Calvinosophy

On the Concept of "Free Will"

2008-10-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

Free Will, a staple concept of philosophy — bulwark against determinism, guarantee of morality. Here, I present my view.

Firstly, let us note that the linguistic expression "free will" disguises a rhetorical trick: the amalgamation of two concepts, "freedom" and "will", whose belonging-together has been so thoroughly enmeshed in our consciousness — through the use of this very expression — that we seldom question it. But make no mistake: "freedom" and "will" are originally two distinct concepts, which have only later been unified in this chimera. Therefore, we will begin our discussion by analytically separating freedom from will, and proceed to discuss them apart.

Freedom, in turn, can be separated again into two sub-concepts. I will call them, respectively, freedom from influence and modal freedom. Freedom from influence is the freedom from — well, why not — external factors that impinge upon man from the world around him — it is the sense in which the master is "free", and the slave is not. Freedom from influence should be a rather straightforward concept in relation to our discussion, although it of course raises a torrent of questions on its own, mainly in regard to political theory.

Modal freedom, on the other hand, is something much more nebulous. It relates to the tension between the possible and the actual, between the indicative and the subjunctive (thus "modal"). It is the extent to which things could have been different — more precisely, the extent to which you could have acted differently. It is the basis of choice (a person doing something is said to have chosen to do this if and only if he could have acted differently), and choice, in turn, is the basis for all moral reasoning (a person is morally responsible for his actions if and only if he chose to act in that way, and to act morally is to make moral choices). It seems safe to assume that when people speak of "free will", this is the kind of freedom they have in mind.

The concept of modal freedom is tricky, of course, because we have no clear understanding of what it means that something "could have been different". Indeed, a materialist determinist would hold that since everything in the universe is subjected to causal, physical laws, which allow for only one effect for each possible cause, nothing could ever "have been different" and choice is ultimately an illusion. One problem with determining whether something "could have been different" is, of course, that we have no positive way of determining whether things could, indeed, have been different. We cannot inspect actual reality in order to determine the nature of the possible realities we have forfeited in the course of making this particular actuality actual. But we do have the concepts of possibility and actuality. It is reasonable to assume that they correspond to some aspect of human existence, or otherwise it is hard to see how we could have come up with them to begin with.

However, our purpose here is not to solve once and for all the riddle of freedom, but only to analyze the concept of "free will". Let us, therefore, content ourselves with the above sketch of freedom for nonce, and turn to the other concept, will. The philosopher that have, above all others, given will a mustache-adorned face is of course Friedrich Nietzsche. To Nietzsche, everything is will. Knowledge is will. Morals are will. Truth is will. And it is not any old kind of will, but the will to power.

The relationship Nietzsche establishes between will and freedom is interesting to discuss, because it flies in the face of the dogma implicit in the phrase "free will". According to Nietzsche, will is everything but free — if we understand "free" according to the concept of modal freedom. Indeed, the idea that a person might act differently than how his will impels him, Nietzsche views as a philosophical mystification. He writes thus in "On the Genealogy of Morals":

To demand of strength that it shall not appear as strength, that it shall not be a will to conquer, to subjugate, to make itself master over others, that it shall not be a longing for enemies, opposition, triumph — this is as unreasonable as to demand of weakness that it shall appear as strength. A certain quantity of strength is an exactly equivalent amount of drive, will, action — more correctly, it is nothing but this drive, will, desire for action. And only through language's seduction (and the fundamental delusions of our reason, petrified in language), which conceives and misconceives of all action as conditioned by an actor, a "subject", can it look like if it were different. For in the same way that people distinguish the lightning from the thundering, and conceives of the latter as an action, the action of a subject called "the lightning", so popular morals distinguish strength from the manifestations of strength, as if there were, behind the strong, a substrate with the freedom to manifest itself as strength or not to. But there is no such substrate; there is no "being" behind the action, the practice, the becoming. (Translated from my Swedish edition of "On the Genealogy of Morals", Om moralens härstamning, 1965, pp 46 f.)

I am willing to buy Nietzsche's point here, at least partially. When someone has a will (i e, a desires something, wants something), and is strong enough to see his will through (i e, "free" in the sense of "freedom from influence")... in what way could he have "acted differently"? How is it meaningful to talk of someone wanting to do something, and having the means to do so, and still not do it? If we were confronted with such a person, we would justly wonder, did he want to do it? And we would start to suspect that maybe he wasn't so sure what he wanted.

Following this line of thought, however, we quickly run into problems, because we have no difficulty imagining a situation where we might want to do something and be able to do it, and still not do it, perhaps because conscience got the better of us or because we worried about the consequences, or what have you. It is possible to meet these problems by saying, "well, if your conscience got in the way, then you really wanted to be a nice guy more than you wanted to do whatever it was that you were thinking about", or "well, if you worried about the consequences then maybe you weren't as free from influence as you thought"... but these objections tend soon to become mere wordplay. How far can you move from the normal use of words like "wanted to" and "able to" before your words lose all meaning?

Still, we have to agree with Nietzsche that whatever it is that is free, it ain't will. Will is directed towards some definite purpose. Will compels, and the stronger you want something, the less likely you are to "choose differently". We must therefore reject the standard association of freedom and will. Freedom, in so far as it exists at all, stands in an opposite relationship to will. If anything is free, it is rather undecidedness. We become aware of our freedom when we don't really know what we want. Freedom confronts us, not in will, but in anxiety — what the Germans call Angst and we Swedes denote by the delightful word ångest.

Anxiety confronts us most acutely when we have to make a hard choice and do not know which alternative to choose. There might be several reasons for this difficulty. The choice might be between moral principles and pragmatic gain, for instance. Or it might simply be a gamble, made against scant background knowledge. The first possibility might certainly give us a clue to the relationship between freedom and morality. The second possibility highlights the fundamental role of ignorance in the dynamics of freedom. Basically, the more we know, the surer we are. This idea, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to a possible account of the "could have been different" that haunted us in the above discussion — that things "could have been different" only in so far as we are ignorant of the fact that, no, they really couldn't. This account gives ignorance a constitutive role in the phenomenon of human freedom, which might seem rather depressing for some.

The Purpose of Philosophy; Reloaded

2008-09-24T06:34:00.000-07:00

Lately, I have spent a lot of time pondering the purpose of philosophy. Not the philosophical subject matter per se, but the relevance of philosophical activity in the larger context of human praxis and human existence. These ponderings really took off after I read Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty's passionate critique of traditional philosophy with it's penchant for endlessly debating irrelevant pseudo-questions and his call for another kind of philosophy, one that consists in a "continuation of the dialogue of Western civilization", really got to me. It made me feel that if philosophy has nothing better to offer than issues that result from a misunderstanding of the way our language works (as Wittgenstein would have it), it is not worthy of our respect and certainly not of my attention. So is there another kind of philosophy, or should we rather give up on philosophizing altogether?

I've recently started to study Marx, a thinker with a philosophy that, unlike the empty scholastic formalism of the analyticians, truly managed to transform the world -- for better or for worse. Marx developed a view of knowledge, history, society and man that was not only mutely descriptive, but cried out for action, for change. In what consists the transformative power of Marx' philosophy? What, put more generally, makes philosophy transformative?

The positive sciences have "applications", in the form of technology or predictions. Philosophy, naturally, have no similar "applications", since it doesn't study a preexisting world but precisely the human experience of and understanding of any such world. Science moves on the hard soil of the actual; philosophy explores the heavens of the possible. Swedish universities distinguish -- with Kant -- between "theoretical" and "practical" philosophy, where the latter is to be understood as moral and political philosophy. But there is nothing about "practical" philosophy that makes it any more practical than theoretical philosophy. No more nor less does moral philosophy inform people how they ought to act, than does epistemology how they ought to learn. And to be certain, the distinction itself is seldom meaningful -- how would one classify, according to this dichotomy, a Sartre, for which ontology itself becomes a matter of a moral (or at least normative) imperative?

No, the purpose of philosophy must not be sought in its "applications". But one should not, therefore, conclude that philosophy is purposeless. Such a conclusion betrays a kind of dualism, according to which ideas always exists prior to and separate from any use to which these ideas might be put -- free-floating wisdom that might or might not be harnessed by mankind. But such thinking is unwarranted. Ideas do not emerge in isolation, but through a dialectical process with the surrounding world, and they are not passive, but actively transformative.

It can be argued to what extent humans live in a world of matter, but it cannot be denied that humans always live in a world of discourse. To quote Jacques Derrida: "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte", there's nothing outside of the text, which is to say, all human experience is in the grasp of language. And to "language" we might add "concepts", because while all language is conceptual, it can be argued that not all concepts are linguistic. Ideas, being conceptual, thus always emerge in the domain that is man's primary dwelling-place. They are shaped by, and shape, other ideas inhabiting this region -- this is what I called "dialectics" -- and in so entering the sphere of human consciousness, it actively moulds man's understanding of and conduct in his world.

Man is never a passive, impassionate observer of a given, material existence "outside of" him. This idea is precisely the Cartesian dualism that recent philosophy has made so much ado about exorcizing. "Subject" and "object" are not natural inhabitants of the universe -- they are secondary constructions, products of man's way of understanding himself and the world he dwells in. Consciousness has no existence independently from the world -- on the contrary, consciousness can only be understood as a stretching-out-towards the world, and "the world" can, mutatis mutandis, only be understood as the towards-which of this stretching-out. In this movement, subject and object are constituted as secondary constructs; temporary, volatile. In this view, knowledge and understanding, being a transformation of the way consciousness relates to world, is always also transformative, since consciousness and world are themselves only functions, only predicates of this relation.

So it becomes apparent how philosophy, which always dabbles only in ideas, can nevertheless be radically transformative simply by influencing human understanding. And certainly, philosophy has made its fair share of contributions to the changing consciousness of Western civilization. What would we be, had not Plato, Descartes, Rousseau, and, yes, Marx shown us new ways of thinking about the universe, about society and about ourselves?

Having seen how philosophy can make a difference, it remains to decide exactly how this capacity should be put to use. Here, of course, every philosopher must follow his conscience. I believe, however, that there's one task that philosophers, due to their training and the nature of their discipline (as described above), are especially well-suited to carry out. Namely, to act as a force of opposition towards those who would use learning and rhetorics to mislead, manipulate and mystify, and thus ultimately subjugate other human beings. Against such people, philosophers can offer different rhetorics, meant to lead straight, to enlighten, to emancipate.

The task for philosophy I've described is not a new one. To find its oldest practitioner, we have to go back all the way to Socrates. The people I described, those who use rhetorics to gain power over others, are the sophists; what Socrates did, was to challenge the sophists on their own game: the transformative wielding of ideas. To this day, the most important task of the philosopher remains the challenging of the sophist.

[Review] The Grasshopper

2008-08-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

The Grasshopper; Games, Life and Utopia — Bernard Suits

You probably know Aesop's fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant: the Grasshopper spends the whole summer fooling around, while the Ant works hard to gather food for the winter, and when winter strikes, the Ant is well prepared, but the Grasshopper dies of famine.

In this delightful book, the Grasshopper is cast in the role of a philosopher, a sort of entomological Socrates — and indeed, the whole book is written as a pastiche of the Socratic dialogs. The Grasshopper, bon vivant, wisest of bugs, faces winter and death, and he has gathered his disciples around him to bid them farewell. The disciples, desperate with sorrow, implore the Grasshopper to accept a share of their food, but he declines. He has devoted his life to play and fun, and now he is prepared to take the consequences. With his dying breath, he leaves his pupils with a riddle. The students have always taken the Grasshopper's concept of the ideal life to amount to never doing anything for the sake of necessity, but always only doing what one wishes to do. However, his last words seem to indicate that being a Grasshopper is not about playing in general, but about playing games.

To solve this riddle, one of the Grasshopper's students, Skepticus, famous for never taking anything for granted, sets out on a flashback where he reminisces the conversations he has had with the master over the last few months, on the topic of games. The Grasshopper has found what he believes to be a definition of 'game', and he wishes Skepticus to summon all his skeptical might to try and find counterexamples. This is the definition:

[T]o play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such an activity.

The larger part of the book is preoccupied with discussing this definition and all its niceties. As such, it is a kind of direct response to Wittgenstein, who used games as a kind of archetypal example of a non-definable concept. But it is also a positive contribution to the field of game inquiry. Chapters nine through twelve are especially interesting for a role-player such as myself, since they deal precisely with role-playing (not specifically the D&D-kind, of which Suits seems to be unaware, but the kind where people affect roles, not for theatrical purposes but for their own enjoyment). To account for them in terms of his definition, he introduces a, in my view potentially fruitful, distinction between open and closed games, where the latter has a specific endpoint, whereas the former has as its goal (qua games) the very continuation of the game.

In the last chapter, Suits becomes profound when the Grasshopper suddenly returns to life (after a fortnight) and starts to talk about Utopia. Suits' idea is that if we define Utopia as a state where all the needs of people are immediately satisfied, then all there is left for people to do is to play games — in effect, artificially circumscribing the allowed means to reach their goals, as per his definition of a game.

All in all, this is a nice book, well argued, with an enjoyable style and some bids at true profundity.

Materialism

2008-08-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post, I wrote about the classic distinction between "realist" and "idealist" philosophers. Another "-ism" to which idealism has traditionally been opposed, is so-called "materialism". Does this mean that "realism" and "materialism" are the same thing, and if not, is it possible to be a materialist without being a realist?

"Materialism" refers, of course, to matter. As a metaphysical position, it harks back to the days of Democritus, father of the atom. Democritus thought that everything that is was made up from atoms -- literally, "undividables" -- of different shapes. Aristotle contrasted the "materialism" of Democritus to the "idealism" of Plato, who thought that the world of the senses was a bleak shadow of a transcendent realm of ideas.

Today, atoms have lost their status as metaphysical entities -- they are safely within the domain of ordinary physics. What power remains, then, in materialism as a metaphysical position? Materialism is sometimes loosely defined as the view, that "everything is made of matter" or that "matter is all that exists". If one takes "matter" as a gloss for "the entities described by physics", this position is also called "physicalism".

One problem with this definition is that it tends towards circularity. If physics is taken as the discipline that investigates the fundamental constituents of the empirical universe, then this universe must by definition be "made of" the entities described by physics. A possible escape from this threatening circle is to suggest, that there is a metaphysical realm "outside" the "empirical universe" and that the real battle between materialists and their opponents is as to the constitution of this metaphysical domain. But this solution has problems of its own, namely, that the entities described by physics can hardly be defined otherwise than as the entities described by physics and physics alone, and since physics is a strictly empirical science, it does not refer to some metaphysical domain. These entitites -- atoms, electrons and so on -- are known only through empirical science, only as that which we "see" if we look, and as such, they can contain no metaphysical residue, no extra-empirical "shadow". In short: physics is preoccupied only with the empirically accessible, and there is nothing in it to suggest anything beyond the empirical.

As a metaphysical position, then, materialism must be defined without recourse to "the entitites of physics". Perhaps we can reach a satisfying definition in a roundabout way, by taking a look at the values with which materialism has traditionally been associated. In the realm of religion, secular materialism is opposed to religious spirituality. In the domain of lifestyles, materialism connotes a preoccupation with "owning stuff", a being weighed down by material possessions. In morality and ethics, materialism is associated with determinism, with relativism and nihilism, and contrasted to the transcendent morals of a pure spirit. In the philosophy of mind, materialism is opposed to "Cartesian dualism", the idea that mind and body are radically different "substances". In the philosophy of history, materialism is the view that history is governed by economic preconditions, by the "means of production". And so on.

By looking at all these usages, a certain picture emerges: a picture of profaneness, of determinism, of the lowly flesh as opposed to the exalted spirit. How are these values associated with physics? The answer is, of course, that physics too describes the world in terms devoid of value-judgments, of references to the divine, of free will -- it is all cold, mindless causality. Materialism, then, could be vaguely described as a tendency to project the physicist's way of understanding the world onto the realm of human affairs and preoccupations. Taking this description as our point of departure, we can understand how materialism needs not necessarily have anything to do with realism. Just as one can be a physicist without being a realist — as was, arguably, Erwin Schrödinger — one can use the physical worldview in the human domain without being a realist.

The materialist standpoint, then, can be summarized as follows: There is no God, no ultimate reality, no "plan", no higher purpose — reality is contingent, "gratuitous". Freedom and moral responsibility are illusions, hiding an uncompromising determinism. This view is easy to hold under the background presumption of dogmatic realism, where one can simply posit such concepts as "meaning", "purpose" and "freedom" as corresponding to things which either exist (are "real") or don't, and then go on to claim that they don't. However, under any standpoint that is opposed to dogmatic realism, we must recognize that these concepts rather correspond to forms of our experience; in so far as there is a purpose, it exists only in our experience of things as purposeful; in so far as there is freedom, it exists only in our experience of ourselves as free, and so on. Thus, if we are to avoid realism, we have to understand the materialist denial of meaning, freedom and so on not as the absence of some positive thing, but as some basic "malfunction" in experience itself.

Here, we reach a difficulty. As philosophers, we are accustomed to thinking of experience as something given. That which is in experience cannot be denied; it can be mistrusted as a veil, hiding some positive reality beyond, but this reality is precisely the realist's "world out there" that we wish to avoid. If we are to claim that the world of our experience is "all there is", then we seem to be stuck with freedom and meaning as inherent in this experience. That is, of course, unless we reject the givenness of experience. And this is exactly what we must do.

Givenness is a contrastive property: it can only be experienced as such in contrast to something else, which is hidden from view. The experience of the given as given thus presupposes the experience of the hidden. Note that we are dealing with "givenness" in two senses: as a property of experience and as an object of experience. When we experience our experience as given (givenness as object of experience), this experience is in itself given (givenness as property of experience). The experience of hiddenness, too, has the property of givenness. This is important, because it allows us to construct a potentially infinite regress where each step opens up the possibility for contrasting some experience of presumptive givenness to the hiddenness which is its necessary corollary, without succumbing to total skepticism. Thus, at first we simply experience freedom, but the moment we say that freedom is therefore given, we start to experience freedom as given and must thus contrast it to some necessary hiddenness.

The well-known, everyday corollary to this is the fact that each person, in his everyday goings-about, experiences himself as making decisions and acting 'freely', but the moment he starts to ponder his freedom he is struck by how it always seems to play out against the background of radical contingency, of being in the dark, of acting on insufficient data. When making a hard decision, we always wish that we had more information; if only we knew this or that, the choice wouldn't be nearly as hard. The givenness of freedom is contrasted with the hiddenness of the information necessary to make an informed choice.

Indeed, if we "knew everything" there would be no decisions in this sense. The givenness of freedom reveals the hiddenness of a (hypothetical) realm of complete knowledge which is also, at the same time, the realm of complete determinism. But here, having solved the problem of givenness, we immediately encounter another problem. For it might be argued that even if we knew everything about the world which is the object of knowledge, a decision is dependent not only upon the state of the world, but also upon the state of the decision-maker himself; even under conditions of complete knowledge of the world, a man would still be free to choose how he would act upon this knowledge, what his goals would be.

To get around this problem, the non-realist materialist might point to another facet of everyday human existence: the experience of internal struggle, of fighting one's bad tendencies and so on. Here we approach the Christian idea of free will: the freedom to choose good before evil, God before Satan. However, what the materialist might do is to point out how this experience reveals the hiddenness of the self: how even the self is a domain of unexplored dark depths. This move places self-knowledge on par with world-knowledge, effectively making the subject an object of its own knowledge. This objectification of the subject, although only hypothetical since it can never be fully carried out in "real life", is nevertheless a characteristic feature of all materialism. It contains the promise that if we only knew everything about ourselves, then we would see how we are as subject to mindless chance and senseless causality as everything else.

We see, then, how we can be materialists without having to subscribe to dogmatic realism. The potential of materialism is inherent in human experience as such, and we need not posit a metaphysical realm of the "really real" in order to be materialists.

Review: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

2008-08-01T16:52:00.001-07:00

In reading Richard Rorty's "philosophy and the mirror of nature", I am gripped by a strong sense of being relieved of a heavy burden. This burden is none other than the burden of philosophy. I have long had a sneaking suspicion that something is wrong in the heart of philosophy; this suspicion has been fueled by amateurish attempts to understand Heidegger and Wittgenstein, but Rorty spells the problem out in terms that even the (educated) layman can understand.

The "mirror of nature" that Rorty criticizes is the philosophical idea of knowledge as a process of mind "mirroring" world, and thus, to the skeptical idea that this mirror-image might be a distortion and that knowledge must therefore be "grounded" in an "epistemology" that can prove the skeptic wrong. From this idea stems for instance the "problem of the external world" that I criticized in an earlier post.

Rorty's alternative to the mind-as-mirror theory of knowledge is to suggest, that claims to knowledge is always only justified within the framework of a certain language game, which is culturally determined. I might not agree that this particular solution is the best. It seems to me to kind of beg the question, by already presupposing that we know about these cultures and these language-games. And, one might ask, why is it that these standards of knowledge appear in our cultures, and not some totally different ones? And I don't mean "different" in the sense of "oh these people believe in witchcraft" but in the sense of "Induction? We don't use that stuff around here".

However, the strength of this book isn't in the realm of particular arguments, but in its role in a wider field of intellectual culture. The grunt of all the work done in any particular academic discipline, is done by hard-working researchers meticulously arguing minor points. Sometimes, a great genius comes by offering some revolutionary insight. But academia also needs flamboyant showmen, masters of the grand gesture, people capable of pointing at something and saying "look at this! Isn't it neat?"

Rorty is, perhaps, nothing more than a popularizer of Wittgenstein. But as such, he is masterful. And Wittgenstein is in dire need of popularization, because, have you ever tried to read the guy? And, well, I haven't studied much analytic philosophy, but whatever little I have studied always struck me as unhealthily preoccupied with problems like "the existence of the external world", "the reality of scientific theories" and "the mind-body problem", all of which appeared to me as pseudo-problems based on untenable metaphysical assumptions. If people like Rorty can contribute towards placing these assumptions in doubt, then all the better for philosophy!

"Methodological Idealism"

2008-07-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

In my last post I promised to elaborate on the idea of "methodological idealism".

Let us start by asking, what is the subject matter of philosophy? The subject matter of geology is rocks, and the subject matter of biology is living beings. To the study of what is philosophy dedicated? A lot of different questions fall under the heading of philosophy, everything from Heidegger's lofty "what is the meaning of Being?", to everyday moral quandaries like "should I eat meat?", and apparent trifles like "what is the logical form of counterfactual conditional clauses?" But arguably, the most important issue that philosophy deals with is the study of the conditions and possibility of human knowledge.

Since all the sciences are preoccupied with the search for knowledge, philosophy, by virtue of being the discipline that investigates knowledge as such, becomes a sort of meta-methodology for every other science. And since philosophy is itself a search for knowledge — knowledge about knowledge, no less — it becomes, at the same time, the study of its own methodology. This is the reason why philosophy is always in a state of starting up, of beginning anew and reinventing itself, why it never settles into the slow pace of normal science: philosophy is always the study of the possibility (or impossibility!) of philosophy.

Philosophy can deal with subjects other than knowledge — indeed, and as I will probably argue in a later post, I feel it should be able to deal with almost anything — but in so doing, it must always first stand on the ground of some idea of how knowledge is achieved.

In the "positive sciences", methodological issues are often in the background: If you want to know anything about rocks, you go out into the world and look at rocks. But you cannot "look at" knowledge. You can, indeed, look at how other people learn, but in so doing, you take your own learning for granted. Too look at how other people learn falls within the domain of psychology. Philosophy studies the fundamental conditions of any kind of knowledge whatsoever. Because of this, it has often been assumed by philosophers that philosophy must find some self-evident ground on which to base all other human knowledge. Philosophy must be a priori, which is to say, it must be true regardless of what we might later find out using our means for acquiring knowledge — since these means are precisely what philosophy is in the business of trying to devise.

With this in mind, we will now go on a short historical detour and see how different philosophers have tackled the issue of knowledge, starting with Descartes.

* * *

During the enlightenment, two groups of philosophers searched for the ultimate ground for all human knowledge. On the one hand, rationalists like Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza claimed that the model for all true knowledge was mathematical knowledge, and made complicated systems where they tried to deduce the true nature of the universe from simple axioms, using logical rules. This often resulted in convoluted ideas that to modern eyes seem rather speculative — not to say nutty — like Leibniz' claim that everything in the universe consisted of self-conscious monads that were ordered in a pre-determined harmony, or Spinoza's idea that the universe and God were one and the same and that it appeared as either mind or matter depending on how you looked.

Opposed to them stood the British empiricists, like Berkeley, Locke and Hume, who claimed that human knowledge was founded on sensory experience, and that we are unable to speak of reality except as it appears to us through our senses. This often led them into skepticism: Berkeley even went so far as to claim, that things only existed in so far as they were perceived — "esse est percipi". Hume, the most influential of the lot, denied the existence of the self and demonstrated that the logical necessity of causality — something that the systems of the rationalists were often built upon — was illusory.

History has been kinder to the empiricists than to the rationalists, but Descartes left at least one lasting contribution to philosophy: the idea that my own existence is self-evident. This is often referred to as the cogito, ergo sum, and despite frequent criticisms — like that from Hume, mentioned above — it retains a certain undeniable appeal. After all, how could it be the case that I, the thinker of these thoughts, would not exist? To Descartes, the self-evidence of his own existence was the basis for all further possibility of knowledge.

Then came Immanuel Kant, and nothing has been the same since. Kant wanted to keep the fundamental insights of the empiricist, but still not abandon the rationalist idea that reality was ultimately intelligible. He accomplished this by what he called a "Copernican revolution", alluding to Copernicus' demonstration that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around. Kant similarly wanted to place the conscious human subject at the center of philosophical investigation, rather than the world.

The gist of Kant's great idea was simply this: in order to discover the ground for all knowledge, the philosopher must turn his eyes towards that which constitutes the condition of possibility for any such knowledge — i e, the knowing subject itself! This idea had had forerunners, not least Descartes' cogito ergo sum, but whereas Descartes went directly from the self-evidence of the ego to assert all sorts of things about the world, Kant called for a careful investigation of how the ego comes about knowledge. The result was a transcendental idealism.

* * *

We now stand prepared to explicate the idea of "methodological idealism". It consists in the acceptance of three notions mentioned above: i) that the foremost task of philosophy is to investigate the possibilities and conditions of human knowledge, ii) that this task must be carried out in an a priori manner, iii) and that the correct way to do this is to start by investigating the knowing subject. As such, it obviously has to take the "knowing subject" as somehow a priori, given, or self-evident. This seems reasonable for this reason at least: if we are to investigate knowledge, we have to presume knowledge, and in so doing, we must also presume that there is someone who (or something which) knows.

With this principle before our eyes, every philosophical investigation then becomes a matter of referring back to the self-evident, knowing subject and make the investigation through the eyes of this subject. We presume the conscious subject as methodologically primordial.

What this idea amounts to is that no philosophical investigation is possible, that leaves out the presence of the conscious subject. We can never describe the world "as such", we can always only describe the world of our experience. Any approach to knowledge that tries to describe the world "as such" — like science, for instance — necessarily becomes an abstraction, an approximation. To be sure, this has never stopped science — but whenever science clashes with our methodological idealism, we should remember that we have at least attempted to ground the latter in the a priori certainty of self-knowledge, whereas science has no similar grounding.

However, we should also remember that our idealism is precisely methodological — i e, that it makes no claim to the "ultimate" truth of its propositions. To adopt methodological idealism is not to claim — in some lofty, metaphysical manner — that the world of our experience is "all there is", but simply to claim that we must act as if the world of our experience is all there is: that the world of our experience is all that is available for our investigation. Because of this, idealism is always simply a descriptive, never an explanatory science. Wittgenstein once remarked that "explanation has to stop somewhere", and for us, explanation stops precisely with the conscious subject. Indeed, for philosophy, even the idea of an "explanation" might be the subject of investigation — but then, the investigation necessarily has to be solely descriptive.

As for the details of the idealistic approach, they might vary, and certain versions might be better than others. Kant's version is perhaps the most famous, but as for me, I tend to lean towards the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. However, to go into such details is not really feasible.

To demonstrate the pros and cons of the idealistic approach vis-a-vis more realistic ones, one would really need an example. However, I will not provide any example in this post, since almost every other post on this blog will be written from the idealist perspective. So there will be plenty examples in due time.

Realism and Idealism

2008-07-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

One way of categorizing philosophers is according to the dichotomy idealists - realists. This dichotomy is often framed in terms of the question of the existence of the external world. Idealists, it is said, believe that the world of things like chairs and trees is inside the minds of people, whereas the realists believe that the world is external, that is, outside of peoples' minds. So, for instance, G. E. Moore wrote a pretty famous article called "Proof of an External World", wherein he tried to show — by waving his hand — that the external world exists.

Here, one should stop, think, and ask: what is meant by the pair of opposites inside - outside? Surely, no philosopher has ever suggested that the mind is literally a container, with a literal inside and a literal outside. The talk about inside and outside is a metaphor. But a metaphor for what?

Perhaps, it is a metaphor for dependency. On this reading, "inside" would correspond to "dependent on", and the idealist position would amount to the idea that the world was somehow dependent on the mind. Yes, somehow. But how? Are we to take it that the world is somehow generated by the mind in the same way as are, for instance, dreams?

I am neither a realist nor an idealist, but if forced to choose, I would lean towards idealism. However, when the question is framed as above, with the talk about insides and outsides, it appears to me as quite nonsensical. I will try to make apparent why it is so, and then suggest a more reasonable way to approach the realist-idealist-dichotomy.

The enlightenment philosophers, in various ways, brought forth the idea that there is something self-evident about personal experience. In some way, although we can doubt many things, we cannot doubt what it is that we experience. These experiences may later turn out to be illusions, of course, but then we can at least say, "I did have these experiences, even though they turned out to be false". Our conscious mind and its various contents is always given to us. For philosophers, who tend to want to investigate the nature of and basis for knowledge, this kind of self-evidence is very attractive. Descartes toyed around with the though that the whole universe was an illusion brought about by an evil demon — but even in this extreme scenario, goes the reasoning, me and my immediate experiences would remain certain to me, even though their source was this demon.

This idea is very hard to argue with, and it has affected philosophy ever since. Kant brought about a "Copernican revolution" in philosophical thinking, with his idea that all philosophical study should be the study of the conscious human subject and its capacity for knowledge. In some sense, most philosophers are still Kantians.

Kant is generally considered an idealist. But here's the deal. From a loosely Kantian perspective, i e, from a perspective where we take the conscious human subject as the starting point of our investigation, there is no possibility of determining the question of whether or not the world is "dependent" on the mind either way. It turns out to be a pseudo-question. Why?

Well, suppose I put forward the metaphysical doctrine that the world is "dependent on the mind". How would we, from the point of view of the conscious human subject, determine if this is true? We must start to acknowledge that "dependency" is a concept, i e, that it is something by means of which we think about the world. We have different means by which we ascertain that things are either dependent or independent on other things. Obviously, one way would be to try to "think away" the world: if we succeeded in this, then surely the world is dependent on the mind. But we know we can't think away the world. Another way would be if our mind disappeared, and the world disappeared with it. But this investigation is impossible to carry out, since there would no longer be anyone there to investigate.

And the problems do not end there. "Mind", too, is a concept. And it is a concept, curiously enough, that is defined precisely in opposition to the world. We know that some things are "in our minds", e g thoughts and emotions, and others are "in the world", e g that tree over there. But if we were to claim that the world was in the mind, we would no longer use a the concept "mind" in any recognizable sense. Usually, we draw the limit between mind and world somewhere right behind our visual field — if we are to continue using the word "mind" in any recognizable sense, then by definition, the world is not in the mind.

Still, there are situations where we experience something that appears as real... until we wake from the dream or the hallucination. Could the whole world be a dream or a hallucination? Once again, we run into trouble. "Dreams" and "hallucinations" are recognized by virtue of the subsequent waking-up. We say that dreams "aren't real" simply because we have the real world to compare with — if the real world was a dream, then one could rightly ask... compared to what?

Here, people tend to confuse the "conscious subject" with "the mind". If someone were to claim that the world is dependent on the conscious subject and not just the mind, it would be trivial to prove him wrong. We certainly do not consciously give rise to the world; it appears to us, it approaches us from a domain outside of our control. This is the case with dreams, as well. We do not consciously generate our dreams (except when we're having a lucid dream... and then we know that it isn't real). The only reason we can claim that our dreams "belong to us", that we are dreaming, is that later, we wake up and realize that we didn't share that dream with anyone else. The dream is not intersubjectively available. It is private, rather than public. But if life were a dream, there would be no way to distinguish "private" from "public" and thus, no grounds for claiming that the dream was mine! The sense in which a dream is "mine" is that it presides in a private sphere within a public world — so when one suggests "the world is a dream" as a form of idealism, one has already presupposed that the world is divided into a private part and a public part — i e, an "internal" and an "external" part.

So much for the internal - external reading of the realism-idealism-dichotomy. But let's remember that this was all based on a "Kantian" premise, i e, the idea that a philosophical inquiry must begin with the conscious human subject. This premise must of course be defended on separate grounds, but it is a premise that I personally embrace. And in so far as I embrace this premise, I actually am an idealist. Not in the sense that I believe that the world is "dependent on the mind", of course, but in the sense that I believe that all philosophical inquiry must begin with human consciousness and that all other aspects of the universe and human existence can only be explored in terms of how they relate to the conscious subject. We can call this a "methodological idealism", as opposed to the "metaphysical idealism" we just refuted.

Later on, I will discuss this notion of a "methodological idealism" further.

Manifesto against Self-Improvement

2008-07-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

Every person seeks to do something with themselves. We all strive for success, money, respect, friendship, love, happiness. But recently and in our culture this basic aspect of human existence has mutated into an aberrant form, which I will designate by the name "self improvement". The idea of self improvement, as the name suggests, is not to improve the external circumstances of one's life, or to achieve something lasting, but to improve oneself, or, more to the point, one's self, one's personality, one's — to use some philoso-lingo — subject.

The method for achieving this is either psychological, mystical, or both. These methods are born from those two movements so characteristic of the twentieth century; psychoanalysis and New Age. But we shan't let the methods fool us; the true ideological source of self help is none other than capitalism.

It should be immediately apparent that the idea of "self-improvement" could only arise in a highly individualistic culture, in which few projects any longer are allowed to be "collective" or — God forbid — "universal". In our late modernity/capitalism, each man is an island. Capitalism is designed so that if each of us works only to further his own personal agenda, then the macroeconomical structures of society will channel this work into material growth for all of society. This tendency has been helped along by the abandonment of all other social institutions that could provide a counterweight to this individualism inherent in the capitalist system, such as religion, nation, race, class, family, and even truth (those things that Jean-François Lyotard calls "metanarratives"). This is not in itself necessarily negative, of course, but when all these things are stripped away, what remains is the individual in its pure nakedness.

The very word "self-improvement" brings to mind an image of the self as a sort of internal living-room which can be decorated, rearranged, refurnished, sometimes under the watchful eye of a professional interior decorator. Our image of the self, the mind, as a place, or better yet, a thing, starts — philosophically speaking — with Renée Descartes, who split the world into the res extensa (extended thing), the world of items having breadth, width and height, and the ego cogito, the nonspatial, nonmaterial thinking self. With Descartes, a tradition began in Western thought which viewed the self, also called the subject (as in "subjective"), as something radically separate from the world of things and experiences. Many confusing doctrines has been based upon this distinction, for instance, idealism, which viewed all of the world as simply a way for the subject to organize its own thought. The self, then, became the timeless, absolute ground on which all of creation rested. All of the world, simply a form of your consciousness. Sounds looney, right?

Looney indeed. And this loonieness lives on today, although in subdued forms. Today, most of us would claim to believe, neither that the world is radically separate from the mind (as Descartes would have it), nor simply a form of it (as the idealists claimed), but that the mind, on the contrary, is in the world, namely, in the form of a brain which is made up of matter that has formed complex molecules, nerve cells and so on. But despite this explicitly stated belief, which goes under the name of "materialism", the Cartesian doctrine continues to lead a hidden but thriving existence to this day. And the commonality of the idea of self-improvement is as good a proof as anything of this.

When man in late modernity/capitalism finds that his own private existence is the sole available focus for his dreams, hopes and strivings, and coupled with the well-ingrained Cartesian picture of the self as a thing, a substance, self-improvement is the result. It can take such forms as improving one's empathy, one's sociability, one's creativity, one's industriousness, one's courage, or to change one's way of looking at the world. It often goes by the path of self help-litterature, seminars, or courses. And the ultimate goal is, of course, to make a better person of oneself, which is interpreted in terms of taking this self-thing and improving upon it, decorating it, making it better and more beautiful. Not unlike how we, who live in a consumerist culture, constantly seek to improve upon and beutify our material surroundings by buying ever more things with which to outfit them.

The only problem is that the self is not a thing.

This simple fact has been recognized almost since the days of Descartes. One of its first proponents was David Hume, who, however, went a little overboard and claimed that the self doesn't exist at all, which is even more absurd. The fact was recognized by such philosophers as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl, but the person who gave it its ultimate formulation was Martin Heidegger.

According to Heidegger, human existence is characterized by what he calls Dasein. Dasein is an everyday German word meaning, simply, human existence, but to Heidegger, it is a technical term, designating the way in which people, characteristically, are (i e, exist), as opposed to things like rocks, trees and chairs. Dasein is characterized by a number of features, the most general of which is Being-in-the-World (this hyphenated monstrosity is the attempt of the English translators to render Heidegger's somewhat idiosyncratical use of German, which has greater allowance for compound neologisms than English). Being-in-the-world means that Dasein (that is, human beings) are never radically separate from the world, like the Cartesian self, but are always already in it.

This is not to be understood as materialism. Materialism would make of the human mind a thing among others, no different from a rock or a tree. True as it may be from a purely scientific perspective, the philosophical problem of this doctrine is that it fails to account for the way in which human existence is undeniably different from the existence of a rock or a tree. This failure leaves the window open for Cartesianism to sneak back in. When the mind is made a thing among others, that quality which separates minds from things are left a mystery, and this mystery is unavowedly accounted for by some variant of the Cartesian doctrine.

When Heidegger says that human beings are in-the-world, he does not mean it in the sense that an object can be inside a container. The world is not a container, and human beings are emphatically not things. What he means is that all that which characterize human beings — thoughts, beliefs, emotions, fears, longings, loves — are directed towards or preoccupied with the world. You cannot have a thought without something to think about. You cannot have a belief without believing in something. There would be no fears with nothing to fear, no longings with nothing to long for, no love with nothing to love. And so on. Human beings are, from the beginning and in all their activities, engaged in the world. They are engrossed in it. They care for it. There is no feature of human activity which is not somehow directed towards the world.

For Descartes, to be a human being is to be a thinking thing, radically separate from the world of extended things. For Heidegger, to be a human being is nothing but this being engaged in the world.

When people, then, engage in self-improvement, treating themselves — their selves — as things to be worked upon, they forget what these selves are, what it means to have a self, what it means to be human — namely, to Be-in-the-World. Instead of directing their gazes outwards, into the world which is the ultimate horizon of meaning for all our human concerns, they direct it “inwards” into that thing which they believe are closest to themselves. But this belief is a delusion, brought about by Cartesian metaphysics and capitalist individualism. The self is not a thing and its direction is not inwards. To engage in self-improvement is to forget what is really important, namely, the world which we all share and which we are all in.

So what am I saying? That we shouldn't strive to become more creative, more empathic, more industrious? Yes, and no. What I'm saying is that the whole point of being empathic is to act with more empathy. The whole point of creativity is to create. The whole point of industriousness is to make industry. That is to say, all of these things are also in-the-World. The risk with the Cartesian self improvement program is that these simple facts are forgotten. That people start to see self-improvement as an end in itself, rather than just as the means to achieve some end which applies to the public world in which we all live. To be thus preoccupied with oneself to the extent that one fails to see the world, is simply egotism. It is vain, it is amoral and it makes no one happy except for the individual himself.

In this, it is neither better nor worse than that other child of capitalism, namely, consumerism. And truly, self-improvement might be seen as a kind of consumerism of the soul. The comparison is especially apt if one considers the enormous amount of money some people spend on self help books, seminars and therapy. Perhaps it makes you happier. But buying a bigger wide-screen TV than your neighbor might also make you happier. And sincerely, I doubt it. Because if Heidegger is correct, then the very meaning of being, say, empathic, is to act empathic. And why, then, go trough the circumlocution of first improving some ghostly self-substance that isn't really there in order to then be able to act in a certain way, when you can just go straight for the goal?

The Beauty of Philosophy

2008-04-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

Philosophy is one of my little indulgences. I was asked by a friend to explain what i like about philosophy, so here goes:

Philosophy is presently considered to be in a crisis. This crisis has been growing upon us for a long time, perhaps since Nietzsche, perhaps since Hume, perhaps since Socrates, but it is epitomized in the thoughts of certain 20th century philosophers, all of which have tried to radically redefine philosophy or criticize or dismantle it from within. The logical positivists wanted to reduce philosophy to the analysis of language. Wittgenstein claimed that language was enough in itself, and that philosophy was a process of clearing up the confusions that had given birth to it, so as to return it to oblivion. These people, then, were preoccupied with language, and it has rightfully been claimed that at the dawn of the 20th century, philosophy took a "linguistic turn": the key to philosophical problems were said to inhere in the words we use. But with the post-structuralist, foremost of them Derrida, language itself becomes treacherous, snakes in on itself, slips from our grasp and leaves us utterly incapable of talking about anything.

This leaves us with philosophy in shambles. How is one to pick up the pieces? Where is one to begin rebuilding this once magnificent edifice, queen of sciences? One can start to wonder if it's even worth it. Don't we have all we need in empirical science? Doesn't it provide us with all the knowledge we need? Doesn't it satisfy our epistemic hunger?

I provide this background because I, like everyone else interested in philosophy in this day and age, have necessarily to battle with these questions when I ask myself, "why do I enjoy philosophy?" This question, then, certainly doesn't have a straightforward answer, and it will lead us down a winding path where we will most probably end up lost. But it is worth it, for though philosophy is a cruel mistress, she is beautiful all the while.

The first approach if one is trying to discredit philosophy is to question its applicability. As opposed to the empirical sciences, philosophy seems to have no practical effects. It seems to be simply intellectual masturbation, dealing in issues not relevant to anyone. Granting for the moment that this is even true (which is of course questionable), one can immediately reply that the critic seems to have applied the normative standard of "practical applicability" as a ground for judging philosophy. If one rejects this standard, the criticism fails. And why, indeed, should we accept it? What does the word "practical" even mean in this context? Does it refer to material gains? But whence, one is justified in asking, this fixation with material gains as the ultimate standard of good? What, indeed, is material wealth other than the means by which man perpetuates his own existence as a biological being, caught in an eternal cycle of growth and decay which serves no purpose whatsoever except for its own endless continuation? Material acquisition can never serve any other purpose than to allow for further material acquisition. We work in order to eat, and we eat so that we will be able to work another day, and so on until the day we die. And when we die, we leave nothing behind, for all our work has gone towards making food, which we have already eaten if it hasn't rot. If this is the standard by which we measure applicability, then count me out.

If philosophy does not partake in this senseless perpetuation of mindless biology, then what does it do? My answer is simply this: a philosopher is somebody who is not content to perpetuate the world, but who wishes to make sense of it. In this respect, philosophy has three colleagues among the activities of man: religion, art and science. However, a way of making sense of the world can easily become a means of trying to escape it. This is so, because a man who spends a lot of time considering the world can easily reach the conclusion that it is inherently senseless, and if this is true, then the only way to make sense of it is to make sense, i e, to make it up, to fabricate it. Faced with a choice between accepting the real senselessness of the world, the lack of meaning, the utter vanity of it all, and to put one's faith in an imaginary realm of supreme meaning, many people understandably chooses the latter.

Of the four methods, religion is the one that lends itself best to escapism. What starts as an attempt to find the meaning hidden behind the façade of the world, ends up as the creation, ex nihilo, of a transcendental realm of pure purpose, pure meaning. Earthly life in all its futility gives way to eternal bliss in the hereafter.

Art, too, easily becomes escapism, although the socially agreed-upon nonreality of most fictional worlds makes art a less powerful tool for escapism than religion. Indeed, if someone finds the same sense of ultimate purpose in, for instance, the plot of a novel that millions find in the teachings of the world religions, we are inclined to view him with not just a slight bit of condescension.

Science, on the contrary, is badly suited for escapism. This is because of science's total disregard for meaning. Science is interested only in causes and effects, explanations and illuminations — not in ultimate purposes. Science is preeminently immanent; this fact accounts for both its success, and for the fact that many people feel it to be extremely inadequate.

This leaves only philosophy, and in a sense, philosophy is the discipline which bridges the gap between the other three. Philosophy is not immune to escapism. More than one philosopher has found in his doctrine a presumptive way of transcending earth-bound existence and reaching something higher. Interesting enough, whereas some philosophers — notably Plato — have identified philosophy itself as the true purpose of man, others have pointed to religion or art as fulfilling this role. Nevertheless, there are other philosophers who stand as proof that one can, by means of philosophy, reach the insight that the world is senseless and still not succumb to the temptation of escapism. I'm thinking here primarily of Albert Camus, whose "absurdity" corresponds to my "senselessness". And yet again, there are those philosophers who have spent a whole life philosophizing without ever so much as touching upon the problem of ultimate purpose.

For this reason, many have hoped that philosophy should be able to succeed where both religion and science have failed, i e, to give an account of reality which neither succumbs to make-believe, as does religion, nor is existentially bankrupt, as is science. Because nowhere does one find standards of intellectual rigor so severe, as in philosophy. The philosopher, from the days of Descartes onward, is not allowed to take anything for granted. He is supposed to question everything, to engage in methodical doubt. Everything science accepts without a word — the validity of induction, the uniformity of nature, the objectivity of the external world — is subject to scrutiny within philosophy. With rules so severe, shouldn't one be able to penetrate into the very core of existence, and finally illuminate everything?

Sadly, no. The world does not lend itself to this kind of explanation. The philosopher tends unavoidably to become entangled in paradoxes and riddles. The result is the perennial battles waged within the philosophical world: between materialists and idealists, between subjectivists and realists, between relativists and positivists, between empiricists and rationalists, between foundationalists and holists, and between post-structuralists and everyone else. And they have led to the present situation: the crisis of philosophy, by which I started this post.

In the face of these paradoxes, these unsolvable problems, these unending debates, is one to give up? Is one to shrug one's shoulders and say, "well, we tried philosophy, but it didn't work. Let's try something else." No! The moment one says that, one has again succumbed to that hated standard of value, by which something can only be good if it is useful. We tried to make sense of the world, and we found only riddles. Well, doesn't that teach us at least one thing, namely, that the world is enigmatic, that it is structured so as to give rise to paradoxes, that multiple viewpoints are possible on the same phenomena, each granting a different, internally coherent picture, but none being commensurable with the other?

And isn't there another standard of value, which we use, parallel with usefulness but totally independent from it, namely, beauty? Just as a work of art needn't necessarily serve the purpose of making sense of the world, but might just serve the "purpose" of being beautiful, so too might philosophy be a way of unearthing the beauty — sometimes weird, sometimes scary, sometimes sublime — of the world in which we live.

In the beginning of this post, I spoke about the "linguistic turn" that philosophy allegedly took in the beginning of the 20th century. In the novel and the poem, linguistics gives way to aesthetics, and if it is true what the postmodernists tell us, that all philosophical systems are merely "metanarratives", then doesn't it make sense to say that the linguistic turn must inevitably give way to an aesthetic turn?

And so, I am finally equipped to answer the question that provoked me to write this post: "Why do you enjoy philosophy?" The answer: "because it is beautiful".