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title: "Aristotle 101: Hylomorphism and the Soul"
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date: 2020-05-18T11:10:00Z
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tags: ["greek philosophy","aristotle","hylomorphism","substance","essence"]
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topics: ["philosophy"]
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image: /img/vitruvian-man-top-half.jpg
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draft: false
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Aristotle’s understanding of the soul is derived from his theory of substance in The Metaphysics. By way of the hylomorphic combination of body-as-matter and soul-as-form, a unique individual is generated and equipped with the capacity to act in ways that living things act. Is this theory a “middle way” between the view of living things as purely material (where life is a sort of emergent property, dependent on matter), and dualism (the view that the body is is a dependent “container” of a Platonic Form)? If so, how successful is it at navigating that path? This essay will argue that Aristotle’s goal was not to thread a needle between Atomist materialism and Platonic dualism, but to provide a more accurate account of living things in general, regardless of either pole of opposition. However, this answer will also suggest that, weighed against both materialism and dualism, it is still a superior theory, despite its flaws.
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Aristotle explains, in The Metaphysics, that the hylomorphic substance is a totality, not a plurality. While the form of the substance is separable from the matter of the substance, in the sense that we can think about the distinction as an intellectual exercise, the two are inseparable in ontological terms. Aristotles likes to use the example of a statue to make his case. I will use Michelangelo’s David. In this case, the form of David is a very simple one, because it includes only the shape (the bit we recognize by sight) – and as such could not be the ‘real’ David for lack of a soul – but the point here, is that the fashioned shape can be thought about independently of the marble out of which the shape was fashioned. However, the shape could have no existence *independently of the marble*. To exist, is to exist in matter; to give a definition to some portion of matter, such that it can be identified as an individual. Another way Aristotle puts this problem, is to ask us to imagine two liquids combined in a glass (honey-water, in his case). While the metaphor is imperfect (two kinds of matter), the point is that there is no actual “relation” between two independent entities, honey, and water. There is, rather, only one entity – honey-water – which could not exist, except for the combination of honey and water. Thus, the first thing to keep in mind is that living substances are not a “relation” of body-to-soul, but the compound of body-and-soul. Attempting to separate them in reality, would destroy them both (as an identifiable substance).
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What’s more, For Aristotle, Forms are not independent entities that are somehow copied, or “participated in”, or projected into matter. They are the feature of the physical universe that make it coherent to the human mind. Aristotles does not speculate as to the origin of these features (except to posit the unmoved mover as the cause of intelligibility), and that is probably for the better, because his goal is simply to explain how it is that individuals come into and go out of being, and how it is that we know of these individuals and their changes. Aristotle posits two kinds of form: sensible and intelligible. In the soul, this corresponds to our capacity to experience or sense objects (perception apprehends the sensible), and our capacity to reason (nous apprehends the intelligible). This parallel set of structures gives Aristotle’s theory the kind of symmetry he would have found appealing – everything fitting together in proper proportion, and that from which all things are made (such as cups and trees and olives), so is made man: the combination of the right kind of matter (imbued with the potentiality for life-as-man) with the right forms (featherless, two-footed, perceiving, intellecting, etc).
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While Aristotle’s theory leaves many unanswered questions (only a few of which we’ve touched on here), it must be admitted that his is superior to either Plato’s dualism, or the Atomists materialism. For one thing, Plato’s theory of Forms is famously problematic, as outlined in the dialogue Parmenides (and elsewhere). What does it mean to “participate in” a Form? How does a realm of complete perfection mingle with a realm of incomplete and perpetual change? And so forth. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Aristotle describes a number of logical problems with identifying substance with atoms (not the least of which, is the problem of the one over the many), but a much bigger problem rests in explaining how self-generated motion is possible, on their account. To put it in modern terms: how is life (self-generated movement) supposed to arise out of lifeless atoms, whose movements are all extrinsically generated? They would require some sort of Platonic supervenience, or at best, an emergence theory, which is fraught with difficulties of its own. Therefore, Aristotle does seem to successfully undo both the dualists and the materialists, with his theory of hylomorphism for the relation between body and soul (even if only superficially). Whether this theory could withstand the scrutiny of modern scientific materialism, is another matter for another time.
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```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
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title: "Aristotle 101: Substance in the Categories"
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date: 2020-03-15T11:33:25Z
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tags: ["aristotle","substance","categories","emergence","transcendence"]
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topics: ["philosophy"]
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image: /img/school-of-athens.jpg
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draft: true
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---
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The Categories is Aristotle’s first attempt to outline a theory of being, in addition to the work’s central focus, which is to provide an account of the ways in which we think about being, and beings. In total, there are ten categories of thought about being, but the core of his theory of being begins with the first category. This is what he called “substance”. This essay will summarise Aristotle’s conception of substance as he presents it in The Categories, briefly explain what distinguishes substance from the other categories, and offer some additional thoughts about the metaphysics of being, in relation to Aristotle’s mentor, Plato.
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So, what is substance, in what does substance consist, and what sets it apart from the other categories? The first two questions can be answered together. Once we’re clear on that, we can move on to the last question. To answer the first two questions, we need to make a distinction. Our first step will be to substitute a synonym for the word substance: being. When Aristotle talks about substance in The Categories, he primarily means to ask what it means *to be*. From this substitution, it should be relatively easy to see the two senses in which he wants to use the word substance: First, the space in which things can be; i.e. the state of being, itself. Second, the individual beings that occupy the space of being itself. Aristotle begins his inquiry by looking at particular beings – a horse, for example. Of that being, he asks two questions: whether or not it *is*, and *what* it is. A traditional way to phrase this, is to say that substance is both the “that-ness” and the “what-ness” of a thing; in the case of our horse, that it exists, and that it is a horse, combine to constitute the substance of the horse.
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### Primary and Secondary Substance
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Aristotle calls the first sense of being the “primary” substance: particular beings, in themselves. Self-sufficient instances of discrete existence, that depend on nothing for their existence (other than the prime matter out of which it arose in combination with the form imposed upon it at generation, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The next installment will discuss this in more detail). So, Socrates is a substance, that pen in your hand is a substance, the sun is a substance, and Flea Biscuit the racehorse is a substance. They are all “primary” substances insofar as they are independent subjects, about which various things can be predicated, and of which they are never predicated of other things (e.g., that Flea Biscuit is your pen, or that Socrates is a Flea Biscuit). So much for the primary substance.
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For Aristotle, the science of metaphysics is the science of giving things their right names. In practice, then, metaphysics (at least in part), is the process of moving things from a state of being, to a state of being named. A substance becomes a subject when it is assigned a noun, and the two ways that nouns can be assigned demarcates the boundary between primary and secondary substance. Socrates, Flea Biscuit, The Parthenon, that pen, item no. 36248 in your Amazon shopping cart, and you, are all proper nouns, and therefore primary substances. But what could we give as a name, that would identify the secondary substance of a being? What could be *said of* Socrates, that would be indicative of Socrates, but only in a general sense, and not particular to his being? That name would move us from the “that-ness” of Socrates, to the “what-ness” of Socrates. We want to know not only *that* Socrates is, but also *what* he is. We can answer this question by saying of Socrates, that he *is a man*. In other words, we can predicate a universal of him. He belongs to a class of similar beings, called *mankind*. That class is the secondary substance.
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### Species and Genus
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Aristotle further divides secondary substance into two kinds: species and genus. Before continuing, a quick note of caution is in order. Though he was an avid naturalist and proto-biologist, Aristotle does not use these terms in the Linnean or genetic sense, as we do today. Rather, Aristotle is dealing with categories of thought. Things group together on account of the similar things that can be said of them. So, Socrates, Pericles, Speussipus, and Oedipus, are all particular subjects, but also members of the species *man*, because we would all say of them that they are two-footed, featherless, rational animals. But we’d also say that the pen in your hand is both a subject, and a species. It is a subject because it is an individual being; and it is a species, because it possesses attributes that are indicative of a class of beings: writing utensils. But, the pen in your hand is not *the* writing tool. It is one among millions of individuals, of which we can say similar things, of all of them: cylindrical, tipped with a liquid that sticks well to paper, fits comfortably in the hand. In other words, it is a member of the species of writing tools.
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Aristotle recognized that it was possible to say of a being more than one thing. In the case of our pen, that it is a writing tool, and that it is an artefact. In the case of Socrates, that he is a man, and that he is an animal (as opposed to an artefact). This higher order attribution is what Aristotle calls the genus of a being. This way of saying something of a subject is still a kind of secondary substance predication, because we are still dealing with a universal classification. It is a more general concept, however, because it includes both individuals and species. Again, Aristotle is working with categories of thought, not genetic lineage, however it is true that the relation between genus, species, and individuals is hierarchical in nature. A species can never be an individual, in the same sense that Socrates is *a man*. Likewise, Socrates cannot *be man* as such, he can only be *a* man. And, obviously, the genus animal cannot be either the species man or the individual Socrates, though it does contain them both.
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### Properties – Or, The Other Categories
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How is it that we come to say of Socrates that he is Socrates, or that he is *a man*, as opposed to a seashell, or a pen? What is it that makes a pen a writing tool or an artefact? These questions signal the dividing line between substance and the rest of the categories. It is not my intention here, to catalogue all of the remaining nine categories. That will have to wait for another time. Suffice to say that, for Aristotle, it is the nature of a thing that determines the “what-ness” of a thing. And, the nature of a thing is determined by what can be *found in* that thing. For example, that Socrates was short, or had Socrates’ snub-nose, or spent his days in the Agora in Athens, or had Socrates’ white beard, or suffered Socrates’ daemon-haunted conscience, are all things that are particular attributes of Socrates, mark him out as Socrates, and are only *found in* Socrates. If he did not exist, then neither would his snub-nose, his white beard, nor his daemon-haunted conscience. The individual attributes, in other words, are entirely dependent upon the substance within which they are found.
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As dependent particulars, the properties of Socrates would only exist while Socrates existed, but we should be careful to make one further distinction. Socrates’ particular snub-nose is *not* snub-noseness. Socrates does not have snub-noseness, he has a snub-nose. The white in Socrates’ beard is particular to Socrates, but also an instance of the universal property of whiteness, since it is present in the substance to which it is being predicated. This notion of universal property, is the closest analogy in Aristotle’s theory, to Plato’s famous Forms. But, unlike his mentor Plato, Aristotle insists that the universal of a property would not exist without at least one particular instance of its expression present in a being. If no individuals were expressing the color white in their beards, there could be no such thing as whiteness, and no such property could be (or reasonably would be) predicated of any subject. To make this point clear, try to imagine the fanciful property “schlerbness”. What would a thing that has “schlerb” look like? How would it behave? To what species of substance could we assign “schlerb” as a property? If one thing did exist that expressed the characteristic of schlerbness, these questions would all be easily answerable. Thus, all of the categories after substance rely in some sense on substance for their own existence, but substance itself stands alone as something that is *in nothing* (though, in the case of secondary substance, may be *said of* primary substance).
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One last point of clarity is needed here, before we continue. Secondary substances are thought to be universals in some sense, as are universal properties. Are secondary substances dependent upon primary substances for their existence in the same way that the properties are? This can’t be the case, since even secondary substances are independent of their individuals. The species *man* need not rely on any surviving individual man, for it to exist. We would simply pass into speaking of mankind in the past tense. Likewise, the species unicorn has independent existence, whether or not any particular unicorn exists (or is being imagined). To speak of one, is to speak of *something*, albeit imaginary. Whereas, to speak of the pink in the unicorn’s mane, or the hardness of its horn, is to speak of properties that would be extinguished as soon as our imaginations moved on to something else more entertaining.
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### Extended Discussion
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From this outline, we can conclude that Aristotle was what we moderns would now call a “nominalist”, relative to his old master Plato. What this means, in a nutshell, is that Aristotle believed that the existence of abstract objects like universals (for the most part) is reliant upon the particular individuals that expressed the property being generalized. Plato, on the other hand, believed that a realm of eternal perfection was home to ideal “Forms” of not only all the qualitative and quantitative properties, but of all individuals as well. Everything in the world, according to Plato, is a sort of forger’s copy of these perfections (or, perhaps, that all particulars were participatory expressions of that singular form of perfection). This put Aristotle at direct loggerheads with his old teacher. For him, everything begins with the particular; both the particular individual and the particular property. These particular entities exhibit consistent patterns that we are able to recognize as rational animals, and it is these patterns that constitute our universal concepts as a product of reason. You might say that Plato was a top-down ontologist, while Aristotle was a bottom-up ontologist. This is the basis for the famous depiction of the two masters in Raphael’s famous School of Athens – Plato, points to the sky, while Aristotle gestures to the ground.
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Aristotle’s bottom-up approach is admittedly a powerful tool for understanding the world around us. In particular, our subjective experience of that world, and how we are to make sense of it. It is Aristotle’s nominalism that was the inspiration for scientific inquiry for the next three thousand years, and the basic assumptions of that nominalism still permeate today’s modern science — especially the assumption that the world is patterned and predictable, and that these patterns are discernible by a rational process of observation and interpretation. But it is precisely this assumption that remains a problem for Aristotle, and his nominalist approach to metaphysics. The first question of the philosopher is not *how*, or even *what*, but *why*. Aristotle never thought to ask why this basic assumption always seems hold. He sought only to provide an account of the things that exist, from that assumption. This more fundamental question was what Plato was targeting. He eschewed the examination of horses and shellfish, not because he thought there was nothing to learn from that examination, but because that knowledge was only derivative of what the philosopher ought to be paying attention to. Studying individuals may give you a vast knowledge of the varieties of the Forms, but it won’t tell you why that knowledge is possible or even whether the Forms are the right theory for why everything isn’t just — as William James put it — a “blooming, buzzing confusion”.
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### Conclusion
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In any case, we’ve drifted far afield from were we began. So, it’s time to put a bow on this episode. The goal here was to show what Aristotle meant by substance in the Categories, and to outline why it is distinct from, and fundamental to, all the other categories, whatever those may be. In the next instalment, we will visit the topic of substances once again, only this time, from the version provided by Aristotle in the Metaphysics. I’ve sprinkled in a few concepts from that in this essay. So, this next instalment should help to clarify those insertions. Then, after we’re thoroughly confused, we’ll take a look at Michael Wedin’s book, “Aristotle’s Theory of Substance”, to get a look at how we might stitch the two versions of substance back together into a coherent whole.
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```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
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---
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title: "Aristotle 101: the Aporia of Future Contingency"
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date: 2020-05-15T11:15:48Z
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tags: ["free will","determinism","time","change"]
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topics: ["philosophy"]
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image: /img/aristotle-and-salamis.jpg
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draft: false
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---
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In On Interpretation, Aristotle presents the thought experiment of the sea battle in order to grapple with a logical paradox stemming from his commitment to correspondence in truth and the Law of Excluded Middle on the one hand, and his commitment to potentiality in the future, on the other. Given these commitments, if we are to say that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then two questions (at least) need to be considered. First, is it *already* true that there will be one? Second, is its occurrence *already* determined by that? The term “already” is an important key to understanding these questions. It suggests a role for necessity in answering this problem. This essay will briefly summarize the logical problem, outline some possible solutions to the problem, and conclude with shrugging resignation at the fact that there isn’t more extant writing from Aristotle on the question.
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Aristotle commits himself implicitly in a number of places, to a very crude correspondence theory of truth. Which is to say, that the valence of any statement is determined by our observational experience of things in the world, as they relate to that statement. For example, “the sky is blue” is either true or false, relative to the color of the sky. Implied by what I just stated, Aristotle is also committed to the Law of Excluded Middle (hereafter, “LeM”). In brief, this just means that the statement “the sky is blue” *must be* either true or false. This is because the observational experience of the sky can only either correspond to the affirmation, or not correspond. For objects in the present, the consequence of these commitments is straightforward: “Socrates is not Aristotle” is *necessarily true* (because it logically must be the case, from the Law of Identity); necessarily, “the sky is blue” (because of the nature of gaseous mixtures and the properties of light causally determine our experience of it).
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However, these commitments cause interesting things to happen when we start making statements about *activities* (like sea battles), particularly when they have yet to take place. What are we referencing, when we say, “a sea battle will take place tomorrow”? There is no observational experience to point to, as yet. So, what truth value could we hope to place on this statement, and how would we assign it? What’s worse, If we maintain our commitment to correspondence and LeM, then we’ll have to deny both deliberative choice and chance, in favor of some form of fatalism or determinism — something that would require Aristotle, at a minimum, to abandon his Ethics. However, if we maintain our commitment to deliberative choice and chance, then we’ll have to either abandon correspondence as a basis for truth, or LeM as a rule for assigning truth values. Neither of which Aristotle is willing to surrender.
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Aristotle’s solution to this problem seems to be to apply a concept of conditional necessity on truth, in order to preserve potentiality in the future. After stating the problem himself, he states, “whatever is, necessarily is, *when it is*; and what is not, necessarily is not, *when it is not*…” and he goes on to argue, “to say that everything that is, is of necessity, when it is, is not the same as saying *unconditionally* that it is of necessity…”. So, the distinction he is drawing is between conditional and unconditional necessity. He says some things are necessarily so all the time, but some things are only necessarily so, at the point in time when they are. If we apply LeM to this, then we arrive at a situation in which all statements are either true or false as an unconditional necessity, but only conditionally necessary, when the condition of their occurrence has been met. Thus, for any statement about a future activity, such as, “there will be a sea battle tomorrow”, two states of affairs hold:
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1. It is necessary that the statement is either true or false, because these are the only values the statement could have, but potentiality requires that two values remain possible; and,
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2. the statement is necessarily true, when it is true, and necessarily false, when it is false, because the point in time when the state of affairs arises will necessitate one value be assigned to the statement.
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One way to interpret this, in answer to our original question, is to see Aristotle’s argument at the end of chapter 9 as saying that it is not necessary (i.e. determined) that the sea battle should happen, on account of our assertion, but it is necessary that the sea battle is *possible* on account of our assertion, and that our assertion will be true, when the sea battle takes place; false, when the sea battle does not take place.
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While this solution may not entail three-valued logic, it certainly heavily implies a sort of purgatorial limbo for our statement: *undefined*. Which is to say, that there may be a missing piece to our understanding of Aristotle’s correspondence theory. Aristotle says that a statement must be “either true or false”, in the sense that it cannot be “somewhat true”, or even “possibly false”, in the “middle value” sense. But, that a statement may be “either true or false” is itself a kind of middle value. The true-or-false setting. So, he must be positing statements that have not yet had their values actualized, at all. Perhaps their truth values exist as “true-or-false” when in a state of potentiality rather than actuality? This would be consistent with his statements about the sea battle itself (that it neither necessarily must happen, nor that it necessarily must not happen). But an evaluation of this will have to wait for another time.
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```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
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title: "Aristotle 101: The Faculty of Perception"
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date: 2020-05-16T11:22:42Z
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tags: ["metaphysics","biology","perception","forms","potentialities"]
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topics: ["philosophy"]
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image: /img/aristotle-staring.jpg
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draft: true
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---
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According to Aristotle, the eyes are an organ of the body meant to inculcate the soul with the capacity for perceiving the forms of shape and color. If one recalls that Aristotle’s theory of the soul is meant to account for the kinds of change that a living body undergoes, and that change is the transition from potentiality to actuality, then the question becomes, how do the eyes enable this kind of change? This essay will briefly summarize Aristotle’s general theory of sense perception, provide a specific account for sight, and then raise some concerns about the efficacy of this theory in the context of Aristotle’s theory of causes.
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The soul, according to Aristotle, is not merely the form of the body, in terms of its shape, but the capacity to engage in the activities that living things engage in. There are three broad categories of activity within which these capacities fall. First, is nutrition, which can be thought of as a sort of purposeful (or intentional) absorption. The second is perception, and the third is thought or nous. The sense organs fall into the second category, enabling perception in the soul, through the structuring of the body in specific ways.
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What does it mean to perceive? According to Aristotle, perception is the reception of the sensible forms. If we recall that change is a movement from potentiality to actuality, and that form is the actuality half of the compound of matter and form, then perception is a process of actualization, that is enabled by the sense organs. But the actualization that is taking place is of a special kind. Aristotle posits, in various ways, three stages of transition. In the first phase, there is no actuality. This is called “first potentiality”, and consists solely in the presence of the faculty of a given sense organ. The second phase is called “second potentiality” (“first actuality”), and consists in a mixture of both actualized potential, and un-actualized potential. In the case of sense perception, this might be like someone who is sighted, but asleep. The third case is “second actuality”, and this consists in the full realization of an object, such that no potentiality is left (e.g. a ripened piece of fruit, or the arrival of our adult teeth). Aristotle believed that all the sense organs functioned in the second phase of transition (for lack of a better way to put it).
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Aristotle thinks that all subjects are capable of affecting all other subjects, in ways in which they are *equipped to be affected*. In living things, the correspondence between effect and affected, lies in the symmetry of the properties of subjects and the sense organs designed to take in those properties. Forms actualize the potential of matter (this is how we have sense organs at all – the soul expresses its faculties through the structures it imposes on the body). So, sense perception is a kind of actualization of the object of perception, within the subject doing the perceiving. But, since a man is himself already an actualized compound of matter and form, some other intermediate state must be the case. This is where “second potentiality” comes in. Sense organs give the soul the capacity to realize certain forms in a state of semi-completeness. Each organ is specialized to bring to actuality, only the form it is capable of receiving, and no more.
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This is where it might be helpful to bring in the sense perception of sight, and the organ of the eye, in particular, to make it clear. Let us consider two distinct substances; a man, and an apple. The apple is an actualization of several properties. Among them, a certain color, shape, smell, and firmness. When the man trains his eyes upon the apple, the apple *affects* his eyes by actualizing within them, the color and the shape (the sensible forms which the eyes have the capacity to receive). These actualizations are “first actualities”, rather than “second actualities”, because (a) the matter of the apple is not transmitted with the sensible form, (b) only the sensible properties corresponding to the sense of sight are part of that transmission, and (c) the matter of the man does not contain the potential itself to become an apple. To put it another way, the apple achieves “first actuality” within the soul of the perceiver, similarly to how a sleeping man has the “first actuality” of sight, while he is sleeping. The difference being, that there is no sense in which the perceiver could “wake up” to discover he has become an apple. Thus, having eyes enables one to “see”, by virtue of the fact that eyes facilitate the first-actualization of the sensible forms of shape and color, within the soul. The same process holds for all the senses.
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Of central importance to Aristotle, was to be able to account for change in the world. His theory of causes is central to this endeavor. One concern about his theory of perception in the soul, that this essay leaves unanswered, is that it is difficult to see how it maps on to his theory of causes. Aristotle spends so much time dealing with the formal and final cause of perception, that his efficient and material explanations are practically tautological (perception is form reception, and form reception just is the act of perceiving). Perhaps some elaboration of this existed somewhere in writings we’ve lost. Still, given the benefit of two thousand years of scientific developments since, it seems a fool’s errand to chase after Aristotelian explanations of the medium through which forms were transmitted, the biological mechanisms in sense organs that “received” those “transmissions”, and the biology of change, in terms of form reception. One is struck by both the absense of any attempt on his part to empirically demonstrate his theories, and with his fascination with symmetries and parallelisms. For all his reputation as an early nominalist, and a proto-scientist, he still comes off as profoundly Platonic.
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```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
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---
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title: "Aristotle 101: The Four Causes"
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date: 2020-02-28T11:38:02Z
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tags: ["aristotle","causality","metaphysics","telos"]
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topics: ["philosophy"]
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image: /img/aristotle_staring_down.jpg
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draft: false
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---
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In the Physics, Aristotle says that we aim at understanding, which he says is to be able to give a full account of “the how and the why of things coming into existence and going out of it”. In other words, to understand something is to be able to give an explanation of how and why a thing changes. That explanation is what Aristotle means by ‘cause’. Today, thinking of explanation in terms of causes is not an alien notion. But, when we do this, we are typically only thinking in one narrow scientific sense of the term. Aristotle, however, describes a theory of causal explanation in both the Physics and the Metaphysics that includes four separate categorical senses of the term. Aristotle insists that a complete explanation will appeal to all four of these kinds of cause. In this answer, I will briefly describe the four causes, and attempt to explain why the fourth, ‘final’ cause is primary in Aristotle’s theory.
|
||||
|
||||
Aristotle’s four causes (perhaps more accurately labeled ‘explanatory factors’) are named ‘material’, ‘efficient’, ‘formal’, and ‘final’. The Physics tells us that Aristotle was interested in using these categories to answer two kinds of question: the how and the why. The material and efficient causes fall under the ‘how’ rubric. The material cause is a description of the physical matter that inheres in the subject. Aristotle’s famous example is the portion of bronze to be used by an artisan to cast a sculpture.
|
||||
|
||||
The efficient cause is the originator of motion or change in the subject. There are two senses of this cause. The first sense is the way in which we think of causation in Humean terms, today: as sequences of events in which one necessitates the other in linear progression. The second sense preserves the temporal priority, but admits that an effect can be independent of its cause, in certain ways. An example of this would be a builder and his buildings. The material and efficient causes are perhaps best understood in a modern context, as the basis for the physical sciences and engineering disciplines.
|
||||
|
||||
Together, the material and efficient causes explain the constitution, and the source of change, of a subject. In short, how it came to be the way it is. But to completely explain a subject, requires answering the ‘why’ question as well. This is done by way of the formal and final causes. The formal cause is the design-plan or formula that defines the subject. Aristotle’s example is the mathematical ratio 2:1 which, when combined with number, defines the octave. But formal causes need not be so precise or technical. Fathers, according to Aristotle, are formal causes of their sons. Combined with the mother (the material cause), the two produce sons that are the form of their father. In a word, like begets like.
|
||||
|
||||
At last, the final cause is the end or goal ‘for the sake of which’ all change occurs. At last, the final cause is the end or goal ‘for the sake of which’ all change occurs. Like the efficient cause, the final cause also has two distinct senses. The first sense is intentional, in that it answers the question what is a thing for? Or, more precisely, why do you need it? For example, brushes are for painting, swords are for fighting, and bedsteads are for sleeping. The second sense is the natural telos of a thing. It is the ‘direction’ in which a thing is pointed in its change, for the sake of its own completion or excellence. In the Nicomachean Ethics, for example, Aristotle argues that eudaemonia is the natural telos – or final cause – of man. But this concept applies to both animate and inanimate things. For example, were we to ask Aristotle why a fire’s flame rises into the sky, he is likely to tell us it is because fire is a fundamental element, and therefore its telos is union with its source, the fire beyond the firmament.
|
||||
|
||||
Aristotle says in the Physics, that the final cause is the primary explanatory factor of all four of the causes. This is because, without the final cause, there can be nothing to animate the other three causes. Without a yearning for eudaemonia, for example, there would be no need to explain virtue or vice because there would be no motivation driving the change in need of an explanation. Secondly, the first three causes may be useful for explaining particular phenomena, such as the birth of a single colt, or the sound of a single musical interval. But what Aristotle needs to account for, is the fact that these things occur in consistent, repeatable patterns. The telos of a thing explains the consistency in its behavior, in terms of an instance of a universal. All men aspire to eudaemonia. All elements seek to be unified with the one source. Thus, the primacy of telos is the most distinctive feature in Aristotle’s account of causality. From his explanation for the origin of the universe, to his theory of human justice, none of it would make any sense without an understanding of final cause as a key component of the four cause theory.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Aristotle 101: The Zoon Politikon"
|
||||
date: 2020-05-17T11:00:43Z
|
||||
tags: ["greek philosophy","aristotle","political animal"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
|
||||
image: /img/democracy-athens.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
In the first book of the Politics, Aristotle argues for the view that man is a ‘political animal’. To assess the claim properly, we must first understand what he means by the term, and we should understand the reasoning he uses to defend it. Thus examined, we will find his position interesting, but ultimately unsatisfactory. However, it may be possible to shore up his case.
|
||||
|
||||
Aristotle’s ‘political animal’ (*zoon politikon*) is not the creature we might expect today – a conventional construct enfranchised by legal edict and duty-bound only to his own individual happiness as a free agent in a democratic nation-state. Instead, what Aristotle had in mind was an animal that was best suited to realize his complete end or natural goal (his *telos*) in a community organized to that end as well. That community is known as a city-state (a *polis*). As an integrated part of a functional polis, man is a creature of the polis – a political animal.
|
||||
|
||||
What does Aristotle mean by ‘realizing complete ends’, and how could it be that the polis (and only the polis) enables this realization? In the Nicomachean Ethics (NE from now on) Aristotle argues that the chief good for man is *eudaimonia* (roughly: the achievement of excellence in life – aka – the ‘Good Life’). He further argues that this Good Life is only attainable by way of *phronesis* (roughly: excellence in both practical and intellectual virtues; or, excellence of character and of intellect). Phronesis, he further argues in both NE and Politics necessitates a community whose telos is the Good Life for its members. That community, according to Politics, is the polis. But why does Aristotle say this?
|
||||
|
||||
The polis, according to Aristotle, is the culmination of two more primitive forms of community: the family, and the village. These communities are formed out of two basic relationships: the man and woman, for the purpose of producing children; and, the master and slave, for the purpose of maintaining the household. The basic subsistence this enables further requires security and cooperation. This end is met by the village: a network of related households. By themselves, they are necessary components of the Good Life, because they exist for the sake of life itself. However, they are insufficient for the Good Life, until they are combined in such a way that they give rise to the polis – a network of interrelated villages. Once the polis emerges, the telos of the whole becomes the eudaimonia of the members of the polis.
|
||||
|
||||
The strongest argument Aristotle offers in defense of the natural necessity of the polis as such, come from his assertion that nature never does anything in vain (that is to say, without a purpose). The argument runs something like this: humans possess the power of speech; speech is only present in animals capable of moral discernment; the only such animal is man; moral discernment is a necessity for the proper pursuit of rational goods (phronesis); phronesis is necessary for eudaimonia; eudaimonia is only possible in a polis. He bolsters this argument by asserting that the solitary man (the man incapable of living in a polis) must be sub-human, and that the ideal man (the man that has somehow achieved eudaimonia independently of the polis) could only be a god.
|
||||
|
||||
A few objections arise from this account of man as a ‘political animal’. Firstly, on the previous argument, it appears that Aristotle is simply defining other forms of living out of the acceptable range of eudemonic lives. Why? No clear answer can be found in either NE or Politics. Secondly, Aristotle provides no account for the telic transition from family and village (subsistence) to the polis (eudaimonia). How does this happen? Why could it not have been a conventional imposition (say, as part of the existing conditions of Hellenic political life)? Lastly, why could other primitive forms of community not have arisen explicitly with eudaimonia as a telos? It is not clear from Aristotle’s arguments why subsistence needs to precede eudaimonia.
|
||||
|
||||
In any case, Aristotle’s claim is still a fascinating one. In the realm of counterfactuals, one wonders what the world might have looked like today, had we never developed the nation-state and remained a vast interlinked network of city-states. Finally, is it really necessary to establish a natural telos in order to justify such a social arrangement? The communitarians (at least a few of them) don’t seem to think so. There are plenty of consequentialist defenses of the position, and given the havoc that the nation-state seems responsible for over the last three-hundred years, it is tempting to take that as a demonstration in the negative, of the correctness of Aristotle’s point about the necessity of the polis for eudaimonia.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Book Review: Enlightenment Philosophy in a Nutshell"
|
||||
date: 2019-07-28T12:27:36Z
|
||||
tags: ["reviews", "enlightenment", "academia"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","history"]
|
||||
image: /img/enlightenment-nutshell.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
*What’s the Goal?*
|
||||
|
||||
In the introduction to [*Enlightenment Philosophy In A Nutshell*](https://amzn.to/30Vzdsu), Jane O’Grady makes her intentions for the book quite explicit:
|
||||
|
||||
> *I hope to show how Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant respond to, develop, reform, and contradict the ideas of their predecessors and peers, such as Hobbes, Leibniz, Hutcheson, Voltaire, and Diderot, and in doing so, to convey the extraordinary courage and innovativeness of the Enlightenment as a whole*… (Pg. 9)
|
||||
|
||||
The problem with stating an ambitious goal like this so explicitly, is that a cautious reader will notice when the goal is not quite satisfied. The book does not (and, practically, cannot) include fair treatments of Hobbes, Leibniz, Voltaire, or Diderot. So it is difficult to show how the others are responding to to them, except by implication or characterization, which O’Grady does quite frequently.
|
||||
|
||||
She occasionally includes references to and passages from twentieth century philosophers as well, all of whom are responding to Descartes, Lock, Hume, and Kant. This is one of the better, and more subtle features of the book, because it vividly demonstrates the extent to which Enlightenment thinking still motivates, informs, and permeates philosophical discussions today. It further demonstrates that the conversation with Enlightenment thinkers is far from over, whether we’d like to think so, or not. But this still seems to me, to be a diversion from the very particular goal stated in the quote above.
|
||||
|
||||
Still, as a summary handbook of the ideas and arguments of the most essential thinkers of the Enlightenment, no student could go wrong in purchasing this volume. The chapters on Locke, Spinoza, and Kant, easily make this book well worth the jacket price. What’s more, the introduction and chapter one are so pregnant with interesting talking points, that I’ve decided to make the bulk of this review a direct response to those two chapters alone, after a brief comment on the problem of ‘compression’.
|
||||
|
||||
### The Problem of Compression
|
||||
|
||||
Early in the introduction, O’Grady laments:
|
||||
|
||||
> …*how can [the history and ideas of the Enlightenment] be crammed into a nutshell? It can’t, of course, but compression is sometimes a handy tool for communicating the sense of a subject and inspiring further investigation*… (Pg. 9)
|
||||
|
||||
The question is, *what “sense”*? O’Grady would probably object that my criticism thus far is unfair, given the scope and nature of her project. Grayling’s recent tome, *The Age of Genius*, which spanned the intricacies of the 30-years-war for most of the first half of the book, still managed to over-simplify the motivations of many of the characters involved, despite being 370 pages in length. So, how is it reasonable to expect a summary work such as this one to be any more nuanced? O’Grady might have a point, if my complaint were simply that she over-simplifies the history. Rather, what I am complaining about here, is that the book uses “compression” as a cover for retelling the same storybook narrative that has been repeated about the Enlightenment, *ad nauseam*: evil repressive monolithic church, versus freethinking swashbucklers who triumph over this evil for progress, in the end. Roll credits. Play anthem.
|
||||
|
||||
But subsequent history has made it clear that the value of religion, and the reliance on tradition, are both far more significant than the nineteenth century progressive interpretation of Enlightenment “liberation” would permit. What’s more, its clear from subsequent biographical and historical scholarship, that for most Enlightenment thinkers (Hume excluded, perhaps), a relationship with the western God and adherence to his church, was not simply a cynical or cowardly ploy to avoid personal harm. This is not to assert that Enlightenment thinkers did not face threats, at times, for their dissidence. Of course, they did. Rather, I am suggesting that we should take their belief seriously, unless we have some indubitable ground for questioning it. Summary treatments of a spectacularly large subject like the Enlightenment lend themselves to just this sort of bias. So, that “sense of the subject” which O’Grady wants to convey, just ends up being the sense that flatters the preconceptions of the Oxbridge set, and the common English view of intellectual history.
|
||||
|
||||
This is not to suggest that there isn’t at least some truth in that perspective. But the broader question then becomes, “who is this book for?”. O’Grady says she wants this compression to “inspire further investigation”. The way this book is structured, I do think it would function as an excellent guide for group discussions of the major events and ideas of the Enlightenment. So, perhaps a classroom or a meetup group of philosophy enthusiasts would find this book valuable. The book reads as if we’re in a private dialogue with Jane herself, and this informal conversational style makes the book a pleasure to read, and much less onerous than heavier tomes like Gottlieb’s “Dream of Enlightenment”. So, perhaps the risk of distortion is worth the possibility of opening up the Enlightenment to a new generation of seekers, willing to explore its deeper meanings. In what follows, I offer two such interpretations.
|
||||
|
||||
### Enlightenment as Rescue
|
||||
|
||||
As with many modern Anglo-American philosophers, O’Grady is susceptible to the nineteenth century view of the Enlightenment as an antidote to medieval Catholic scholasticism, and a much needed reaction to the ostensible hegemony of the Catholic church. She quotes Kant’s “*What Is Enlightenment*” approvingly, to this effect:
|
||||
|
||||
> *…’Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’, is the first sentence of Kant’s essay on Enlightenment – ‘self-imposed’ because of what Kant considers our ‘laziness and cowardice’ in failing to think for ourselves without being guided by others. ‘If I have a book to understand for me, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a doctor to decide my diet, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if I can only pay’…* (Pg. 15)
|
||||
|
||||
When one considers the implications of these assertions from Kant, it is difficult to take him seriously. For starters, his condemnation of all who’ve gone before, as lazy and cowardly, is as cynical as it is itself lazy. Enlightenment thinkers were constantly cribbing material from the church fathers, even as they claimed a “starting from scratch” project. Second, I am struggling to think of a time when I’ve had thoughts of my own that weren’t guided in some way by all these thinkers from the Enlightenment — either by adaptation or reaction. Lastly, if the immaturity was self-imposed, and its source was a natural laziness and/or cowardice, it is difficult to imagine why we would ever want to bother being awakened from any ‘dogmatic slumber’.
|
||||
|
||||
Kant was shaping the lens through which several later generations would view the Enlightenment, the medieval thinkers that preceded it, and most importantly, themselves relative to it all. It seems to me the modern Anglo-Americans are also wearing Kant’s glasses. Take, for example, O’Grady’s characterization of Kant’s remarks, from the same page:
|
||||
|
||||
> *…Enlightenment thinkers were trying to do what the ancient Greeks had done: think from first principles, and persuade everyone else to do so, too. They urged criticism of all beliefs and ideas, including their own, and the promulgation of new ones…* (Pg. 15)
|
||||
|
||||
The implication here, clearly borrowed from Kant, is that no such effort was taking place anywhere else in the church-dominated culture of the West, prior to the Enlightenment. Kant certainly believed this. But (to borrow the Royal Society’s motto for a moment) why should we take his word for it? Of course, there’s nowhere near enough space or time in the book for O’Grady to address this question. So, I am left to pursue that question myself. Later, O’Grady claims that the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert was suppressed by the church, but doesn’t actually explain the politics of that suppression, instead juxtaposing it with Galileo’s recantation and subsequent house arrest, as if the two were related, or that Diderot and d’Alembert faced the same sort of threat. She likewise equates Descartes’ self-suppression of his “*Treatise of the World*” with this threat, but offers no explanation for why he later felt entirely comfortable submitting his Meditations to the scholastics in Paris, under his own name.
|
||||
|
||||
The picture painted for the reader is clear enough, and it is a common trope in retellings of the Enlightenment: the monolithic church was a ubiquitously oppressive force, and the thinkers of the Enlightenment were brave revolutionaries and visionaries who only paid cynical lip-service to this backward religion, in order to avoid the fate of Giordano Bruno. Indeed, O’Grady’s consonance with Kant’s view of pre-Enlightenment society, and the significance of the Enlightenment as a movement, is explicit:
|
||||
|
||||
> …*Enlightenment thinkers unanimously saw themselves as throwing off the shackles of religious and state authority*… (Pg. 15)
|
||||
|
||||
But, is this actually the case? Why, for instance, would Descartes submit both his Discourse and his Meditations, to the authority of the Sorbonne, then? Why would he have cared what their opinion was? Why would Locke have spent so much effort tutoring nobles and princes? Why, for that matter, would Kant have bothered seeking a position as a university lecturer? Perhaps the issue they had wasn’t with authority *per se*, but with authority as constituted? It’s hard to say, and the book never explores this nuance.
|
||||
|
||||
O’Grady, sensing that some nuance is warranted in this characterization, does say this in her own defense:
|
||||
|
||||
> *…Even revisionists who insist that the ‘Dark Ages’ had their own sort of light would admit that great thinkers such as Augustine, Abelard, and Aquinas had been constrained by the need to examine religious questions and not exceed prescribed Christian boundaries…* (Pg. 16)
|
||||
|
||||
But this just isn’t the case. Enormous intellectual, ecumenical, and theological battles were raging throughout the church across the whole of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’. Augustine and Plotinus represented one major sect in a theological war with Aquinas and Abelard, over the Platonic versus the Aristotelian conception of not just the nature of the soul, the location of heaven, and the meaning of the crucifixion, but *also*, the nature and behavior of the planets, the nature of the earth and the creatures within it, the correct methods of reasoning, and much more. The end result of that battle, by the fifteenth century, had left the Augustinians far outside the authoritative canon of Catholic theology, and yet that scholarly tradition persisted within the church despite losing its ascendancy. How is this possible in a world where a pre-existing totalizing dogma is already the rule? In fact, the world of the medievals is far more complicated than we moderns care to grant it, and the relationship of the Enlightenment thinkers to that history is far more confused and misunderstood than this just-so story is willing to reveal.
|
||||
|
||||
### Enlightenment As Cautionary Tale
|
||||
|
||||
In spite of her pronounced modern Anglo-American perspective, O’Grady is not naive about the Enlightenment. She recognizes some of the inherent problems of Enlightenment thinking, and does the reader a great service in pointing these out from time to time, and demonstrating the importance of these flaws in the modern debate. For example, on the principle of universalism, which is core to Enlightenment humanism, she points out:
|
||||
|
||||
> …*it was precisely exploitation, eurocentrism, and racism that the Enlightenment was attacking… for the diversity of cultures to be celebrated, it was first necessary that they were not belittled or vilified — that the assumed exclusivity and superiority that European, and other cultures, assumed to themselves be transcended and respect be extended to all. Enlightenment universalism was what enabled the very identity politics that now condemns it. It is a victim of its own success and of the incessant critiquing that was so essential to it*… (P. 19)
|
||||
|
||||
One can hear whispers of Nietzsche in this. His identification of the Will To Truth, that corroded Western religion, it seems has also corroded Western culture itself. But O’Grady’s insight is even more subtle than this, and more relevant to the present. She is hinting at a strange role-reversal that seems to have overtaken contemporary politics, as a consequence of centuries of struggling with the ideal of universalism:
|
||||
|
||||
> *…Enlightenment thinkers saw themselves as ‘citizens of the world’, yet oddly, many on the present-day [radical] left would probably agree with the reactionary aristocrat Joseph de Maistre, who objected that the Republican constitution of 1795 ‘has been drawn up for Man’, and that ‘a constitution that has been drawn up for all nations is made for none.’ For de Maistre averred that, although in the course of his life he had come across Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and even (thanks to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters) Persians, he had never met ‘Man’…* (Pg. 23)
|
||||
|
||||
While the radical left today is dedicated to borderless globalism, it is still true that those in the identity politics movement insist that the notion of a universal “Man” is just a narcissistic projection of “white supremacy” (or, at least, colonialist chauvinism) on all the world. And O’Grady further correctly points out that:
|
||||
|
||||
> …supporters of identity politics similarly deny that there can be any general ‘human’ interests, any more than there can be ‘truth’… (Pg. 23)
|
||||
|
||||
Still, there is something O’Grady has missed, perhaps because her vantage point does not make it easy to see. There are identitarians *on both the left and the right*, and they both would deny the reality of the universal ‘Man’. For the left, this denial amounts to a condemnation of the Enlightenment as a fundamentally racist project. For the right, however, this denial is an affirmation of an obvious fact (at least, to them): the domination of western culture (and the white men that populate it) in the form of the products of the Enlightenment, makes explicit what Enlightenment thinkers took as an unacknowledged self-evident truth: Western culture is superior, and promotion of Enlightenment ideas helps to preserve that superiority — i.e., that there indeed just are the interests of specific peoples, and that we who belong to this group of peoples have a duty to defend and promote those interests, everywhere in the world.
|
||||
|
||||
Both interpretations of the idea of Enlightenment universalism are pernicious and cynical corruptions. The thinkers of the Enlightenment were neither unconscious of the true nature of their project, nor were they disingenuous about it. They may have been mistaken, but they *really did* subscribe to the notion of the universal brotherhood of man, and to the notion of the equal human dignity this afforded all men. They *really did* see themselves as ‘citizens of the world’, and were not simply adopting, in Foucaultian terms, language effective for the accumulation of power to themselves (whether for good or bad purposes). To take the cynical view of universalism, is to make the same mistake as with their religious beliefs: to read backward into history a secret psychological motive that helps to confirm a flattering view of ourselves, relative to them.
|
||||
|
||||
O’Grady rightly recognizes this problem, and highlights one of the sources of this distortion in the way that we interpret Kant today:
|
||||
|
||||
> …*There is something anachronistic in the way **sapere aude** (Kant’s declared motto of Enlightenment) is so often translated as ‘dare to think for yourself’, when its more accurate translation is ‘dare to know’… thinking for yourself was important, not for its own sake, but rather… [they] expected that subjective reasonings would ultimately converge on objective truth… the exhortation to free thinking has been exaggerated and distorted into the notion that all opinions are important and equally valid… [thus ironically encouraging] the return of group-think within cultural boundaries…* (Pg. 23)
|
||||
|
||||
The twenty-first century argument clearly seems to be taking us back to the Nietzschean struggle between the Will To Power and the Will To Truth, and O’Grady points to this in her book, even if only by suggestion. Her awareness of the significance of the Enlightenment does not stop there. O’Grady also outlines a further Nietzschean warning about the Enlightenment:
|
||||
|
||||
> …The backlash against reason which led to Romanticism was in fact part of the Enlightenment itself. In the very act of dethroning superstition and authority, and crowning human dignity and freedom of thought, reason began the discovery of how insignificant and irrational human beings really are. Elevating humans and human reason led to the downgrade of both… The fabulous fecundity of the Enlightenment was the gateway to modern bleakness — to Freud, who would see reason as a specious gloss over our wild unconscious desires, and to Darwin, who would show us to be glorified apes. It was the beginning of what Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’ in which divinity would be stripped away, not just from the cosmos, but from ourselves… (Pg. 25)
|
||||
|
||||
Yet, while acknowledging the bleakness of a world bereft of divinity, she seems to think that the liberation from ‘superstition’ was worth the price we’ve paid. Was it? I have been an atheist and a seeker for most of my life. Until very recently, I would have said yes. I no longer think this. I will reserve an explanation for this change for another post, but the point I wish to make here, is that this “disenchantment” is perhaps the most significant and devastating feature of the Enlightenment, and that the Enlightenment thinkers who emphasized human dignity and political individualism were unconsciously reacting to the implications of this disenchantment in the only way they knew how: by trying to reinvent it anew, as a ‘natural’ phenomenon. O’Grady doesn’t spend a lot of time on this, but readers of this book will want to explore the writings of modern thinkers who do.
|
||||
|
||||
### Conclusion
|
||||
|
||||
This book does far more than “inspire further investigation”. It is a compact hand-grenade with the explosive power of an H-bomb. Anyone with the ambition and the sensitivity to the philosophical conundrums addressed in this book, could find himself on a life-long quest hunting down the splinters in the mind it leaves behind. This is why I was disappointed not to find a decent bibliography in the back of the book. Only the most ambitious (and most adroit at the internet search) is going to have any luck tracking down many of the casual references O’Grady litters throughout this text. From Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles, to Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, to Simon Blackburn’s Quasi-Realism, if the reader doesn’t already know what he’s looking for, he’s likely to be frustrated by this book, absent a bibliography. Indeed, if he doesn’t already know what he’s looking for, there’s a good chance he might miss some of these, because they’re often offered as vague “other philosophers think” asides.
|
||||
|
||||
But, given a wise guide, and a group with which to discuss the men and ideas presented in this book, I think the book is a fantastic place to begin the journey, not just in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but in philosophy itself. One of the great advantages of starting a philosophical journey from the Enlightenment outward, is that it fills the seeker with very much the same sort of enthusiasm that the Enlightenment thinkers themselves were filled. *Enlightenment Philosophy In A Nutshell* is itself brimming with precisely this same sort of enthusiasm, and despite the aforementioned annoyance, would thus make an excellent handbook for those new to the journey of philosophy.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Chamberlain Nozick and Rawls"
|
||||
date: 2020-01-09T11:43:30Z
|
||||
tags: ["egalitarianism","libertarianism","patterned justice","property"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
|
||||
image: /img/nozick-and-rawls.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
In his book, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”, Robert Nozick offers the Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment in order to demonstrate how a conception of justice based on “end-state patterned distributions” (as he put it) would require constant coercive interventions on the part of the state, in order to maintain the desired pattern. This, in turn, would undermine theories of justice that incorporated liberty into their framework. John Rawls’ theory of justice is one such example. I will briefly outline the thought experiment and the problem it poses, consider some objections to Nozick, and conclude that despite these objections, Nozick succeeds.
|
||||
|
||||
The Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment comes near the beginning of a section of Anarchy, State, and Utopia appropriately titled “Liberty Upsets Patterns”. The basic outline of the scenario runs like this: Imagine a world in which all property holdings are uniformly just according to Nozick’s theory of justice in acquisition and justice in transfer. Imagine that this world is also in some desired end state pattern, according to some other theory of justice (such as Rawls). Imagine this world includes the game of basketball, and that Wilt Chamberlain is a player on a team. Now, imagine that, because he knows he’s a massive audience draw, he has negotiated with his employers to charge an additional 25¢ per ticket, the proceeds of which would go directly to him. As a result of this, at the end of the season, Chamberlain’s pay radically exceeds the preferred distribution of incomes established at the beginning of the season. If we are committed to the patterned distribution view of justice, then such a payout would be unjust. But, if we are also committed to liberty, so Nozick insists, then it would be unjust to force Chamberlain to surrender the difference.
|
||||
|
||||
Thus, we have an irreconcilable conflict between the two principles enshrined in our theory of justice, and therefore, some rational reconciliation would be needed to make the theory coherent. If the principle of liberty were to be abandoned, the use of coercion to prevent the odd possibility of breaking the pattern seems acceptable. But, thinkers like Rawls (to whom Nozick is directly responding) insist that liberty is an essential component. Indeed, Rawls even asserts that it has ‘lexical priority’ over the second principle of “difference”. So, there does seem to be a problem here, for theorists like Rawls.
|
||||
|
||||
Defending Rawls, Jonathan Wolff has objected that Nozick was exaggerating his case against Rawls, and that redistribution is compatible with liberty, because it increases overall liberty by giving the poor more economic choices. The first complaint is a red herring. Nozick does hyperbolize, to be sure (he describes “re-education” camps for entrepreneurs, and police raids on equality transgressors, in his other scenarios). But the hyperbole is not essential to the point Nozick is making – which is simply that Rawls needs to reconcile the conflict between liberty and difference in order to be coherent. The degree to which the conflict manifests is irrelevant. The second objection is more interesting, but also untenable. In order to defeat Nozick, Wolff has to redefine liberty in ways that neither Rawls nor Nozick are admitting, and he has to obfuscate an important distinction Rawls makes with regard to property. When one looks directly at what Rawls wrote about liberty and property, one finds the standard Marxist distinction between “personal” property, and property that functions as the “means of production”. This is important, because Rawls counts only the first form of property ownership among the list of “basic liberties” protected against the difference principle, in his theory of justice. It is not clear where the line between “personal” and “productive” property lies in practice for Rawls, but it really doesn’t matter. The point is, that it is there at all. Nozick wants to say that the state would be violating the liberty principle by preventing me from, say, melting down my kitchen cutlery in order to build a widget-making machine.
|
||||
|
||||
Rawls would reply that this is not a violation of the liberty principle, because once the cutlery stopped being “personal” property, and became a means of production, it was no longer protected as a “basic liberty”. Wolff’s defense of Rawls was that the power to make economic choices is what liberty amounted to – freedom just is the freedom to make purchases. Overall freedom increases by giving purchasing power to those who lack it, by redistributing it from those who wouldn’t miss the property seized. However, it’s clear from the source texts, that this is not at all what either Rawls or Nozick had in mind when they talked about liberty.
|
||||
|
||||
Ultimately, then, the dispute between Nozick and Rawls is over the nature of property. Nozick’s view is very clear on this point, but very broad. It is based on Locke’s conception of property acquisition and property holdings. Rawls view, on the other hand, is the Marxist view I outlined above. It is vague and confusing, at best. What is happening when I smelt my cutlery into a sewing machine? What metaphysical magic revokes my right of possession? For that matter, suppose I used the cutlery as-is, but to slice carrots which I sold out my kitchen window, to my neighbors (along with some dipping sauce)? If the cutlery isn’t physically altered, then the key here is not what form the property takes, but the end for which it is used. But what justification is there for denying the liberty to engage in any activity with my property (personal or otherwise)? The Marxist would say, that it is to prevent the accumulation of a profit. More to the point, here: to prevent a distortion in an ideal patterned distribution, just as Nozick explained.
|
||||
|
||||
If the Marxist (in this case Rawls) cannot coherently explain the difference between “personal” and “productive” property, then the liberty principle must apply to all forms of property ownership as a “basic liberty”. If that is so, then the difference principle would place a constraint on liberty not consistent with the theory. Therefore, the difference principle and the liberty principle remain at odds, and Rawls is defeated. As such, Nozick does indeed succeed.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Creativity, Transcendence, and Love"
|
||||
date: 2020-05-15T20:20:58Z
|
||||
date: 2020-05-13T20:20:58Z
|
||||
tags: []
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy", "psychology"]
|
||||
image: /img/kids-in-grass.jpg
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Induction - An Introduction to the Problem"
|
||||
date: 2019-03-18T13:00:14Z
|
||||
tags: ["induction","logic","metaphysics","scientific method","transitive property"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/russells-chickens.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The so-called problem of induction, plainly stated, comes down to this: inductive reasoning appears to have no rational justification. Unlike deductive reasoning, which offers apparent justification in its formal structure, the form of an inductive argument can at best only offer probabilistic confidence, and at worst, no justification at all, if we examine it’s application in the context of, say, a causal explanation. To see why this is the case, let’s examine some formal examples.
|
||||
|
||||
First, let’s have a look at a deductive argument to see why it appears to be rational:
|
||||
|
||||
> P1: Thomas is a Catholic Monk
|
||||
> P2: Catholic monks believe in a triune God
|
||||
> C: Therefore, Thomas believes in a triune God
|
||||
|
||||
In this classic example of a deductive syllogism, the premises are propositional assertions that are independent of each other. That is to say, they are assertions about individual objects, to which a predicate coherently applies, that could be uttered individually, without reliance upon the other.
|
||||
|
||||
Yet, together, they share a common feature that links them in an important way. The shared feature is the property of “Catholic monkness”. In the first premise, that property is a predicate applied to Thomas. In the second premise, it is the object to which a belief in a triune God is applied. Understood this way, you could abstract the assertions into a kind of formula:
|
||||
|
||||
T(homas) = M(onk) = G(od belief). Or, mathematically: a = b; b = c.
|
||||
|
||||
This is what is known as the “transitive law” of logic (which has an analogue in math as well). This property is what gives our conclusion it’s deductive weight. If Thomas is a monk, and monks believe in God, then obviously, Thomas believes in God. To put it in formal logical terms: If aRb and bRc, then aRc.
|
||||
|
||||
There are indeed linguistic and ontological questions in philosophy that call into question the nature of the transitive property and logical necessitation, and by extension, the rational basis for accepting this law as read, but that is beyond the scope of this essay, and beyond the scope of everyday usage. Suffice it to say, the only point here is that relative to a valid deduction like this, we have even less reason to claim rationality for our inductive conclusions, if folks like David Hume are correct. Let’s now juxtapose an inductive syllogism against this, to see the problem in a more clear light:
|
||||
|
||||
> P1: On Monday, Thomas made his morning offering in the chapel.
|
||||
> P2: On Tuesday, Thomas made his morning offering in the chapel.
|
||||
> C: Therefore, on Wednesday, Thomas will make his morning offering in the chapel.
|
||||
|
||||
This is what is known as a simple “enumerative induction”, because it simply enumerates instances, and infers a prediction from them. This form of argument suffers from two problems: first, despite the fact that the enumerative premises are independent of each other (like in the deduction), they do not share a transitive property between them. Nothing “logically links” the enumerations. They are like random pebbles on the beach.
|
||||
|
||||
Next, If you look at the conclusion, it too appears to be nothing more than another enumeration, with one difference: it is a prediction. Our premises are statements about the past, and our conclusion is a statement about the future. What, in the two premises, compels the conclusion? What makes it true, that Thomas will be in the chapel on Wednesday morning? Hume offered a tentative theory to explain this. He would have said that the “constant conjunction” of experiences of Thomas in the Chapel each morning, impresses upon us a psychological disposition to expect Thomas in the chapel on subsequent mornings. Perhaps this is so. But, if it is, it renders inductive inference a wholly irrational phenomenon, because rather than from our reasoning, we derive the expectation from phenomenal “impressions” that give rise organically to an idea of Thomas in the chapel on future mornings.
|
||||
|
||||
To be a bit more charitable, let’s restate this induction in a way that appears as deductive as possible:
|
||||
|
||||
> P1: During his career as a monk, Thomas has always made his morning offering in the chapel.
|
||||
> P2: Presently, it is morning.
|
||||
> C: Therefore, Thomas will soon be making his morning offering in the chapel.
|
||||
|
||||
At first glance, this appears to contain a transitive relation between premise one and two, in the circumstance of the morning. But this is illusory. To see why, it will help to formalize this a bit more:
|
||||
|
||||
Let’s call “has made his morning offering”, “was-A”;
|
||||
|
||||
Next, let’s call “it is morning”, “is-B”
|
||||
|
||||
Finally, let’s call “will soon be making his morning offering”, “will-be-C”
|
||||
|
||||
Before I even formulate this, the problem should begin to whisper itself in how I labeled the terms. But, here is the formula: was-A = is-B = will-be-C. Surely, it’s obvious by now: deduction deals with what is, and only with what is. It cannot cope with movement through time, because it is not possible to formalize epistemic certainty about the future. This syllogism is attempting to masquerade as a deduction, in order to give deductive weight to modal ways of thinking. In other words, inductive inferences draw conclusions about what is possible, while deductive inferences draw conclusions about what is necessarily so. But the conclusion in our present argument is no more necessitated than in the first induction. There are extensions that have been made to classical logic, in an attempt to deal with this problem, with varying degrees of success, but none of them is definitive. This is again beyond the scope of this essay. So, the problem of induction remains for us.
|
||||
|
||||
There is a second problem with our second induction. In the case of the deduction, part of what facilitates the transitive property, and imposes necessity upon our conclusion, is the definitional nature of our propositional assertions, and thus, the syllogism as a whole. Thomas must believe in the triune God, because by definition, Catholic monks believe in the triune God. But, there is nothing in the definition of a Catholic monk, that necessitates morning offerings in the chapel; nothing in the definition of morning, that necessitates that Catholic monks will be in chapels; and so forth. Thomas could just as easily make his offerings in his billet, or in the garden, or if he is ill, not at all, and he would still be a Catholic monk, and mornings would still occur (presumably).
|
||||
|
||||
So, the question becomes, is it only rational to believe things that can be derived from valid deductive arguments, or definitional tautologies? Or, contra Hume, is a man reasonable for belief in things that could only be, at best, probabilistically true? Intuitively, it seems insane to suggest that believing that the sun will rise tomorrow is irrational. Scientists, for example, often take the “regularity of nature” as an ontological given, or axiom. They do this, because they assume the truth of the optimistic meta-induction: inductive inferences have yielded many successful results in the past, so they will in the future. But this is circular reasoning. And yet, induction does seem to “work”. Even in the small things. Each time a breath in, my expectations are satisfied. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, on my way to the coffee shop, my foot lands on the pavement, and I move forward. Surely, this is a rational expectation?
|
||||
|
||||
But perhaps we are confusing the nature of the term “rational”, with something like “sane” or “acceptable” or “appropriate”. These are value-laden, normative terms. You’re a “right-thinking” or “sane” person, we might say, to expect that your pencil will not suddenly turn into an inflatable raft, or your girlfriend to suddenly turn into a cucumber. This is clearly an appeal to a psychological state, rather than a reasoned worldview. So, perhaps there is something to what Hume was suggesting. In which case, our task is to figure out what sort of irrational beliefs are also acceptable or appropriate to have, and on what sort of standard we would base this distinction between acceptable and unacceptable irrational beliefs. The alternative, is that we need to rationally account for expectation, which is to say, justify induction, in order to count inductive inferences among the rational set of beliefs, and escape the pit of irrationality we seem to be sliding into.
|
||||
|
||||
That justification will be the subject of my next post on Induction (if it ever comes).
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Justice Culture and the Enlightenment"
|
||||
date: 2019-11-25T12:03:26Z
|
||||
tags: []
|
||||
topics: []
|
||||
image: /img/blind-lady-justice.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
A question is posed to me via my coursework: “*Does justice require that anything be distributed equally? If so, what?*” This is, of course, the bog-standard prompt for the student to explain the modern dispute between John Rawls[^1] and Robert Nozick[^2] . We’ll get there shortly, but first I want to back up and ask the more fundamental (indeed, perennial) question: *What is justice?* At the risk of plagiarizing Socrates, I might clarify that I am not asking, “*what makes a just circumstance just*“, or “*show me a particular instance of a just set of arrangements*“. Rather, I want to know about *Justice qua Justice*. In more common terms, can we adequately describe the thing at which we point, when we want to say “this thing is like that thing”. Once we can answer that question, then we can begin to consider the question of what prerequisites must be met in any given circumstance, in order to declare, “this is a just arrangement of goods”. Of course, I’m not going to be able to answer that question in this post. But what I can offer, are some thoughts and observations on the concept, that give the coursework question some context, and some real-world purchase.
|
||||
|
||||
Some say that justice obtains in an ordering of goods such that certain moral principles are adequately respected. The meting out of rewards and punishments according to a proportional measure, or the distribution of wealth according to a preference for moderation and an avoidance of excess, for example. All of these theories, whether egalitarian, aristocratic, libertarian, or meritocratic, have a tension at their core: the autonomy of the individual as against the prerogative of the society within which he exists. The recognition of that tension goes straight back to Plato[^3]. Its source is a fundamental insight of his: the role of the individual in society, the relationship he has with his society, and the kinds and degrees of liberty, equality, obligation, and right he has, is a direct consequence of the unifying value around which the society is formed, matures, and flourishes. That fundamental value becomes the primary good toward which the society strives, and it operates, at least, as the proxy standard for justice in that society.
|
||||
|
||||
In the deep past, the fundamental at the core of any healthy society (as the ancients saw it) was typically something like the material success of an ethnic family as a whole. The triumph of the Spartans over the Athenians was, for the Spartans, a testament to the superiority of their tribe. The conquest of the Barbarians by the Romans, was a testament for the Romans, of the superiority of Roman martial virtues. In both of these examples, the sacred is the tribe and its cultural expressions. The superiority of these concepts is directly related to the successes earned in the real world, against foes.
|
||||
|
||||
All that changed, I think, with the rise of Christianity. No longer is some notion of solidarity to an ethno-cultural identity the ground of moral legitimacy, but a set of sacred ideals revolving around a faith-based belief. The Catholic church that rose out of the collapsing Roman empire valorized very Platonic notions of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, and coupled them with liturgical concepts of Love, Sin and Redemption through the sacrifice of Christ[^4]. At which point, European and English societies had a transcendent focal-point that superseded their own tribal instincts, and gave them a common cause, whose integrity held until the Enlightenment. However, the Enlightenment did not abandon the valorization of abstract Platonic ideals as organizing principles for society over tribal identity. Rather, it attempted to replace the abstract ideals of “scholastic” medieval society, with new ideals. Ideals that were meant to diminish the authority of the church and state, and strengthen the individual. The goal was, in the spirit of the new scientific approach to the world, to find a single unifying principle of human nature[^5] that could unite all of humanity under a single umbrella of brotherhood. You can see the ecstatic expression of this goal in the poetry of Schiller[^6] and Goethe.
|
||||
|
||||
The United States would appear to be the final political expression of that transformation. But, if the goal was a single, unifying ideal, then the project is incomplete. American society seems to be grounded in not one, but two sacred values given to it by the Enlightenment: Liberty and Equality. These ideals on their own are not unique to the United States, but they are unique in their combination and expression in the United States. Even in the country that is their intellectual home, they are combined with yet a third ideal that, arguably, stands as the real primary — and it harkens back to the pre-medieval heritage of the nation. I am, of course, speaking of France, and its famous triumvirate of ideals: Liberty, Equality, and *Fraternity*. Fraternity, however, is not understood by the French as Schiller or Goethe would have meant it (as a universal brotherhood of all men). Rather, it is indeed a statement of ethno-cultural solidarity. It is the Frankish People, who love their pastoral homeland, whose sacred heart is Paris, and out of whose ranks rose such renowned names as Charlemagne, Louis IX, Rousseau, Robespierre, Napoleon, de Gaul, Sartre, and Foucault. This sort of tribal identification is the bit that is missing from the American political ethos. Even the Russians, with their nearly eighty year long dysfunctional love-hate relationship with Marxism, have been unable to shake their ethno-cultural tribal identity as a core political value over and above the Communist egalitarianism that nearly destroyed them.
|
||||
|
||||
The “American People”, such as they are, have always been a hodge-podge of ethnic and social confusions. At first, loosely affiliated colonial villages made up of Dutch, English, Spanish, and French settlers and explorers, all arrayed more or less against the indigenous populations. Because the English were the dominant presence in the colonies, it is their legal culture and political philosophy that dominate the institutions of those early settlements. For the English, an early form of individual sovereignty grounded in property rights derived mainly from colonial corporate charters and the heritage of the Magna Carta put Liberty front and center as the core value of that society[^7]. Their most successful political competitors were the French, and the colonial period also happens to be the most productive period for the French segment of the Enlightenment. For thinkers like Rousseau, the highest ideal was Equality (see his {{< newtab title="Discourses on Inequality," url="https://aub.edu.lb/fas/cvsp/Documents/DiscourseonInequality.pdf879500092.pdf" >}} for example). Thus, this too became a motivating force in early colonial life, and later alloyed to Liberty, the composed the dual pillars of the American polity. Yet, apart from their shared experience of extreme hardship on the frontier of a new continent, there was very little on offer in the way of a tribal identity known as “American”. Instead, the label was as sort of circumstantial short-hand. It’s true that de Tocqueville use the term “American” in a quasi-ethnic sense, but his use invoked an imaginative idea of the Puritans as a way to characterize the attitudes of all who populated the newly formed nation. In general the term “American” was just a convenient way of referring to the people who chose to live on the new continent, be they English, French, Dutch, Spanish, or eventually Irish, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, or later still, Turkish, Greek, Polish, and Arab.
|
||||
|
||||
The implications of this are staggering. For the first time in human history, you have an entire continent that represents a veritable blank-slate upon which could be inscribed any and all of the human yearning to learn and grow and explore, and it just so happened to coincide with the explosion of Enlightenment idealism in the popular culture — the secular philosophical cousin of the ancient Catholic ideal of the “universal church”. It is this highly religious notion of Enlightenment universalism that envelopes and informs the American understanding of the ideals of Liberty and Equality. The words of Paul in Galatians must have been ringing in Jefferson’s ears, as he penned the first words of the Declaration of Independence: “*there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free… for you are all one in Christ Jesus…*” ({{< newtab title="Galatians 3:28" url="https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Galatians-3-28/" >}}).
|
||||
|
||||
It is this universalism that acts as the “glue” binding Liberty and Equality together, and it is this universalism that some have tried to engineer into a new kind of limitless ethno-cultural identity, which could function as a final form of tribal identity: the tribe of the human race. But this is a mistake. Enlightenment universalism cannot replace tribal allegiance, and it cannot function as a higher-order value to which Liberty and Equality must pay homage. First, because it is limitless and tribes, by definition, are limited to specific very concrete characteristics. Second, because it lacks the particularity of its original religious parent. The “universal church” works, because it offers Christ up as a kind of ideal man, which functions as a model for emulation, and upon which can be focused our moral aspirations. Enlightenment universalism offers only the ecstatic sentiment of Schiller’s “spark of divinity” found in all men alike, but no guide as to what to do about that spark.
|
||||
|
||||
\* * * *
|
||||
|
||||
It is in this historical context that we arrive at our original question: “*does justice require that anything be distributed equally? If so, what?*“. Let’s bring the discourse back down to earth, and consider it in concrete terms. The modern theorist of “distributive justice” sees his role in much the same way an economist might, except as a moral accountant rather than a material one. All the goods that really matter are material goods (and ‘material’ includes such things as circumstantial goods like ‘opportunities’), and the task of the theorist is to devise a method for deciding how to apportion those goods amongst the living. In short who gets what, and why? These theorists all take a kind of comparative attitude as their starting point. Johnny has three apples. Janey has four apples. Is it a good thing or a bad thing for Janey to have one more apple than Johnny? At which point, they will all line up on one side or the other of the question, offering various rationales for each side: the effort required to obtain the apples, the adequacy of access to the apple trees, the race and gender of Johnny and Janey, their relative health and vigor, the effects of emotions like envy and jealousy, the scarcity of the apples, the fulfillment inherent in the work of apple picking, the circumstantial luck involved in the selection of trees to pick from, and on and on. There is an assumption lurking quietly under the moral question first raised. Namely, the default position against which all deviations require a moral justification is relative equality. Johnny and Janey *ought to have the same number of apples* unless you can provide a moral justification for it being otherwise.
|
||||
|
||||
The debate between the two most prominent theorists of distributive justice in the twentieth century can dramatically illustrate this assumption. John Rawls concocted a thought experiment designed to convince us all that if we were in an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance”, we would all rationally choose to organize the democratic society in which we presently lived, in such a way that it minimized the personal risk of being trapped permanently at the bottom of the economic heap. This was indeed meant in a very economic sense (Rawls ruled out things like slavery and extreme scarcity, because he starts from a presumption of modern abundance). He further argued that the presence of any wealth or income inequalities would only be justified where it could be shown to be “for the benefit of all”. Robert Nozick famously retorted with a thought experiment of his own, involving Wilt Chamberlain and a special collection box into which his fans could divest themselves of any unused quarters, in his name. Nozick wasn’t arguing that he had an example of Rawls’ Difference Principle in action. Rather, Nozick takes Rawls’ claim that Liberty is primary seriously, but Rawls does not. Rawls’ defenders claim that Rawlsian Equality is a necessary precondition for true Liberty, arguing that, after all, it takes access to wealth to be able to make certain choices (e.g., going to school or starting a business). Defenders of Nozick retort that the forced appropriation of property in order to satisfy a requirement for a “patterned distribution” is a direct violation of Rawls own Liberty Principle, which Rawls claimed was lexical in his scheme.
|
||||
|
||||
To an extent, both men are correct. Contrary to some who claim that Liberty and Equality are consonant ideals, it does seem fairly clear that taken to their limits, these ideals are direct competitors (and at the present moment of history, it appears Equality may have gained the high ground against Liberty). What’s more, I am not convinced that a reconciliation is possible between them. The reason is because these ideals are *moral principles*, fundamentally. Any society that is organized around a moral principle (rather than, say, a primitive need, a tribal identity, or a secondary cause) is going to work to expand the scope of the principle as a means of perfecting the society relative to it. Liberty is one of those principles that, when extended to its limit, is incapable of admitting any other principle. It begins with the liberty to do what you must; extends to the liberty to do what you can, in the face of material obstacles; and finally ends with the liberty to do as you please, regardless of material or moral constraints. Likewise with Equality. At first, the concern is for procedural fairness, and impartiality, i.e. “equality before the law”; it extends to notions like “equality of opportunity” and “equality of regard” (which we can see overtaking the culture of the west now); and finally ends in absolute equality, in which the state spends all of its effort on capture and redistribution of all inequalities, regardless of material contingency or moral justification. It is at these extremes where we can see Rawls and Nozick intuitively anticipating the failure of each others’ doctrines.
|
||||
|
||||
The implications for the United States (and to some extent, the UK and Europe) are dire. As mentioned above, our political society is grounded on both of these ideals, and as I’ve shown here with at least these two ideals, no society can sustain itself, where competing ideals form its foundation. Eventually, factions will form around these ideals, and the inevitably irreconcilable conflict will fracture it. Already, we could see this conflict bubbling up in the 19th century. But I think it was averted by the Civil War. Just at the moment that Liberty and Equality were sure to drive the union itself into dissolution, Lincoln appeared and elevated a third principle above them. He made this explicit in his famous {{< newtab title="Gettysburg Address." url="https://www.britannica.com/event/Gettysburg-Address" >}} He says of the federal union, that it was “*conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal*“. He understands the dual moral loyalties of the Founders. And, he realizes what is needed to reconcile the conflict. He shifts the language. He calls the United States a *nation*, and insists that we have a duty before God, and a sacred debt to the dead, to insure that it “never perishes from the earth”. Union, then, becomes the overarching principle, to which Liberty and Equality are subordinated. His “new birth of freedom” is a demotion for both equality and freedom. But subordination might be exactly what is needed.
|
||||
|
||||
Other than a concrete goal such as the self-preservation of an existing state (the preservation of the American union, for example), or an arbitrary notion like ethno-cultural identity (particular heritages such as the Frankish, Slavic, English, etc), or a religious commitment (i.e. a theocracy), it is not clear what could fill the role of ultimate purpose, to which all other ideals could be subordinated. I am well aware of the spectre I am raising in all this talk of ethno-cultural solidarity and theocracy. The tribal instinct in man is a powerful one, and a deadly one. I am clear-eyed about the very real threat it presents. At the same time, I am also aware that the sort of quirky experiment that the Enlightenment was, is an aberration in human history, that it is frightfully young and vulnerable, and that it makes extreme counter-evolutionary demands upon us that I suspect are unsustainable. Recent naive utopian attempts at achieving those counter-evolutionary dreams have largely been a horror show of their own.
|
||||
|
||||
Perhaps what is needed, is a fresh look back at the ancients, again. It could be, that a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of the Greeks, Romans, and early church fathers of the Catholic tradition, could yield insights we haven’t noticed before, in the light of modern scholarship, linguistic prowess, and technological advancements. Another possibility, is the fusion of Humean naturalism and the psychological sciences that sprang from it, with the intellectual and mystical traditions of early Christianity (Plato, Aristotle, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, et. al.). Perhaps justice, in the end, is exactly as the Greeks imagined it: everything in its proper place, and aiming toward its proper end. Aristotle began the work of systematizing this in the Nicomachean Ethics, with his notion of justice as a balancing of terms in a ratio, rather than the modern idea of a leveled plane. Some claim that Aristotle’s concept was a purely legal one (which is why a blind woman holds aloft a balanced scale, in front of every American court room). But I think this is far too narrow an interpretation of his idea. For Aristotle, what is owed and what is deserved, are a numerator and the denominator that must reduce to 1, if justice is to be served. Likewise, across a society, all numerators and denominators must resolve ultimately to 1. In such a scheme, Liberty and Equality would resume their proper role as instrumental goods enjoyed in measures that balanced the scale. The very first thing Aristotle argues for in the Nicomachean Ethics, is an ideal of the greatest good for man. He calls this “Eudaemonia”, which as near as I can tell, means something like the pride of conscience experienced when surveying an entire life lived in excellence (according to the virtues). What we like to call “happiness”, today (also the term used by Jefferson). Justice, then, would be the balance of contributions made and rewards given, to a life lived in excellence in the polis. As long as the ratio of those two things reduces to 1, justice is sufficiently met.
|
||||
|
||||
There is not enough room to explore this possibility any further here. Suffice to say, it is a live option. But, I would add this much: it seems to me that this is the only way to escape the predicament we find ourselves in. Clearly, composites of Enlightenment ideals are not sufficient. and a return to primitive tribal principles are a non-starter. Liberty and Equality must be dethroned as ultimate ends. But what are they to serve as their new master? A return to primitive tribal concepts like ethno-cultural solidarity are a non-starter. So, a new philosophical understanding is needed. One that locates justice in some higher ideal than we’ve yet imagined. But what is that? I don’t know if there is an answer to this question.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: [John Rawls’ Difference Principle](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/#Difference) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/justice-culture-and-the-inheritance-of-the-enlightenment/#fnref-1)
|
||||
[^2]: [Robert Nozick’s Patterned Distributions Critique](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nozick-political/#CriEndStaPatPri) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/justice-culture-and-the-inheritance-of-the-enlightenment/#fnref-2)
|
||||
[^3]: [e.g. Plato’s Republic](http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/justice-culture-and-the-inheritance-of-the-enlightenment/#fnref-3)
|
||||
[^4]: [e.g. Augustine’s Doctrine of Justification](http://lonelypilgrim.com/2013/08/28/the-doctrine-of-justification-augustine-is-catholic/) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/justice-culture-and-the-inheritance-of-the-enlightenment/#fnref-4)
|
||||
[^5]: [e.g. Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4705) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/justice-culture-and-the-inheritance-of-the-enlightenment/#fnref-5)
|
||||
[^6]: [The non-denominational deistic tendency of Schiller’s famous poem is typical of the ethos of the 18th century](https://penandthepad.com/meaning-poem-ode-joy-3627.html) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/justice-culture-and-the-inheritance-of-the-enlightenment/#fnref-6)
|
||||
[^7]: [See, for example, “The Rights of Englishmen”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Englishmen) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/justice-culture-and-the-inheritance-of-the-enlightenment/#fnref-7)
|
||||
|
|
@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Locke Destroys Filmer With Facts and Logic"
|
||||
date: 2020-05-17T20:29:14Z
|
||||
date: 2020-05-14T20:29:14Z
|
||||
tags: ["locke", "filmer"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/pwned.jpg
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Metaphysical Realism - A Stream of Consciousness"
|
||||
date: 2019-02-11T13:05:57Z
|
||||
tags: ["metaphysics","dualism","empiricism","rationalism","realism","nominalism"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/fabric-of-reality.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The following notes are an attempt at outlining my basic thought process, to document my progress in the study of metaphysical realism, and offer the reader some food for thought. I offer it, as is. If there are any actual arguments in this post, it is purely by accident. If there are any answers to the problem of realism within this text, the reader is free to take them.
|
||||
|
||||
**A (Very) Brief History of What Is**
|
||||
|
||||
The first question in metaphysics, the fundamental question, is “*What is there?*” Putting this more succinctly, in order to rely on fewer linguistic crutches, you could just say, “*What **is***?”. In order to answer this question — or even to imagine an answer is possible — we have to ask ourselves a few other questions first. To begin with, why is this *the* question?
|
||||
|
||||
Somehow, we are beings. Somehow, we are beings aware of being, and of our own being. What is that awareness, and why do we have it? Descartes[^1] took that awareness as axiomatic (a “*clear and distinct idea*“, in his terms). It was the fundamental feature of his entire ontology, famously captured as “*Cogito, Ergo Sum*“. Awareness, thinking, not only implies being, it *entails* it. Descartes speculated that sense experiences were just another kind of thinking: they are the ideas that come to us as sense experiences. Berkeley posited this speculation as a fact.[^2] Experiences *just are* ideas in the mind, including the mind of God. Locke[^3] agreed that sensations are ideas in the mind, but insisted in a world apart from those ideas, a mindless mechanical world, in which inhered powers to populate the mind with the ideas of experience. Our bodies function as a reception medium, upon which reality makes its impressions, and the mind records those impressions. There are whispers of Hume in this language.
|
||||
|
||||
Tying this back to the germ of “*awareness*“, it seems from the preceding paragraph, that there are two different forms of awareness taking shape: thoughtful awareness, and experiential awareness. This vague duality corresponds with several well known distinctions in philosophy. The “subject-object dichotomy”, the “analytic-synthetic” distinction, and the “rationalism-empiricism” distinction. Described in various ways, by various philosophers, these two forms of awareness are said to give us a complete set of tools for discovering “*what is*“. As I see it, then, the core dispute amongst metaphysicians of modern philosophy, has been over whether experiential awareness just collapses into thoughtful awareness, and whether it makes sense at all to talk about the being of things beyond the reach of either thoughtful or experiential awareness. In the first case, this is the argument between rationalists and empiricists. In the second case, this is the argument between the realists and the anti-realists. The realists, so-called counterintuitively, because they accept as “real”, any number of beings beyond the reach of thoughtful or experiential awareness. The anti-realist, so-called because he does not accept anything as real, other than what can be grounded in thoughtful or experiential awareness. The Idealist may find it hard to locate a fit for himself within this schema. On the one hand, the Berkeleyan Idealist will want to say that it makes no sense to talk of beings that are beyond the reach of thoughtful or experiential awareness, thus placing him in the anti-realist camp. The Platonic Idealist, on the other hand, could be seen as defending realism, as against Parmenides[^4], by insisting both that the Forms exist, and that they are beyond our worldly apprehension.
|
||||
|
||||
### How Do We Know?
|
||||
|
||||
Lurking in the background of this outline, lies a third major component. Namely, the problem of knowledge. When I speculate about tools for answering questions of an ontological nature, I am talking not just about whether the answers to those questions are true or false, as compared to a reality. I am also asking *how we know* “***what is***“? I have left it an unspoken assumption up to this point, that thoughtful and experiential awareness constitutes *knowledge of being*, whether that being is a complete entity or merely some particular property of a complete entity. Despite the confusing label of “*conceptual realist*“, Berkeley would deny that anything like an entity or properties of an entity could be known without an idea of it, because it is a bald absurdity to say that *what is unknown is also known*. On this basis, one could count Berkeley amongst the anti-realists, though also an idealist.
|
||||
|
||||
Empiricists like Locke seem far more willing to take certain beings as real, independently of any conception of them. Locke posited two kinds (“primary” and “secondary”) of properties of objects. His “secondary” properties were a kind of experiential awareness of an object that did not derive directly from the object, but from powers or features *hidden from experiential awareness*, yet inherent in the objects nonetheless. It is not hard to see why Berkeley would have had a complaint with Locke. How could he claim this reasonably, with no recourse to any demonstration, logical or empirical? The paradigm example of such a thing, is color. An apple is not red, says Locke, but hidden features of the apple and its surrounding environment conspire to produce the experiential awareness of red within our minds. Berkeley (I think rightly) asks, if we are going to posit such mechanisms for color or smell, then why not for shape, or heft, or motion, as well? He insists it is a distinction without a difference. If the idea of red is in the mind, then so is the idea of the shape of the apple, and the idea of it’s girth in our hand, and this is what makes the apple and all of its properties *real*.
|
||||
|
||||
As it turns out, later discoveries about light, the eye, and color have all apparently vindicated Locke over Berkeley. It is indeed a hidden feature of the apple, interacting with hidden features in the environment, that give us the experiential awareness of a red apple. However, further discoveries about the neurology of the eye and the brain, and subsequent discoveries about the quantum behaviors of light, that also seem to vindicate Berkeley. We know from neuroscience, for example, that experiential awareness is actually a coordinated composition of numerous asynchronous events. Nerve signals from the retina, from the ear drum, from the skin in our fingertips, from the olfactory nerves, and the tongue, all arrive in the brain as a more-or-less disordered collection of snap-together parts, often in different orders of arrangement and time, requiring the waiting for parts to complete the assembly of each moment of experiential awareness into a coherent composite image. This is often cited by determinists as a strong reason to reject free will (a question I will not address here). Why is this not also a strong reason to accept Berkeley’s “*conceptual realism*“? If this composite picture is not in fact, an *idea*, what is it?
|
||||
|
||||
But I digress. The present question, is what constitutes a justification for a claim that some entity or property is “real”? How can I make a claim about “what is” or “what is not”, that will carry at least the force of believability if not also deductive and epistemic certainty? The anti-realist insists not merely that an assertion about something be logically justifiable, but that it is also amenable to some sort of experiential validation. I cannot concoct just any story about what exists and have it accepted merely because I can demonstrate the validity of the logic. My story cannot be “*evidence transcendent*“[^5], as the philosophers like to say. To be true or false — to even be able to judge as true or false — my assertions must be subject to some sort of comparison with some sort of object of the senses. As the dominant epistemologists would say, they must be subject to validation by way of correspondence with a reality[^6] about which my assertions make reference. Parmenides’ complaint to Socrates comes to mind here. How could the gods know us, or we them, if the world of the gods is impenetrable by the sensible world of instances? Descartes’ “*clear and distinct idea*” is no help here, either, since it just reiterates this very problem.
|
||||
|
||||
### What Do We Mean?
|
||||
|
||||
The semantic philosophers would say that I am on the right track to ask about assertions, and what they mean, or in wondering how utterances about reality are justified in terms of their meaning. But I think this is a different problem than the questions I have been asking so far. The semantic philosophers are concerned with the assignment of a property to a *thought*. The description of a value belonging to a relationship between a thought and the object of that thought. They are unconcerned with objects beyond the fact that objects must be there to somehow give substance or experiential content to the relationship. A kind of equation: Thought == Object. (Interestingly, Hume frequently referred to events – both in reality, and in the mind – as “objects”[^7]). This is the structure that Blackburn gives to truth[^8]. Not so much a correspondence, as an equation. And he goes further than this. He wants to say that some objects come into being *by thier having been thought about*. Realizing the dangerous territory he is in, he is quick to draw clear lines of demarcation. Only certain things are “real” by virtue of our having thoughts of them; moral properties, or the value that inheres in money, for example. He calls this “quasi-realism”. In moral philosophy, this has come to be known as “projectivism”. This is different from Humean emotivism, because for Blackburn, the qualitative and quantitative value properties he’s describing *really do exist*. It’s just that the source of their existence is entirely mind-dependent. This mind-dependence is collective like Berkeley’s but it requires at least one human mind. For example, as long as at least one person sees the “value” in a dollar, the dollar *has that value*.
|
||||
|
||||
This question of the direction of flow between thought and object is fascinating to me. In Locke and Berkeley, it is fairly obvious that a substantive reality (be it a universal mind, or a mindless material) is producing experiences, and giving rise to the ideas of experiences, which we then express with varying degrees of specificity and accuracy with language. The only difference between Lockeans and Berkeleyans seems to be the nature of that substantive reality: is it mindless material governed by immutable laws in a mechanical clockwork universe, or is it a manifestation of the universal mind of God, intelligible to us because we share in that mind in some way? Both of these views puts the “ultimate” reality outside ourselves, while Blackburn wants to place at least some of it — or the responsibility for some aspects of it — squarely in our own minds. Does the source of an object or its properties affect how we answer “what is?” or even “is it real?” What sorts of properties constitute the full status of “real”? What things can be said to attain the property of existence (if being is a property, say, and not an absolute state)? For that matter, what is “existence”? The matrix of reality, within which individual beings are located? The “substrate” (as Berkeley’s Hylas would put it) that grounds all objects? Scientists (at least, the Einsteinians) would say, in a broad sense, that “existence” means some identifiable, finite accumulation of matter and energy at a locatable point in space-time. The planet Earth “exists”, for example. But this is too concrete, and thus too limiting, says someone like Blackburn. To say that because the value of a dollar has no spacio-temporal location, it therefore is non-existent, is to make us all into crazy people. So, returning to the question of direction, thoughtful and experiential awareness may be impressed by the objects in existence, or it may manifest the objects of existence, or both, or neither. Those are the choices, it seems. The last is some sort of extreme nihilism or Pyrrhonism. Locke (and Hume) take the first option, Berkeley takes the second, and Blackburn takes the third. Which of these is the correct choice?
|
||||
|
||||
### Truth, Meaning, and Being
|
||||
|
||||
Crispin Wright[^9] takes us one level up, and asks the meta-linguistic question of whether truth is a substantive property of thoughts. Wright argues for the “deflationist” view of truth, and his is the first explication of the position that didn’t seem to me to be nothing more than a truism, or a complaint of superfluousness. The deflationist, he says, isn’t just suggesting that we economize our use of phrases like “is true” by retreating to implication only. Rather, the deflationist is denying that truth is a property of sentences *at all*. He is saying that it is a “disquotational tool” for making an agreement between thinkers, explicit. Since truth is either the assignment or the identification of a value property to a relationship between thought (subject) and reality (object), this would make the deflationist a kind of anti-realist about truth.
|
||||
|
||||
It seems to me, there are at least three ways to think about this problem:
|
||||
|
||||
1. Truth is a real property of the relationship between thought and object, that only manifests in our asserted language through the disquotational device: “P is true, if and only if P”
|
||||
2. Truth is a real property of the relationship between thought and object, and is manifest in our asserted language whether or not we employ the disquotational device: either “P” or “P is true, if and only if P”
|
||||
3. Truth is not a real property of the relationship between thought and object, and any use of a disquotational device is misleading at best: “P” is merely the expression of an attitude or a
|
||||
|
||||
Perhaps it is misguided to attempt to apply the question “*what is?*” to such things as sentences, and the valence meanings applied to them. Do sentences “exists”? My use of phrases like “such things” suggests they do. What about thoughts? Can they have properties like an apple or a table? Can they have properties *unlike* an apple or a table? Can those properties be “primary” or “secondary”, as in Locke’s empiricism? The semantic philosophers are asking these questions from an analytical point of view (the view I have been taking throughout this post). But the questions have application *far* beyond understanding the instrumental components of linguistic meaning.
|
||||
|
||||
Applying my earlier question to the idea of truth makes this fairly clear: What is the “direction of flow” of the instantiation of these properties? Do we impose truth as a property on our relationship with reality? Is the relationship itself what imposes the truth? Is conceptualizing a “*relationship*” itself unreasonably imposing a meaning on experiential and thoughtful awareness? Where do we draw these lines, and why? More to the point, *how* do we draw these lines? Should we be drawing lines? As beings, as parts of the whole of being itself, there is the fundamental question of how it is we can tell the difference between the two, and even more significantly, how there can even be a difference? To put it in more concrete terms, how can mindless, mechanistic material being (the reality of Locke and Newton), give rise to a mindful, thoughtful, intentional beings? This is the kind of question that leads many philosophers into positions like animism, theism, and panpsychism.
|
||||
|
||||
### The End
|
||||
|
||||
One of the most frustrating features of the study of metaphysics, is it’s capacity to pull you down an endless rabbit hole, strip away all your certainties, dissolve all your boundaries, and leave you with endless questions, the answers to which you have almost no hope of answering. This disorienting effect, instinctively, sends most people screaming in the opposite direction. Many philosophers who are not metaphysicians, will simply draw lines arbitrarily, and insist we go no further than them. Scientists do this, too, for professional reasons. I can’t say that I blame them. There is great value in the mechanistic, dualistic view of the universe and our place within it. It has yielded many benefits to the human species. But the philosopher cannot help asking the question, “what if we’re wrong?”, and based on some of the work going on in physics and astronomy, it seems like we just might be.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: [Discourse on Method, 1637](http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf)
|
||||
[^2]: [Three Dialogues Of Hylas and Philonous, 1714](http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/berkeley1713.pdf)
|
||||
[^3]: [Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1689](http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1690book1.pdf)
|
||||
[^4]: [Plato, The Parmenides](http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/parmenides.html)
|
||||
[^5]: [Realism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/)
|
||||
[^6]: [Correspondence Theory of Truth, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/)
|
||||
[^7]: [Treatise on Human Nature, 1739](http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/hume1739book1.pdf)
|
||||
[^8]: [Spreading The Word, 1984](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/spreading-the-word-9780198246510?cc=gb&lang=en&)
|
||||
[^9]: [Truth and Objectivity, 1994](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674910874)
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Mill Harm Liberty and Censorship"
|
||||
date: 2019-12-06T11:59:07Z
|
||||
tags: ["censorship","free speech","harm principle","liberty","human nature"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/mill-cartoon.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
J.S. Mill’s famous essay *On Liberty* proposes a broadly Utilitarian principle to be applied for the purpose of the preservation of individual liberty against state coercion. This principle is known as the ‘*harm principle*’. Mill provides three vaguely distinct formulations of the principle, and in each one, the term ‘harm’ takes on a slightly different meaning. The first formulation implies a definition of harm as an act which would require either individual or collective ‘self-protection’ as a response. The second, more augmented formulation implies that a harm is an act of either commission or omission, that is hurtful to the ‘interests of others’. The final formulation of the principle implies that a harm is any act which impedes or deprives others’ pursuit of ‘their own good, in their own way’. This essay will first briefly summarize these three formulations, and then assess whether they function as bulwarks of liberty. At that point, I will pivot to examine how the harm principle is incorporated into Mill’s view of free speech in chapter two of the work, and briefly evaluate the strength of his defense against censorship in that context.
|
||||
|
||||
The basic formulation of the harm principle says, essentially, that an act of state coercion can only be justified insofar as it prevents any individual from ‘harming’ any other individual. In outlining this formulation, Mill deploys the phrase ‘self-protection’. This gives the meaning of ‘harm’ a very visceral, and very naïve sense, as for example, a simple threat of physical violence. On this reading of the meaning of ‘harm’, the state has a very narrow role to play in society. It is one that suggests a limited responsibility for policing violence, property crime, and not much else. This is perhaps the most libertarian sense of the principle.
|
||||
|
||||
The second formulation of the harm principle hints at the famous ‘pursuit of happiness’ right, enumerated in the US Declaration of Independence. This formulation says that a harm is any act which might deprive or impede another individual’s ‘*pursuit of their own good, in their own way*’. For Mill, one’s own good just is one’s happiness as understood in Utilitarian terms. In Utilitarianism, happiness is defined in terms of a variety of “higher pleasure”, akin to a sublime experience, or the satisfaction of a job well done. This is vaguely similar to Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, but leans more heavily on the psychological than Aristotle does. A harm in this context, then, is anything that would reduce the possibility of an individual attaining that kind of happiness. Depriving a child of a satisfactory education, denying access to an institution like political suffrage, or property ownership, might constitute this sort of harm.
|
||||
|
||||
The third and final formulation incorporates Mill’s Utilitarianism, suggesting that the ‘greatest good’ is in some way a duty of each citizen in a society, and not solely the state. Paraphrased, this formulation says the state may engage in active coercion when any act by any individual is deemed injurious to the ‘interests of others’. On this interpretation, the ‘interests of others’ is read as a set of legally enumerated rights, that guarantee certain benefits to each individual in the society. This legal enumeration thus places positive obligations on individuals, the failure of which to satisfy, is regarded a ‘harm’ and renders the transgressor subject to punishment by the state. This formulation is thought to justify institutions like the welfare state, and taxation.
|
||||
|
||||
Each of the three definitions of harm resides in a context unique to its definition, implying varying degrees of both negative and positive obligations on the part of the individual, and varying degrees and kinds of positive intervention on the part of the state, for the sake of ‘*the greatest happiness*’. The third formulation relies on the state itself to define and enumerate rights (understood as ‘certain interests’), which suggests that the state would end up being the sole arbiter of what constituted an infringement, and thus a ‘harm’. The basic definition of harm seems to rule out any form of harm that does not involve ‘self-protection’. The second formulation leans libertarian, and offers a definition of harm that lacks the clarity of the final more Utilitarian one, but suggests a more prominent and expansive role for rights than the others.
|
||||
|
||||
One might imagine the three conceptions as concentric rings contained within each other. The smallest ring being the “self-protection” one. The middle ring being the “libertarian” rights conception. The outermost ring being the utilitarian “welfare” conception. As the rings expand, our responsibilities and obligations expand with them. However, it is also clear to see from this metaphor, that an obvious tension exists between the two inner-most rings, and the outer “welfare” ring. At what point does my pursuit of “my own good, in my own way” stop being the operative principle, and the “general welfare” start being the operative principle? Even between the two inner rings, there is the question of where my self-protection ends and your pursuit of “your own good, in your own way” begins. Mill leaves the boundaries and overlaps between the rings entirely unspecified, even after an entire chapter of practical “applications”. In the end, there does not seem to be an obvious way to reconcile the three definitions found in these formulations of the harm principle, leaving the question of the preservation of liberty an entirely open issue.
|
||||
|
||||
\* * * *
|
||||
|
||||
Chapter two of On Liberty is J. S. Mill’s attempt to carry the harm principle enumerated in chapter one into the realm of broader public policy, by arguing against the censorship of so-called socially harmful views. Broadly construed, his case is persuasive. However, the force of that persuasion relies upon at least two hidden presuppositions that deny the efficacy of his own pleasure principle, as outlined in Utilitarianism. While the four reasons summarized at the end of On Liberty do depend on the harm principle outlined in chapter one of the book, the harm he is warning us against has nothing to do with a threat to aggregates of pleasure, or even psychological happiness in the collective sense. So, a Platonist or Kantian may find much succor in his reasoning, but a utilitarian is likely to be confused by it.
|
||||
|
||||
Mill’s first implicit presupposition reorients the center of his ethics. No longer is happiness in the utilitarian sense (aggregates of pleasure) the *summum bonum*, but truth. The pursuit of truth elevates the moral ‘dignity’ of the individual, and in so doing, maximizes his potential. Being robbed of the opportunity to pursue the truth in an ‘atmosphere of freedom of thought’, then, is a harm in Mill’s second sense of harm, because it is preventing him from satisfying his duty to society and denying him the benefits owed in return. However, not being grounded in utilitarian pleasure makes the premise an alien one. On this view, a society is maximizing its overall well-being when it is maximizing the possibility of every member’s achievement of the “dignity of thinking beings”. That social good is ill-defined and seems independently parallel to his conception of the ‘greatest happiness’ principle found in Utilitarianism. He also diverges dramatically from at least one of his conceptions of ‘harm’ in the previous chapter, by arguing that a certain sort of moral dignity is necessary for happiness, which is only attainable by an elevation of ‘mental stature’, which in turn is only possible through the rigor of the ‘atmosphere of freedom of thought’. The harm, then, would be to strike at the root of this tree, by suppressing or censoring opinion, whatever its valence either moral or ontological.
|
||||
|
||||
Mill’s second implicit presupposition is to impose a subtle change in man’s fundamental nature. He is no longer simply an animal (albeit a sophisticated one) in a straightforward, unplanned pursuit of pleasures and avoidances of pains, but a rational being whose purpose is to progress toward the truth. Any state that impedes that progress is thus an illiberal one, and unjustified on the grounds of the harm principle. Given that the freedom of opinion is instrumentally necessary to the pursuit of truth, censorship of opinion would thus constitute a violation of the state’s legitimate authority, because only societies that are in a state of progress toward the truth, can be justly said to be interested in the well-being of their individual members. This certainly gives the harm principle greater importance, because all forms of error and falsehood take on an urgency which they lack under the narrower utilitarian pleasure principle. On this conception of the greatest good, the attainment of ‘one’s own good, in one’s own way’ loses its relativistic character because all paths lead to the truth. Liberty of thought and opinion is instrumentally necessary because without it, the attainment of truth through the clash of free opinions is impossible. Thus, to deny citizens access to the means of attaining truth, is to deny them the means by which they can realize their full potential as ‘progressive beings’ (from chapter one).
|
||||
|
||||
If one were to accept these quasi-Aristotelian presuppositions, the four grounds of Freedom of Opinion that Mill provides at the end of chapter two of On Liberty follow fairly easily: (1) The suppression of opinion may suppress the truth, and to insist it won’t is to presume to judge for all what the truth is. (2) The suppression of partial truths, on the basis that they are not the complete truth, prevents the combination and collation of partial truths to arrive at complete truth. (3) The suppression of falsehoods prevents challenges to received actual truths and encourages the dogmatic propagation of received truths. (4) The development of moral character is not possible in a regime in which everyone apes correct opinion as a matter of convention, rather than independent thought. These reasons for opposing censorship are all, still, consequentialist in nature. But none of them rests entirely on the pleasure principle enumerated in Utilitarianism, and they all rest on the harm principle only insofar as they impede access to the truth. So, were one a committed hedonic utilitarian, one would likely not find these reasons very persuasive. Fortunately, there are other grounds for accepting these reasons. So, Mill’s effort is not in vain, in spite of himself.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,62 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "On Culture, Knowledge, and Discipline"
|
||||
date: 2019-06-30T12:35:10Z
|
||||
tags: ["identity","social knowledge","allegory", "meaning"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","culture"]
|
||||
image: /img/sailing-ship.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Sea Symphony” is often giggled at for its overt sexual imagery, given to it by the famous poet who supplied it’s libretto. One must concede, the titterers have a point. Walt Witman’s “limitless heaving breasts”, and “husky nurse” who sings “her husky song”, are visuals that are rather hard to refute.
|
||||
|
||||
But, just as much as Witman’s poetry is littered with sexual symbolism, it is also laden quite heavily with religious imagery. Witman’s valorization of the Christian idea of purpose is everywhere in this symphony. With his “emblem of man” that “elates above death”, and his “first intent” that “remains and shall be carried out”, Witman is clearly alluding to the notion of God’s plan for man, and the salvation necessary to complete that plan. And the farther we go in the poetry, the more explicit that gets: “finally shall come the poet worthy that name; the true Son of God shall come singing his songs.”
|
||||
|
||||
In addition to this, Witman leaves hints of classical Greek mythology and philosophy. References to the cycle of night and day, the endless eternity of space, the soul as the occupant of a ship on a sea of existence, and the sea depicted as a great mother, all call to mind the ancient Greek view of the world, as a temporary stop on a cyclical journey akin to the Myth of Er, found in Plato’s Republic.
|
||||
|
||||
Witman’s poetry (e.g. Leaves of Grass) is popular today in other contexts, mainly because of the cultural politics of homosexuality. Witman was gay, and we moderns get a certain self-satisfaction in the idea of ourselves as tolerant cosmopolitan sophisticates, undaunted by the thought of two men buggering each other. To fail to flinch, is to overcome your parochial bigotry.
|
||||
|
||||
But, what do the sophisticates of this generation make of the much more interesting feature of Witman’s work? Namely, his deep grasp of the history, culture, theology, and psychology of the civilization into which he was born? What’s more, having grasped it, his uninhibited willingness to embrace it, love it, and mingle himself with it, in the creation of magnificent works of art like his sea-faring poetry? Could the modern sophisticate countenance such an indulgence? Would they even recognize it, if they saw it? Without a willingness to engage and understand Witman and the context in which he created his art, the sophisticate is really no better than the antebellum bigot that would have imprisoned Witman for buggery. The answer to one form of bigotry cannot simply be to adopt an opposing form of the same vice. Yet, it seems this is precisely what is going on today. All around us today, we see bigots willing to desecrate, pervert, destroy, and erase the storehouse of history, art, culture, philosophy and theology that made it possible for those bigots to have something to hate, in the first place.
|
||||
|
||||
Where would Witman’s poetry be without Theseus and his wife’s suitors in waiting, or Odysseus and the sirens, or Plato’s encapsulated soul yearning to spread its wings to heaven in the presence of love, or the virgin mother who nursed the Son of God, or the sacrifice of her son on a Roman cross for the salvation of man? His work would have been vapid, ephemeral, self-obsessed, vain, and empty. In other words, roughly equivalent to what we see churned out today, by the class of bigoted sophisticates who dismiss this inheritance. Empty heads and hard hearts, scrabbling in the dust of a desiccated terrain that’s been stripped of all of its cultural artifacts, in the name of anti-chauvinism. They fumble around for any little scrap of self-satisfaction that can be cobbled together out of the immediacy of the moment. Gone, are Witman’s “vast similitudes” and “great rondures”. Gone, is the “husky old mother”, and her “feverish children”. Gone, is the “poet worth that name”. It their place, what we have instead, are Andre’s neat stack of bricks, Warhol’s pallet of Brillo boxes, deranged feminists howling on stage at the moon, beat poetry that amounts to complaints about commonplace annoyances, and music that does nothing but drown out the ever encroaching emptiness and despair of an increasingly banal society. If Hannah Arendt is right about banality, then the next generation of artists is not to be wished for.
|
||||
|
||||
### The Road To Recovery
|
||||
|
||||
When I was a boy, I was fortunate enough to have attended a high school that still offered genuine music theory courses. Probably, that school was one of the last of its kind in the early 1980’s. Anyway, I fancied myself an artistically inclined soul at the time (journalling, drawing, and singing were favorite hobbies), and so, jumped at the opportunity. Almost immediately after the course began, the instructor of the course (who was also the choir director) chided us all for wanting to gallop off into the staff paper without any idea what we were doing. However, the point he wished to stress was more subtle than simply one of authoritarian control. He emphasized that breaking the rules of good composition was not wrong in-and-of itself. Indeed, most good composers did violate conventions frequently. But, in order to know when and why you would need to break those rules (or, indeed, whether you are even breaking them), you have to know what they are, how they’re applied, and why they’re there in the first place. In a sense, he was admitting that “rules are made to be broken”. But this isn’t just a cheeky rebel bromide. It’s a fundamental fact about life itself. Order is unrecognizable without the chaos at its boundaries, and order quickly dissolves into stasis without the reinvigoration of the rule-breaker.
|
||||
|
||||
There is a second benefit to consider, as well. It is a paradoxical truth that the more stringent the rules and the more demanding the governing principles, the more subtle, expressive, and meaningful the art. I think this is especially true of poetry and music, but it could easily apply to visual arts like painting, and sculpture. The more willing we are to find a way to work within the rules, the more beautiful the work we produce. The less constrained the artist, the less meaningful the art.
|
||||
|
||||
What’s more, these rules, in combination with the storehouse of artefacts accumulated over history, provide continuity with the culture into which we’ve been thrust. The rules that governed Palestrina’s responsories or Bach’s cantatas, are the same rules that govern a John Adams opera or a Philip Glass symphony. Thier art could not possibly be more distinct and alien to each other, yet they both demonstrate the same subtlety and expressiveness. This is the product of cultural knowledge, and the discipline to apply it with care and respect. We have to know where we’ve come from before we can decide where we want to (or should) go.
|
||||
|
||||
This discipline (and reverence for craft and tradition) is vitally important to a civilization, because it is through the work of skilled and disciplined artists that the rest of us are able to explore our own emotional and intellectual experiences, and find ways to make sense of them. The effort to learn the rules, the reasoning behind them, and to formulate plausible arguments against any particular one of them, is a process of self-discipline, and self-mastery. Discipline, then, is at the heart of genuine creativity, and an essential component of art. Stephen Fry offers this insight in his book, “*The Ode Less Traveled*“:
|
||||
|
||||
> Even if some secret part of you might have been privately moved and engaged, you probably went through a stage of loathing those bores Shakespeare, Keats, Owen, Eliot, Larkin and all who came before and after them. You may love them now, you may still hate them or perhaps you feel entirely indifferent to the whole pack of them. But however well or badly we were taught English literature, how many of us have ever been shown how to write our own poems?
|
||||
>
|
||||
> > Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to rhyme. Don’t bother with metre and verses. Just express yourself. Pour out your feelings.
|
||||
>
|
||||
> Suppose you had never played the piano in your life.
|
||||
>
|
||||
> > Don’t worry, just lift the lid and express yourself. Pour out your feelings.
|
||||
>
|
||||
> We have all heard children do just that and we have all wanted to treat them with great violence as a result. Yet this is the only instruction we are ever likely to get in the art of writing poetry:
|
||||
>
|
||||
> *Anything goes.*
|
||||
>
|
||||
> But that’s how modern poetry works, isn’t it? Free verse, don’t they call it? *Vers libre*?
|
||||
>
|
||||
> Ye-e-es . . . And in avant-garde music, John Cage famously wrote a piece of silence called ‘4 Minutes 33 Seconds’ and created other works requiring ball-bearings and chains to be dropped on to prepared pianos. Do music teachers suggest that to children? Do we encourage them to ignore all harmony and rhythm and just make noise? *It is important to realise that Cage’s first pieces were written in the Western compositional tradition, in movements with conventional Italian names like lento, vivace and fugato. Picasso’s early paintings are flawless models of figurative accuracy.*[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### A Warning From Our Past
|
||||
|
||||
Over the last 60 years, the transmission of rules and principles has radically diminished with each new generation, under the guise of “liberation” from oppression. We can now see the this liberation bearing the rotten fruit of our own impotence. A diet of music that is homogenous in amplitude, homogenous in tonal quality, homogenous in technique, and homogenous in emotional content. We are allowed only a narrow and coarse set of basic expressions (at least, in music): anger (often masquerading as glee), despair, lust, and self-pity. This is the brutish pallet we’ve made available to ourselves for what remains of our capacity for introspection. That, I think, is profoundly disturbing.
|
||||
|
||||
In George Orwell’s “1984”, Winston briefly befriends a man who’s job it is to shrink the vocabulary allowed by the inner party (one wonders if his task of piecemeal elimination or replacement of individual words might have been made easier by merely eliminating all of the most stringent rules of English grammar). The goal of The Party was total control over the society, which it sought by means of total control over thought. As the argument goes, the fewer words available for self-expression, the fewer (and the less subtle) the ideas available to be expressed. The fewer the ideas, the easier it is to control and manipulate the minds of men.
|
||||
|
||||
Orwell recognized that this would not be enough, however. Because some ideas come to us not by way of words (indeed, there is much scholarly debate about whether words condition thought at all), but by our emotional experiences — Winston’s longings and desires transcended his capacity to express them in language.
|
||||
|
||||
What, though, if you could do to a man’s emotional life through the diminishment of art, what Winston’s colleague sought to do to a man’s intellectual life through the diminishment of language? What if, by limiting access to the vocabulary of emotions, you could indeed achieve a kind of predictable, manageable subject of the state, that The Party sought through limited access to spoken vocabulary? This is the threat we face. Winston tried scrawling what he could into the pages of an illicitly obtained pen and paper notebook. In our future, perhaps the guitar or the paintbrush will become the same sort of contraband.
|
||||
|
||||
Being undisciplined is the opposite of being free. Being ignorant of ourselves and our past is the opposite of being liberated. When the power to express ourselves in any significant sense is stripped from us, because no one thought it worth the effort to condition us in childhood, we are left in a state of infantile impotence, incapable of acting on our freedom in any productive way, except by sheer accident of circumstance or endowment. Where does this leave us? Could we even call the resulting situation a “civilization” at all? A shell of one, I would argue. Superficially ordered, but ultimately, a chaos of atomistic despair and failure.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Fry, Stephen. The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within . Random House. Kindle Edition.
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "Terror Responsibility and the Example of God"
|
||||
date: 2019-03-27T12:55:01Z
|
||||
tags: ["christianity","nihilism","power","terrorism"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","theology","psychology"]
|
||||
image: /img/christ-crucified.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
### We are what we choose to do
|
||||
|
||||
Whether you believe there actually is a God or not, it is still instructive to explore the conception of God provided by the religious. In particular, the difference in character between the Christian God and the Muslim God, is very interesting.
|
||||
|
||||
The Muslim (and perhaps Jewish) conception of God’s omnipotence is one of active and continuous expression. God is all powerful — and thus the greatest of great — because he exercises his power everywhere, at all times. Were he not to do so, we could not call him great, or omnipotent, because there would be gaps in time in which his omnipotence is not fully expressed.
|
||||
|
||||
The Christian conception of God’s omnipotence is starkly different. Unlike the old testament god of “power and might”, the Christian God is great, precisely because he can choose to refrain from exercising his power, for the sake of something greater. The defining example of this, of course, is Christ’s last moments on the cross, in which the Romans are permitted to murder his Son, and in a brief moment of his human frailty, Christ begs to know why. Thus, the God of Christianity has free will, and Christ answers Socrates Euthyphro dilemma, by suggesting that yes, there is a moral order written into the universe itself, that even God himself looks to for guidance.
|
||||
|
||||
This willingness to refrain from the wanton and capricious exercise of the ultimate power of life and death, even in the most dire of circumstances, is one model of behavior that Brenton Tarrant might have been wise to take to heart from his religion, before choosing to act on his own anguish and rage.
|
||||
|
||||
What is plain to see from Tarrant’s manifesto, is that while he is a moral monster, he is also a typical human being. The implications of that are terrifying to most people. The fact that we **have choices**, and that those choices have this degree of significance, is something most people would rather die, than face head-on.
|
||||
|
||||
Notice the reaction he has to the murder of the Swedish girl, and to the WWI graveyard in France. This is a **normal human response**. What follows from it, is also something **we all face**: what do you *do* about those feelings? What choices do you make? What actions follow from those choices?
|
||||
|
||||
Brenton made the *wrong* choice. And it had powerfully devastating consequences. He chose death over life; he chose destruction over construction; he chose the coward’s way.
|
||||
|
||||
### “Changing the world” is Amoral
|
||||
|
||||
Marx is credited as saying, “*The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.*”
|
||||
|
||||
I disagree with his contention. The point of philosophy is *neither* to “interpret” the world, *nor* to change it. The point of philosophy is to *understand* the world, our place in it, and – most importantly – to understand the significance for action that relation has. Though the consequence of achieving understanding is certainly to change the world in some way, it is not the *telos* of philosophy.
|
||||
|
||||
When I publicly write down ideas like this one, I very often begin with lofty abstractions; relations of rough concepts; and, in this case, even a theological interpretation. If I were to stop there, I would leave you with no real value. I would tell you only, how much I’ve read about certain subjects. Which is uninteresting at best, and utterly vain at worst. I would not have helped anyone achieve any understanding.
|
||||
|
||||
To do that, I have to find a way to tie a rope around those floating abstractions and dancing relations, and pull them down to earth. I must connect them to the way we act in the world. It is in linking our moral conception of ourselves, to the moral evaluation of our actions, that morality has any purchase at all, and philosophy has any chance at all of improving the world through understanding, and not merely “changing” it.
|
||||
|
||||
Improving the understanding of why we act the way that we do, and the understanding of how we make decisions, is perhaps the most important task of philosophy today. Very few philosophers actually do this, precisely because they refuse to “make it specific”. I will not elaborate here as to the fundamental reasons why philosophers refuse to do this, but I will say that they utterly fail their mission when they do not.
|
||||
|
||||
The thought experiment is a common tool of the philosopher. It is often used to enable “safe” discussion of incredibly uncomfortable questions about the ways we act and the kinds of choices we make, as human beings. But one need not dwell in the fantasy land of trolleys, lifeboats, and flagpoles, when stark reality itself is crying out for an explanation. Brenton Tarrant is just such a cry.
|
||||
|
||||
Were I not to make my brief essay “specific” – were I to avoid including this example of a failure to understand the fundamental nature of Tarrant’s obligation to the world – the whole project would have been nothing but vain self-congratulation. The truth is, we all have the capacity to do what that man did, and every time we look upon an outrage, we face the same choice he faced. We need to look long and hard at that moment in him — and that capacity in ourselves — to understand why he acted as he did, and why we don’t follow suit.
|
||||
|
||||
### Where we are headed
|
||||
|
||||
It is precisely this unwillingness to stare this choice in the face — to own the darkness that inhabits our own hearts — that brought us to the precipice of extinction in the twentieth century. Nietzsche warned us. Jung warned us. Solzhenitsyn warned us. The passion for imagined future states of universal perfection, the collective rage against perceived injustices, the instinctive drive to justify ourselves corrupted into a lust for blood and vengeance; these things were not “insanities”. They were evils. We allowed ourselves to be taken by them, and a hundred million people perished in unimaginable suffering, because of it.
|
||||
|
||||
We can certainly pretend now, that men like Tarrant are just psychological automata; momentary anomalies to be disregarded as inevitable consequences of a deterministic universe, but significant of nothing. That is one choice we can make. If we do, then we are certainly doomed to repeat the horrors of the past century, only on a scale I don’t think anyone is really prepared for. On the other hand, we can take Tarrant seriously, and treat him as the warning that he is (although, not quite the one he intended consciously). He stands as the expression, the actualization, the realization of the evil we are all capable of, given the right sort of ideological possession. If we heed that warning, then perhaps the future will be different from the twentieth century. Perhaps we will have learned our lesson finally, and can turn this ship toward more gentle shores.
|
||||
|
||||
The more I study philosophy, the more I am convinced that a reconciliation of our divided hearts is only possible through some kind of religious awakening. The model of God humbling himself on the cross is not only a lesson that Brenton Tarrant needed. It was a lesson we all needed, and still need. I think Nietzsche’s spokesman in Zarathustra put it best:
|
||||
|
||||
> God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "The Justice of Market Outcomes"
|
||||
date: 2019-12-12T11:48:41Z
|
||||
tags: ["marxism","egalitarianism","redistribution","justice"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","economics"]
|
||||
image: /img/starling-flock.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
In any given exchange market (whether free or otherwise), goods and services are traded as a matter of course, in the pursuit of both individual and social goals. Those trades will result in substantive outcomes both for the individuals involved in trades, and more broadly for society as a whole. It has been suggested that some of those outcomes may be undeserved. If we assume this to be the case, the question then arises, are undeserved market outcomes are unjust? Any reasonable answer to this question requires a coherent idea of justice within which we could determine what is deserved and undeserved, and judge the justice of those deserts. In the interest of space, this essay will briefly describe two essential notions of justice, and rule one of them out as the less coherent of the two. Once an acceptable sense of justice is established, I will then proceed to render a decision on the question of desert and justice in the market.
|
||||
|
||||
Broadly speaking, there are two sense of justice that underlie discussions of the market and its moral character. The first, is the sense of the “right ordering” of the universe and its contents. This could be thought of as the Platonic sense of justice[^1], wherein individuals are incomplete component parts of a harmonious whole into which they fit. By their particular properties, individuals are sorted into a hierarchy of roles that are deserving of certain benefits and obliged to certain duties. The just society, on this view, is one in which all men properly assume the role they’ve been assigned on account of their properties, and carry out duties and receive benefits according to the divine justice that imposed the right order in the first place. Thus, any benefit received or duty executed that violated this preordained order, would constitute an undeserved outcome, which would be unjust by definition. The second sense of justice is found in the character of particular relations between individuals. On this conception, the hierarchy one finds oneself a part of is less important than the awareness of the value present in any given exchange between oneself and others. This sense of justice could be thought of as roughly Aristotelian[^2]; what matters is correct proportion of reciprocity in exchange. The just relationship is one in which participants owe to each other roughly equal proportions of good or evil, to the extent that they have received the same. In such a regime, an “undeserved outcome” would be any exchange in which the outcome of the exchange resulted in an imbalanced ratio of cost and benefit. If the numerator and denominator of the ratio representing the reciprocity involved in the exchange did not resolve to 1, an injustice has occurred, and in such a situation, both parties will have experienced an undeserved outcome: one will have benefited undeservedly, the other, suffered undeservedly.
|
||||
|
||||
F.A . Hayek[^3] denies that the first sense of justice could be legitimate. He argues from a strictly descriptive view of social organization. He says that any attempt to attribute a moral valence to one particular ordering of society over another would be incoherent because there could be no sense in which any given pattern is “right” or “wrong”. Think of a flock of starlings, swirling and shifting in various shapes and formations across an evening sky. At best, all we could do is describe the collective shape and patterns of motion mathematically. We might even be able to predict their patterns, given enough information about the biology of starlings, and the physics of flight. But what we could not reasonably say, is that any given location in the sky, any given distribution of birds, or any given pattern of flight of the flock, is the “correct” one. This is a problem as old as Plato’s dialogues. To what are we referring, when we declare any particular ordering of society (or any particular distribution of goods in the market) to be just or unjust? How could this be anything other than an an arbitrary preference (thus, lacking the moral authority to justify the imposition of force against anyone in order to impose it)? Resolving the Parmenidean problem is beyond the scope of this essay, but it does provide enough justification to call into question the coherence of justice as a correctly “patterned distribution” (of men or goods or both). Hayek’s criticism of this first sense of justice is evocative of Robert Nozick[^4]. However, it is a much stronger claim than Nozick’s. He also rejected “patterned distributions”, but not on Humean grounds. Rather, Nozick takes the moral valence of the principles of liberty and equality as John Rawls presents them in his Theory of Justice, but points to an inconsistency present in Rawls’ theory, as a result of assigning these values. Rawls holds liberty up, on the one hand, as a “lexical” principle against which all other principles are to be subordinated. On the other hand, he thinks that forced redistributions (antithetical to liberty) are justifiable in order to satisfy the patterned distributions mandated by the limits of his Difference Principle. Rawls never sufficiently reconciles this tension, and the best his defenders can offer is to say that practical limitations at the boundaries of any principle will necessarily require the principle to be sacrificed sometimes. This is hardly consolation, when the principle in question is itself liberty. So, even if we could argue that Hayek was making too strong a claim, it still seems that the first sense of justice is untenable from the point of view of Nozick.
|
||||
|
||||
The first sense of justice having been collapsed for lack coherence, we are thus left with the second sense of justice as a sort of balance of accounts between individuals. Here, we diverge from Aristotle in that the right proportions are not determined relative to an official judgment of contributions made to the public weal (as in, for example, the case of the honour earned by an Athenian juryman or soldier), but rather relative to a spontaneously emergent attribution of material value, determined dynamically, Hayek (and Adam Smith) argues, by the aggregate expression of the preferences of large numbers of individuals acting freely in the market. In simple terms, this means that if I decide I want a new pair of sneakers, I must be willing to pay a price somewhere in the range of prices set by the various competitors offering sneakers for sale. The exchange of a satisfactory pair of sneakers for the requisite sum of money, is a just market outcome, insofar as both parties are satisfied with the value received during the exchange. It is clear from this simple illustration that an undeserved outcome would be nearly synonymous with an unjust outcome, because there could be no situation in which one party believed his half of a bargain was undeserved, without it also constituting an obviously unjust imbalance of accounts – for example, if I had stolen the sneakers, or if the retailer had taken my payment and then refused to provide the shoes. On this view, it is difficult to see how any undeserved outcomes could be considered just. As Hayek puts it in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, “competitive prices arrived at without fraud, monopoly, and violence, are all that justice require[s]… it is only ‘the way in which competition is carried out, not its results, that can be judged just or unjust…” (pg. 236) Even in cases of charity, gift-giving, and inheritance, there is an exchange of value taking place. So, even if the kinds of value differ, it could be argued that the partners in the exchange have at least judged the values traded of like degree. All undeserved outcomes, then, would seem to already fall under the rubric of criminal activity: theft, fraud, or property destruction, which are obviously unjust.
|
||||
|
||||
The answer to our original question, then, is an emphatic, ‘yes’. On both the defeated form of justice, and the one we’ve settled with here, undeserved market outcomes are indeed unjust. In fact, it seems that justice and desert are at least generally co-extensive. What this investigation strongly suggests, but only addresses in passing, is the fact that our concept of desert is heavily dependent upon the moral ontology underlying our understanding a just ordering of society. Though Aristotle’s analysis of justice is individualistic in one sense, he still takes it to be the case that some objective hierarchy conditions how judgments of value and desert are made. Hayek, on the other hand, comes at the question from a position of the economists’ moral skepticism. Value is emergent rather than imminent, for him. So, justice is emergent as well. For others, certain fundamental values (such as Nozick’s liberty, or Williams’ equality[^5]) stand as the axiomatic basis (real or otherwise) of a foundational ethic that derives desert as a consequence of the implications of those values. Within this landscape of moral foundations, the market must somehow be accounted for. The way in which we characterize the market and its inevitable outcomes, therefore, is going to be conditioned heavily by the concept of justice that arises out of our moral milieu. This essay has offered one rough, simple introduction into how that might be done.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Plato, [The Republic](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/the-justice-of-market-outcomes-an-exploration-of-desert/#fnref-1)
|
||||
[^2]: Aristotle, [Nicomachean Ethics, Book V](https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/903#lf0328_label_230) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/the-justice-of-market-outcomes-an-exploration-of-desert/#fnref-2)
|
||||
[^3]: F. A. Hayek, [Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume II](https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo5970048.html) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/the-justice-of-market-outcomes-an-exploration-of-desert/#fnref-3)
|
||||
[^4]: Robert Nozick, [Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Part II](https://archive.org/stream/0001AnarchyStateAndUtopia/0001_anarchy_state_and_utopia_djvu.txt) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/the-justice-of-market-outcomes-an-exploration-of-desert/#fnref-4)
|
||||
[^5]: Bernard Williams [Problems of the Self, Chapter 14, The Idea of Equality](https://exitingthecave.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2f88c-bernard_williams_-_the_idea_of_equality.pdf) [↩](https://exitingthecave.com/the-justice-of-market-outcomes-an-exploration-of-desert/#fnref-5)
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "The Struggle Between Public and Private"
|
||||
date: 2019-06-09T12:49:57Z
|
||||
tags: ["ethics","politics","sociology","feminism","orwell","social media","technocracy"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","culture"]
|
||||
image: /img/private-man.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The world around me is getting ever more crazy, with each passing day. Politics is rapidly consuming all aspects of life within itself. We’ve reached a point in some areas of society where nothing can be considered except in terms of political relations and power dynamics. From toilet functions, to one’s choice of entertainment genres, to whom one takes as friends, to larger social and electoral questions, all things are seen through the lens of ideology now. It’s not even a sliding scale anymore. All of it is equally as political, and equally as contentious. Where and how you shit, is as political an act, as who you vote for.
|
||||
|
||||
The role of the private sphere of life has been drastically eroded and diminished over the last twenty-five years, by the exploitation of network technology in the form of social media — and the public scrutiny of private life doesn’t stop with Twitter or Facebook. Everywhere, network connected devices are collecting data about your activities, your choices, your relationships, your habits, and your preferences. Doorbells, televisions, stereo systems, building security systems, and of course, computers and now the ubiquitous smartphone, all have microphones, cameras, GPS trackers, ‘call home’ beacons, and various other means of generating and vomiting data about you, to massive commercial institutions that are more than willing to hand that information over to political institutions, or even to openly publicize it for no other reason than to increase the potential for revenue generation. All digital records are fair game for exploitation. Emails, purchase receipts, government documents, video recordings, audio recordings, private chats, even files stored on local hard disks — if they’re connected to the internet, they’re “public” in some sense enough to skirt legal limits. If your mother notes your birthday on her Facebook page, your birthdate is public record. If your girlfriend breaks up with you and rants about it on Twitter, your relationship status is public record. If you add your friends to your snapchat address book, your friends contact information is public record. What’s more, if it’s public, the automatic assumption is that it is fodder for not just commercial, but *political* action. Celebrity is now an abundant commodity, diluted across the entire population of internet-connected citizens, whether it wants that status or not. If you have a phone number, you are as much a celebrity as Megan Markle. The only difference, is that not everyone has heard of you yet.
|
||||
|
||||
Where does this leave the status of the sphere of the private? When the only barrier left between public and private, is mere ignorance of your presence in this new ubiquitous public sphere, can it really be said that there is a private sphere anymore?
|
||||
|
||||
### Deliniating the spheres
|
||||
|
||||
The realm of the public, is the realm of the political. The political realm is the realm of closed systems, binary choices, and global effects. It is the realm of finite possibility. It is characterized by a fixed amount of power which is fought over for access to a certain list of privileges not available to us in the private sphere of life: namely, the privilege of wielding the means of **force** and **fear**. Within this sphere, life is a continuous process of movement from submission to dominance, and back again. Hierarchies of aggression form around pyramidal peaks personified in the form of a leader (a president, or a prime minister, or a king, or a dictator). The better you are at wielding the tools of force and fear, the higher up the hierarchy you climb, and the larger your slice of the public pie.
|
||||
|
||||
The realm of life that was intended for the delicate subtlety of multivariate interpersonal connection and the complexity of individual choice, was the private sphere. It was meant to be the space of open possibility, and freedom of movement. A place where you could experiment, and make mistakes, and where cascading consequences (whether good or bad) would be mitigated by the extent of your personal network of friends and colleagues. Private life grows in scope and variety with our choices and our social connections, rather than shrinking and homogenizing, as we climb the power ladder in the public sphere. The private sphere is a realm meant to function as a bulwark against the political, and within which a wholly different set of privileges function as the operative motivators: the privileges of preference and love. Notions like the institutions of courtship and marriage, the legal concept of property, and the common sense understanding of freedom of conscience and association, signify both a desire for stability, and a healthy antagonism with the public sphere. These features of the private sphere make it so that dominance and control – if they work at all – can only have a limited effectiveness. Where individuals have the freedom of a myriad of choices available to them, hierarchies of aggression are going to dry up quickly, as people leave them for better pastures, and the aggressive find themselves isolated and unable to function. Private life requires the creation of value that can be combined and traded. A range of different values – from good critical thinking skills, to a good sense of humor, to technical prowess, to the traditional virtues of nobility – when cultivated, make individuals in the private sphere appealing, and they often inspire collaboration and creative activity. In the realm of the public, these values get cannibalized, and parasitized. Those who have managed to wrest access to the privilege of force and fear, often want to be seen as possessing the privilege of preference and love, because the latter is far more highly prized (in spite of the superficial appearance to the opposite).
|
||||
|
||||
When I was growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the public/political sphere of life, even as late as then, still occupied a relatively minor place in day-to-day living. The “news” could be had twice a day, at 6PM and 10PM (and its content was largely confined to the most major events). Newspapers provided long-form commentary on the week’s most significant happenings. Elections ticked off in ritual succession, with ad campaigns being limited to short periods of time in the run up to election day. From time to time, people would gather in front of the state or federal capitol to bemoan a war or complain about some domestic issue. Even with the rise of the 24-hour cable TV news cycle, this remained largely the reality (at least until the events of 9/11). One could live one’s entire private life without even so much as a mention of a president, a governor, or even a mayor, and only come into contact with the public sphere for necessities like a driver’s licence or a marriage certificate. The public or private doings of private citizens anywhere else in the world were an extremely rare topic of conversation, and never a question of whether one ought to have a voice in any moral plebiscite about it.
|
||||
|
||||
This is no longer the case, today. The public sphere of life has intruded into and saturated almost everything we do. The ubiquitous presence of internet-connected devices, and the constant stream of data they feed to a hungry public, offer a constant diet of political debate, analysis, discussion, and moral judgment – all day, every day, leaving only a small space in the dead of night for a few hour’s nap (and even that is now threatened). One cannot go to a restaurant, have a spat with one’s spouse, grumble about work frustrations, attend a movie, or even just sit contemplating on one’s front porch, without someone, somewhere on the internet, knowing about it and providing public commentary on it.
|
||||
|
||||
What’s especially bizarre about this change, is that it has not been forced upon us. We have at least passively volunteered to expose ourselves in this way. We gladly hand over our geolocation, photos, videos, personal and legal details, relationship information, and loads of other personal details, precisely in the hope that others will see it, and respond to it. We have embraced the potential for celebrity with open arms. In the process, we have willingly accepted the destruction of the private, and along with it, we are welcoming our own demise.
|
||||
|
||||
Why am I saying all this? Am I just being hyperbolic? Is this just another case of “elderly luddite hates those kids and their new-fangled gadgets”? Perhaps. But I don’t think so. You see, even with the rise of 24×7 cable television, you could always still *turn it off*. But that’s not possible anymore. The ubiquity of internet-connected devices means you cannot escape being noticed, or being forced to notice others, anywhere you go. Whether, by your own cell phone, or a street camera, or an ATM, or another person with a cell phone or laptop, the internet *is never really off*, even if we wanted it to be. But we don’t, do we? The gormless geniuses at these giant tech firms have managed to hack human psychology to the point that almost nobody can withstand the craving to be consumed by this omniscient devouring beast. What does this mean for mankind? What are the implications? The consequences? The prognosis for the future?
|
||||
|
||||
### A bleak future?
|
||||
|
||||
While reading a recent article in Areo magazine, I stumbled across a quote from Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, which expresses a very similar concern as I have been outlining so far:
|
||||
|
||||
> *…what distinguishes a free society from an unfree society is that in the former, each individual has a recognized private sphere, distinct from the public sphere, and the private individual cannot be ordered about but is expected to obey only those rules which are equally applicable to all…*
|
||||
|
||||
In addition to venerating the rule of law with this quote, the author of the article is using it as part of an argument defending religious freedom. But the more fundamental insight in this quote, in my view, is that freedom begins where they domain of the public ends. The more the domain of the public encroaches on the domain of the private and the personal, the less liberty and autonomy the individual will have. The fact that this encroachment is taking place with the tacit (and even active) assistance of so-called “private” corporate tech platforms, does not damage the fundamental point of this essay. Nor does it allay any of my original concerns. In the “digital” arena, life is a constant battle for position and “influence”. All actions are subject to moral plebiscite, and those at the top of the hierarchy determine not only the rules of the game, but who is allowed to participate in the game. Anyone found out-of-order is summarily sentenced in perpetuity (and typically in absentia), by a mob of self-appointed judges, jurists, and executioners. This new domain of public mob rule is beginning to have serious consequences in ever-expanding circles of bricks-and-mortar reality. Indeed, the internet’s Lord of the Flies tribal justice is costing people access to employment, banking services, business opportunities, and many other real life freedoms, all as a result of offending the ephemeral gods of the new public square. All these once entirely private matters have been commandeered into the public sphere of control, limiting choices, and diminishing the agency of free people to act as their private conscience dictates. Fear and force are now the ascendant principles. Love and preference are receding.
|
||||
|
||||
Even intimate partner relationships are not immune to this encroachment. As dating, childcare, relationship advice, and other once private aspects of life have moved online, thick boundaries between individual and group have radically blurred. With the help of the effectiveness of feminist attacks on family and gender roles, one can clearly see the relationship of private coupling grounded in social bonding, love, and personal preference, being transformed (distorted?) into a political union grounded in overt estimations of social cache, income parity, and pragmatism (in a sense, feminism is restoring the old feudal custom of political marriages of convenience, under the guise of progressive justice). When these new unions fail, the private ritual of dissolution is no longer the common habit. Now, there is a very public trial, in which at least one party must be shamed and demoted in the public space — sometimes even to the point of criminal punishment (see, for example, the bevy of stories coming from universities, in which men are constantly thrown onto a pyre for their failure to maintain favor with a woman). Gone is the notion of a mutual private feeling of love and respect, shared between equals in the eyes of God. In its place, we are erecting a framework of hierarchical public justice, in which coupled participants must continuously compete for top spot.
|
||||
|
||||
I am here reminded of the Kate Hepburn movie, “The Lion in Winter”, in which the entire family of Henry and Elenor of Aquitaine is engaged in a tortuous, self-destructive struggle to the death with each other, for access to Henry’s crown. The film portrays the drama as though it were a complex web of private familial entanglements, cursed only by the psychology of its participants. But, the tensions present are all about the political power struggle of Medieval England — an aging English King, his French competitor, his wife’s control of the Aquitaine, and his three jealous sons, all vying for the throne — and how that power struggle had infected and utterly diseased all the personal relationships. The political sphere had so interleaved itself into the private relationships, that they were virtually indistinguishable. Even Henry’s mistress mingles amongst the family openly, in an attempt to garner her own influence over the crown.
|
||||
|
||||
Second-wave feminists have a favorite slogan: *The personal is the political*. The argument behind this bromide is precisely that there is (or should be) no such thing as a private sphere of life – that every choice you make, by virtue of its source in political values and its implications for political life, is necessarily a political choice whether you want it to be or not. This is why many of them, at least in the 1970’s, made conscious decisions to live *as if* they were lesbians, even if they weren’t. The idea being that female empowerment means liberation from the patriarchy, and liberation from the patriarchy means rejecting the biological imperative to couple with a man for the sake of reproduction. This act presages the modern-day political struggle with the recently coined “transgender” movement. There’s is also an effort to rebel against the biological, in an effort to achieve some unspecified emancipation. In any case, the feminism of the 1970’s took the stereotype of Victorian England, with its feminine “private” domain and masculine “public” domain, to be the template of the patriarchy. Reading twentieth-century sensibilities backward into history, they imagined Victorians must have viewed the masculine “public” domain as the more “superior” or “important” of the two, and reacted against that — not by questioning their own interpretation of Victorian England through a Deridian lens of “false hierarchy”, but by committing themselves to the obliteration of the “less superior” private domain, and the total colonization of the “more superior” public domain, so that, in the end, there can be no space in society where a woman might be rendered “unimportant”. The advent of the internet has provided them a massive set of weapons with which to wage that war.
|
||||
|
||||
George Orwell seems to have sensed this assault, as well. In his well-worn novel *Nineteen Eighty-four* (celebrating it’s 70th anniversary this year), Winston Smith is locked in a doomed struggle to preserve some private space of his own, and some sense of his own private self, in the form of animal desire, aspiration, and an escape into the life of the mind. The novel opens with Smith attempting to hide from the all-seeing tele-screen in order to write a letter to the future, in an illegally acquired pen-and-paper journal. As the novel progresses, he becomes more bold, and tries to expand his sphere of private life to incorporate a relationship. Smith seems self-conscious of what he’s doing, too, as this passage describing a triste between Smith and Julia attests:
|
||||
|
||||
> In the old days, [Winston] thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act…
|
||||
|
||||
This passage also clearly predicts the consequences of intermingling private and public, as I have outlined above. The open landscape of love and preference are gone, and in its wake, all that is left is the closed loop of fear and force. Orwell pessimistically crafts the story in such a way that Smith’s desire for a private life is his Achille’s Heel. His relationship with Julia turns out to be a trap, and even his attempt to recede into his own mind is rendered vain. In the end, for Orwell, this struggle between the public and the private can only end inevitably in the destruction of the private. He may have a point.
|
||||
|
||||
By saturating all of life with a public, political character, and eliminating any sense of private, apolitical, personal interaction, we’re effectively destroying the avenues for creative problem-solving, for the proliferation of choice, for the possibility of negotiation and trade, and for the mitigation of problems of hierarchy (ironically), and primarily, for the possibility of virtue. The public, political sphere is necessarily a realm of diminishing binaries, of rigid hierarchy, of threats of force, and “necessary evils”. Feminism, and other neo- and anti-Enlightenment movements have made a Frankenstein out of the most decrepit body parts of Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche by commandeering the very “patriarchal” structures they decry, distorting them into a shape they cannot take, and using their distorted forms to attempt to grind our natural, private impulses out of us, in pursuit of a more perfect reality. They have resumed the task of Socrates and Augustine, of bringing about God’s kingdom on Earth, and from where I’m sitting, it looks to me like they are forging yet another hell we’ll all have to suffer through. Returning to Orwell, I think O’Brien summarizes the end-game quite chillingly:
|
||||
|
||||
> …The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no employment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless…
|
||||
|
||||
### Conclusion: what do we do about it?
|
||||
|
||||
Is O’Brien right? Is this ultimately where we are headed? I imagine it must have seemed so, to careful observers like Orwell, in the 1940’s. And, as I’ve outlined so far, the remainder of the twentieth century seems to have validated him. I don’t lay the cause of this erosion entirely at the feet of technology. I think it has simply functioned as a tool for increasing the speed of a change already underway. The question is, can we turn it against that change? Can we use this tool for good, rather than evil? There are few signs today, that we can.
|
||||
|
||||
For us to fully recover from the choices of the twentieth century, we’re somehow going to have to recover the sphere of the private from our own yearning to publicize everything. That must happen now, in an environment in which every cultural product encourages us not to. Such a change is going to require an enormous amount of intellectual and social maturity, and personal discipline. What would that look like, in practice? Do we abandon the smartphone? Put ourselves on a quota system? Disconnect altogether? Transition to some new form of technology? All of these measures are directed at the proximal cause, not the final one. That, I think, is ironically a political problem. We need to rediscover ourselves as individuals in some way that integrates local connections, rather than global ones. We need to reaffirm the importance of the family, and of trust relationships, and make it worthwhile for the next generation to value the same. In the absense of this, the sphere of the public will continue to expand and consume everything, and with it, any likelihood of redemption.
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "What Do We Owe to Society?"
|
||||
date: 2020-04-18T11:27:39Z
|
||||
tags: ["plato","aristotle","individualism","collectivism","egoism"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
|
||||
image: /img/plato-vs-aristotle.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Socrates’ story is famous enough. Melisas accused him of corrupting the young, and worshipping gods contrary to the state. The charges were false, and thus, the subsequent conviction was unjust on its face. Yet, Socrates, committed to his principles (ostensibly), went to his grave defending the judgment on the grounds that it was a greater injustice to disobey the law, and that no good man would trade an evil for an evil.
|
||||
|
||||
Aristotle’s story is not as well known. Rather than face execution at the hands of the Athenians, he saw no such duty in obeisance where it meant participation in injustice. Rather than submit to Athens, Aristotle apocryphally declared that he would not be giving Athens the opportunity to “sin twice against philosophy,” and promptly fobbed off to his home in Chalcis. He died there about a year later.
|
||||
|
||||
There is some debate over whether Aristotle’s motivation wasn’t simply sourced in the fact that he wasn’t actually Greek, but Macedonian. This, of course, was precisely the speculation that motivated the phobia that compelled his accusers in the first place. Not being Athenian, and Athens having grown tired of certain Macedonians, Aristotle was a suspect in his own adopted (and arguably, spiritual) home.
|
||||
|
||||
Aristotle’s reasoning on this specific matter does not survive. Though, some thin inferences might be drawn from his treatises on Ethics and Politics. We have a great deal of writing on the subject of Socrates’ execution, of course. The Apology and The Crito, being the two most popular. This is just a shower thought. So, I’m not going to go into a comparative exposition of Socrates and Plato, on the nature of justice and duty, here. Instead, I’ll just point out two things.
|
||||
|
||||
First, Aristotle would have said that a successful polis is one in which it was ordered toward the good for every individual man. His famous phrase in the Ethics — that “the greatest good for man” is Eudaimonia — was derived from an observation of individuals, and he believed that the telos of living things was to actualize their own individual potentiality for excellence. Socrates, on the other hand, seemed to believe that it was impossible for a polis to be rightly ordered, unless it was ordered as a complete unity, first. Once ordered, it was the sacred duty of all men within it, to serve their purpose to that right ordering. The most stark description of this, of course, can be found in The Republic. What began as a metaphor for the well-ordered soul, seemed to have transformed into a complete theory of social order (without Socrates apparently realizing he’d originally been working on a theory of the soul).
|
||||
|
||||
Second, When The Good has a definition that focuses on the individual first, it makes a conception of The Good as a unity actualizable in practice. Even Socrates acknowledges in The Republic, that implementing his scheme would never really be possible. And, Aristotle moreso than Socrates, seems to have been more amenable to the idea that it was possible for Athens to be mistaken. Like Socrates, Aristotle’s theory of ethics insists that the complete realization of the excellence of man (Eudaimonia) is not possible outside of a polis. But the difference between Aristotle and Socrates, is that he does not argue that the accidental position in which one finds oneself, within a given polis, just is the realization of one’s excellence (such as, in a bee hive). Rather, when a polis fails to serve the telos of Eudaimonia, at the individual level, it has failed in its proper functioning, and the individual is thus free to seek his full actualization elsewhere.
|
||||
|
||||
This has incredibly radical implications. I think this is one of the key sources of our ideas of libertarian society, and our ideas about social justice. But the main point here, is that Aristotle’s position is one that places the individual’s duty squarely with himself (or rather, with The Good, conceived as the actualization of his own Telos), and Plato’s position is one that places the individual’s duty squarely with the state (or rather, with The Good, conceived as the actualization of the Ordered Society, through his participation in it).
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
title: "What Does Marx Mean by Alienated Labor?"
|
||||
date: 2019-10-28T12:20:10Z
|
||||
tags: ["hegel","human nature","alienation","marx","socialism","being"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","politics","economics"]
|
||||
image: /img/laborers.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
In his famous *Paris Manuscripts* of 1844, Marx argues that a society organized around the principle of private property and the commercial production of commodities forces man to stand in opposition to his own nature in order to subsist, and that this self-oppositional stance is best described as ‘alienated’ (or ‘estranged’) labor. To fully understand what Marx means by ‘alienated labor’, and under what circumstances labor becomes alienated, we must therefore first understand what Marx means by ‘human nature’. From there, we can understand what it means to be alienated from it, and the various ways in which this alienation is accomplished in a capitalist situation.
|
||||
|
||||
Marx defines human nature as consisting of two fundamental (but fundamentally separable) aspects: existence, and essence. Existence, put simply, is the material fact of being in the world. It is the material conditions by which that fact is sustained. We are living creatures that must engage in a ‘life-activity’ to maintain our existence. That is the basic fact. But all living creatures face the same challenge. So, what makes us any different from the mollusk or the mule deer? This is where essence comes in. Essence is a feature of a particular being that distinguishes that being categorically from all other beings. This method of distinction is very similar to Aristotle. Marx tried to identify man’s essence by observing him, and locating the common description that separates him from the animals. But Marx’s observation is very different from Aristotle’s. Rather than looking at static capacities (such as the capacity to grow, or the capacity to think), Marx looked at the functional activities of living beings to determine their essence. Marx argued that man’s essence is drawn from the fact that he “makes his life-activity the object of his will and consciousness”. He does this by means of his labor, and in so doing, proves his essence as a creative ‘species-being’; he demonstrates his humanness. Man projects the ideas of his mind into the world, by fashioning nature into the likeness of those ideas. In short, his labor enables the creative objectification of nature, realizing human nature as a creatively productive being[^1]. When the material conditions of man’s existence force him to engage in activities that violate this fundamental nature, man is said to be in a state of alienation: his existence and his essence are at odds with each other. To put it another way, man is made a stranger to himself when he can no longer recognize the creative/productive being in the material conditions of his own existence. Or, to put It even more simply: man is alienated when he is no longer living in accordance with what is the good for man, which for Marx, was creative productivity.
|
||||
|
||||
At the time of the Paris Manuscripts, Marx understood ‘capitalism’ as it was described in Adam Smith, to mean a ‘commodity producing commercial society’. In other words, a world in which all goods are reduced to commodity items which are traded on the open market for profit. Marx believed that the production of commodity capital for profit created the conditions necessary for alienation to occur. In the manuscripts, he outlines four ways in which alienation occurs in such a society. Two of these forms are directly related to man’s labor: alienation from the products of labor, and alienation from the activity of labor itself. Understanding these two forms of alienation will help us to understand why Marx thought the stage of capitalism was unique among the stages of history in its propensity for causing alienation.
|
||||
|
||||
### Alienation from the Products of Labor
|
||||
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Since, according to Marx, man’s fundamental nature is the creatively productive being, objectifying nature for the sake of his nature alone, then the proper result of man’s life-activity should be the complete product of his own labor, and that product should be his to dispose of as he sees fit. A man imagines a suit of clothes he would like to wear. He sketches a pattern for that suit. He cuts and sews the material together, and he tailors the finished suit to his own taste. His existence is enhanced by his life-activity, and his creativity is fully engaged in the realization of the finished product. This is man, fully unified with his nature. However, in a capitalist society, this is not possible. At best, this man becomes a worker at a clothing manufacturer. At which point, he will be responsible only for, say, cutting the sleeves, stitching the pockets, starching the collars, or any of a thousand specialized tasks so forth down the line. The complete suit of clothes does not belong to him. The suit is a commodity, owned by the manufacturer. The individual part he works on is of no personal use to him. He can no longer identify with his own creation. In Marx’s terms, the “realization of labor is a loss of the realization of the worker’s life-activity”. In a word, he is alienated from the products of his labor.
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### Alienation from the Activity of Labor
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Since man is essentially a being defined and sustained by his creative productivity, it is when he is engaged in labor that realizes his own conscious designs, that he is unified with his nature (think of a craftsman, artisan, baker, or farmer). In the commodity producing commercial society, however, labor is a commodity which can be bought and consumed like any other good. Man’s labor, as a commodity, is no longer an essential activity of the man, realizing his essence as a producer of conscious creations. Rather, it is transformed into a means to an entirely different end. Ownership of labor activity (and its products) is transferred to the capitalist in exchange for an abstract exchange medium which functions as a tool for acquiring commodities necessary for subsistence. What’s more, the worker must separate his creative capacity from his productive capacity in order to make his labor attractive on the commodity market. In order to do this, the worker must condition himself to suppress his creative capacity in order to maximize mechanical efficiency. No longer is he fully engaged in the realization of his own conscious purposes, but put to work as an actual tool of the capitalist. No longer acting on his own behalf, the worker is literally alienated from himself, through his work. Sensing this alienation, at least semi-consciously, the worker will (as Marx put it) be most at home with himself when he is consuming (eating, drinking, procreating), and most alien to himself when he is producing (think of office clock-watchers, or the napping security guard).
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### Alienation from Species-Being and From Others
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The above two forms of alienation together culminate in the complete alienation from one’s ‘species-being’ (fundamental nature). Unable to recognize anything familiar or life-enhancing in either the day’s work, or the product of the day’s work, the worker will find himself without a fundamental meaning or purpose to his existence, because his existence is so divorced from its essence. This, then, will cascade into the fourth form of alienation: the alienation of men from men. In a commodity producing commercial society, men have no choice but to relate to each other as commodities of utility maximization, rather than as ends in themselves – i.e. as subjects engaged in the life-activity of creative objectification for its own sake. The loss of the ability to recognize the species-being in oneself ends in the loss of the ability to see it in others. Thus, since man’s essential nature just is creative objectification, each commercial relationship a worker is engaged in represents yet a further alienation.
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### Conclusion
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On a superficial reading, it seems easy to form an affinity for this concept. There does seem to be a certain amount of psychological distance (or, as some would say, ‘spiritual dissatisfaction’) inherent in commercial society, and its focus on the continual acquisition of commodity products. We have all sorts of labels for this now; ‘consumer culture’, and the ‘crisis of meaning’ being the two obvious examples. But Marx’s concept is not psychological, and only spiritual by reference to Hegel. It is *ontological*, and his goal was to identify the causes and remedies necessary to achieve Hegel’s end of history. What’s more, it is not clear that commodity exchange is an activity exclusive to “capitalist” society, either as Adam Smith imagined it, or as the 19th century industrial world Marx was critiquing. A more precise definition is needed to condemn the idea of capitalism exclusively for the alienation resulting from commodity markets. Also, it may be the case that slave and feudal societies involved forms of alienation of their own, unrecognized by Marx. But, if we take Marx’s account on its face – that the totality of alienation is only possible in a capitalist society, due to the Lockean notion of private property, and the commodity economy making the appropriation of labor at scale both possible and morally excusable – then this description of the alienation of labor does indeed seem to be local to capitalism, and not a general phenomenon. It is beyond the scope of this essay to dispute the facts or the normative valence of Marx’s alienation, as a concept, but I will suggest this: from an empirical (and admittedly consequentialist) point of view, it still seems like the real-world benefits of capitalism practiced over the last one hundred years of history, far outweigh the cost of any possible alienation we’ve suffered as a consequence.
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```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```
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[^1]: This conception of human nature is very early in Marx’s writings, and bears some of the hallmarks of Hegelian idealism. This is, therefore, a very different position from the dialectical materialism he adopts much later on, in Capital.
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Reference in New Issue