A Philosophic Crank Immortalized

“Among the philosophic cranks of my acquaintance in the past was a lady all the tenets of whose system I have forgotten except one.  Had she been born in the Ionian archipelago some three thousand years ago, that one doctrine would probably have made her name sure of a place in every university curriculum and examination paper. The world, she said, is composed of only two elements, the Thick, namely, and the Thin.”   -- William James.

There’s a lot to like about this passage.  There is, to begin, the mild streak of misanthropy. James’ prose often gives you the sense that he did not suffer fools gladly, and someone of his prominence must certainly have heard from a lot of “philosophic cranks” out to sell their own brand of snake oil.

Secondly, though, and somewhat at odds with that: there’s a love of human variety. This woman was a “crank,” but she was a crank whose silly idea sticks in his mind, and might in the right time and place have made her famous.

Third, there is the point of it. For James, the distinction between thick and thin is critical in examining philosophies. Some are thin – they seem to proceed entirely by logic chopping, by the dance of bloodless categories. Such is the vice of intellectualism. Other philosophies are thick – they bring in the empirical world at every turn – and they draw James’ admiration.  He uses this anonymous woman’s distinction to introduce the works of Fechner, and the remainder of that chapter tells of his admiration for Fechner’s mind as a “multitudinously organized cross-roads of truth.”

It is the distinction, in short, between the hedgehog and the fox.      

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis VIII

Kane’s chapter 10 is called “Objections and Replies.” The objections that he surveys here are from “astute and persistent critics of my view” as expressed in earlier publications, “to whom I am indebted for waking me from many a dogmatic slumber.”

I won’t go through the objections and his replies for you. They expand but marginally on the argument I’ve already presented. I will note, though, that one of the objections forces Kane to expand upon the quantum-theoretical gist of his own argument on the way "down the mountain." Could there be two people with exactly the same history, biochemistry, etc., whose deliberations on exactly the same point come to contrary conclusions? In a footnote, he explains:

“A natural objection here would be that the quantum-wave functions of the brains of the two persons would be exactly the same … combinations of the wave functions of their component particles. But these wave functions are abstract descriptions of the real brains that do not tell us what the exact positions and momenta of the component particles are. Rather they yield various probabilities that the particles will have such-and-such positions and momenta.” So, yes, so far as we know, this is possible. Just as it’s possible that in one context Schrodinger’s cat is dead and in another exactly identical context the cat is still alive when the lid is opened.

In his conclusion, chapter 11, Kane seeks to “situate the debates about free will … within broader intellectual currents of the late twentieth century and of the modern era in philosophy generally.”

Kane returns here to Walden Two, the B.F. Skinner utopia that many readers (Kane amongst them) see as an unintended dystopia. In the story, a philosopher named Castle asks some skeptical questions of the utopia’s leader, Frazier. Frazer says that scientists now know what the good life is, so it would be wrong to refuse to condition people into leading it. Castle asks, then: what is the good life?

Skinner/Frazier answers: It is a lengthy answer, beginning at p. 146 of the book and continuing into page 149. There are five points to the good life: physical and psychological health, a minimum of unpleasant labor, opportunities to exercise talents, satisfying personal contacts, and necessary opportunities for relaxation. There need be no philosophical explanation behind this list, in fact (Frazier says) efforts to get behind it philosophically are misguided, like “a centipede trying to decide how to walk,” when the thing to do is just walk.

“This response by Frazier temporarily silences poor Castle,” as Kane observers. But Kane comes to Castle’s aid. Castle's question is unanswered, and is unanswered for a reason that even the most practical of caterpillars should not ignore. The good life, including each of those five attractive things, might for all we know be satisfied in any of several or an “indefinite number” of different ways. Further, those different ways might well conflict with one another as Isaiah Berlin suggested in his writing about “value pluralism.” We might lose one way of satisfying these requirements for the good life as we grasp for another.

The idea of free will as Kane has expounded it, though, is inherently a “value experimental” idea. It suggests that we can and do remake ourselves, in ways that determine which values, in a world of competing value/projects, we will pursue. It is a justified rebuke to Skinner’s value monism.   

With that rebuke we may fittingly and freely end.

The Significance of Free Will, Exegesis VII

After presenting a view of self-forming willings (SFWs) that involves "chaos, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and neural networks," Kane presents a typology of such SFWs.

There are SFWs: of moral deliberation, where the indeterminacy lies between duty on the one hand and self interest on the other; of prudential deliberation; where it lies between long-term goals and present satisfaction; and the sustaining of attention, where it lies between the performance of an arduous task on the one hand and various “fears, inhibitions, aversions, and other countervailing inclinations” on the other.

I have to say I don’t see the point of this typology. From a psychological point of view, it may well be that the third type is the fundamental one, and the other two are only manifestations thereof. And why should the psychological point of view not also be that of the philosopher in such a matter? 

Take one of James’ examples: “The exhausted sailor on a wreck has a will which is obstructed. One of his ideas is that of his sore hands, of the nameless exhaustion of his whole frame which the act of farther pumping involves, and of the deliciousness of sinking into sleep. The other is that of the hungry sea ingulfing him. ‘Rather the aching toil!’ he says; and it becomes reality then, in spite of the inhibiting influence of the relatively luxurious sensations which he gets from lying still.”  

This example fits all the items that Kane wants kept distinct. The sailor is doing his duty to his fellow crew members, to the captain, to any passengers on board, etc. It would be selfish for him to fall asleep while he could continue to pump out water during this crisis – it would mean that if he lived it would be by the exertions of others, made more burdensome by his default. Thus, it fits Kane’s definition of an SFW of moral deliberation. Yet from the point of view of prudential deliberation, our sailor cannot be confident he would survive if he did not keep up his own efforts –he improves his own chances by doing so, however taxing it is. Thus, it fits Kane’s definition of prudential deliberation. Yet it was introduced by James into his great work on psychology specifically to illustrate the act of sustaining attention, which Kane lists as a third type of SFW.  Our sailor sustains his attention upon the “hungry sea,” and thus he keeps on with his pumping.

Assuming Kane is right about everything else (and I am at least sympathetic with him on everything else) why not just regard that matter of sustaining attention as the Ur-SFW? And others not as other types but as expressions or consequences thereof?  

We have nearly completed our project of summarizing Kane’s book, one that has required a more sustained focusing of attention on our part than is the custom for blogs, so far as I know the customs of this tribe.

Tomorrow, we shall complete this survey, with a view of Kane’s last two chapters. On Sunday, (after a Saturday diversion) we shall wrap it all up, summarizing our summary if you will.

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis V

Here's the final question we have to answer in order to establish the mutual incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism, on Kane's understanding: "Why do we, or should we, want to possess a kind of freedom ... that requires UR (as well as AP-for-some-free-actions) .... What is so important about ultimate responsibility that should make a freedom requiring it 'worth wanting'?"

Kane responds by rehearsing somewhat familiar arguments to the effect that this UR + AP freedom "is necessary for the possession of many other goods such as genuine creativity, autonomy, desert and the like." But he acknowledges that compatibilists can usually redefine creativity, autonomy, etc. in their own favored ways, ways that don't require this UR/AP combination. So, Kane asks: how break the deadlock?

He answers in a passage that reminds me a bit of Jean Piaget, a passage making recourse to the development of human ideas of selfhood, human self-understanding, from infancy to adulthood. Infants begin to perceive the difference of self and not-self. As humans grow, we develop ever more sophisticated versions of that distinction, at each stage preserving "a remnant of the idea that we are independent sources of activity or motion in the world."

An incompatibilist view of freedom in full metaphysical Magilla sense, then, is the natural culmination of that struggle that began in the cradle. It is what the toddler means to say when her body language tells Mom, "Unhand me, I want to do this walking thing on my own!"

What determinism in either hard or soft form can never do is accomodate our primordial desire to be a somebody whose contribution to the world is one' s own, which in turn is connected to "higher aspirations in human beings toward a worth for their existence that transcends transitory satisfactions."

Welcome to the top of the mountain.  Now: can Kane get us down?

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis IV

Last week we had reached the point of Kane's argument at which he had decided that the issue of the presence of alternative possibilities (AP) is not sufficient in explaining incompatibilism. He needed to invoke another intuition: that of ultimate responsibility (UR).

In what sense, if any, is the willer of an act the one ultimately responsible for that act?

As to moral responsibility, a classical statement of what amounts to a compatibilist position comes from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, and Kane plays against Frankfurt through much of Kane's chapter 5. Frankfurt, in a 1971 essay, observed that compulsive behavior is a threat to some accounts of free will. If I am addicted to nicotine it certainly doesn't seem to me that my reaching for a cigarette is a free act.

Such reflections led Frankfurt to distinguish between first-order and second-order desires. My first-order desire is to get a quick smoke, to satisfy my immediate need for a fix. Beyond that, I may reflect about such compulsions, and I may be either content with my first-order desires or in rebellion against them. An addict who is unhappy about the situation doesn't "have the will he wants to have."

From this, we get a certain conception of freedom. A person will be said to "act freely" in the sense pertinent to moral responsibility, when that person's second-order volitions -- and third or fourth oreder if you like -- are all in accord with the first-order desires and the actual actions based thereon.

Kane's words here: "Though Frankfurt is reluctant to call himself a compatibilist or incompatibilist, it is clear that one of his motives was to offer a demystified account of freedom of will that would not commit one to the excesses of traditional libertarian views....As a consequence, theories of hierarchical motivation like his have been developed by ... others to defend compatibilist views of freedom and autonomy."

Yet Kane finds such arguments for compatibilism unsatisfactory. There is plenty of room, he says, for covert non-constraining controls (CNC) that would leave the objects of control in the full confidence that their whole hierarchy of wills or volitions was lined up properly -- yet which would leave ultimate responsibility in the hands of the controller, like a cult leader, or the psychologists in charge of Walden Two.

"At the very highest level of sophistication one might imagine God doing the controlling, since the problems posed by [subtle] control have their theological counterparts in problems of devine predestnation or foreordination."

We have ultimate responsibility for our own actions, he concludes, if and only if we have, at least now and then, self-creating or self-forming actions.

So, are we at the top of incompatibilist mountain yet, and can we start downward, worrying about how this self-formation actually happens, if it does? No ... there is one more point to cover before we get to the summit. I'll hold this off until tomorrow.

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis III

Chapter 4 continues our discussion of the notion of alternative possibilities (AP) as critical to freedom and, thus, moral responsibility.

Kane cites a discussion by Peter van Inwagen, who wrote, "If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born....Therefore the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us." The point is that we would then have no power to do anything deserving praise or blame.

This is called the "consequence" argument. Against such arguments, compatibilists often contend that we are free in any circumstance in which we "could have done" X had we wanted to do X. I'm using quote marks because this is headed in an ordinary-language direction. It doesn't matter that the fact that we didn't want to do X is a consequence of other facts back to the Big Bang  -- what matters is simply that in a range of cases we do what we want, for good or ill.  Thus, we have the "power" to do right or wrong after all.

Kane thinks that Inwagen's argument is a good one, although not decisive, and the counters to it depend upon unpersuasive non-intuitive usage of ordinary-language words like "could have" or "power." Following a suggestion in an essay by quintessential ordinary-langauge philosopher J.L. Austin, Kane asks us to think a golfer on the green lining up a three-foot putt.

This golfer has made three-foot putts before. He has also missed from that distance. Indeed, you can get elaborate here: he has made putts at three feet with slants of the ground comparable to this, wind conditions etc., comparable to this, etc. -- and, in his long golfing career, he has also sometimes missed them. This is a level fo difficulty beyond a predictable gimme but well short of hopelessness for him.

Now, in ordinary language, we would happily say that our golfer has the power to make the putt. But if he misses, we will not treat this as proof that he didn't want to make the putt. Thus, the significance of terms like "power" are not very closely tied to the "could have done X if he wanted to" conditionals employed by Inwagen's adversaries. Arguments that rely on their synonymity, then, fail, and Inwagen's case for incompatibilism looks plausible again.

Plausible but, in Kane's eyes, not dispositive. To get beyond the impasse between compatibilist intuitions and incompatibilist intuitions, we have to get beyond the notion of AP. There is another intuitive characteristic of freedom we have to bring in as a supplement at this point: the idea that in some sense I am the one with Ultimate Responsibility (UR) for my actions.

Free will consists not just in AP, nor just in UR, but in AP + UR. Arguments like Inwagen's fail to persuade because UR is left implicit, tucked inside words like "power." Hereafter, Kane vows to be explicit about it.

And here I will leave things until next week.  Happy Easter.

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis II

In his first chapter, Kane writes that he wants to keep the notion of the will as a human function, indeed as a faculty. This is itself a curious point.

Personally, I believe we can get rid of the idea of will, and that applying Ockham's razor to psychology rather demands that we do so. We call the actions on behalf of which we want to make this claim our willed or voluntary actions (as distinct from the beats of our heart, or the reflex jerk of a knee when it's tapped with the doctor's hammer). Still, the freedom of the actions of humans is the main thing, surely, and the "will" in the phrase "free will" is a convenient shortcut to denominating them, not the name of a subjective faculty.

James' admirers will remember that for James as a psychologist the will is, essentially, the act of paying attention. I get out of bed when I pay attention to my need to be out of bed, rather than to any tempting contrary thoughts about how nicely warm the blankets are.

It appears that Kane is contending otherwise, and here I suspect he errs. Furthermore, my initial guess -- without having read the whole of his book -- is that the material in which he advances his views on the nature of the "will" could come right out of the book without loss.

In his second chapter, "Responsibility," we get to the heart of the matter.  Kane discusses the "Alternative Possibilities" (AP) idea, once expressed (by Immanuel Kant) as the idea that "the act as well as its opposite must be within the power of the subject at the moment of its taking place."

Then, though, he quotes Daniel Dennett, a prominent compatibilist, making a point about Martin Luther. In connection with his break with Rome, Luther said: "Here I stand. I can do no other."
Dennett tells us that Luther wasn't denying that he was morally responsible for that break. He was saying, being Martin Luther, this is what he had to do. He was accepting and concentrating moral responsibility, not avoiding it.

Kane acknowledges the force of this point, and revises AP a bit, dropping one element of Kant's statement of it.  Kant, as you see from the quote above, said that "at the moment" of an act's taking place, the subject must have had the power to do other. Kane, agreeing with Dennett, agreeing then with Luther's self-knowledge, says that this may not be the case. We do think Luther was free when he was defying a papal commission or nailing protesting theses to a church door. But ... he was free there because at earlier moments in his life he had chosen among paths that genuinely diverged. He had voluntarily made himself the man who, at those moments, could no longer do anything else.

AP retains its plausibility in the face of such counter-examples, then, if it is applied to the whole of a life rather than separate moments, and: "Those who know something about Luther's biography know about the long period of inner turmoil and struggle he endured in the years leading up to that fateful 'Here I stand.'"

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis I

Prof. Kane was kind enough to email and tell me that I was wrong in one detail of my earlier post about his book. I gave its date of publication as 1998. I should have said 1996. The paperback edition, which is the one I own, appeared in '98.

At any rate, for today I'll simply single out one sentence from the work. Kane uses the following striking figure of speech in his introduction: "The air is cold and thin up there on Incompatibilist Mountain, and if one stays up there for any length of time without going down the other side, one's mind becomes clouded in mist and is visited by visions of noumenal selves, nonoccurent causes, transempirical egos, and other fantasies."

He is making a couple of points here. First, he is saying that a free-will incompatbilist has to make a two-part case. First, that we have deep moral intuitions with which determinism is incompatible (that is the way up the mountain). Second, that we can -- in a secular scientific manner -- construct a vision of ourselves that does justice to facts and that accomodates those moral intuitions better. That second step gets up back down the mountain to the thicker air.

The reference to "noumenal selves" of course is an allusion to Immanuel Kant. The other two references are less obviously identifiable, at least to a philosophy amateur such as myself. A little web surfing yields the secret. Non-occurent causation is an idea within the stockpile of Roderick Chisholm . The idea is this: we normally think of one event as causing another event -- the striped ball moves along the pool table until it hits the solid ball. Then the striped ball stops and the solid ball starts to move. The movement of the first caused the movement of the second. Both movements were events, i.e. they occurred.

But with human volition: do we have to say this? Can't a free-willist simply say that my action is caused by who I am? not by anything that has occurred?  And, if so, isn't this non-occurent causation, causation by a who rather than a what-happened-earlier, the essence of free will?  So Chisholm would argue. Kane is obviously signalling here that he is not making this point, that non-occurent causation ranks up there with the noumenal self as one of those ideas by which we will be afflicted if we get up the mountain but never make our way back down again.

Trans-empirical ego? That is, as you might by now have cottoned, sort of the bastard offspring of noumenal self and non-occurent cause. It is a phrase associated with John Eccles, an Australian physiologist-turned philosopher, author of How the Self Controls Its Brain (1994).  We needn't go into detail about how Eccles thinks the trans-empirical self controls the empirical brain. The point is simply that this is part of what Kane rejects. He wants to get up the mountain to an incompatibilist conception of freedom, then down the mountain again, into naturalistic explanations of psychology and choice.

Philosophy: Some Terminology Changes

By the late 19th century, philosophers had formulated three theories about the nature of truth.

Before I should say any more, I should add: they were all using the word "truth" in a way that contemporary philosophers would not. They all meant, not "truth" specifically, as a property of belief -- but KNOWLEDGE of truth, as the reason why we know truths, when we do.

The three classical theories were these: correspondence, coherence, pragmatism.

According to the correspondence theory, a belief is true when it accurately copies a fact in the world. As Wittgenstein said, in his usual straightforward style, "In order to tell whether a picture is
true or false we must compare it with reality."

The correspondence theory carried with it some pretty heavy metaphysical baggage. Suppose I'm looking at a painted portrait of John Smith. If I want to decide whether that's a "true" portrait of
John Smith, I can go up to John himself, get a good like at him, then decide whether the likeness is an accurate one.

But even then, we should say that the portrait is either realistic or not. A surrealistic portrait of John Smith, painted say by Salvador Dali, might be as "true" in its own way as anything that can come out
of a camera in the noontime sun, but it would be true in a non-copyist way.

Furthermore, that is a very bad metaphor for my efforts to know the world. After all, both the portrait and the man who sat for it are facts outside of my skull -- I have the same kind of access to the
one as to the other. An analogy to that sort of comparison gets us nowhere if what is in question is the nature of truth/knowledge about people and paintings both.

The coherence and pragmatic theories of knowledge were both efforts to get rid of the metaphysical baggage of correspondence, or the copy theory. They both said that there is something about some of my experiences, my ideas, my beliefs, etc. that makes them true -- and that something isn't a transcendence of the whole body of my experience by the way that it relates to itself, the way the parts of it relate to one another.

In the coherence view, error is inconsistency. If I could only get all my beliefs into a single coherent whole, I would know them as true -- or, strictly, I would know them as the whole single shining
body of Truth itself.

In the pragmatic view, error is failure. Beliefs guide me through experiences well or poorly, they are valuable when they lead me where I want to go, harmful when they get me lost. Truth, then, is success.

The tendency in Anglo-American philosophy since about the 1930s has been to distinguish sharply between the issue of truth and the issue of knowledge, then to render the notion of truth impoverished. To say "it is true that this computer is working" is just to say, with a little extra emphasis perhaps, that "this computer is working" -- the word "true" is the emphasis, but in terms of strict meaning its
redundant.

I've said all this before, but what I'd like to emphasize today is that it isn't only pragmatism that needs restatement in order to become comprehensible within contemporary philosophical jargon. It is each
of the original three positions. They all turn out, in 21st century terms, to have been more about knowledge -- and even more specifically one's WARRANT for a true belief -- than about truth as
such.

The correspondence theory looks backward for warrant, for evidence that the copy derives casually from the thing copied.

The coherence theory looks inward for warrant, and worries whether all parts of a world view cohere.

The pragmatic view would LIKE to look forward -- but since the success or failure of this moment's forward looks is necessarily still unsettled, it adapts by looking backward at earlier instances
of successful forward look, and imitating whatever made them succeed.

The Mereological Fallacy

Philosopher Anderson Brown contends that much of our confusion about the mind-body problem is a "mereological fallacy," a confusion about parts and wholes.

The stomach doesn't "have lunch." The stomach digests, which is part of the process, but we don't accordingly say that the stomach has lunch, and we don't think of the activity of having lunch as internal. It is a fact about our behavior.

Likewise, the brain doesn't think. Brown doesn't give a name to exactly what the brain does -- what is the equivalent of digestion here? "impulse processing"? -- but it isn't "thinking," anyway. A person thinks and, as with lunch, there is nothing internal about it.

I'll reproduce here in italics the comment I made on his site, except that I'll clean it up a bit for this blog.  I was a more-than-usually sloppy typist in the comment section of his.

I'm reminded of one aspect of Julian Jaynes' theories, in his book on the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

I don't have the book with me so I'll work from memory, and more than usually subject to correction. But Jaynes said that the "bicameral mind" was not "conscious" in the way in which we are, NOT just for reasons of neurology, but because certain metaphors hadn't come into use yet. The idea of a sort of theatre "inside" the human body -- chest or head, depending on who is writing -- started as a highly literary metaphor, and gradually became an essential part of how people saw themselves. THAT was the "breakdown" of Jaynes' title, when the metaphor became generally accepted as a literal fact. Thus, "consciousness" pulled itself into existence by imagining itself, if you will.

This seems akin to your point, except for chronology.

Yet implicit in Jaynes' account is the point that we don't really have a choice. Going back to the bicameral mind is not an option. Or, in your terminology, thinking of thought as a fact about behavior, like lunch, isn't really an option either. The notion of an inner space where we deliberate is something more than a useful fiction, it is a constitutive fiction.

Perhaps rather like the fiction that the elite group of white men that gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 had any business speaking for "We, the people" of the United States.

Soap Suds Again

I wrote a blog entry here some time ago about the "metaphysics of soap suds."

For those of you who don't want to follow links around, here is the story in brief.  A fellow asked a question in Yahoo!Answers about whether some famous philosopher had copmpared huiman thoughts to soap bubles in the wash basin of nothingness. 

I tried to help him, and found a similar quote, but it was actually describing certain intellectual hypotheses as soap bubbles, it wasn't speaking generally of human life.

More recent, I have heard, via my facebook page, from Dave Natas, who informed me that he is the guy who originally asked about that quote, and that now he has found his answer. 

He had been thinking about a quote in a book by Henry Thomas, and Thomas was describing not his own views, but his understanding of the views of David Hume.

"Subtract all the forms and colours of our so called 'certain' beliefs, and what remains? A heap of empty, random sensations whirling around endlessly like unsubstantial soap bubbles in the washbowl of nothingness."

Kant and the Austrian Economists II

Yesterday, I discussed the "Austrian" school of economics, and how it distinguishes itself from the "Chicago" school, although in the minds of the general public they are all alike free marketeers.

I ended with the observation that there is a Kantian edge to Austrian method, it treats the significance of incentives and other premises in much the way that Kant treated his synthetic a priori principles.  I am not learned enough to know whether this is a matter of direct influence, coincidence, or something else.

But the Austrian arguments I quoted yesterday do make another bell go off in my mind: Ayn Rand.

Rand, as my readers may know, was the Russian-born screenwriter-turned-novelist who became the center of an "Objectivist" movement of pop philosophy in the 1960s, an influence upon such young minds as Nathaniel Branden and Alan Greenspan, etc.  Her aphorisms are still quoted today by many free market advocates, including apparently tea partiers.

I have never been one of her admirers.  Certainly my goal in this blog, the goal of refreshing pragmatism, is not one that appeals to Objectivists.

But one fact that stands out in my own mind from the reading I've done in O-ist literature is how vituperative they are toward the memory of Immanuel Kant, and anything that they think smacks of his influence.  It is enough to say, "X sounds like Kant" to thoroughly and foundationally condemn X amongst them.

Why this vituperation?  I'm not clear.  It isn't justified by the reasons they give.  Indeed, if you read Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?," you'll find that much of it has an O-ist feel to it, beginning with the Latin motto, Sapare Aude, "Dare to Know," that Kant there takes as his own.  Dare to think for yourself! he was saying, which is exactly the daring that Objectivists generally believe their own central virtue.

Perhaps the reason for the vituperation, though, is precisely that Rand had to carve out her own space in the world of ideas in order to be seen -- in order even to see herself -- as an original thinker.  She couldn't do that by being yet another popularizer of the free-market ideas of the Austrian school.  But perhaps (a) I'm right that the Austrians were Kantians, and (b) she knew or sensed the same thing.  She might well have decided to carve out some space for herself by being the anti-Kantian Austrian!

Puzzle solved.

Some Reactions to Moore as Ethicist

I quoted last week a crucial, perhaps the crucial, passage from G.E. Moore's book Principia Ethica.

This gist of it is that goods come in two sorts: instrumental and inherent. We pursue instrumental goods so that we may secure and increase the inherent goods.

Furthermore, inherent good consists chiefly of a consciousness enjoying something outside of itself: personal relationships or beautiful objects.

Each of these is a compound whole: that they are consciousness-enjoying-X or consciousness-enjoying-Y already makes them so, and X and Y are each compounds as well. What do we mean by attributing inherent good to either of these compounds? We mean that each possesses the non-natural property that we call goodness, and that is not subject to further analyses. Goodness is in that sense a simple property, though it simply adheres in a compound, or an "organic unity" as Moore sometimes put it.

At any rate, Moore ends up with a moral objectivism. In calling something good we assign an objective character to it, and we are at least sometimes right about this.

This has all been subjected to a good deal of criticism over the intervening century plus. I'll provide a pertinent link here.

His friend Bertrand Russell agreed with Moore about much of this, at least for a time. Indeed, in the essay "The Elements of Ethics," published seven years later (1910), Russell wrote: "Good and bad are qualities which belong to objects independently of our opinions, just as much as round and square do; and when two people differ as to whether a thing is good, only one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is right."

George Santayana criticized Russell in Santayana's Winds of Doctrine (1913). Although it was directed at Russell by name, the criticism was clearly aimed at aspects of Russell's views that came from Moore. Santayana, who describes his own views as ethical skepticism, complains that "we are asked to believe" by Moore and Russell, "that good attaches to things for no reason or cause, and according to no principles of distribution; that it must be found there by a sort of receptive exploration in each separate case; in other words, that it is an absolute, not a relative thing, a primary and not a secondary property."

Addressing Russell's own chosen example, Santayana observes, "while square is always square, and round round, a thing that is round may actually be square also, if we allow it to have a little body, and to be a cylinder."

Aristotle: Some Thoughts

The combination of Aristotle’s ethics with those of Christianity is a very awkward fit. Aristotle’s ethics was all about becoming the “great-souled man.” His audience consisted of those who had the necessary preconditions for his description of the great-souled: free born, for example, and at least comfortable in material things – enough so that crass matters of trade would not concern them. If this is so for you, then you can concern yourself with the greatness of your soul in Aristotle’s sense.

“He [the great-souled man] is one who will possess beautiful and profitless things rather than profitable and useful ones,” says Aristotle.

(By the way, in the translation of the relevant passage to which I just linked you, W.D. Ross uses the adjective "proud" where a more literal translation would be "great-souled," and a flat-footed transliteration would be "magnanimous." I know no Greek myself, ancient or modern -- but these alternative renderings of the word are easy enough to find in the literature, even when directed at a popular audience. Bertrand Russell explains, in a footnote to his famous "History of Western Philosophy," that neither "magnanimous" nor "proud" quite captures Aristotle's meaning.)

Well, proud buddy, some of us need those profitable and useful things. In the way that the first disciples of Jesus needed, say, a fishing vessel and a net. These weren’t luxuries. They weren’t beautiful in the luxury-goods sense Aristotle had in mind. So the first disciples of Jesus were not even in Aristotle's chosen audience.

A little later, still describing his protagonist, Ari writes that he will walk in slow steps, with “a deep voice and a level utterance; for the man who takes few things seriously is not likely to be hurried, nor the man who thinks nothing great to be excited, while a shrill voice and a rapid gait are the results of hurry and excitement.”


One wonders how this guy ever got his admission ticket to the Great Philosophers’ Club?

It doesn't seem to me that this guy ended up with a good referential morality for anything but the ruling elite, those who never had to adopt a rapid gait because someone else was doing all the work for them.

Indeed, although Aristotle is sometimes used as a figure of contrast to Plato, the contrast is not really as marked as often thought. Consider politics. Plato famously devised a three-class theory of the City (aka the State). At the top are the rulers, who should also be philosophers. In the middle are administrators and the military, whose guiding virtue must be bravery, and at the bottom are slaves and working free people who must actually ... you know ... do productive stuff. Their passions are dangerous so their guiding virtue must be obediance. Consider Dorothy's three friends on the way to the Emerald City, and you have the gist of this class structure. But Dorothy, with good Kansas/American sentiments, played no favorites among them. (And doesn't she say, in the balloon-launch scene, that she loved the Tinman best? An inversion of Platonism, then.)

Anyway, it seems to me that Aristotle adopted his teacher's politics without much change, except that he shrunk its geographical scale from the city to the estate. Consider a working estate in the countryside outside of Athens. There is the magnanimous man who owns the place, and who is a philosopher who has studied Aristotle and knows that he should walk slowly and buy beautiful trinkets for his home. He is top dog. Beneath him are his wife and children, and perhaps a hired estate manager, who must administer the place on his behalf. Because he's too wrapped up in magnaminity to do such things himself. Beneath them are the manual laborers, whether freeborn or chattel, and beneath them the beasts of the field.

This has nothing to do with Christianity, which was preached first to shepherds tending their beasts in the field. I don't imagine those shepherds had a lot of beautiful and useless things.

That some bright medieval thinkers managed to baptize Aristotle was a striking accident of history, a project that was also one of the borrowings of the west from the Muslim world of that time, but I can not accept what seems to be the presumption on the part of many Christians even today that it was a fortunate move.

Random Quote: History of Philosophy

Henri Bergson, CREATIVE EVOLUTION (1913).

"There is, then, immanent in the philosophy of Ideas" [Platonism and its kin], "a particular conception of causality, which it is important to bring into full light, because it is that which each of us will reach when, in order to ascend to the origin of things, he follows to the end the natural movement of the intellect....The affirmation of a reality implies the affirmation of all the degrees of reality intermediate between it and nothing. The principle is evident in the case of number: we cannot affirm the existence of the number 10 without affirming the existence of the numbers 9, 8, 7, ... , etc., -- in short of the whole interval between 10 and zero."

Emphasis in the original.

Emerson on Nature

Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay on nature begins thus:

"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes . Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?"

You can read the whole text here.

There is a paradox in quoting those famous words at this distance. If I take them to heart, if I ask you to take them to heart, then I am violating the counsel they offer. For why is Emerson not to be regarded by now as one of those sepulchred fathers he was telling us to ignore?

Still, the flow of thought is lovely, and the confidence is inspiring. "Undoubtedly, we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable." Who is it who does not at times doubt that undoubtable point?

The passage reminds me that Emerson was a frequent guest in the James home when William and Henry were boys there. Indeed, Emerson was William James' godfather. If we are going to see that connection as philosophically significant, we might look to these words: The everyman "acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth."

Josiah Royce again

Another Josiah Royce quote worth blogging, from the same book that I cited last week. Here, he is talking about different forms of Realism -- by which he means, roughly, epistemological dualism -- the view that the known (especially when it is a material something in the "external world") is utterly independent of, but causes ideas in, the knower.

His broad point is that although Realism sounds like common sense, when pressed and when a persistent mind tries to expound it systematically, it ends up someplace offensive to the very common sense that gave it birth -- it ends up giving us Leibniz' monads, or the Parmenidean One, or something else outrageous.

One of his examples of Realism/duaism comes from the Indian/Hindu philosophic tradition, the Sankhya, who appear to have been philosophic foes of the early Buddhists. But their insistence that the material objects that we sense are utterly independent of our minds led to the view that minds are utterly independent of matter, even unaffected thereby.

This, then, leads to a problem. In Western philosophy, it is a famous post-Cartesian quandry. How do we perceive anything external unless, in the act of perceiving, we are affected by what we perceive? If we are affected, dualism can't be as sharp as Royce says the Sankhya would like to make it. And if we are not affected, what does it mean to perceive or to know at all?

Royce said that the Sankhyas contend that "the soul is not only separated by a chasm from matter; it is even really unaffected by matter," and they expressed this in a favorite simile of "the red Hibiscus flower [that] is reflected in a crystal that all the while remains inwardly unaltered by the presence of the flower. The result is a theory of a sort of psycho-physical parallelism, founded, to be sure, according to the Sankhya, upon an illusion." (p. 103).

All this comes as new to me.

Josiah Royce

Two brief quotes from my reading in the early pages of THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL.

1. "You may in these region" [discussions of Being] "either think or not think the truth; but you cannot think the truth without loving it; and the dreariness which men often impute to Metaphysics, is merely the dreariness of not understanding the subject, -- a sort of dreariness for which indeed there is no help except learning to understand. In fact, no one can ever regret seeing ultimate truth. That we shall hereafter find to be, so to speak, one of the immediate implications of our very definition of Being. When people complain of philosophy as a dreary enterprise, they are then merely complaining of their own lack of philosophical insight." (pages 8-9).

2. "The difference between merely seeing your friend, or hearing his voice, and consciously or actively regarding him as your friend, and behaving toward him in a friendly way, is a difference obvious to consciousness, whatever your theory of the sources of mental activity. Now this difference between outer sense impressions, or images derived from such impressions, and active responses to sense impressions, or ideas founded upon such responses, is not merely a difference bvetween what is sometimes called the intellect, and what is called the will. For, as a fact, the intellectual life is as much bound up with our consciousness of our act as is the will." (p. 21).

The first of those points shows the difference between Royce and his mentor/friend, William James. James would have agreed, did agree, with those who thought that metaphysics -- as traditionally practiced and as practiced by Royce -- is a drary business, and he sought to build upon the human intuitions that deem it so.

The second of those points, though, shows the profound influence that the two men had upon one another, for here Royce is insisting on a characteristically Jamesian psychological observation.

Chesterton on the egg (which is an egg).

More on Chesterton. One passage often cited by his admirers comes from his book on Thomas Aquinas:

"Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other
eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God."

As usual, when someone intones a tautology, some form of "A is A," as if it is of tremendous significance, he or she is trying to sneak in a presumption. Here, Chesterton is being less sneaky than are some who use this ploy. For he's been quite open with us, earlier, about the presumption. By "egg" he means a common-sense egg, the egg that an untutored individual who isn't too much concerned about the "particular go of it" will understand to be an egg. When Chesterton says "eggs are eggs" he means that we can't or shouldn't try to get further in than that in our understanding of them. Addling one's brains in an effort to get behind the obviousness of egghood is a bad thing. That's the message here.

IMHO, that message is exactly wrong, and wisdom consists precisely of trying to go further than "an egg is an egg." To consider any more sustained inquiry a matter of "addling one's brains" is to ask that one's brains be perpetually chained by this "authority of the sense." Although we do need the sense to get started, we also need as humans to remember that the reports of the senses are seldom the end.

Top 20 Philosophers???

The history of philosophy is about the long-haul, not this month or next week, so it really doesn't matter that I'm a few months late in learning that in the spring, blogger Brian Leiter has polled his readers and listed what they believed to be the top 20 philosophers of all time.

Follow that link, and I expect many will agree with me that that is an extraordinary list. Blaise Pascal isn't there. Neither is George Berkeley. Neither is William James! The list is entirely western: No Lao-Tzu, no Buddha. And in general it seems to value the more abstract realms of philosophy (metaphysics and epistemology) over those with a more practical bent (political, social, aesthetic).

The middle three on this list -- Frege, Aquinas, and Hegel at positions 9 - 11 -- are all vastly overrated thereby.

At any rate, the test produced an intriguing series of comments, including one who apparently thinks of Socrates as a fictional character invented by Plato. He said that including them both on the list is like including both Nietzsche and Zarathustra. Cute, though I can't really buy it. Like Leiter himself, I find the first six names reasonable enough.

Still, anyone working up such a list, or even voting and thereby contributing to a list in the collectivist methodology used here, ought to confront the basic ambiguity: vote for the twenty who seem to you most nearly right? or for the twenty who seem of most world-historical significance? or some combination of the two standards?

[Edited to correct some misstatements regarding the list.]