likely to make her popular with many of the people who see this film (i.e. Americans). But it also suggests that her "grocer's daughter" economics really might have been simplistic, that her electoral success was largely luck (if deciding to fight and then winning the Falklands war counts as luck), and that she sacrificed her family for her own ambition. The hero of the film, whether or not he was in real life, is her husband Dennis. Much of the film consists of Thatcher in a very mild kind of hell, house-bound, drinking too much, and accompanied only by the friendly ghost of Dennis, whom we see her sometimes ignoring while he was alive (in a series of flashbacks). When his business and health are going badly and he wants sympathy she can only feel excitement at her decision to try to become leader of her party. Her children go similarly neglected. In retirement all she seems to want is her family's presence, but they have died, or moved to South Africa, or are shut out by her mental deterioration. There is no doubt that she loves her family, and they certainly seem to love her, but there is a certain aptness in the champion of self-reliance finding herself left all alone.

Is this really a hell? As I say, if it is then it's a very mild kind. But I always think of Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus  when I think of hell. Faustus asks him how he is able to be on Earth with Faustus if he is a demon. Shouldn't he be in hell? Mephistopheles replies that he is in hell, because he is separated from God. Thatcher wants only to be with Dennis, and he both is and is not with her. Her options are insanely believing that Dennis is there and sanely knowing that he is not. That seems like a kind of hell to me.

Is it deserved? The film doesn't say. She is presented about as sympathetically as possible, but still perhaps a little too single-minded. In her wardrobe the clothes are all shades of blue, suggesting some imaginative limitation. Several references are made to Irish terrorists opposing her and her government, and it is never suggested that these terrorists don't represent the views of the Irish as a whole. I imagine that this might incline many Americans to be somewhat ambivalent, however much they oppose terrorism. And we see various crowds shouting abuse at her and being violent. There are also hints of something nastier than we actually see. At one point we see a book about Bismarck lying around. There is also a portrait hanging up that appears to show a man in a German military uniform. (Or is he wearing a Maltese cross rather than the iron cross? It's probably someone famous who I have failed to recognize.) Not all German military men are Nazis, of course, and Bismarck was around at the wrong time to even possibly be a Nazi. But I don't think I'm alone in tending to think of Nazis when I think of German military power. There are also a couple of references to South Africa, which was still practicing apartheid at that time, as a place the Thatchers seem to like to go. And Dennis puts on a turban to do a "funny" impression of an Indian. The film certainly does not say that Thatcher is a racist or a fascist, but there are hints that she might be.

On the other hand, when she is first elected the trade unions appear to be out of control, bringing the country almost to its knees. So it's easy to think that something radical had to be done. But then events just sort of unfold. Argentina invades the Falklands for reasons of its own. Prosperity comes in the 1980s, but no explicit connection between this and Thatcher's policies is made in the film. And there are riots against the poll tax, which she is shown defending. In the end I think you are left with the feeling that the times called for something to be done and for someone who would do it, someone who was not afraid the rock the boat. Thatcher was just that kind of person, and reaped the benefits as well as paying the price. Hers were ideas whose time had come. Although, as Larkin said, an idea whose time has come might not be any good.  

Moral expertise

Linking to a paper on the moral intuitions of philosophers, Brian Leiter asks whether there are expert moral intuitions and answers "probably not." I agree with what I think he means, that philosophers cannot be relied upon to have better intuitions than other people. In that sense there are no moral experts. But I think there are such experts in two other senses.

There is, I believe, such a thing as wisdom, and this is often concentrated in religious traditions. So I would expect the Dalai Lama and the Pope to have better moral intuitions than people picked at random. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, and perhaps it would be easy to find religious leaders who are bad people. But my point is really just that not everyone is equal when it comes to wisdom, and that this is relevant with regard to mortal intuitions. The wise are likely to have better intuitions than the rest of us. In that sense there are expert moral intuitions.

Possibly related to this is the fear I feel when I find out that courses on ethics are being taught by people with no philosophical training. Philosophers can certainly develop and encourage bad ways of thinking about ethics, but there are at least some pits that they are unlikely to fall into, and that can be hard for others to avoid, e.g. crude forms of relativism and subjectivism. In that sense I think philosophers do have a kind of expertise.

Following the link Leiter provided led me to this paper on human rights, which looks misguided in a way that I think most philosophers would avoid. The abstract, in part, reads:

A striking feature of contemporary human rights scholarship is the extent to which it has turned its back on the idea that human rights can grounded in a theory of human nature. Philosophers, social scientists, and political and legal theorists thus frequently assert that the classical Enlightenment project of supplying a naturalistic foundation for human rights is dead. The main purpose of this contribution to a new book of essays on human rights is to rebut this pervasive skepticism. Drawing on recent work in the cognitive science of moral judgment, I defend one of the critical premises of ancient philosophy, Enlightenment Rationalism and the modern human rights movement alike: that human beings are moral and political animals, who are endowed with a moral faculty or sense of justice. The chapter thereby seeks to offer a new perspective on an old and venerable argument about the naturalistic foundation of human rights.

This new perspective begins from the observation that whether human beings possess a common moral faculty is not primarily a philosophical, political, or theological question, but an empirical question that belongs in principle in the cognitive and brain sciences, broadly construed. The confident assertions of skeptics such as Michael Ignatieff, Richard Rorty, Gilbert Ryle, Alasdair MacIntyre, Sigmund Freud, Ruth Benedict, Richard Posner, Robert Bork, and many other writers notwithstanding, one cannot therefore simply decide the matter from the armchair. On the contrary, probative evidence and sound scientific argument must be brought to bear. [...]

... classical accounts typically rest on the claim that an innate moral faculty and with it principles of justice, fairness, empathy, and solidarity are written into the very frame of human nature. These themes were particularly influential during the Enlightenment, when the modern human rights movement first emerged. It is precisely this set of ideas that modern cognitive science, liberated from the crippling methodological restrictions of positivism, behaviorism, historicism, and other discredited theoretical frameworks, has recently begun to explicate and to a substantial extent verify. This new trend in the science of human nature, I suggest, has potentially profound implications for the theory and practice of universal human rights.    

One mistake that might be here (I'd have to read the whole paper to tell) is that of thinking that a common faculty of moral judgment would give human beings a special moral status. But surely having the ability to discern moral value is not the same thing as having moral value itself. So if human beings have rights it can't (simply and straightforwardly) be because we have a moral faculty.

Another apparent mistake is the idea that anything about ethics, anything normative, would follow from a discovery about human brains, such as a discovery that they have an innate sense of fairness. From "human beings have an innate tendency to x" it does not follow that x is good. What we naturally consider fair or just might not be fair or just. Mill points this out, I think, in Utilitarianism. Familiarity with that kind of insight is the kind of expertise that moral philosophers have, and that others often appear to lack.

This point might seem to be the same as the point in the paragraph before it, but it's not. Even if we have the ability to tell what really is just I don't think it follows immediately that we have any moral value ourselves. The ability to tell what is right is a good thing, of course, so we might have value just as possessors of this ability. But this value might not be very great, for instance if we never use our ability for good, or if telling what is right and what is wrong is supremely easy for every being, so that beings that have the ability to do so are nothing special. Perhaps more to the point, from the fact that a being can tell what is just it does not follow that one must not, say, beat or enslave that being.

Well, that's probably enough for a critique of a paper that I haven't read. The key mistake I think is here:

whether human beings possess a common moral faculty is not primarily a philosophical, political, or theological question, but an empirical question that belongs in principle in the cognitive and brain sciences, broadly construed

The empirical question is whether human beings possess a "moral faculty," i.e. something that scientists call a moral faculty.  Whether they possess a moral faculty (i.e. whether this faculty, if it exists, actually identifies what is right) is a question for ethicists, i.e. moral philosophers, i.e. philosophers. These philosophers might well include scientists. Indeed, they include everyone who thinks about what is right and what is wrong. But doing that is not "an empirical question that belongs in principle in the cognitive and brain sciences, broadly construed." 


The author of the article wants to bring together work in several disciplines, "including experimental philosophy, developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, primatology, anthropology, comparative criminal law, and other fields." Good reason to be suspicious of experimental philosophy is given by Lars Hertzberg here. 

Roman holiday

Part of me feels as though it is falling down stairs whenever a well known philosopher asks on his blog for advice on what to see and what fabulous restaurants to eat at when visiting some glamorous place. (Envy is its own punishment, I suppose.) So I am aware of the danger in asking this, but here goes anyway. I'm going on vacation with my family to Rome next month. If anyone reading this has advice, please feel free to share it.

I'm thinking maybe this itinerary: http://www.italylogue.com/planning-a-trip/itinerary-for-5-days-in-rome.html with Ostia Antica instead of Pompeii, and as many of the "weird things to do in Rome" as we can manage. Visiting the Vatican sounds unpleasant but necessary. I'd be especially interested in hearing solutions to this dilemma. Surely the "city of iniquity" is a must-see? 

Primitive painters

In case you missed it, Tommi Uschanov quotes Angela Carter in comments on this post:

A very nice man who edits a magazine called Rabies came and did a modest Verlaine. He performed a poem containing a variety of farmyard impressions. We all liked it very much but afterwards a crisp, grey-haired lady put us down terribly by saying: "I suppose he thinks we don't know what Dada is in Ilkley." She turned out to be a marvellous primitive painter. She was mad as fire about the way people like me sneered at people like her - "little old ladies", she said. "They go on and on about little old ladies not knowing nothing about anything." She had a painting of a waterfall done in silver paint. She said it had been especially difficult to do, since she was trying to get the sound.

And he links to the longer essay from which this comes, in which I found these great lines:

Jean and I soon discovered the Oxfam shop and the Shelter shop and combed them, exclaiming. Nothing but good tweed, sturdy jersey; name brands. I had spent the money I’d earmarked for a winter coat on Barbara Whalley’s paintings but, lo and behold, I managed to purchase a square-cut early sixties coat in a fabric we used to call poodle cloth for the price of a kebab and chips in The Smoke.

The lady volunteer at the tea bar in the festival club admired it, but she said she herself never dared buy anything from the Shelter shop — though often tempted — for fear she might meet its donor in the street when she was wearing it. That is what I call real life. You could write like Balzac if you lived in a town like that. Indeed, it would require the intransigence of a Brontë not to write like Balzac in a town like that. 

What follows is not much of a video, but a tremendous song (especially once Elizabeth Fraser comes in, around 1:40).

Anxiety and influence

Over at Quantum Est In Rebus Inane there's a nice question:

What writer (and by that I mean anyone who writes, whether literature, philosophy, history … whatever) do you most wish you could successfully reduplicate as a writer?

Having once deleted my answer through sheer absent-mindedness and once lost it through WordPress not liking my combination of email address and username, I am afraid to try again. So I'll post a version of my comment here, and perhaps cut and paste it over there when my courage returns.

What I wanted to say is that I don't want to copy anyone else's style, but that I wish I had the ability to do so. Cavell, for instance, has a style that wonderfully allows him to have his own voice while still doing philosophy. But it would be a disaster if I tried to copy him. Perhaps others can do so successfully, either by recreating what Cavell does or by producing something new by attempting to reproduce his style. Mostly I try to write plainly, influenced to varying degrees by professional norms, Orwell, and Simone Weil (as well as a sense of my own limitations). But I do sometimes try to personalize my writing by attempting humor (probably a bad idea) and making references to things I like. One of these is Larkin's poetry, and I have had lines from his poems in mind at times while writing, for instance "If I were called in to construct a religion I should make use of water".

On the other hand, I also wish I made use of more words than I generally do, and had the ability to keep multiple ideas in the air at the same time. It would be nice to be able to write as cleverly as Chesterton or De Quincey.

Chesterton: Among the bewildering welter of fallacies which Mr. Shaw has just given us, I prefer to deal first with the simplest. When Mr. Shaw refrains from hitting me over the head with his umbrella, the real reason–apart from his real kindness of heart, which makes him tolerant of the humblest of the creatures of God–is not because he does not own his umbrella, but because he does not own my head. As I am still in possession of that imperfect organ, I will proceed to use it to the confutation of some of his other fallacies.   

De Quincey: Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent drapery” which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them; accordingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers: and for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent and self-respecting part of society, we must look to French literature, or to that part of the German which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French.

To be able to write like Cavell, Chesterton, and De Quincey, but to end up, by choice, writing like Larkin might be the best of all possible worlds. Chesterton writes with energy and wit, and De Quincey is a rogue. He sounds like Captain Haddock when he talks about demireps and adventurers, and his anti-French ranting is bracingly crude. On its own it would be dull and unpleasant, but its a nice contrast with his baroque sentence-structure and vocabulary. (That is, the contrast is nice; it's not both a contrast and nice.) To be a well-read, quick-witted cross between Santa Claus and Jack Sparrow who writes and speaks with a deceptive simplicity seems pretty desirable to me. (As does doing just about anything but grading papers right now.)