Post Category → Philosophy

The Incarnation: A Modal Problem

A proposition is necessary if it could not have been false, contingent if it is true (or false) but might have been otherwise, possible if it is true in at least some way things could have gone, and impossible if there is no way things could have gone on which it obtains. Actuality is a separate axis: the actual is what is in fact the case as opposed to merely possible. Possible-worlds semantics (as developed by Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others) provides an elegant formulation of these relations. Imagine the totality of ways things could coherently have been: each such way is a possible world, and the actual world is just one of them. A proposition is necessary if true in every possible world, possible if true in at least one possible world, impossible if true in no possible world, and contingent if true in at least one possible world and false in others. Necessity is universal quantification over worlds, possibility is existential quantification, and actuality is indexical: it picks out this world, the one we happen to inhabit.

Johannes Climacus, in the “Interlude” of Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, operates with a version of these distinctions adapted from the work of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg. His central claim is that necessity and coming-into-existence are incompatible. Since what is necessary has no unrealized alternatives, there is nothing for a process of becoming to bring about. Whatever comes into being, by contrast, might not have done so or might have come about differently, and its actualization does eliminate alternatives. Thus everything historical is contingent in the strict modal sense even after it has happened: the fact that what’s done can’t be undone is not the same as necessity. The past is unrevisable in the actual world but remains false in countless other possible worlds, and that is enough to keep it contingent. From this Climacus infers that historical claims cannot be objects of demonstrative knowledge in the way logical or mathematical truths are. They must be taken up by belief, an organ specifically suited to apprehending the contingent with all of the uncertainty and ambiguity that entails. Continue reading →

Pluribus

A longstanding moral tradition distinguishes between mere life or life as such and the good life. The importance of this distinction is not only its content – various ideas about what the good life or human flourishing amounts to – but that facing up to the issue is an essential aspect of what makes us persons. Personhood is determined not merely by our beliefs and desires but our attitude towards our beliefs and desires, and more specifically those we reflectively or deliberately endorse. Who (as opposed to what) we are depends on what we care about. To care about something means not only that it matters, but that we want it to matter and to go on mattering, such that for it to stop mattering would constitute a change in our understanding of who we are. If I care about art, for example, the fact that art matters to me is at least partly definitive of who I am, and for art not to matter would substantially alter my identity. Human personhood is reflective and reflexive.

The “Others” don’t make the distinction between mere life and the good life or numerical versus personal identity. For them all life, from apples to ants to human beings, is equally valuable. They see nothing special about the form of life for which personhood is possible because they don’t value personhood at all – on the contrary, it stands in the way of contentedness and therefore must be abolished, which is what “joining” accomplishes. The Others illustrate Alexandre Kojève’s description of Zarathustra’s “last man”:

After the end of Man, human beings begin building their houses as beavers, making music as cicadas and frogs, playing as young mammals, and making love as adult beasts. This means one cannot say that these human animals will be happy – they will merely be content. The discourse, the Logos will disappear – human language will be like the language of bees. Not only philosophy but also Wisdom will disappear. For in these post-historical animals, there will no longer be any understanding of the World and of the self. [Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 159ff.]

C.S. Lewis’s “trousered apes” and “men without chests” (The Abolition of Man) also come to mind, along with Kierkegaard’s “aesthete” who lives a life of “lower immediacy,” drifting from pleasure to pleasure in a vain attempt to avoid boredom (Either/Or). And another Kierkegaardian concept applies, that of leveling (The Present Age). This refers to the weakening of qualitative distinctions – the idea that some things matter more and are more worth caring about than others – which are what give meaning to life. The Others have been completely leveled, such that they recognize only quantitative distinctions (the more life, any sort of life, the better). But this means that nothing can really matter to them and that they can’t care about anyone in particular.

Because we are persons who can and must relate to ourselves by taking a stand on what matters, we are prone to specifically human forms of distress: divided wills and conflicts over how to live with one another. Distress of this kind goes with the territory; it’s a feature not a bug and a central part of what it is to be human. Still, it’s understandable that some would yearn to be rid of it. The attempt to live as if this condition did not obtain and apply is what Heidegger called inauthenticity and what Sartre called bad faith.

Pluribus dramatizes the attractions and dangers of inauthenticity and the challenges and ambiguities of personhood. It illustrates the conditions required for meaningful life – reflexivity, counterfactual cognition, qualitative distinctions of value, and personhood – by depicting a form of life that doesn’t feature them. In such a life there’s no conflict, but also no meaning.

The problem is vividly demonstrated by Carol’s moment of clarity in the last episode, brought about by Zosia’s declaration that she loves Manousos in the same way she loves Carol. The love of a person, of course, is the love of a unique individual and therefore cannot possibly be “the same” as others. Zosia was in fact admitting that she loved neither Carol nor Manousos.

Although Carol is a wordsmith, she doesn’t seem to be able to put why this bothers her into words. She stutters in response to Zosia’s declaration and says “no,” but fails to articulate Zosia’s error. Instead she becomes angry and lashes out, something the Others fear but also seem not to understand. Part of Carol’s journey, I suspect, will concern whether she is able to achieve clarity about what matters to her and what such clarity will mean to her if she does achieve it.

Quora Question: What do you think about the concept of justice in Meillassoux?

Meillassoux’s concept of justice is remote from the concerns of political philosophy and closer in spirit to a religious or eschatological vision. It isn’t immediately clear how to think about it, much less what to think. It offers little guidance for the organization of institutions in the actual world, and its dependence on speculative metaphysical premises (i.e., the supposed necessity of contingency) stands in marked contrast to the Rawlsian effort to minimize such assumptions. If, as Meillassoux claims, the supreme injustice is death, it’s difficult to see what institutions could meaningfully do to address so basic a fact of the human condition. (The right to life is already reasonably well-understood; a right against death is hardly actionable.) The effect is to divert attention from the more urgent and tractable questions of distributive fairness, individual and political rights, and institutional design. One can easily imagine, moreover, that in pursuing the impossible task of overcoming death a state might trample on individual rights or neglect the needs of the less advantaged. In this sense, Meillassoux’s account seems detached from the values and conditions that matter to real persons and communities.

Quora question: What do you think of Meillassoux’s philosophy?

Anyone familiar with the post-Wittgensteinian discussion of objectivity in anglophone philosophy (from Quine, Kuhn, and Nagel to Davidson, McDowell, Brandom, and Burge) will likely regard After Finitude (2006) as taking up a problem that had long since been set aside. That tradition largely abandoned the representational dualism that opposes mind to world, whereas Meillassoux accepts it as his point of departure and seeks to break through it with his “speculative materialism.” The same will be true, I suspect, of anyone who thinks that Heidegger was on to something.

Meillassoux aims to overcome what he calls correlationism: the Kantian conviction that we can never know reality apart from its relation to thought. He argues that philosophy since Kant has been imprisoned within this correlation, and that the confinement is untenable. Consider scientific statements about events preceding life and consciousness, such as the formation of the earth billions of years ago. If correlationism were right, such statements would be meaningless because they concern a time when no correlation obtained. Yet they are meaningful and true. Hence, Meillassoux concludes, we must be able to conceive of a reality wholly independent of thought.

To achieve this goal, Meillassoux transforms what Kant called the “contingency of the empirical” into the necessity of contingency: the one thing that cannot be otherwise is that everything could be otherwise. It is necessarily the case, that is, that no law of nature is necessary. This, he believes, is a statement about the way things are independently of human cognition.

But one may argue that Meillassoux’s problem arises from a conceptual confusion. Donald Davidson, for instance, forcefully denies that we can make sense of a distinction between our “conceptual scheme” and an uninterpreted “content” or reality in itself. To compare scheme and world we must already represent the world within some scheme; thus the very idea of an external comparison is unintelligible. Yet Meillassoux presupposes precisely this distinction: either we remain inside the correlation (the “scheme”) or break through to the “absolute” (the “content”). For Davidson, that is a pseudo-dilemma. The truths of statements about the pre-human world pose no metaphysical mystery; such statements are answerable to the world through ordinary causal and linguistic constraints.

John McDowell reaches a similar verdict from another direction. McDowell criticizes the oscillation between coherentism (thought trapped within itself) and empiricism (a non-conceptual “Given”). For him, perceptual experience is already world-presenting because our conceptual capacities are shaped within the space of reasons, our “second nature.” We are not sealed off from reality by our minds; our minds just are the way reality becomes rationally available to us. Meillassoux’s conviction that objectivity requires a leap beyond the conditions of appearance therefore mistakes the very nature of experience. The world of pre-human events is not beyond our reach; rather, it is precisely what our conceptual capacities enable us to think.

Tyler Burge’s “externalism” offers a more naturalistic approach: our perceptual and cognitive capacities function properly only in causal interactions with stable surroundings. Objectivity is secured not by speculative transcendence but by the reliable operation of these capacities in a cooperative environment. Meillassoux conflates epistemic dependence with mind-dependence: from the fact that knowledge relies on our cognitive capacities, he mistakenly infers that only correlates are knowable. Yet dependence on cognitive capacities is precisely what makes knowledge of a mind-independent world possible. Furthermore, Meillassoux’s “necessity of contingency” undermines the very stability such capacities presuppose. If even logical or causal structure could collapse at any moment, then no system of representation could function reliably. His metaphysics thus defeats its own epistemic purpose.

Robert Brandom’s “inferentialism” formulates the same point in pragmatist terms. The content of a claim is its place in a network of commitments and entitlements; objectivity arises from the social practice of giving and asking for reasons. To seek a form of objectivity outside those practices is merely to misconstrue what objectivity is. The authority of our ways of knowing is normative and semantic, not dogmatic and metaphysical.

From a Heideggerian perspective, Meillassoux’s attempt to escape correlationism simply repeats the metaphysics of presence that produced correlationism in the first place. Human sense-making (Dasein) presupposes being-in-the-world, and our practical engagement with it precedes and grounds any theoretical attitude. To think we are cut off from access to the real world is already to have forgotten that reality is disclosed through existence, not grasped from outside it.

It would seem, then, that speculative realism remains bound to a picture of mind and world that much twentieth- and twenty-first century philosophy has long regarded as misconceived and unnecessary. Davidson would call the picture incoherent; McDowell would say it misconstrues experience; Burge would say it confuses cognitive dependence with subjectivism; Brandom would say it fails to understand how claims about reality acquire their content and authority; and Heidegger would say it neglects being-in-the-world.

Making a Difference

Making a difference requires accepting the world as it is, at least if the world includes what is possible as well as what is actual. Politics is commonly defined as the art of the possible, but a somewhat more precise formulation would render it as the art of making the possible actual. This means, in the first place, focusing your efforts on what is, so to speak, actually possible – and desirable.

Preventing an undesirable possibility from becoming actual is also a way of making a difference – one of the more important ones, I’d say. This too is a modally rich affair. As Tancredi Falconeri put it in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

On Sheldon S. Wolin’s Interpretation of Nietzsche

In the expanded second edition of Politics and Vision (2004) Sheldon S. Wolin devotes an entire chapter to Friedrich Nietzsche, a figure omitted from the original 1960 edition. Wolin’s Nietzsche is a deeply political thinker who would do away with liberal democracy on the grounds that it fosters a “herd mentality”: an attraction to security and docility that disguises itself as an altruistic concern for humanity.

At the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Wolin argues, is the concept of power. Nietzsche held that life itself is the “will to power,” understood as the drive to increase one’s strength and impose one’s will. In Nietzsche’s view as Wolin understands it, all human institutions are expressions of power relations, not of justice or morality. By making power the central value, Nietzsche denied the liberal democratic hope that politics could accommodate reasonable deliberation and the recognition of equal rights, instead conceiving of it as an arena of conflict, struggle, and domination.

Culture, not parliaments and certainly not bureaucracies, is according to Nietzsche the real shaper of humanity. Governance for Nietzsche could not be about law or procedure but must focus instead on whatever is required to cultivate a certain type of personality, one who is self-confident, assertive, domineering, and comfortable with his superiority to the majority. Instead of focusing on policies and principles, then, Nietzsche was concerned with the “revaluation of values.” Accordingly, he offered no vision of an adequate or ideal political association – a fatal flaw for Wolin – and instead undertook a kind of cultural revolution against modern liberalism.

Nietzsche’s celebration of strength naturally lends itself to an aristocratic politics for which “the political way of life … has never been … for the many but only for ‘the best.’” Wolin sees Nietzsche as longing for a “new elite” to reshape culture. This is part of what Wolin calls Nietzsche’s “cult of the exceptional,” the idea that human greatness is achieved only by rare individuals who are not inhibited by the “herd” and its norms. In contrast to the “last men” of modernity, who are complacent, petty, and devoid of creativity, the Übermensch represents a future type who will overcome the nihilism of the modern age by creating a new myth that celebrates domination through creative achievement.

Wolin thus portrays Nietzsche as an unrelenting critic of liberal democratic institutions. Nietzsche rejected egalitarian ideals, endorsed a politics of raw power, prioritized creative individuals over the democratic herd, and denied rational and moral constraints in favor of myth and struggle. While acknowledging the value of Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism and conformity, Wolin places far more weight on Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian and anti-rationalist stance and finds in it a dangerous repudiation of “the political” as an explicitly shared or common form of life.

Continue reading →

Deleuze and Guattari on Wolves and Wolf Packs

In “Un seul ou plusieurs loups?” (Mille Plateaux, 1980) Deleuze and Guattari claim that Freud, in his essay “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1919), fails to recognize the devenir-animal of his patient Sergei Pankejeff, a.k.a. the Wolf Man. Pankejeff had a recurring dream of being stared at by a group of wolves in a tree, and Freud wondered why there were several of them as opposed to just one. In Freud’s view dreaming of a group of wolves rather than a single wolf was a way of masking while also expressing Pankejeff’s anxiety about his father.

Deleuze and Guattari ridicule Freud’s apparent belief that the appearance of several wolves requires an explanation because, they say, “everyone knows” that wolves are always part of a “pack.” They go on to describe how exhilarating it is to be part of a pack: interacting with others who have no fixed roles, constantly on the move, at one moment straying from the group and at another merging with it, leading at times and being led at others, alert to and exploiting opportunities as they arrive, constantly improvising without a rigid hierarchy or enduring aim. While Freud sees his patient’s desire as possessive, repetitive, directed towards symbols and statuses, and linked to authority and repression as orchestrated by the Oedipal Triangle of “Mommy-Daddy-me,” what the Wolf Man really wants is to experience his ability to bring about states of affairs that enable growth and open-ended transformation in the real world.

Ironically, we now know that a wolf pack doesn’t consist of unrelated wolves competing for dominance. They are in fact families consisting of a breeding pair and multiple offspring, with a natural hierarchy and division of labor.

See L. David Mech, “Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs” (1999).

Sergei Pankajeff, Wolves Sitting in a Tree (1964).

On John Cage’s 4’33”

It stretches the concept of music beyond recognition to classify 4′33″ as a musical work. It makes much more sense to regard it as a work of performance art. However, the fact that it was created by Cage means that we inevitably think about in the context of music.

We naturally ask what was Cage’s intention, and a plausible answer is that he is drawing our attention to music – its nature and value – by denying us music. We are led to listen to the non-musical sounds in the environment with the kind of attention we normally reserve for music and to reflect on what we’re missing. The work is an opportunity to consider what we want from music.

One thing we want, typically, is to hear sounds that a composer has determined will reward our attention. Perhaps we imagine a kind of contract between us and the composer: we give the composer our time (and money), and she gives us enjoyment. In return for complete control over what we hear for the duration, we receive a meaningful expression. 4′33″ defeats these expectations – neither Cage nor the performer has any control over what we hear – and in that way makes them available for inspection. Is this “contract” the best way to imagine the relationship between composer and listener? Cage certainly didn’t think so.

According to Cage himself, 4′33″ dramatizes the distinction between traditional and modern music. He says that modern music “accepts” sounds that, when heard during the performance of traditional music, “interrupt” it. Because it consists only of such sounds, 4′33″ affords an opportunity to reflect on how our perceptions are shaped by our expectations. When we are listening to a Beethoven piano sonata, a cough is perceived as noise. When we are listening to what Cage regards as a modern performance, and certainly when we are listening to 4′33″, it is perceived as sound.

For Cage’s comments on traditional and modern music, see Conversing with Cage by Richard Kostelanetz.

Assessing Nietzsche

Nietzsche staked his reputation on the future. He believed that a great cultural upheaval was imminent and that his thought provided the resources required to make the best of it.

In some ways Nietzsche’s expectations for the future of Western civilization were borne out by the twentieth century. He said that Christian belief would decline; it did. He predicted newly destructive wars driven by ideological conflict; they came to pass. He hoped for creative geniuses who would free themselves from Christian morality and other forms of the “ascetic ideal” and create great works of art that would celebrate “this world” rather than the metaphysical “other worlds.” Here too, in my opinion, the last century did not disappoint. It would be silly to try to list the artistic accomplishments of the last 120 years. But in literature, names such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, and Wallace Stevens come to mind. In music, it’s difficult to imagine a more Dionysian composition than Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913), not to mention composers like Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. With the exception of Eliot, their works were not notably shaped by Christian morality; in fact many were inspired or influenced by Nietzsche himself. An assessment would also have to take into account the achievements of film, an art form that didn’t even exist in Nietzsche’s time.

In moral theory virtually no one working in the field relies on religious assumptions; academic moral philosophy, at least, is emphatically post-theological. It is true that most contemporary philosophers uphold the universality and objectivity of our moral obligations to one another, and Nietzsche wouldn’t approve of that. On the other hand, during the last decades of the twentieth century many philosophers (e.g. Bernard Williams and Susan Wolf) argued for a more “relaxed” understanding of the place of morality in human life, as one among other legitimate goods. Again, the influence of Nietzsche himself is at work here. In the wider moral culture, the sexual revolution beginning in the 1960s was just one expression of the emergence of a more tolerant and pluralistic atmosphere than the Victorian morality that Nietzsche found so destructive. Continue reading →

Michael Oakeshott on Conversation

The word “conversation” combines the Latin con- or com- meaning “with, together” with versare or vertere meaning “to turn, bend” to form conversation, meaning literally “to turn together” or cooperate and more specifically “to live, dwell with, keep company with,” and from the 14th century “general course of actions or habits, way of conducting oneself in the world.” In the mid-16th century, the English conversation is used to mean “informal exchange of thoughts and sentiments by spoken words,” but Cicero already used conversatio to indicate private conversation among friends as opposed to public oratory. Oratory was formal and rule-governed whereas conversation obeyed conventions of politeness but not strict rules. Conversation was important in ancient Athens and Rome and was revived by Renaissance humanism because the ability to speak well with anyone was a mark of worldliness and sophistication. Politely exploring differences such that the conversation itself was more important than any of its participants was a model for moderate political life as the alternative to revolution and anarchy. This idea was central to civic humanism and civic republicanism.

Michael Oakeshott’s view of conversation is in line with this tradition. (See his “The Place of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind.”) Conversation, he says, is what “distinguishes the civilized man from the barbarian.” The barbarian promotes his point of view and only his point of view, which is narrowly practical and concerned with survival and power. The civilized person is interested in the good things life has to offer beyond mere survival and other purely practical matters. He or she also understands that the search for good things shouldn’t depend on radically changing our conditions of existence. Carried too far, that would force one to live exclusively for the future and make it impossible to enjoy the present. A civilized person, Oakeshott says, “[a]ccepts the unavoidable conditions of life and makes the best of them.” One way of making the best of them is learning from one another about the good things life has to offer beyond mere survival. Conversation is the form this takes.

The qualities of conversation and the virtues of the conversationalist flow from its purpose. You mustn’t be exclusively or overly concerned with practical matters, and in particular you mustn’t insist that your personal practical concerns dominate the conversation (these are sure signs of barbarism). A conversation is personal: the words spoken are those of a speaker who takes personal responsibility for them and what they imply. The partners to a conversation must trust and respect one another (or at least act as if they do). They approach a theme in a variety of ways, informally trying out illustrations and hypotheses. They have no expectation that they will fully express themselves and come to a complete understanding of the topic or of one another, much less agree with one another. They don’t expect others to endorse their views and are prepared to fail to persuade, but they must also be willing to change their minds when it is reasonable to do so. Continue reading →