Schopenhauer on Music

"For music everywhere expresses only the quintessence of life and of the events taking place in it, never these themselves, and so distinctions within these do not always influence it. Precisely this universality, exclusive as it is to music, together with the most exact precision gives music its high value as the panacea for all our suffering. Thus if music ties itself too closely to words or tries to model itself on events, it is tryingf to speak a language that is not its own. Nobody has avoided this error as completely as Rossini; which is why his music speaks its own language so clearly and purely that it has no need of words at all and retains its full effect when performed in instruments alone." That sounds rather equivocal praise for Rossini, who composed for opera, i.e. specifically for words and a stage set, not the concert halls Schopenhauer seems to have in mind here.

The Significance of Free Will: Wrapping It Up

Let us go through Kane's book one more time, with appropriate links:

I bought the book because I had heard that Kane brought up to date the incompatibilist tradition of James and Isaiah Berlin.

Kane structures his own work in two parts: an ascent (showing why we have and value these strong intuitions about moral philosophy that are incompatible with determinism) and a descent (showing that indeterminism of the necessary sort may well be part of the natural physical world.)

Martin Luther was free even when, as he said, he could “do nothing else” than what he was doing. But this just means that his inability to do anything else at a given mature moment is the consequence of a long life of diverging paths at many points of which he could have done otherwise.

The issue of whether freedom and moral responsibility in strong sense of the terms are compatible with determinism necessarily brings us through some discussion of ordinary language, seeking help from that quarter. This has some interest, but is not dispositive.

The problem is brought to something of a head by B.F. Skinner’s portrayal of Walden Two, and its covert non-constraining controls on its happy campers.

We get to the top of our ascent, we understand the incompatibility of certain deep intuitions with determinism, when we come to understand our own development as individuals, from infancy onward, as ever-more-sophisticated attempts to accommodate a primordial desire.

But now, how do we get back down the mountain and find a place for this primordial desire in the real world? Consider certain critical willings as the subjective manifestation of genuine neurological uncertainties all the way down to the electron level. These are our self-forming willings (SFWs). I have presented my reasons for believing that Kane is overly elaborate  in his descriptions of the different types of SFW: that, following a cue from William James, we might better reduce them all to a single form, the sustaining of attention.

In his conclusion, Kane comes back to the writings of B.F. Skinner as a negative example, and argues that a belief in free will as a metaphysical and psychological matter may help contribute to a society that is free in the political sense.

Schopenhauer on time

"Past and future (apart from the consequences of their content) are as empty and unreal as any dream; but present is only the boundary between the two, having neither extension nor duration. In just the same way, we shall also recognize the same emptiness in all the other forms of the principle of sufficient reason and shall see that, like time, space also, and like this, everything that exists simultaneously in space and time ... is only through and for another like itself, i.e. only just as enduring."

I understand the reasoning here in broad terms. Indeed, William James' notion of the 'specious present' was developed largely as a riposte to such reasoning.

Philosophy After Aristotle

On June 11th I quoted a passage from a book by philosopher Shadworth Hodgson, TIME AND SPACE (1865). 

Here's a later passage from the same book discussing Greek philosophy after Aristotle: 

"Here the progress of speculative metaphysic was checked for many centuries.  Until Descartes, no one arose capable of carrying on the deveopment of metaphysic from the point where Aristotle left it, or proceeding to the separation of ontology from metaphysic, and educing reflection out of direct understanding."

By "the separation of ontology from metaphysic" Hodgson means roughly the separation of the question "how did the world come to be as it is?" from the question "how is it?"  A little bit later he writes, "The remaining schools of philosophy in Greece were all schools of practical philosophy, Stoic, Epicurean, Cynic, Cyrenaic, the Academies, and the Sceptics; they were not exclusively indeed but primarily and predominantly practical; speculative knowledge was not their chief purpose...."

Shadworth Hodgson

"We shall have to consider in the course of these pages whether any causal relation obtains between these two correlates, necessity and universality. For the present it is enough to explain, that no necessity can be admitted to exist in the objective world; that what we call a necessary sequence is necessary solely in reference to our understanding, because we refer the consequent to a special antecedent, and bring it thus under some law which we think of as fixed, at least so far as the particular case under consideration in concerned; and that the only thing which corresponds to our notion of necessity in nature in the phenomenon of universality."

Laws of Nature

I'm not as comfortable as are some with the phrase "laws of nature."

One way of framing the issue of "physicalism" versus various non-physicalist or dualist views of the world is to ask whether humans or something about human nature constitutes an exception to the laws of nature. If the ansawer is "no" then (runs this line of thought) you are a physicalist.

Not so fast! I have to say. The phrase "laws of nature" implies something ironclad, and this biases whatever constitutes the "physicalism" thus defined. For all we know, though, every 'law of nature' may be probabilistic. That almost certainly is the case with the second law of thermodynamics, for example. The reason heat disperses is that there are lots and lots of molecules moving about and the law of "large numbers" applies. If there is a small group of fast-moving molecules that start off as a tight knot (a hot spot, in macro terms) and a surrounding group of slower-moving molecules, (cooler surroundings) then the fast ones will disperse into the slower ones, even though some specific fast-moving molecules will be moving toward one another some of the time. At a macro level, that won't matter.

I'm out of my debt there and shouldn't go any further, but the bottom line is that the famous 2d law is a statement of probability, which at the macro level looks like an inevitability.

Suppose every law of nature, even gravity, turns out to be probabilistic. This means that we will be in a position to accept something like ideas of free will as applied to human nature without making of the human mind an "empire inside the empire." This line of thought, as you can see, points us toward Penrose, quantum computing, etc.

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.

Not all redundancy theory is alike

Deflationism as to truth is a major trend in epistemology, at least in English speaking countries, one that has lasted throughout much of the 20th century into the 21st. But let us back up a bit: century ago, a triangular debate was underway as to the Meaning of Truth. The correspondence theory, affiliated with various forms of realism about the external world, represented one corner of this triangle. The coherence theory, affiliated generally with idealism, represented another, and pragmatism the third. But the deflationists sought to ring the bell and end the fight, declaring that "truth" doesn't mean anything interesting, i.e. that the grand metaphysical puzzle of its significance is actually a hot air balloon.

Personally, my view is that deflationism is well and good, but if the air is let out of this balloon it will go somewhere else. The matters that Russell, Royce, and James debated back in the old days under the label "truth" will still have to be thrashed out under other labels.

Today, I wish simply to observe that not all deflationism is alike. One variant of deflation is the "redundancy theory of truth." According to this view, to say "it is true that the grass is green" is the same thing as to say "the grass is green," so the extra words are redundant. One of those extra redundant words, of course, is the word "true," no matter how attached to that one we tend to be. Other forms of deflationism give the concept of "truth" some minimalist function. It is not just redundancy. It is, for example, a type of performance. Or a way of creating emphasis (like using italics in the way I just did.) Still, the hot-air of metaphysics is to be deflated.

Now comes a further revelation. File this under the heading "philosophy is fractal." For it appears that not all redundancy theories of truth are alike, either. According to Pierre le Morvan here, there are at least three distinct redundancy theories: a "robust" redundancy that Morvan associates with W.E. Johnson; a skinnier redundancy that Morvan calls the "received interpretation," and an intermediate view he associates with Frank Ramsey.

His explanation of the differences among these, though, makes my brain hurt, so further into the exploration of this Mandelbrot set I will not press.

Geology as a Science

Why is it so difficult to predict earthquakes?

Ingenious scientists have been studying the matter for a long time, there is a wonderful incentive for success in this endeavor -- since many lives as well as a lot of property are threatened by the continued randomness of these planetary upheavals -- and the basic theory of plate tectonics seems to have been worked out in elaborate detail. So ... why no predictions?

Here's a column on the general point by Robert Roy Britt, managing editor of LiveScience.

But what Britt doesn't mention is the intriguing fact that geology is a science with a sample size of one. In the study of human physiology and its disorders, we can treat any human who has ever been subjected to medical study as a separate sample. From all of these samples, the relevant research community can draw important generalizations. In the study of the internal workings of the earth and what (from our puny point of view as its surface dwellers) we may call its "disorders," though, we have only the one Earth. Our knowledge of other planets is rudimentary, our knowledge of their internal workings is, I suspect, nil.

We have many observations of the earth and different earthquakes, but the multiplicity of observations doesn't make for a large sample. You can take my temperature several times, if you like. Each of those readings will be a fact about a single organism, reflecting either its equilibrium or some change in its condition over the period in which your measurements were take. There is still just the one organism.

This line of thought could lead us in any of several directions, most of them moving far beyond the quotidian difficulty in predicting earthquakes with which we began. It could lead us into metaphysics, for example, and the question of what constitutes a "thing," an "entity," even if you like a "substantial form." That is on some readings THE problem of metaphysics. But I'll leave off here for the day.

The metaphysics of soap suds

Someone in Yahoo!Answers said recently that he/she had heard of some prominent philosopher who described human thoughts as "soap suds in the washbowl of nothingness," and asked if we could come up with a name.

I haven't found that exact quote, or anything with a distiguished pedigree, but I did find the use of the imagery, an invocation of soap bubbles in 'vain casings of nothingness,' and then the use of that image as a descriptor of intellectual constructions. I found this in a book review written for Union Seminary Magazine.

This just shows how neat a project Google Books has become. It is amazing the things you can find, including a bit of perhaps overly elaborate prose styling at the start of a review written in 1890.

The imagery appears as an expression of scepticism about theories of the "Aryan race," a subject that might have seemed harmlessly academic in 1890.

The author of the book review is R.B. Woodworth, and he begins this way: "To blow a bubble requires but a pipe, a basin of soap-suds and a blower. And it is pleasant, too, to watch these vain casings of nothingness as, reflecting in their diaphanous films the varied and beautiful colors of the rainbow, they float away beyond human ken into the azure depths of the heavens.' He goes on like that for awhile before he gets to the point. Adult intellectuals too, he says, "are bubble blowers. Castles in the air delight us children of a larger growth." And so forth.

If you want to read the whole bit, go to page 303 of the volume to which I've just linked you, and partake in Mr. Woodworth's bid for immortality.

This is probably far from what the Yahoo! questioner had in mind, but I ghad fun and, hey, isn't that the point of the existence of the cosmos?

William James

Here's a passage I like from one of the better-known of James' essays: The Dilemma of Determinism.

James has at this point established what he means by "indeterminism," in contradiction to both the hard and the soft forms of determinism.

But, he asks, is indeterminism compatible with theism? If we are the creatures of an all-knowing Creator, then the knowledge of that creator of what we will do next Tuesday surely implies that on next Tuesday we will do something now already determined, doesn't it?

James replies:

"Suppose two men before a chessboard, -- the one a novice, the other an expert player of the game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what any one move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all the possible moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the novice's king."

Likewise, then, even an infinitely powerful mind could be working through time and despite indeterminist elements in a situation to achieve that Mind's end.

In a footnote, he acknowledges that this (the sort of idea that long after James' death became known as "process theology") may well be considered heterodox.

"This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of time. And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I have no reply to make....To say that time is an illusory appearance is only a roundabout manner of saying that there is no real plurality, and that the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may be its form."

A Pluralistic Universe

The title of this entry is also the title of William James' most metaphysical, most speculative, most free-ranging work.

I'll limit myself today to some observations about its structure. James defines his own position through a series of dichotomies, of either/ors if you please. The first two of them are set out clearly in the first lecture, the third appears more gradually.

There is first the question of materialism versuis some sort of supernaturalism. Philosophies of the former sort define the world "so as to leave man's soul upon it as a sort of outside passenger or alien" while supernaturalism of any variety "insists that the intimate and human must surround and underlie the brutal."
James opts for the latter. "Not to demand intimate relations with the universe, and not to wish them satisfactory, should be accounted signs of something wrong."

The second dichotomy takes place AFTER we have crossed the threshold of supernaturalism. Shall we worship a Being who transcends this world, or shall we worship the world itself as supernatural enough?

Dualistic theism or pantheism? Given the former, "Man being an outsider and a mere subject to God, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades the field. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but our magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however strange they may be,
remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations with him."

With such a God as that, James will have nothing to do. So he will be a pantheistic supernaturalist. A critic might think this an oxymoron, since if we reduce God to identity with nature, then God has ceased to be supernatural. But what James really means by supernatural, remember, is intimate, vital, non-mechanical, and what
he means by God is that something intimate, vital, etc. that infuses or surrounds all that seems external, material, mechanical, etc.

That is what it means to say that nature is itself supernatural.

Still, we can understand this God/nature in one of two ways -- monistically or pluralistically, and filling out THAT distinction, the third in the series, constitutes the heart of the book. We have to give at least our provisional, for-the-sake-of-discussion consent to the first two steps he takes even in order to understand what he is on about thereafter.

The Meaning of Life

Terrence Eagleton, a Marxist literary theorist, has written a new book on what, for those who've followed his career, is an unexpected subject.

The Meaning of Life.

http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/Religion/?view=usa&ci=9780199210701

Some of the reviews seem to regard the book as a sort of Gilbert's Outline (excuse the former law student's allusion) of the major philosophical/religious efforts to answer the ultimate question.

Actually, there are two ultimate questions, which are psychologically intertwined although logically distinct: why is there something rather than nothing? is the metaphysical question. Why (if at all) does it matter how I live my life, is a foundational/ethical question.

Let us say, for purposes of discussion that the answer to the first question is that it is just a fluke that there is something rather than nothing. Furthermore, the somethingness came into existence and will pass out of existence. Nothingness preceded it forever, nothingness will follow it, after the universe ends in a "Big Crunch," a singularity that amounts to the Big Bang run backwards.

If we gave that kind of answer to the first of those questions, wouldn't we find it difficult to give any sort of answer other than "it doesn't matter at all" to the second question.

Certainly, at the moment of the Big Crunch it won't matter how Christopher Faille or Terrence Eagleton have led their lives. So does it follow that it doesn't matter now?

Those are the questions with which, as I understand it, Eagleton is grappling. Good for him.

On Making Myself At Home

William James wrote somewhere (I'm feeling too lazy to look it up) that there is a class of cases where the word "it" has no clear antecedent, yet where this apparent ambiguity is perfectly acceptable as a matter of idiomatic English. "It is raining," after all, is a simple statement of fact. Nobody, hearing it, scratches his head and askes, "what is raining?" The phrase in question conveys the same meaning as "Rain is falling at this moment," yet conveys it in half as many syllables.

The lesson: we can't deduce a metaphysical fact from a grammatical subject.

So what of the pronoun "I" in the sentence "I think"? This is one crucial problem with Descartes' famous reasoning. The thoughts with which he tormented himself in the course of his methodical doubt, the thought that there might be a powerful evil demon, etc., and the thought "I think" itself, might all be rain, as it were, coming from no "substance" more specific than the atmosphere at large. Or much less specific than that. All we can really get from paraphrasing "cogito ergo sum" with such an understanding is this: "Thinking goes on, therefore a universe that includes thought, exists."

Okay, all of this is derivative. Not only have I stolen from James, I've stolen it from myself. I just posted the same thoughts on a listserve I run. But why should the first post on a new blog not be derivative? At least, in this way I don't set myself any impossibly high hurdle for future jumps.

I have been blogging for about a year and a half now at blog-city. Unfortunately, blog-city will cease offering us the cyber-real estate for free at the end of this year, and is already making various changes that seem designed to drive us out ahead of that. So I figured I'd begin my migration to blogspot today.