July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 3
Philosophy Now
ISSUE 97 July/Aug 2013
I IL LL LU US SI IO ON NS S &
CONTRADICTIONS
pages 9, 23, 25
and throughout!
EDITORIAL & NEWS
4 Self, Self, Self! Rick Lewis
5 News in Brief
THE SELF
6 A Philosophical Identity Crisis
Chris Durante looks at different views of personal identity
9 The Illusion of the Self
Sam Woolfe says that theres no reality to the sense of self
10 Is the Buddhist No Self Compatible with Nirvana?
Katie Javanaud asks whether there is a contradiction at
the heart of Buddhism
14 How Old Is The Self?
Frank S. Robinson disagrees with a fashionable view that the
self is a very recent development
17 Focusing On The Brain, Ignoring The Body
Alessandro Colarossi on Merleau-Ponty & Artificial Intelligence
OTHER ARTICLES
20 Bertrand Russell Stalks the Nazis
Thomas Akehurst says Russell blamed German philosophy
23 Moral Relativism is Incoherent
Julien Beillard says that moral relativists dont make sense
25 One Law to Rule Them All
Tim Wilkinson is consistent about non-contradiction
29 Good News from Neurology
Francis Fallon tells us why brain scans cannot be mind scans
31 Trying Herder
Dale DeBakcsy on one of the greatest 18th Century thinkers
REVIEWS
42 Television: Black Mirror Reflections
Terri Murray looks at Marcuse through her TV set
45 Book: Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
reviewed by Eleni Panagiotarakou
47 Book: The Self and Self-Knowledge ed. by Annalisa Coliva
reviewed by Richard Baron
REGULARS
34 Brief Lives: Niccol Machiavelli
Graeme Garrard reconsiders the infamous political theorist
36 Food For Thought: I Gave Them A Sword
Tim Madigan on Richard Nixons admiration for Machiavelli
38 Letters to the Editor
50 Tallis in Wonderland: Does The Universe Give A Toss?
Raymond Tallis on coin tossing and quantum probabilities
52 Ethical Episodes: This Ones For You
Joel Marks reviews his own amoral book trilogy
POETRY & FICTION
19 Poem: That Which I Am
Ivan Searle poetically questions our knowledge of our selves
53 Dialogue: Sartre & The Waiter
Frank OCarroll on liberty and coffee
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I S S N 0 9 6 1 - 5 9 7 0
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Machiavelli
Hes been misunderstood...
pages 34 and 36
pages 6-19 and page 47
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July/August 2013
Editorial Self, Self, Self!
Frank Robinson examines and takes issue with Julian Jayness
famous theory that our sense of self is a recent historical
development; dating back only some three thousand years.
And Alessandro Colarossi argues, with the help of his friend
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that Artificial Intelligence research
will hit a dead end because of a failure to appreciate that
consciousness must be embodied to be complete; just building
a complex electronic brain on a laboratory bench wont be
good enough.
This year sees the 500th anniversary of The Prince, Niccol
di Machiavellis notorious masterpiece of political theory /
handbook for aspiring dictators. To mark the anniversary we
have two articles on the wily Florentine diplomat whose name
gave the English language a verb (Machiavellian) and a
synonym for the Devil (Old Nick). Machiavelli was a
pessimist about human nature, believing that most people
tend to be lazy and unambitious, and arent greatly interested
in developing virtue in themselves although they admire it in
others. He was the first to openly conceptualise a split
between ethics and politics; earlier writers assumed that being
virtuous is important for a political leader, but Machiavelli
flatly denies this. If you want to be a ruler it is useful to appear
virtuous, as virtue is admired, but actually being virtuous is not
helpful and can be a hindrance. What is important is how you
relate to the people. Being liked is fine, but it is not as stable a
bond as that created by fear, because people easily transfer
their positive likings to others but fear isnt transferrable in
this way; they will always fear you. So you should aim to be
feared, but you shouldnt allow yourself to become hated
because hatred is destructive and breeds rebellion. You can use
violence but dont be excessive as that will create hatred.... The
Prince is a ruthlessly practical book, illustrated with examples
drawn from Machiavellis wide experience as a diplomat and
courtier. No wonder his reputation is sulphurous.
Our contributors give a good sketch of Old Nicks life and
ideas, and both suggest that he was no more immoral than
other political schemers of his time (and since) and that his
near-demonic reputation is mainly a result of him simply
being far more candid than his peers. Almost everything about
Machiavelli is controversial, even including whether the
articles about him in this issue should be part of our section
on the self. After all, in some ways he seems a philosopher of
ruthless self-interest. However, along with his unabashed
advocacy of treachery, deception, and murder in the pursuit of
power, he also argued that such actions could be justified only
if they resulted in a better outcome for society at large, and
not otherwise. In sixteenth century terms, that made him
practically a saint!
M
any of us enjoy talking about ourselves, perhaps too
much sometimes. But in this issue well be talking
about our selves, which maybe is a bit different.
In Platos dialogues, Socrates often urges his fellow
Athenians to Know Thyself, which was a popular maxim
inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. There seems a
widespread consensus among philosophers, psychoanalysts
and suchlike folk that striving to understand yourself better is
a good idea. Why should that be the case? If you fret too
much about the details of your self, you might become self-
conscious, and this can impede the effectiveness of your
dealings with others. Nevertheless, Ren Descartes kicked off
modern philosophy with introspection and the self as his
starting point. He mused that however comprehensively
deluded his thinking might be, he was at least definitely
having thoughts, and if he was thinking, that must mean that
he existed. From that small foothold he went on to deduce the
existence of a benevolent God and of the external world and,
for better or worse, set the whole adventure of Western
philosophy on a new path.
Philosophers have been self-obsessed ever since, and our
contributors this month deal with some of the central philo-
sophical problems of the self. Chris Durante asks about
personal identity: given that over the course of your whole life
from when you first became self-aware, you have changed
dramatically in terms of physical appearance, experiences,
capabilities and in many other ways, what exactly is the
constant thread that makes you the same person, rather than a
succession of different people? Sam Woolfe looks at some
competing conceptions of the self and discusses the idea that a
unitary self is an illusion, perhaps arising because we arrange
our different experiences so as to make a coherent narrative in
ways that are biologically advantageous. Some think the
existence of the self is self-evident, and attempts to disprove it
are self-contradictory. David Hume is perhaps the best-known
Western philosopher to have doubted whether the self existed
(see box on p8), but the Buddha too taught that there was no
self. In her article, Katie Javanaud examines whether this
doctrine is logically compatible with another Buddhist
doctrine, that people can achieve liberation from the cycle of
death and rebirth. This requires a careful examination of what
is meant by self; one of the striking things about Javanauds
article is how much the logical approach and core concerns of
ancient Buddhist and Hindu writers have in common with
debates about the self in modern Western philosophy.
Perhaps this shows that the concerns of philosophy are
universal, and that logic is logic everywhere, in all ages, rather
than being relative to different cultures or belief systems.
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 5
Emotions and the Brain
Recent neurological research at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, suggests that each emotion
humans experience has a distinctive signa-
ture on fMRI (functional Magnetic Reso-
nance Imaging) scans. The scans tend to
look the same whenever a particular indi-
vidual has a particular feeling, and look
broadly similar even in the brains of
different people experiencing a similar
emotion. This effect can be obscured by
distractions and researchers found that the
clearest results could be obtained by scan-
ning the brains of trained method actors
from the universitys drama school. As ten
actors each made themselves experience
nine different feelings, researchers were
able to identify distinctive patterns of
mental activity linked to each emotional
state. Following this, the scientists found a
computerised method of predicting how
the actors were feeling from a fresh set of
brain scans. The computer was 84% accu-
rate at guessing their emotions based on
their own previous results and 70% accu-
rate when basing its judgment on patterns
of activity seen in brain scans of other
participants. Some reflections on earlier
uses of fMRI to investigate human mental
activity can be found in Francis Fallons
article on page 29.
APA JAPA, Do!
The American Philosophical Associa-
tion (APA) is planning to launch its very
own scholarly journal in partnership with
Cambridge University Press in 2015. The
imaginatively-named Journal of the Amer-
ican Philosophical Association (JAPA) will
appear quarterly and will include various
discussion topics in the diverse subfields of
philosophy as well as contribute to the
disciplines continued growth and global
impact. The APA, based at the University
of Delaware, is one of the worlds largest
philosophical societies with a membership
of over 10,000 professional philosophers
and 90 affiliated groups, so their new
journal might become quite influential.
World Congress in Athens
The 23rd World Congress of Philos-
ophy will be held in Athens from 4-10
August 2013. The theme will be Philos-
ophy as inquiry and way of life. The
organisers are the International Federation
of Philosophical Societies (FISP) and the
Greek Philosophical Society, under the
auspices of Unesco and the President of
Greece. The World Congress is held in a
different city every five years and is always
a massive organisational undertaking. Over
2,000 philosophers from 105 countries will
be gathering in Athens, and the provisional
timetable lists well over 500 events. The
conference committee have also announced
special sessions to be held at four locations
of particular interest in the history of
philosophy: the sites of Platos Academy
and Aristotles Lyceum, the Pnyx (the hill
on which the democratic assembly of
ancient Athens was always held) and the
location in which Platos Phaedrus dialogue
is set.
A team from Philosophy Now magazine
will be attending the World Congress and
organising a round table discussion there
on Philosophy in the Public Sphere.
Art and Philosophy
It seems that the summer has caused
artists to seek inspiration from philosophy,
and vice versa. In the medieval town of St
Paul de Vence, in South West France, the
Maeght Foundation is staging a major
exhibition which gives a free reign to
philosopher, writer and media superstar
Bernard-Henri Lvy (pronounced BHL
in French). His aim is to increase under-
Emotions correlate with brain activity
Athens braces for World Congress of
Philosophy APA to launch its own journal
News reports by Sue Roberts.
News
standing of the age-old battle between
philosophy and painting using a hundred
ancient and contemporary artifacts. In a
series of short black and white videos,
filmed by Lvy, contemporary artists read
directly to camera from their choice of
works by philosophers including Plato,
Hegel and Schelling.
Later in the summer, in Northern
Ireland, the world premiere of The
Conquest of Happiness will be staged at
The Venue 2013 in Derry/Londonderry
on 21-22 September. The production is
inspired by Bertrand Russells book of the
same name, and by a question he asked:
how can people deserve happiness? It will
be a multi-artform event featuring actors,
musicians and dancers from Northern
Ireland, the Republic of Ireland,
BosniaHerzegovina and Slovenia,
directed by Haris Paovic of the East West
Theatre Company in Sarajevo.
Congress venue
under construction
Philosophy Now Festival
8th September 2013
The 2nd Philosophy Now Festival
will be held in Londons Conway Hall
all day on 8th September. It will include
talks, debates, workshops, events for
children, a round table on Surveillance
and Privacy (which we will be secretly
filming), another
round table on
Zombies and Philos-
ophy and much
more. There will be
a best-dressed
zombie contest.
Stephen Law will
give the PFA George
Ross Memorial
Lecture and this
magazines own columnist Professor
Raymond Tallis will give a lecture
about whether science has killed philos-
ophy. (Plot spoiler alert: he thinks it
hasnt.) All are welcome. For more
details please visit:
philosophynow.org/festival
6 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
S
tepping into a park I had frequented as a little boy, mem-
ories of my childhood began to flood my mind, each one
a rich story of a distant past. As I continued to reminisce,
each story flowed into the next, and I began to witness the
development of an intricate character whom I refer to as me.
All these stories that I had authored in my experience flowed
together to give me a unique history. Yet reflecting on all the
experiences, goals, traits, and values that Ive had, it dawned on
me that my identity seemed more elusive than one might usu-
ally believe. Ruminating over these strands of my past, at times
it was as if I could watch my traits develop, values evolve, my
goals be accomplished and recreated; but other moments I rec-
ollected appeared in my mind as if they were foreign elements
in my mental landscape. Some of the stories seemed to be inte-
gral aspects of who I am, while other memories seemed very
distant, almost as if the main character was a different person.
Contemplating further, I began to wonder if there was
more to my identity than common sense or intuition could
account for. What struck me was the fact that I considered
myself to be a single person with a single identity, yet viewing
myself as always having been me left something unresolved.
The little boy, who shares my name and appears in my stories,
seems to be so different from the person I am today, yet I tend
to incorporate him into my identity as a single person. What is
it exactly that makes me a single human person persisting
through time with a single identity? Could it be my body
that I am and have been a single biological organism? Or, is it
my mind that my psychological states interconnect so that
they constitute a single continuum? I also began to wonder,
At what point in my life did I begin to be a person? When
did I attain personhood? This got me thinking about a
whole new series of questions: Is that little boy truly the same
person as I am today?; If I became severely demented, could
I still be considered to be the same person as I was before?
Suddenly my pondering had led me to very serious metaphysi-
cal and philosophical problems. A dark storm of confusion and
lightning-quick thoughts set in, only to give rise to a spectacu-
lar rainbow of insight in my psychic sky.
Distinct Identity Theories
We usually intuitively believe that our identities remain
constant over long periods of time. We acknowledge changes
in character traits, etc., yet maintain a belief in the singularity
of peoples actual identities. If your good friend Greg were to
claim that he was not the same person he was five years ago,
we would not usually assume that Greg was now a numerically
distinct person, we would take it as a figure of speech denoting
that Greg has undergone some major event in his life, or that
he has undergone some drastic change in his personality traits.
Yet when asked Just what is it that makes a person persist as
the same person over time? can we really say what it is that
gives human beings the unique personal identities we assume
them to have?
Many philosophers have attempted to tackle the issue of
personal identity, generating a number of distinct theories. I
shall provide a synopsis of the two major accounts, mentioning
some of the major players, and proceed to reconcile these
opposing views with a hybrid account of what constitutes a per-
sonal identity which persists over time as a numerically identi-
cal individual, or in other words, what makes a single person.
The two major and rival accounts of personal identity in
philosophy have been physical or body-based theories, and psy-
chological theories of persistent identity. The dominant of the
two are those theories which adhere to some form of psychol-
ogy-based criterion of continuing personal identity. Yet before
delving into this account I would like to summarize the physi-
calist approach.
The bodily continuity criterion for personal identity states that
for a person at a particular time (t1) and a person at a later time
(t2) to be numerically identical (meaning, retaining a single iden-
tity which has persisted over time), the person at t1 (P1) and the
person at t2 (P2) must possess the same body. If it can be said
that the body in question is indeed the same body despite any
changes in regard to its individual parts or particular material
composition, then P2 is indeed the same person as P1.
This view focuses upon a body in its entirety: a single
human body which may be said to be the same physical thing
as a previous body regardless of differences in some descriptive
characteristics. Hence, if we follow the existence of the physical
body which received the name Greg at birth to the same
grown body called Greg at age twenty-five, then despite many
differing physical traits, it may be said that this is indeed the
same individual to whom the name Greg was given in infancy.
Therefore, on this theory, what matters for continuing per-
sonal identity is the continuing existence of a single physical
entity. (More complex and elaborate versions of this theory
have been put forth by David Wiggins and Eric Olsen.)
By contrast, psychological theories assert that the criterion for
the persistence of personal identity over time is the intertwined
relations of an individuals psychological states. Initially, this
theory was postulated by John Locke (1632-1704), often deemed
the father of the personal identity problem. He employed
memory as the sole criterion for identity. Later the theory was
APhilosophical Identity Crisis
Chris Durante asks himself just what make him the person he used to be.
The Ship of Theseus:
a famous paradox
of physical
continuity
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 7
revised, by Lockeans and others, to include a plethora of psy-
chological factors, not solely memories, as means of accounting
for ones singular personal identity over time. These more
sophisticated theories focus primarily on either psychological conti-
nuity or psychological connectedness, or on a fusion of the two, and
often rely on the idea of person-stages (a person at t1 is a
person-stage, at t2 is another person-stage, etc).
The psychological continuity theory typically states that in
order for P1 at t1 to be identical to P2 at t2, some continuity
of memory and personality must be recognizable between P1
and P2. The psychological connectedness theory, closely
related to the psychological continuity theory, maintains that
some type of psychological connectedness is necessary between
person-stages for the two to have a single identity over time;
but unlike memory-based theories of identity, the entirety of
the contents of psychological states may be analysed and
utilised to ascribe identity. To borrow a concise summary of
Harold Noonans from his book Personal Identity (1989):
One such connection is that which holds between an intention and the
later act in which this intention is carried out. Other such direct psycho-
logical connections are those which hold when a belief, desire, or any
other psychological feature, persistsIn general any causal links between
past factors and present psychological traits [not merely memories] can be
subsumed under the notion of psychological connectedness. (pp.10-11).
Objections and Persons
A classic refutation of Lockes simple memory criterion for
personal identity has been made by Thomas Reid (1710-96).
His Paradox of the Brave Officer essentially goes as follows.
Consider a child who grows into a young man, and then into
an old man. Based on a simple memory criterion alone, one
could assert that the child is psychologically connected to the
young man if the young man has a good portion of the memo-
ries of the child; and the young man is psychologically con-
nected to the old man insofar as the old man has sufficient
memories of being the young man. However, the old man may
nevertheless be said to be psychologically discontinuous with,
that is, unconnected with, the child, due to the fact that the old
man has no memories of being the child. Yet, how is it possible
for the child to be the young man, and the young man to be
the old man, but for the child to be a different person from the
old man? Obviously, these objections hit their target [the
simple Lockean memory criterion], but they do not go deep
Noonan writes (p.55). That is, while powerful in its time, this
objection fails to be an adequate objection to contemporary
theories of psychological continuity, which say that as long as
there is a continuous set of links of memories between the
child and the old man, they may be said to be the same person.
So (for example) as long as the old man can remember being
the young man, and the young man can remember being the
child, then the old man is the same person as the child.
One influential argument in favour of psychological rather
than physical theories of identity has been put forward by Derek
Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984). It goes as follows. An indi-
vidual enters a teleport machine on Earth, loses consciousness,
and awakes in the teleport on Mars. The machine on Earth is
the scanner and the one on Mars is the replicator. Once the
scanner has scanned the precise states of each molecule of the
persons body, it beams that information to the replicator on
Mars and simultaneously completely destroys the body on
Earth. Out of entirely new matter, the replicator on Mars cre-
ates a body which is an exact replica of the previous one. The
person then steps out of the replicator with no thought that he is
not continuous with the person on Earth, and thus he may be
considered the same person. So this person has psychological
but not bodily continuity with the person on Earth.
Despite their dominance in philosophy, there are objections
to psychological theories of personal identity. One such objec-
tion might be called the duplication problem. It is conceiv-
able that one day there will exist a machine which will be able
to record everything about ones psychological states and
transfer this information into a new body, or even into more
than one body. This case is akin to a variation on Parfits tele-
portation thought experiment, in which the replicator mal-
functions and produces a number of exact replicas of the body
being transported. In either case, more than one individual will
be in possession of precisely the same psychological states, all
of which are continuous and connected with one previous
person. According to this critique, the psychological criteria
for identity must therefore fail, for we shall be left with two or
more embodied people who according to the psychological
criteria may rightfully be considered continuous with the same
person. Intuitively, this seems rather absurd.
Another Story of Identity
While the defenders of the psychological criteria and the
advocates of the bodily criteria continue to duel, concocting
Thomas Reids Paradox of the Brave Officer
8 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
amusing and intriguing science-fiction-inspired thought-
experiments, neither group has successfully managed to take
down their opponent.
Each camp of theorists has attempted to capture something
of what makes a human being a person retaining a single iden-
tity. However, neither position seems to capture another inte-
gral element of our lived existences, namely, that we tend to
define ourselves through the telling of stories. We get to know
one another by learning about each others life histories, and we
relate to others, identifying with them, based on their values,
ideologies, beliefs, personalities, etc, all of which are transmit-
ted via narratives, verbal, written, or otherwise. Hence, an
alternative response to the philosophical identity crisis has been
the proposal that a human self gains its identity through narra-
tion. This is often referred to as Narrative Identity Theory.
All Narrative Identity Theorists maintain in some form or
another that the identities of persons are self-created narratives
claiming that narration, or story-telling, is the mode in which
we represent ourselves to ourselves, present ourselves to
others, and represent others around us. The narrative theorist
is attempting to capture that element of experience in which
we say, Hey, tell me your story, or I know you, Ive heard
stories about you.
On this account, who one is (and is not) is contingent upon
the stories of ones past, and the stories of who one wishes to
become; the goals one possesses and the actions taken to arrive
at those ends; the values inherited narratively or arrived at
through reflection and self-story-telling; and ones emplotment
as a character in the story of ones life, interacting with the sto-
ries of others. The narrative theorist thus takes human linguistic
abilities and goal-orientation to play a major role in someones
acquisition of a unique identity as a person. Some theorists have
maintained that the personal self is the product of an interactive
unified narrative, others the virtual center of multiple narrative
streams, while yet others maintain a more existential position,
viewing the self as a constant becoming, evolving as we interact
with our environments and reflect on our lives. Pre-eminent
defenders of narrative identity include Daniel Dennett, Alasdair
MacIntyre, and Paul Ricoeur. Although they differ in their
approaches, they all attempt to capture features of the human
condition which previous theorizing has ultimately left out,
namely the importance of our life histories, story-telling, cul-
tural immersion, goal-directedness, and self-creation.
Back To Life
While these theories of what make you continue to be you
may seem obscure or abstract, they do indeed hold some bear-
ing on human life and the concerns which arise on a daily basis
especially in medical settings, where we are faced with issues
relating to brain death, permanent vegetative states, comas,
advance directives and living wills, and many psychiatric
dilemmas. All of these in one way or another evoke questions
touching on the various theories presented.
Retiring from my sojourn in the park, having pondered the
great mysteries of the human condition, I asked myself,
Could it not be that I am at once dependent upon my psycho-
logical connectedness, my biological persistence, and my life
history, for my identity? Although I did not accomplish a
miraculous philosophical breakthrough during my stroll, I
hope I have provided some food for thought with this prcis of
positions on the Philosophical Identity Crisis.
DR CHRIS DURANTE 2013
Chris Durante has a PhD in Ethics, MA in Religious Studies, and
MSc in Philosophy of Mental Disorder. His interests in theories of
identity and personhood span a variety of fields, including bioethics,
philosophy, comparative religion and sociopolitical theory. He teaches
at McGill University in Montral, and also at Marymount Man-
hattan College and St Johns University, both in New York City.
David Humes Theory of Personal Identity
In section 1.4.6 of A Treatise Of Human Nature (1739), Scottish philosopher David Hume presents his analysis of personal identity,
in which he concludes that the entire notion of the self is founded on a mistake, and is nothing but a confusion of ideas.
From the outset of the Treatise, Hume has argued that all our ideas are derived from our impressions: it is not until we
have tasted pineapple (had an impression of it) that we can have an idea of how pineapple tastes. Likewise, one cannot
describe the colour red in such a way that a man blind from birth could have any idea of redness, because he is inca-
pable of having an impression of red. Using this argument (a form of radical empiricism), Hume asserts that since nobody
has any distinct impression of the self as something independent of an array of perceptions, nobody can have any idea
of self. He writes: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular
perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time
without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. Since his only impressions are of fleeting percep-
tions and never of a constant self who is the putative subject of such experiences, this leads him to conclude that he is no more than a
bundle of perceptions. He even goes so far as to say that if he does not experience any perception while hes sleeping, he cannot prop-
erly be said even to exist at that moment. Hume accounts for our belief in a permanent and enduring self by referring to the fact that
where small changes occur gradually we are apt not to treat them as important enough to signify a change in identity. In philosophical
terms, however, failure to recognize even small changes as a change in identity is an error, he says.
In the Appendix of his Treatise, Hume acknowledged the central defect in his account of personal identity: if there is merely a bun-
dle of perceptions, and no enduring self that is the subject of these perceptions (i.e. a perceiver), then the entire project of the Trea-
tise is invalidated, as skepticism about the self leads ultimately to an irreversible wholesale skepticism, since without the self we are
not able to ground our knowledge. Hume also realised his account is guilty of raising perceptions to the status of substances (sub-
stance being another notion which Hume had rejected in the Treatise). So, Hume eventually writes in the Appendix: of the section
concerning personal identity, I find myself involv'd in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former
opinions, nor how to render them consistent. Katie Javanaud
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 9
I
n our day-to-day lives, it always appears that there is an I
who is thinking, perceiving, and interacting with the
world. Even the language we use assumes that there is a
self a distinct conscious entity: when we talk to each other we
say, I think..., You are... etc. However, appearances can be
deceptive. The cognitive scientist Bruce Hood defines an illu-
sion as an experience of something that is not what it seems.
He uses this definition in his book, The Self Illusion: How The
Social Brain Creates Identity (2012), arguing that the self is
an illusion and he admits that everyone experi-
ences a sense of self a feeling that we have an iden-
tity, and that this identity does our thinking and
perceiving but he says that beyond the experience,
there is nothing we can identify as the self.
In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William
James said that we can think of there being
two kinds of self. There is the
self which is consciously aware of
the present moment we repre-
sent this self by using the pronoun
I; then theres also the self we
recognise as being our personal iden-
tity who we think we are which
we represent by using the
term me. According to
Hood, both of these
selves are generated by
our brain in order to
make sense of our
thoughts and the out-
side world: both I
and me can be thought of as a
narrative or a way to connect our experiences
together so that we can behave in an biologically advantageous
way in the world.
A helpful way to understand how the brain creates the illu-
sion of the self is to think about perceptual illusions such as the
Kanizsa triangle [see illustration]. In this illusion we see a trian-
gle even though no triangle has been drawn, due to the sur-
rounding lines and shapes giving the impression of there being a
triangle. Our brain essentially fills in the gaps. Hood states that
our sense of a self is similarly a hallucination created through
the combination of parts. We perceive the self as a result of dif-
ferent regions in our brain trying to combine our experiences,
thoughts, and behaviours into a narrative, and in this sense the
self is artificial.
Hood's argument is that our brain naturally create narratives
in order to make sense of the world. Essentially, our brains are
always thinking in terms of stories: what the main character is
doing, who they are speaking to, and where the beginning,
middle, and end is; and our self is a fabrication which emerges
out of the story-telling powers of our brain.
This belief has been backed up by case studies in neurology.
For example, in many of his books, neurologist Oliver Sacks
describes patients who suffer some damage to a memory region
of their brain, and they literally lose a part of themselves. In Dr
Sacks best-known book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a
Hat (1985), he describes a patient known as Jimmy G who has
lost the ability to form new memories and constantly forgets what
he is doing from one minute to the next. (In the film Memento,
the protagonist suffers from the same condition.) Due to this
condition, however, Jimmy has also almost lost his sense of self,
since he cannot form a coherent narrative of his life. This loss
of narrative is deeply troubling, and means Jimmy strug-
gles to find meaning, satisfaction, and happiness. Cases
like this show not only that the sense of self depends on
a multitude of brain regions and processes, but that our
happiness depends on the illusion of self.
Other evidence from neuroscience supports the claim
that the brain is a narrative-creating machine. Dr
Sacks reports many different patients
who make up stories to explain their
impairments. The neuroscientist V.S.
Ramachandran also recounts patients
who are paralysed but who deny that
they have a problem. The brain is deter-
mined to make up stories even in the face
of obvious and compelling evidence
(e.g. that an arm will not move).
This does not mean that
the illusion of the self is
pointless. It is the most
powerful and consistent
illusion we experience, so
there must be some purpose
to it. And in evolutionary
terms, it is indeed useful to think of ourselves as
distinct and personal. There is more of an incentive to survive
and reproduce if it is for my survival, and my genes remain in the
gene pool. After all, how can you be selfish without a sense of
self? If we had no sense of self, and we perceived everything as
one or interconnected, what would be the point of competi-
tion? Perhaps then some important moral lessons can be drawn
from the fact that the self is artificial, a construct.
The idea that the self is an illusion is not new. David Hume
made a similar point, saying the self is merely a collection of
experiences [see box opposite]. And in early Buddhist texts the
Buddha uses the term anatta, which means not-self or the
illusion of the self. Thus Buddhism contrasts to, for example,
Cartesianism, which says that there is a conscious entity behind
all of our thoughts. The Buddha taught his followers that
things are perceived by the senses, but not by an I or me.
Things such as material wealth cannot belong to me if there is
no me, therefore we should not cling to them or crave them.
SAM WOOLFE 2013
Sam Woolfe is a philosophy graduate from Durham University. He is a
writer and editor at The Backbencher magazine (backbencher.co.uk)
and blogs at www.samwoolfe.com. He lives in London.
The I
I
l
l
l
l
u
u
s
s
i
i
o
o
n
n
of theSelf
Sam Woolfe says that were deluding our selves.
T
wo of the most fundamental doctrines of Buddhism
are firstly that the self is illusory, and secondly that we
can achieve liberation from the cycle of death and
rebirth to reach a state of peace called Nirvana. From the per-
spective of Western philosophy, it may appear inconsistent to
claim both that there is no self and that Nirvana can nonethe-
less be attained, for who or what attains liberation if there is no
self in need of liberation?
Although this is a common objection to Buddhism, to con-
sider its validity we must explore the concept of Nirvana more
fully in order to understand the liberation it offers. We will
also need to examine the notion that there is no self, a notion
which is inherently difficult to accept, but has been held by a
number of philosophers, notably David Hume. The doctrine is
certainly asserted by Buddhism, and was strongly implied by
sermons of the Buddha himself (see verse 7 of the Dhamma-
pada, or the Alagaddupama-Sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya).
When examining the compatibility between the Buddhist
claims of no-self and the Buddhist project of liberation, the
pursuit of Nirvana, as we will do in this article, we will have to
remember that many profound thinkers have found a way to
hold the two doctrines simultaneously. However, as we shall
see, one difficulty with this stance is that it seems to require
those who hold it to abandon the demands of reason for a
position which is defended without recourse to the usual
methods of philosophical enquiry.
What would result from the discovery of either the compati-
bility or the incompatibility of the two doctrines? Even if we
discover that the Nirvana/no-self combination lacks cogency,
does it follow that the theory of no-self is no longer valuable
for that theory supports the doctrine of non-attachment, which
grounds the Buddhist ethic of universal compassion? Alterna-
tively, if we discover that Buddhists can hold the two claims
simultaneously without contradiction, this in itself neither
shows that the no-self doctrine is actually true, nor that the lay
person would be compelled to accept that the self is an illusion.
According to Buddhism, the central characteristics of exis-
tence are impermanence, suffering and no-self. The Buddhas
view of life as suffering might give rise to the notion that Bud-
dhism is essentially pessimistic. However, as I argue, in offering
a complete liberation from suffering, Buddhism is highly opti-
mistic. Understanding that the cause of suffering is craving (the
Buddhas Second Noble Truth) enables us to eradicate suffer-
ing by removing the cause which is achieved by following the
Eightfold Path in order to be freed from the cycle of re-birth
and the accumulation of karma. To attain liberation from the
cycle of re-birth and the accumulation of karma, among other
things, one must relinquish the belief in an enduring self
retaining identity over time and performing the executive func-
tion of controller. Abandoning a belief in an enduring self is a
natural step for any Buddhist paying close attention to the con-
stant flux occurring in the world. So our starting point will be
an examination of the no-self doctrine. We will then examine
various definitions of liberation, attempting to construct a defi-
nition that renders this liberation compatible with no-self. I
shall in fact offer two answers to the title question; which one
we accept will depend on our attitude towards the claims of
logic. For textual sources, I will focus primarily on the Abhid-
harma forms of Buddhism, as it is impossible here to cover all
branches/schools of Buddhism.
The Self That Buddhism Denies
What is the nature of the self that Buddhists deny, and how
can they justify this claim?
It is necessary firstly to understand the Buddhist distinction
between persons and the self, which is legitimised by differ-
entiating between conventional and ultimate truths:
A statement is conventionally true if and only if it is acceptable to
common sense and consistently leads to successful practice A statement
is ultimately true if and only if it corresponds to the facts and neither
asserts nor presupposes the existence of any conceptual fictions.
(Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy, 2007)
Buddhists argue that it is only conventionally, not ulti-
mately, true that we are persons: that is, our conception of our-
selves as persons does not correspond with reality. As it says in
the Mahayana-Sutralankara, A person should be mentioned as
existing only in designation but not in reality [or substance,
Is The Buddhist No-Self Doctrine
Compatible With Pursuing Nirvana?
Katie Javanaud asks whether there is a contradiction at the heart of Buddhism.
10 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
dravya]. Buddhists say that we consider ourselves persons
because, through experience, we learn that we are constituted
of five skandhas or aspects: body (rupa), feelings (vedana), per-
ceptions (samjna), volitions (samskaras), and consciousness (vij-
nana). But the word person becomes merely a convenient
designator for the fiction we accept when we believe that a
person is something over and above these component parts.
Buddhists therefore accept what Buddhism scholar Mark
Siderits calls a mereological reductionism about persons: they
claim that the parts exist, but the supposed whole does not.
This position is discussed in the Milindapanha or Questions of
King Milinda (c.100 BCE). Milinda is shocked to hear the
monk Nagasena deny the existence of a self, and asks whether
each of the bodily parts of Nagasena and then each of his
mental constituents constitute his self. To each question
Nagasena replies negatively. Initially this leads Milinda to view
the term Nagasena as an empty sound even a lie. Nagasena
then scrutinises Milindas claim that he arrived by chariot in
the same terms, asking whether chariot refers to the axle,
pole, seat etc., or whether chariot refers simply to the unity of
these parts. To each of these Milinda too replies negatively.
During this interrogation Milindas view of the self as a conve-
nient designator or conceptual fiction is transformed from
the idea of it being a mere empty sound into his understand-
ing that the term chariot or Nagasena or any other compos-
ite entity is but a way of counting, term, appellation, conve-
nient designation, mere name He acknowledges that the
belief is conventionally true, but of persons in the absolute
sense there is no ego to be found (Radhakrishnan & Moore,
A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, p.284).
When Buddhists assert the doctrine of no-self, they have a
clear conception of what a self would be. The self Buddhists
deny would have to meet the following criteria: it would (i)
retain identity over time, (ii) be permanent (that is, enduring),
and (iii) have controlling powers over the parts of a person.
Yet through empirical investigation, Buddhists conclude that
there is no such thing. I is commonly used to refer to the
mind/body integration of the five skandhas, but when we exam-
ine these, we discover that in none alone are the necessary cri-
teria for self met, and as weve seen, the combination of them is
a convenient fiction. So, could there be something outside the
skandhas that constitutes the self? Siderits observes: in order
for the Buddhas strategy to work, he will have to show that the
doctrine of the five skandhas gives an exhaustive analysis of the
parts of the person (Buddhism as Philosophy, p.37). This exhaus-
tiveness claim amounts to asserting that every element or aspect
of a person is accounted for by the five skandhas.
Objectors to the exhaustiveness claim often argue that for
discovering the self the Buddhist commitment to empirical
means is mistaken. True, we cannot discover the self in the five
skandhas, precisely because the self is that which is beyond or
distinct from the five skandhas. Whereas Buddhists deny the
self on grounds that, if it were there, we would be able to point
it out, opponents of this view, including Sankara of the Hindu
Advaita Vedanta school, are not at all surprised that we cannot
point out the self; for the self is that which does the pointing
rather than that which is pointed at. Buddha defended his
commitment to the empirical method on grounds that, with-
out it, one abandons the pursuit of knowledge in favour of
speculation. In the Alagaddupama-Sutta (= Snake Simile Dis-
course), Buddha says O monks, when neither self nor any-
thing pertaining to self can truly and really be found, this spec-
ulative view The universe is that Atman (Soul); I shall be that
after death, permanent, abiding, ever-lasting, unchanging and I
shall exist as such for eternity, is it not wholly and completely
foolish? (W.S. Rahula, What The Buddha Taught, p58).
The Argument from Impermanence
Buddhism presents two further arguments for the doctrine of
no-self: the argument from impermanence and the argument
from control. The argument from impermanence relies on the
exhaustiveness claim, whose validity is implicit in the premises of
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 11
Ancient Buddhist
site of Ayutthaya
in Thailand
12 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
the argument. The argument can be summarized thus:
1. The five skandhas are impermanent.
2. If there was a self, it would be permanent.
3. A person is no more than the five skandhas (this is the
exhaustiveness claim).
4. Therefore there is no self.
This argument is logically sound. However, the truth of the
conclusion depends on premise 3. Could there be something tran-
scending the five skandhas which should be recognized as a self?
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a follower of the Hindu school of
Advaita-Vedanta, thinks that there must be. More controversially,
he argues that the Buddha too thought there must be some self
beyond the five skandhas. Radhakrishnan (an Oxford philoso-
pher and later President of India) appeals to Udana 8.3, where
the Buddha states, There is an unborn, an unoriginated, an
unmade, an uncompounded; were there not there would be
no escape from the world of the born, the originated, the made
and the compounded (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy Vol.1,
p.320). However, what Buddha meant by his assertions about
the unborn in Udana 8.3 is unclear. There are at least two pos-
sible interpretations: (i) To assert that x is unborn is to say that
it does not come into existence at a particular time because it
never has a beginning, i.e., it is eternal. In this case, being
unborn would be predicated of some eternal entity; (ii) Alter-
natively to posit that x is unborn may be to assert the absence
of xs birth i.e. it is not-born. On this interpretation we would
simply be denying the existence of the entity in question, saying
either that the being in question had not been born yet or that it
never would be born (although in either case, particularly the
latter, it would not make much sense to refer to it as a being).
Given the divergent interpretations of the Buddhas meaning of
unborn here, we cannot assume that the Buddha intended to
posit an eternal entity which is unborn in the first sense.
Instead, and more in keeping with the rest of Buddhist thought,
Udana 8.3 could be an expression of the absence of an eternal
entity. So, when Buddha says there is an unborn rather than an
eternal changeless entity, he could simply be asserting that there
is no such entity. And even if Buddha is asserting the existence of
some unoriginated entity, why should we designate this entity as
the self? What Buddhism is precisely denying is that the entity
we commonly call self meets the criteria for selfhood (namely
permanence, control and numerical identity over time).
The idea of permanence is closely related to that of numeri-
cal identity. Buddhists deny that a person can remain numeri-
cally identical with him or herself over time on that grounds
that time itself necessarily implies numerical change. This
doctrine of momentariness entails that at every moment, the
five skandhas arise, are destroyed and are succeeded by other
numerically distinct (if similar) skandhas. Indeed, observation
of mental states does reveal that our feelings, volitions and
objects of consciousness are constantly changing.
The Argument from Control
On the conventional view of a person as accepted in common
discourse, we believe we can alter aspects of ourselves, and that
it is we who do this. If there is an aspect of our self which dis-
satisfies us, we try to change it. This concept presupposes that
the self is the type of thing that can perform a controlling func-
tion on parts of the person. However, the executive functioning
of the self is undermined by the Principle of Irreflexivity, which
asserts that an entity cannot operate upon itself. The truth of
this principle is established by observation, in keeping with Bud-
dhist empiricism. To support the claim, Buddhists appeal to the
following evidence: a knife cannot cut itself, a finger cannot
point to itself, etc. It follows that if the self performed the exec-
utive function, it could perform that function on other parts of
the person, but not on itself. This means that I could never find
myself dissatisfied with and wanting to change myself, which in
turn means that any part of me that I can find myself wanting to
change could not be myself (Buddhism as Philosophy, p.47).
Sankaras principle of consciousness bears some of the same
properties (such as numerical identity over time and perma-
nence) as the self which Buddhists deny. Unlike the Buddhist
notion of self, however, the Advaita Vedanta school does not
say the self would be a controller or performer of executive
functions, only an experiencer of perceptions and thoughts.
According to Sankara, the self is a universal transcendental
entity unconnected with the physical world of appearances. In
both philosophical systems the question of the relationship
between this somewhat abstract self and the individual one
takes as oneself arises, for the transcendental and experien-
tial self do not seem identical. Consequently, when we talk of
the self which the Buddhist denies but other schools accept, we
are not talking of persons or individuals in their usual senses.
In characterizing what a self would be if it were instantiated,
Buddhists have claimed three main properties: permanence,
control and numerical identity. We have looked at two argu-
ments advancing the no-self doctrine, which draw on the idea of
a self as permanent or controlling respectively. These arguments
provide some support for the doctrine of no-self. However, our
initial protest against the doctrine remains. Knowledge, suffer-
ing, rebirth (all key Buddhist ideas), arise only if we can assume
the existence of a subject to whom these things apply. For
instance, our ability to analyse the arguments for no-self, and
our acknowledging that the skandhas are in a constant state of
arising and dissolving, presupposes that there is a self which has
the capacity to analyse and to observe change. This leads us
again to ask: how can the concept of liberation remain coherent
unless we can identify one who is liberated? Would it be philo-
sophically justifiable to accept the Buddhas suggestion that
these problems are not in need of urgent address?
The Concept of Nirvana
The definition of Nirvana is crucial to determining whether
the no-self doctrine and the Buddhist project of liberation are
compatible. Nirvana is literally translated from the Sanskrit as
extinction/snuffed out. This liberation from continual rebirth
and suffering is the result of enlightenment, which occurs when
our ignorance about the nature of existence and the false belief in
a self is eradicated. It is important to qualify that what is extin-
guished is suffering (ultimately caused by ignorance): the self is not
extinguished, for there never was a self, only the illusion of one.
If we define Nirvana in negative terms, as annihilation, extinc-
tion or nothingness, then since true nothingness plausibly implies
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 13
that nobody experiences it, the Buddhists could plausibly assert
the compatibility of no-self with this concept of liberation.
However, if we do characterise Nirvana as nothingness, there are
at least two different things we could mean by this, and both are
questionable. If by nothingness we mean an absolute void, then
although this may be compatible with the doctrine of no-self, the
question arises as to whether we could rightly describe this as
liberation. Rather, this definition of Nirvana forces the conclu-
sion that Buddhism is essentially nihilistic which Buddhists
would deny. Alternatively, we could interpret the nothingness of
Nirvana to mean an undifferentiated continuum. This defini-
tion too has its difficulties: could we be describing nothingness if
we are providing an idea of what it is like? Wouldnt this be a
refutation of its actual nothingness? And again, in what sense
would this be liberation? It remains the case that the notion of
liberation is meaningful only if we can identify who is liberated.
Alternatively, we could characterize Nirvana in positive terms,
describing it as a blissful state although once again, this would
seem to necessitate a self for whom it is blissful.
Buddha himself said little about the state of beings who attain
liberation, or what happens to them after death. In a dialogue
with his disciple Vaccha, Buddha says of the Enlightened One:
to say that he is reborn would not fit the case to say that he is
not reborn would not fit the case to say that he is both reborn
and not reborn would not fit the case to say that he is neither
reborn nor not reborn would not fit the case (A Sourcebook in
Indian Philosophy, p.290). The tetralemma indicates that when we
ask what the state of liberation is like for the one who has
attained it, the question has been misconceived.
Although logically it must be the case that the Enlightened
One is either reborn or not reborn (either continues to experi-
ence after death or does not), Buddha is here asserting that
none of the four possibilities are actualized. What this suggests
is that to define Nirvana in either negative or positive terms is
to misunderstand it, limiting it according to our present state
of ignorance. As Siderits writes, Since logic suggests that one
of the four possibilities would have to be true, the conclusion
seems inescapable that the Buddha is calling Nirvana some-
thing that transcends all rational discourse (Buddhism as Phi-
losophy, p.72). Nirvana could be that which transcends all
normal human experience (and for the Buddhist must neces-
sarily do so, since normal human existence entails suffering
and is characterized by becoming). To attempt to speak ratio-
nally of the condition of those who attain Nirvana, or about
the nature of Nirvana itself, is to misunderstand the topic
under discussion: Nirvana is ineffable. As D.T. Suzuki, an
adherent of Zen Buddhism, puts it: As long as we stay at the
level of relativity or intellectualization, we shall have all kinds
of disagreement and have to keep up a series of hot discus-
sions (The Field of Zen, p.36); and as long as Buddhism
appeals to language to express itself, it inevitably becomes the
victim of all the inconveniences, all the restrictions, and all the
contradictions which are inherent in language (p.28). Yet as
radically other from anything we experience, Nirvana is in a
category of its own. However, from this conception of Nir-
vana, it is impossible to decide whether it is logically compati-
ble with the doctrine of no-self.
Appeals to the ineffable quality of Nirvana may be legitimate,
since Buddhism defines Nirvana as that which is radically differ-
ent from anything which we now experience. But given that the
Buddha made quite scathing remarks about the foolishness of
speculation not based on experience, how can we talk about
the nature of liberation? As A.K. Warder correctly observes of
Buddhist methodology What was first picked up as a piece of
information will not be fully understood until the trainee sees
the truth himself through his own experience. He must not just
believe it, he must verify it (Indian Buddhism, p.102).
There are two other major problems with experience here:
(i) If experience is suffering, how could the experience of
enlightenment result in liberation? (ii) A central cause of suf-
fering, according to Buddhism, is psychological attachment to
the self. This is one of the main hindrances to liberation; and
yet in the very process of relinquishing this attachment, in
order to attain it one must personally experience liberation.
This seems to be putting the cart before the horse, only imme-
diately afterwards to put the horse back in front of the cart.
The paradox of liberation, meanwhile, trots on! Given these
problems, we must be careful not simply to appeal to mysti-
cism, or to the ineffable quality of Nirvana. Although from
this side of liberation (that is, from our position of ignorance)
it may be tempting to speculate about Nirvana, doing so could
itself be a form of ignorance, and thus a barrier to the very
thing we seek. For perhaps Nirvana is nothing positive in its
own right, but simply a cessation of suffering and ignorance.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the best we can offer by way of an answer to
our title question is itself a question: does logic invariably
reflect ultimate reality, or is it possible that the logically impos-
sible could in fact be instantiated? Would the logical incom-
patibility of the two doctrines of no-self and self-liberation
necessarily have to result in the falsehood of at least one of the
doctrines? What Buddhists have attempted to do in postulat-
ing Nirvana is to clear away all obstacles including reason
itself that stood in the way of the realization of the reality
that transcended ordinary phenomenal existence [Buddhists]
rejected all reasons and positions not because [they are] pes-
simists or nihilists but because reality was inaccessible to
reason and ordinary perception (B.A. Elman, Nietzsche and
Buddhism; Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.44, 1983, p.683).
When Buddhists claim that Nirvana is blissful, they could be
describing it as a positive state of pleasure or happiness, but
this interpretation is unwarranted given their commitment to
the view that human experience invariably brings with it exis-
tential angst and suffering. The alternative we are left with is
that Nirvana is blissful in the sense that it is a state free from
all pain and suffering, but it is otherwise not something about
which we can speak meaningfully from this side of liberation.
Perhaps we may have glimpses in our lifetime of what Nirvana
is like, but whenever we attempt to capture what it is, we
immediately loose sight of it: Nirvana is by nature indescrib-
able, and therefore we cannot make the final pronouncement
on whether no-self is compatible with it.
KATIE JAVANAUD 2013
Katie Javanaud has a degree in philosophy and theology from Oxford,
and is studying for an MA in History of Philosophy at Kings, London.
R
ichard Dawkins called Julian Jayness 1976 book, The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind either complete rubbish or a work of consum-
mate genius (The God Delusion, 2006). I first encountered its
theories discussed in an article in an ancient coin magazine in
2001, and found it so outrageous I had to write to the maga-
zine. Since then Ive seen the theory discsussed widely, cited
widely, and taken seriously, so I finally decided to read the book
itself.
Jaynes (1920-97) was a psychology professor who argued in
his book that consciousness as we know it emerged only a mere
3,000 years ago. Thats right: the builders of the pyramids were
not conscious in our sense: they didnt understand that their
thoughts were their own, but considered them voices of gods.
Jaynes calls this a bicameral mind, where the voices generated
by the right brain hemisphere appear as detached hallucina-
tions rather than as the inner narrative we now think of as our-
selves thinking. By consciousness, Jaynes doesnt mean mere sen-
tience or perception, then, but rather a sense of self a sense
that theres a me in here, running the show. Thats what he says
people lacked until around 1000 BC. According to Jaynes, the
change to modern consciousness around 1000 BC was occa-
sioned by societal and geopolitical upheavals, making bicamer-
alism no longer good enough for people to get by with.
Jaynes recognized that this theory is surprising; he even
labeled it preposterous. But his book is so strongly argued
that many have been persuaded by it, so its worth examining.
A Sense Of Self
Jaynes starts by discussing what consciousness is and delim-
iting the concept in various ways, relegating vast realms of our
mental activity to unconscious processes unavailable to intro-
spection. For example, look at the series X O X O X O....
What comes next? Did you think your way to answering, X?
Jaynes says no; you simply saw the answer, and if you try to
explain how, youre just making up a story for what youre
guessing must have happened.
This argument is aimed at making plausible the existence of
human beings behaving much as we do, but without being
conscious. But its hardly a revelation that a lot of our mental
functioning is more or less unconscious. It has to be; you
wouldnt be able to walk if you had to think out each muscle
movement. We can even perform complex tasks, like driving,
in a zoned-out state without conscious attentiveness. Yet we do
consciously think about some things. And importantly, we dont
only think about the physical world, we think about our
thoughts. Thats what the self does; and this type of thinking
differs from the unconscious functioning Jaynes discusses, and
which a computer could do, without self-awareness.
Understanding our sense of self remains, of course, a deep
problem. David Hume said that no amount of introspection
could enable him to catch hold of his self. But the trouble was
that he was using the self to look for the self. (Jaynes recog-
nizes this difficulty; he makes the analogy of using a flashlight
to look for darkness.) However, it is fairly certain that the self
is not found in a localized brain module, but is rather an emer-
gent property of the system as a whole. It doesnt arise in com-
puters because their complexity is still actually orders of mag-
nitude below ours. Jaynes is nevertheless arguing that our level
of complex mental functioning could exist without the emer-
gent property of self; an argument thats contradicted by our
own example. You might say a single example is weak evi-
dence. However, its actually seven billion examples. Complex-
ity of mental functioning obviously varies greatly among
humans; many dont read philosophy magazines, but even
those people have some sense of self virtually every single
one, and some of them as dumb as boards. This is powerful
evidence that functioning complexity above a certain level
must induce consciousness, and rebuts Jayness thesis that ear-
lier people could have had the former without the latter.
Ancient Voices
To justify his theory, Jaynes devotes much attention to The
Iliad (c.769-710 BC), composed during the supposed transition
time. In this epic poem about the Trojan War, he says, charac-
ters are never portrayed with inner lives or deciding anything,
but instead always manipulated by gods. The war, Jaynes
declares, was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who
were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble
automatons who knew not what they did.
Whenever the ancients talk about gods speaking, as in The
Iliad, Jaynes takes this to mean the hearers actually hallucinated
voices. He uses the word hallucinated repeatedly, invoking the
hallucinated voices heard by schizophrenics and other mentally
ill people as models. These phenomena he sees as a throwback
How Old is the Self?
Frank S. Robinson takes issue with Julian Jaynes argument about the self.
14 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
Expression of self-consciousness through art?
to, or vestige of, the bicameral mind. Or in other words, people
before 1000 BC were all schizophrenic, all the time, hearing
voices continually. Jaynes similarly explains the bicameral mind
as resembling the hypnotized mind, with our susceptibility to
hypnosis being another alleged vestige of bicameralism.
A lot of what Jaynes marshals as evidence for a fundamental
change in mental function is really just normal cultural evolu-
tion. In assessing his interpretations of all things ancient, we
must remember (as he seemingly does not) that civilization was
an invention, and that Rome wasnt built in a day: it took time
to develop the panoply of behaviors, adaptations and practices
were familiar with. But that doesnt mean the early and neces-
sarily primitive stages signified a fundamentally different con-
sciousness. If civilization were stripped from you and you had to
reinvent it from scratch, how fast would you get up to speed?
Thus The Iliad was written the way it
was because that was the convention of
the time for how tales were told. Liter-
ature had to evolve a lot before arriving
at Proust. The idea of portraying a
characters inner life is actually an
advanced literary technique whose
absence in the earliest works would be
entirely expected.
But even on its own terms, Jayness
take on The Iliad seems wrong. He
stresses how Achilles vacillated over
killing Agamemnon until the goddess
Athena ordered him to. But what was
this vacillation if not the working of
his own mind? Or perhaps Achilles
was vacillating because a god told him
to vacillate? Jaynes says the vacillating
is depicted physiologically gut churning etc. rather than
mentally, but I think the Greeks understood such imagery as
conveying something ultimately mental. I dont see Achilles in
The Iliad portrayed as lacking a self.
A perhaps better example: Jaynes makes much of how the
early cuneiform messages of the Babyonians were written as
though addressed to the clay tablet itself, asking it to pass the
message along to the recipient. Only later (post-bicameral)
letters were addressed directly to recipients. But surely this was
a mere change of cultural convention. Written language had
only just been invented; letter writing too had to be invented,
and the concept evolved. The early concept was perfectly logi-
cal, and understandable to us. My mother treats phone mes-
sages as equivalent to letters and thus signs off, Love, Mom.
Thats not common practice, but its understandable, and it
doesnt show she lacks a self!
Normal States
As to schizophrenia and other delusional states, normal
human consciousness is a phenomenon of such subtle com-
plexity that its a wonder we can sustain it so stably through
life, and its easy to envision it being disrupted or going on the
fritz. Its akin to a computer program getting corrupted; and
that possibility doesnt tell us that the program evolved from a
state of primordial corruptedness. If human consciousness
were a product of intelligent design, perhaps we could expect it
to be more robust and impervious to the kinds of malfunctions
at issue, but thats not how evolution works. It develops new
adaptations by modifying what already exists, and is often inel-
egant in its solutions as with our eyes, which are actually
quite suboptimal compared to what an intelligently designed
visual system would be like. So too our consciousness, and
hence its vulnerable to glitches like schizophrenia. But that
hardly implies that we evolved from a race of schizophrenics.
While its true that normal minds can hold delusions (as in
religious beliefs), mass pervasive hallucination simply is not
part of human experience. Likewise, though many believe God
directs their lives in some way, thats a far cry from being the
veritable puppets of gods that Jaynesian bicamerals would have
considered themselves. And while some people can be hypno-
tized, outside of a zombie film its
absurd to envisage entire popula-
tions going about in that manner.
Bizarrely, Jaynes speculates that
schizophrenia itself is an evolution-
ary adaptation, conferring certain
alleged advantages on sufferers. But
from a survival and reproductive
standpoint, surely its more advanta-
geous to see the real world rather
than a hallucinated one?
Moreover, Jaynes is wrong to talk
in terms of hallucinations. His
ancients hearing voices were hearing
their own thoughts, which were real;
and thats very different from halluci-
nating voices seeming to come from
outside (although, obviously, the hal-
lucinations also originate within the persons mind). Possibly
one could imagine a voices of the gods notion concerning
inner voices which arrive suddenly, out of the blue, after a life-
time of silence (as it is with the hallucinated voices of many
schizophrenics). But in contrast, people become aware of their
own thoughts in early childhood, as soon as they learn language.
And, from such an early age, when we talk to ourselves, we
know who is doing the talking and do not ascribe the interior
chatter to the gods. Certainly humans were capable of such
minimal mental sophistication long before 1000 BC. Jaynesian
bicameralism would have had to start with a childs earliest
thinking, which would bespeak a rather severe form of mental
disorder for which there is no present-day parallel.
Even if Jaynes were right about all the classical hallucinating
he postulates, he fails to explain why that would have been
inconsistent with these people also having consciousness as we
know it. While he does put much weight on deficits in the sense
of self that schizophrenics often report, they dont lack that
sense entirely; even auditory hallucinators are self-conscious and
introspective to a considerable degree. Jayness hypothesis, how-
ever, has hallucination substituting for a sense of self.
Notice that Jayness bicameral model lacks a crucial inter-
connection between the god voices, supposedly directing
action, and the muscles carrying the action out. That is,
thered have to be an intermediary between hearing the gods
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 15
16 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
voice and the brain transmitting the command heard to the
muscles: the human being deciding to obey the voice. In other
words, whats really the difference between a gods voice
instantiating action through the nervous system via a decision
to obey it, and a thought doing essentially the same thing?
Either way, theres a decision; and who is the decider? It still has to
be a self, even if a self thats heeding gods voices. Jaynes thus
fails to banish the self after all: in his model, youd still have
had a self that obeys the voice of the god, only you didnt know
you had one. Thats even more implausible than the idea of not
having a sense of self at all. I think people would have been
smart enough to figure this out pretty fast.
To say that you have a theory of mind often refers to your
inferring that because Joe behaves somewhat like you, he must
be experiencing something like your sense of self. But Jaynes
holds that this actually has it backwards as regards the origin of
consciousness: when people first began to be conscious, youd
look at Joe and infer that if hes got it, then you must have it
too. You didnt know you had a self till you saw it in others.
But whos in there to make such a deduction, if not your self?
Without The Gods
Jaynes seems to say that bicameral minds, with their halluci-
nations of god-talk, actually emerged at the beginnings of civi-
lization around 10,000 years ago, as a form of social control
when communities became larger than tribal bands, with the
god-voices evolving from the actual voices of kings, and then of
dead kings, who became gods. This begs the question of what
sort of mental life preceded bicameralism, and on this Jaynes is
remarkably silent. If people had selves before bicameralism, is it
reasonable to suppose theyd give up those selves and their
understanding that their inner voices were their own? And if so,
then obviously Jaynes cant claim a later origin for introspective
consciousness. One is left to infer that before the beginning of
civilization, people were not even bicameral, with consciousness
even more impoverished than that. Yet archaeological evidence
shows that pre-civilization and even pre-agricultural humans led
quite sophisticated lives, with plenty of technology, art, and arti-
sanship. Language also goes back tens of thousands of years, and
its hard to imagine that the people who developed and used it
didnt know when they were talking to themselves. Weve also
found jewelry 80,000 years old, and its hard to understand such
adornment if wearers had no sense of self.
The absurdity becomes further evident when Jaynes discusses
the breakdown of the bicameral mind when the voices of gods
went away. He describes people as then searching about for
alternative sources of godly instruction divination, oracles,
casting lots, horoscopes, etc. In fact, he thinks this search for our
lost god voices remains a key to the human psyche to the pre-
sent day. But who were these people undergoing the breakdown
of the divine link inside their own heads? Robots denied instruc-
tions dont agonize about what to do. Conversely, if people did
agonise, they couldnt have been without self-consciousness.
Wondering what to do is something a self does.
Apart from a throw-away speculation that the Spaniards so
easily conquered the Incas because the latter were still non-
conscious bicamerals, Jaynes is also conspicuously silent about
human communities outside the Near East and Mediterranean
areas. As for how the Chinese, Africans, and many other peo-
ples became conscious, Jaynes has no answer. Certainly his
arguments invoking social upheavals 3000 years ago would not
necessarily be applicable to regions with very different histo-
ries. Even his discussion of historical upheavals in his own
region of concern is cursory. He does cite some particulars,
like the volcanic explosion of Thera (Santorini) around 1600
BC. Yes, that must have been devastating; likewise wars and
invasions; but life in ancient times was pervasively tumultuous,
difficult, and much more violent than we are accustomed to.
Jaynes fails to make a case that there was something so
uniquely unsettling about the times around 1000 BC that it
wrenched human minds into a whole new functionality.
Jaynes further asserts that introspective consciousness is
something we learned at that juncture; thus it was not even bio-
logically evolved. Hes probably forced into this position
because its implausible that biological evolution could have hap-
pened so fast, even with a punctuated equilibrium scenario.
But it makes far more sense to see our consciousness as a bio-
logical adaptation occurring far earlier and over a much longer
period of time. Intelligence and consciousness are useful adap-
tations, evolved in many creatures to some degree at least, and
Homo sapiens is simply the most extreme example of these
adaptations. A sense of self helps too, because it makes the
animal care what happens to it, and act accordingly. So it
seems likely that we evolved our especially big brains to facili-
tate the complex social cooperation that was so important for
survival for our early forebears. In other words, we obtained
our minds in order to cope with a terribly hostile, danger-
filled, stressful environment long, long before 1000 BC. Its
ludicrous to think that life was a breeze till then.
Perhaps most insufferable of all is Jayness suggestion that a
human sense of morality could not have predated the first mil-
lennium BC, with the true beginning of personal responsibil-
ity. Hes off by a factor of hundreds. There is ample evidence
that instincts for morality, justice, and even altruism are deeply
wired into us by evolution, as an adaptive response to the envi-
ronment faced by our earliest ancestors, where such traits
would have been advantageous for group survival. Indeed,
rudimentary moral sense is found even in non-human animals.
Anyone who studies deeply the earliest civilizations must
come to realize that far more unites us with them than differ-
entiates us. These ancestors of ours, only a few hundred gener-
ations past, who first figured out how to plant and harvest
crops, domesticate animals, build villages and then cities,
create writing and literature and music and art, invent govern-
ment and law, launch great architecture, exploration, trade and
conquest, and lay the foundations of science and mathematics,
could not possibly have done all this with minds that func-
tioned in the primitive manner Jaynes postulates. His theory
belittles those people and their stupendous achievements. All
our subsequent accomplishments build upon theirs; they
themselves did not have the benefit of following trailblazers
they had to build from scratch. Its inconceivable that they
knew not what they did. One might even say preposterous.
FRANK S. ROBINSON 2013
Frank S. Robinson is the author of five books, including The Case
for Rational Optimism. He blogs at rationaloptimist.wordpress.com.
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 17
F
rench phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-
1961) claimed that to understand
human awareness we need to focus
on the lived body and its relationship
to the world. In brief, the idea is that
rather than encountering the world
in the form of raw sensations,
human beings see objects as repre-
sentations perceived specifically
though our bodies as they interact
with the world. In this article I will
explore Merleau-Pontys concept of
the lived body specifically with the aim
of understanding what it suggests for
artificial intelligence a discipline whose
primary focus is on developing com-
puter systems capable of performing tasks that would otherwise
require the mental facility of a human being. According to
Merleau-Pontys understanding of the lived body and the
mechanisms of perception, artificial intelligence is doomed to
failure for two fundamental reasons. First, a simulation cannot
have the same type of meaningful interaction with the world
that an embodied conscious being can have, and the absence of
such interactions amounts to a fundamental absence of intelli-
gence. Second, and perhaps more importantly, a reductionist
account of the mind such as is common in artificial intelligence
research simply does not paint an accurate picture of what is
perceived, experienced and felt by a mind encapsulated within a
lived body. Thus, artificial intelligence cannot be developed by
just reverse engineering the brain, nor could it operate in a dis-
embodied environment, as we shall see.
Merleau-Pontys Lived Body
The lived body is a relationship between the body and the
external world by which we are capable of being both intelli-
gent and reflective. Merleau-Ponty states that the lived body is
aware of a world that contains data to be interpreted, such as
immediate patterns and direct meanings. One aspect of the
lived body that Merleau-Ponty analyses is the role of sense
experience, beginning with the truism that our thought is a
product of the bodys interaction with the world it inhabits.
More specifically, he states that the subject of perception pre-
sents itself with the world ready made, as the setting of every
possible event, and treats perception as one of these events
(Phenomenology of Perception, 1962, p.240).
Merleau-Ponty begins his exploration of the concept of the
lived body by reminding us that perception is the key compo-
nent of our life in the world; but its how we perceive that is
important. For him, the external world is encountered, inter-
preted and perceived by the body, through various forms of
immersive awareness through action. For instance, colour quality
is revealed to experience by a specific type of behaviour by the
body, specifically the eye, that is geared toward the colour. In the
eyes case, specific colour-sensitive cells are stimulated in the
retina: an interaction. With further regard to our sense experience
and its relationship to the world, Merleau-Ponty writes that the
objective world being given, it is assumed that it passes on to the
sense-organs messages which must be registered, then deci-
phered in such a way as to reproduce in us the original text
(PoP, p.7). According to Merleau-Ponty, then, there is a consis-
tant connection between the original stimulus of the external
world and our elementary perceptual experience of it.
What about our perception of others? Merleau-Ponty writes,
other consciousness can be deduced only if the emotional
expressions of others are compared and identified with, and pre-
cise correlations recognized between my physical behaviour and
my psychic events (PoP, p.410). So we recognise the minds of
other people by recognising our own behaviour in them. In fact,
for Merleau-Ponty, the interaction with the Other allows for
the development of the self. Elaborating on the connection, he
writes that what we have learned in individual perception [is]
not to conceive our perspective views as independent of each
other; we know that they slip into each other (ibid).
Everybody Needs Some Body
Merleau-Pontys perspective is shared and reinforced by
cognitive scientists such as Sandra and
Matthew Blakeslee, who write
that meaning is rooted in
agency (the ability to
act and choose), and
agency depends on
embodiment. In
fact, this is a hard-
won lesson that
the artificial
intelligence
community
has finally
begun to
grasp after
decades of
frustration:
Nothing truly
intelligent is going
to develop in a
bodiless mainframe.
In real life there is no
such thing as disem-
bodied consciousness
(The Body Has A
Mind Of Its
Own, 2008,
p.12).
Focusing On The Brain,
Ignoring the Body
Alessandro Colarossi says that Artificial Intelligence is in danger of a dead end.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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18 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
They present the following thought experiment to illustrate
the importance of Merleau-Pontys lived body:
If you were to carry around a young mammal such as a kitten during its
critical early months of brain development, allowing it to see everything in
its environment but never permitting it to move around on its own, the
unlucky creature would turn out to be effectively blind for life. While it
would still be able to perceive levels of light, color, and shadow the most
basic, hardwired abilities of the visual system its depth perception and
object recognition would be abysmal. Its eyes and optic nerves would be
perfectly normal and intact, yet its higher visual system would be next to
useless. (pp.12-13)
Without embodied access to the environment, the cat cannot
develop its nervous system with regard to proper responses to
external stimuli. If correct, this suggests that the prospects for
artificial intelligence in a strong sense (i.e. the creation of a com-
puter simulation or algorithm so sophisticated that it would be
conscious) are severely limited for two principle reasons.
The first reason is that artificial intelligence, if we mean the
intelligence of an advanced computer simulation, does not
possess the faculties needed for constructive interaction. That
is, although a human being may interact with such a computer,
it is not the case that the human is thereby helping the simula-
tion progress intellectually. The popular video game The Sims
illustrates what I mean by this. The player of the game con-
structs a small world that simulated people inhabit, who par-
take of a variety of different interactions with each other;
appear to sleep, to eat, and to even have goals and go to work.
Nevertheless, it would be perverse to argue that such a simula-
tion could count as an actual instantiation of a world. In play-
ing the game, it becomes quickly apparent that the little Sims
are just going through the motions, and all appearance of
their intentionality and goal-directed behaviour is just appear-
ance. More specifically, there is no interaction within the game
other than having the characters execute the steps with which
they have been programmed. The program does not learn
from any interactions with the world. Like the cat held captive,
there is no chance for the characters to learn. Therefore,
behind the surface of the simulation, there is nothing no
inner life, no thoughts, and no consciousness.
The second reason why artificial intelligence will never
achieve consciousness is that it cannot replicate perception;
And it does not and will not have the capacity for replicating
this without a body that encompasses inner subjective experi-
ence. Visual experience, for example, is more than just the
mechanistic process of recording photon impacts. Human
beings know what its like to see a color like red in a context
something that simulated-intelligence algorithms cannot achieve.
Philosophers such as Patricia Churchland and Daniel C.
Dennett raise objections to this line of thinking, arguing that if
an intelligence has knowledge of all the physical facts, then it
would thereby know what the color red is like, for example. In
other words, there is nothing to conscious awareness over and
above knowledge of facts and their representation in some kind
of symbol-manipulating system. In responding to this view,
phenomenologist Arthur Melnick says that Churchlands and
Dennetts perspective depends on there being a phenomeno-
logical [experiential] characterization that a physical process can
get at or align itself with (Phenomenology and the Physical Reality
of Consciousness, 2011, p.108), further stating that if what red is
like is phenomenologically ineffable (has no intrinsic phenome-
nological characterization other than [our] having the experi-
ence and its being like that), then no matter how complete [a
persons] knowledge of physics might be, [they] cannot tell at all
what red is like (ibid). In other words, hes claiming that one
will never know about the experiential nature of something like
red without actually experiencing it: a knowledge of, say, the
facts about wavelengths, is not enough, because you cant
reduce what its like to have the experience to any sort of
description of facts. Therefore the phenomenological qualities
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July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 19
of embodied consciousness cannot be replicated in an artificial
form just by programming a computer with facts.
Summary
The aim of this article is not to discredit the ever-growing
field of computer science and artificial intelligence. On the
contrary, researchers have made impressive breakthroughs,
such as writing programs that can defeat grandmasters at chess,
or developing search algorithms that allow for lighting-fast data
retrieval, and other tasks useful to humanity. What I did hope
to indicate, however, is that if Merleau-Ponty is right that
embodiment is a key feature of developing meaningful experi-
ence, then the discipline of artificial intelligence can never hope
to replicate consciousness solely through the elaboration of
algorithms. We could say that since our intelligence, even our
very experience, is not just a product of our brain, but is also a
result of the action of our bodies in a physical world. Artificial
intelligence is doomed to fail as an attempt to mimic human
intelligence insofar as it lacks elements that correspond to the
lived body. The first and perhaps the most significant reason
that artificial intelligence is doomed to fail was illustrated as the
lack of human-like interaction. Algorithms embedded in com-
puter hardware can
be so complex as to
create the appear-
ance of intelligent
behaviour (as seen
in the video game
example) without
the concomitant
experiential data of
true consciousness
which allows
human mental
interaction to
develop. This sug-
gests that actual
intelligence and
simulated intelli-
gence belong to
fundamentally dif-
ferent categories. Simulated intelligence simply follows its pro-
gramming, and unlike actual intelligence, does not have an
inner voice. So it cannot reason, and it cannot accept meaning-
ful (ie conscious) feedback from interaction between the world
and a body.
There is much more to mimicking human intelligence than
just trying to copy the physical processes of the brain. At its
best, artificial intelligence could mimic the appearance of
human behaviour so well that a person will not be able to tell
the difference between a human and a computer. However, it
will not be able to replicate the phenomenological experiences
of the lived human body, and any attempt to do so will just be
another simulation.
ALESSANDRO COLAROSSI 2013
Alessandro Colarossi is a web developer from Toronto. He has a BA in
Philosophy from York University, and an Advanced Diploma in
Systems Analysis from Sheridan College, Toronto.
That Which I Am
That which I am I know
That which I seem you know
Therefore he who knows me
Walks not with me but is me.
That which you see is what I seem
That what you cant see, that I am
That which I say is what I seem
That which I dont say, that I am.
Do you search for the mystery of life?
It can be seen, but not with the eye
It can be heard, but not with the ear
The ego plays games to lead you afar
Lose it and all will come clear.
Seek reality not with the eye
That which is real cannot be seen
Forms of the mind lead you astray
Intuition is the key you must use.
Of Truth what can be said?
For he who knows does not speak
If you understand this then you will know
A blank piece of paper is all that can be shown.
You might not see, but of this I am sure:
It's only when you know it, all becomes clear.
IVAN SEARLE 2013
Ivan Searle lives in Whangarei, New Zealand. Hes married to Anna,
has two sons and three grandchildren, is an electronic technician, and
has always been interested in philosophy.

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20 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
B
ertrand Russell
(1872-1970) is best
known for his
activities at the very
beginning and at the very
end of his working life.
His philosophical reputa-
tion was made by his pio-
neering insights into logic
in the first decade of the
twentieth century, and he
cut his political teeth
through his pacifist oppo-
sition to World War I an
opposition which saw him
jailed for spreading
rumours harmful to the alliance between Britain and America.
Forty years later, as an old man, he helped found the Cam-
paign for Nuclear Disarmament in the late 1950s. These facts,
plus his brief flirtation with polyamory, which scandalized con-
servative elements in Britain and America, tend to be what we
know about him. What is less well known is that in the 1930s
and 1940s Russells attention turned to the idea that the origins
of Nazism were primarily philosophical. I want to argue that
this account of the origins of Nazism helped to shape the hos-
tility to continental philosophy which ran, and in some quar-
ters still runs, through analytic (Anglo-Saxon) philosophy.
The Philosophical Tide Turns
The story of Russells philosophical account of the evils of
German politics starts with the chaotic jingoism of the First
World War. Prior to 1914, German scholarship had been widely
respected in Britain. However, as nationalist rhetoric intensified,
and German Shepherd dogs were shot in British streets, German
philosophy too came under increasing fire. In his The Metaphysi-
cal Theory of the State published in 1918, L.T. Hobhouse wrote
this about witnessing a Zeppelin raid on London:
Presently three white specks could be seen dimly through the light of the
haze overhead, and we watched their course from the field. The raid was
soon over As I went back to my Hegel my mood was one of self-satire.
Was this a time for theorizing or for destroying theories, when the world
was tumbling about our ears? In the bombing of London I had just wit-
nessed the visible and tangible outcome of the false and wicked doctrine,
the foundations of which lay, as I believe, in the book before me.
(Quoted in Thomas Baldwin, Interlude: Philosophy and the First World
War in The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870-1945, 2003, p.367.)
Hobhouse was not alone. Many British philosophers
thought that they saw the root causes of the First World War
in German nationalist philosophies of the nineteenth century,
most particularly in Hegel. Friedrich Nietzsche was the other
popular target. A bookseller on the Strand in London
announced in his window that this was The Euro-Nietzschean
War, and urged passers-by to Read the Devil, in order to
fight him the better. (Quoted in Nicholas Martin, Fighting a
Philosophy: The Figure of Nietzsche in British Propaganda of
the First World War, The Modern Language Review 98, no.2,
2003, p.372.)
Russell was a witness to the peculiar spectacle of the British
public turning on German philosophy during World War I,
but did not make any moves to join the general condemnation.
All of this changed in the early 1930s, when in an article called
The Ancestry of Fascism in his In Praise of Idleness (1935) he
resurrected the argument that German philosophy lay behind
German political aggression. Following the lead set by Hob-
house and others in the First World War, Russell argued that
while Nazism could be accounted for partially through political
and economic factors, at its heart lay a philosophy that
emerged from trends in nineteenth century thought. Although
during the First World War there had been principally two vil-
lains, Hegel and Nietzsche, Russell managed to find a whole
family tree of Nazisms ancestors: Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Johann Gotlieb Fichte,
Giuseppe Mazzini, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Heinrich Von Treitschke, Thomas Carlyle, William James and
John Dewey! This rogues gallery of philosophical forebears of
the Nazis is a fairly diverse one, encompassing two Americans
(James and Dewey), a Swiss (Rousseau), an Italian (Mazzini),
and an Englishman (Carlyle); but by far the largest grouping
are the Germans. Russell was convinced that the concentration
of this (allegedly) proto-fascist philosophy in Germany was no
mere historical accident, since Germany was always more sus-
ceptible to Romanticism than any other country, and so more
likely to provide a governmental outlet for this kind of anti-
rational philosophy (see p.752 of Russells A History of Western
Philosophy, 1946). So the appearance of the National Socialist
movement in Germany rather than elsewhere was for Russell
entirely predictable, since to him the Germans had a psycho-
logical weakness for this kind of philosophy. The Brits by com-
parison appear relatively immune only Carlyle makes it onto
Russells list of the philosophical precursors of fascism; and he,
Russell points out, belongs in the German tradition, being a
disciple of Fichte.
Bad Philosophy
What were all these men guilty of according to Russell?
They all espoused philosophies that promoted proto-fascist
politics. Russell suggested that, for instance, Hegels concep-
tion of freedom means the right to obey the police and it
Bertrand Russell
Stalks The Nazis
Thomas Akehurst on why Russell blamed German fascism on German philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 21
means nothing else at all (ibid) and so is perfectly attuned to
totalitarian politics. Meanwhile, Hegels doctrine of the state,
if accepted, justifies every internal tyranny and every external
aggression that can possibly be imagined (History, pp.768-9).
Furthermore, Nietzsches aristocratic ethics led to a moral case
for the eugenic eradication of the bungled and botched
non-noble people, to whom no value therefore attaches. Rus-
sell also saw Nietzsche contributing to the store of ideas his
loathing for democracy and his gleeful prophecy of future
wars (History, p.791). But Russell was not content to just con-
demn the apparent politics of his rogues gallery; he wanted to
make clear that this bad politics emerges from bad philosophy.
This claim is well summed-up in A History of Western Philosophy:
A man may be pardoned if logic compels him regretfully to
reach conclusions which he deplores, but not for departing
from logic in order to be free to advocate crimes (p.769). This
comment is aimed at Hegel, but it is precisely what Russell
accuses many of the supposed ancestors of Nazism of doing of
leaving behind good argument in order to promote barbarity.
This view sits slightly uncomfortably with a rival interpreta-
tion Russell offers of the argumentative failings of the proto-
Nazis. Sometimes he seems to imply that they do not deliber-
ately make bad arguments, but rather that they are so philo-
sophically inept that they cannot help but make bad argu-
ments. So Russell also says of Hegel, for example, that in order
to arrive at his philosophy you would require a lack of interest
in facts, and considerable ignorance (p.762). He also claims
that almost all Hegels doctrines are false (p.757).
Whether the diagnosis is incompetence or deception, the
force of Russells critique of these thinkers is that their philo-
sophical contributions are of a painfully low quality. Some-
times Russell is content simply to assert this; at other times he
seeks to provide arguments demonstrating the absurdity of
their views. This is an early attempt to dismiss Nietzsches
ethics: There is [in Nietzsches argument] a natural connec-
tion with irrationality since reason demands impartiality,
whereas the cult of the great man always has as its minor
premise the assertion I am a great man (History, p.757). Rus-
sells claim here is that to believe, as Nietzsche did, that only a
small number of humans are of any value must imply that you
believe yourself to be one of those humans. But, Russell
claims, this is a failed argument, because the assumption
involved, that I am a great man, may well be wrong, and in
any case, has not been arrived at in an impartial way.
It is a striking feature of Russells attempts to show that
these philosophical ancestors of fascism cant make good argu-
ments that in the course of doing so he makes so many poor
arguments himself. This argument against Nietzsche is a clear
example: there is absolutely no reason why someone who
believes that only a few people are of value must believe that
they themselves are amongst those people. Many who believe
in the aristocratic ethics may include themselves among the
elect; but there is no reason why this must follow. In fact, the
very notion of hero worship implies a veneration for someone
else for their having heroic qualities we do not possess.
Matters become more surreal yet in A History of Western Phi-
losophy, as, reaching around for a more telling argument against
Nietzsches ethics, Russell has the Buddha condemn Nietzsche
for being a bad man. The anachronistic dialogue between
Nietzsche and the Buddha is rounded off by Nietzsche
claiming that the Buddhas world of peace would cause us all
to die of boredom. You might, the Buddha replies, because
you love pain, and your love of life is a sham. But those of us
who really love life would be happy as no-one can be happy in
the world as it is. (History, p.800.) As we can see, this dialogue
ends with the Buddha rather implausibly insulting Nietzsches
character. The Buddhas line of argument against Nietzsche
here is remarkably similar to Russells own: elsewhere Russell
accuses Nietzsche of being insane, megalomaniac, and possibly
having an unnatural relationship with his sister.
Condemned Without Evidence
There are several peculiarities in Russells characterisation
of the supposed ancestors of fascism. We have seen some of his
rather desperate attempts to prove that these ancestors are
philosophically incompetent attempts which often leave the
reader more concerned about Russells argumentative stan-
dards than those of his opponent. But the story gets stranger.
In his writings on this subject, Russell offers no evidence what-
soever that there is any historical relationship between the
ideas of his lengthy canon of proto-fascist philosophers, and
those of any actual fascists. For example, no evidence is offered
that Hitler read Hegel. Nor is there any analysis offered of the
Nazi state that would demonstrate that it at all corresponded
to Hegels ideas. What kinds of ancestors of fascism are these
thinkers, then, if there is no apparent relationship between
them and the fascists? Yet this lack of evidence doesnt prevent
Russell from freely asserting very definite claims, such as,
Hitlers ideals come mainly from Nietzsche (Religion and Sci-
ence, 1935, p.210) and The Nazis upheld German idealism,
though the degree of allegiance given to Kant, Fichte or Hegel
respectively was not clearly laid down (from Unpopular Essays,
1950, p.10). Worse, throughout his investigations into the
ancestry of fascism, Russell continued to use the strongest pos-
22 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
sible terms of condemnation: the tenor of his work on Nazism
is that philosophers like Nietzsche and Hegel were bad people
who wanted bad things to happen, and would be generally
pretty pleased with the Nazis performance. Rarely does he
concede the possibility that if the Nazis were influenced by
these thinkers, it was the result of misreading or distortion. He
is content to allow the full blame fall on the shoulders of the
philosophers.
So we have a blanket condemnation of a host of nineteenth
century philosophers as originators of Nazism, based on what
appears to be no evidence. Given such a slap-dash approach to
the history of political thought, one would be justified in think-
ing that Russells colleagues would offer some sharp words of
rebuke, or at the very least ignore his accusations. Instead, his
accusations against his major targets were straightforwardly
accepted by people who would go on to shape analytic philoso-
phy for the rest of the twentieth century. Many of the most
notable mid-twentieth-century British philosophers A.J. Ayer,
Isaiah Berlin and Gilbert Ryle, for example lined up to agree
that nineteenth century German philosophy was corrupt, totali-
tarian in its predilections, and in some way responsible for
Nazism. Isaiah Berlin in his review in Mind even called Russells
treatment of Nietzsche in A History of Western Philosophy with
insulting Buddha and all a distinguished essay (Mind 56, no.
222, 1947, p.165). But they had no more evidence of the guilt
of these philosophers than did Russell.
Imperfect Philosophers
Why were such strong yet unsupported criticisms of fellow
philosophers allowed to circulate as unquestioned fact within
British analytic philosophy? Several factors seem to have been
in play. There was the heightened nationalism caused by the
war a nationalism to which the philosophers turned out to be
no more immune than non-philosophical citizens. There was
the pervasive idea of the guilt of German philosophy, which
was a legacy of World War I. There was also the belief,
common amongst Russell and his analytic colleagues, that
these continental philosophers were philosophically hopeless.
Hegel, the wellspring of much of nineteenth-century philoso-
phy, had, they believed, been decisively refuted by Russells
close colleague G.E. Moore in the first decade of the century.
So none of Russells analytic colleagues had anything invested
in looking again at these condemned philosophers. This rich
combination of philosophical and cultural factors were suffi-
cient for them to simply accept that the German philosophical
tradition was fascist. Thus Russells at-best eccentric condem-
nation of German philosophy was perpetuated both by many
of his influential followers and through his best-selling A His-
tory of Western Philosophy. Shortly after the war, Russells intel-
lectual disciples gained a powerful grip on the discipline of
philosophy in Britain. So began an active process of forget-
ting and exclusion as David West writes in The Contribution
of Continental Philosophy in A Companion to Contemporary
Political Philosophy (ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit,
1995, p.39). This process saw thinkers in what Russell identi-
fied as the proto-Nazi tradition excluded from philosophical
consideration in Anglo-American universities. And although
thinkers like Nietzsche and Hegel have subsequently made
something of a comeback, the continued hostility among some
analytic philosophers to so-called continental philosophy is in
part the legacy of Russells tarring of the originators of this tra-
dition with the brush of totalitarianism.
This lost episode in the recent history of analytic philoso-
phy raises again the old question of the value of philosophical
education. Russell made his own views on this very clear at the
end of A History of Western Philosophy:
The habit of careful veracity acquired in the practice of this philosophical
method can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing,
wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism with an increasing capacity of
sympathy and mutual understanding. In abandoning a part of its dogmatic
pretensions, philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life.
(A History of Western Philosophy, p.864.)
Yet Russell and his followers readiness to condemn their
fellow philosophers for proto-fascism seems to rather under-
mine his claims for the salutary power of his own philosophical
tradition. He and his highly trained, and in some cases bril-
liant, colleagues appear to have been no more immune to the
nationalist atmosphere of the day than their fellow citizens.
DR THOMAS AKEHURST 2013
Thomas Akehurst teaches political philosophy for the Open University
and the University of Sussex. His book The Cultural Politics of
Analytic Philosophy: Britishness and the Spectre of Europe
(2010) is available from Continuum.
The London School of Philosophy
2013-14 programme of courses
is now out
Including our new module
Introduction to Philosophy
can be taken as part of a
certificate/diploma/BA
Please visit our website:
londonschoolofphilosophy.org
PHILOSOPHY CLASSES OF THE HIGHEST
QUALITY FOR THOUGHTFUL PEOPLE IN
THE LONDON AREA!
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 23
T
he diversity of beliefs and ways of life is a striking fact
about our species. What Mormons find right and rea-
sonable may be abhorrent to Marxists or Maoris. The
Aztecs practiced human sacrifice for reasons we find totally
unconvincing, and no doubt future people may be similarly
perplexed or repulsed by some of our practices. For such rea-
sons, some conclude that there is no objective truth about
morality. They say moral disagreement is best explained by the
idea that there are many different and incompatible relative
moral truths, which are in some way determined by the beliefs
of a given society; and that this is the only kind of moral truth
there is. So for the Aztecs it was true that human sacrifice is
morally permissible, although it is false for us. Generally then,
a moral statement M is relatively true provided that it is
believed by the members of a society S. (The same basic idea
may be developed somewhat differently. Some relativists may
say, for example, that M is relatively true provided it is implied
by the standards of S, regardless of whether members of S
actually believe it. I will ignore these details because they make
no difference to the point Im going to make.)
In this article I will discuss this argument from moral dis-
agreement and present what I think is the most serious prob-
lem for moral relativism: that we cannot understand what it
could mean for moral truths to be relative. And since we have
no idea what it could mean, moral relativism cannot be a good
explanation of the fact of deep and enduring moral disagree-
ment nor can moral relativism be supported by any other
kind of reasoning. So if moral disagreement is evidence against
the objectivity of moral truth, it can only be evidence for moral
nihilism: the idea that there are no moral truths.
Self-Defeat?
The argument for moral relativism from moral diversity is
not especially convincing as it stands. If the mere fact that
people or groups disagree over some idea were enough to show
that that idea has no objective truth value, there would be no
objective truth about the age of the universe or the causes of
autism. Hoping to ward off that counter-argument, relativists
usually claim that these other disagreements are unlike moral
disagreements in some relevant way. For instance, writing in
this magazine (in Issue 82), Jesse Prinz claimed that scientific
disagreements can be settled by better observations or measure-
ments, and that when presented with the same body of evidence
or reasons, scientists come to agree, but the same cannot be said
of thinkers operating with different moral codes.
Even if we grant this distinction, however, it is still doubtful
that moral disagreement is a good reason for accepting moral
relativism. After all, there is deep and apparently irresolvable dis-
agreements in philosophy as well as morality. For instance, some
philosophers think mental states such as pain or desire are just
physical states; others deny this, and yet both camps are familiar
with the evidence and reasons taken to support the opposing
point of view. Should we say, then, that there is no objective
truth about how mental states are related to the physical world?
That seems deeply implausible. For that matter, many philoso-
phers deny the moral relativists claim that moral truth is relative
to what a given society believes. Does it follow that there is only
relative truth and no objective truth about moral relativism itself
that moral relativism is true relative to the outlook of Jesse Prinz,
say, and anti-relativism no less true relative to mine?
I suspect that few moral relativists would be willing to
accept this higher kind of relativism. They think that even
though many benighted philosophers disagree with them,
moral truth just is relative to a given society that it is an
objective fact about reality that there are no objective moral
facts but merely relative ones. But this would be a distressingly
unstable position, if relativists believe their relativism on the
basis of an argument that depends on the principle that if there
is a certain kind of disagreement over some topic T, there is no
objective truth about T. If that principle is true, the fact that
there is such disagreement about their relativist conclusion
implies that that conclusion is itself not objectively true, but
only relatively so. So if this relativists argument is good, then
by his own standards he should not believe its conclusion is
objectively true; or if he is entitled to believe its conclusion, it
follows that the argument is not good.
Need it be self-defeating to hold that moral truth is relative,
and that that truth about moral truth is itself merely relatively
true too? Happily, we do not need to consider this question with
much care, since I think the core problem with moral relativism
is not that it is false, implausible or self-defeating, but simply
that it is unintelligible. I mean by this that there is no intelligible
concept of truth that can be used to frame the thesis that moral
truth is relative to the standards or beliefs of a given society.
Moral Relativism Is Unintelligible
Julien Beillard argues that it makes no sense to say that morality is relatively true.
Aztecs
performing a
human sacrifice
Truth & Belief
Let me try to clarify this objection by introducing some tru-
isms about truth. First, a statement is true only if it represents
things as they really are. The statement that Im wearing blue socks
is true only if I really am wearing socks, and they really are blue.
The same general principle surely holds for moral statements.
Suppose I say that suicide is immoral, yet that in objective reality
there is no such thing as moral wrongness. That is, suppose that
nothing that anyone does really is morally wrong, although
some actions seem wrong
to us. Then my assertion of
immorality is simply false,
for it attributes to certain
acts a property that nothing
has. It is like an assertion
that my socks were made
by Santas niece. Nothing
has the property of being
made by Santas neice, and
any statement that repre-
sents my socks as having it
is therefore false.
Those attracted to moral
relativism might object
that I am simply presup-
posing an objectivist con-
cept of truth: a concept
that relates what is said or
thought about the world to
the way that the world really is, independent of these thoughts.
What they have in mind instead is a different concept of truth
one that does not involve any such relation between subjec-
tive points of view or representations and something indepen-
dent of those points of view.
I admit that I am presupposing an objectivist conception of
truth, but whats the alternative? Do we have any concept of
truth that does not involve that kind of relation? To be sure,
people sometimes say that a statement is true for one person
but not another meaning that the statement seems true to the
first person but does not seem true to the second. But just as
seeming gold is not a kind of gold, seeming truth is not a kind
of truth. What is meant by this way of speaking (if anything), is
simply belief. To say that it is true for some children that Santa
Claus lives in the North Pole, if that means merely that to
some children it seems true that he does, is really just a way of
saying that they believe it. But believing doesnt make it so.
Similarly, if moral relativism is just the claim that what seems
true of morality to some people (what they believe about
morality) seems false to others, this is true but philosophically
trivial, and consistent with objectivism about moral truth. It is
also worth noting that, interpreted in this trivial way, moral
relativism could not be supported by the argument from dis-
agreement. The gist of that argument was that moral relativism
is a good explanation of the moral disagreements we observe.
Yet the claim that some moral statements seem true to some
people and false to others merely restates the fact of moral dis-
agreement that is supposedly explained by relativism, it cannot
explain that fact. (Perhaps some things are self-explanatory, but
not moral disagreement!)
So there is the familiar kind of truth dependent on how
reality is apart from peoples beliefs or perceptions, and a
bogus kind that is nothing more than belief. The relativists
theory of moral truth explicitly denies that moral statements
are ever true (or false) in the familiar sense; but if it is inter-
preted in the second way, relativism collapses into absurdity or
triviality. The relativist needs a third kind of truth, midway
between the familiar and the bogus: not just an appearance of
truth, but not a truth that depends on objective reality. But there
is no such thing. At least, I am unable to imagine what this
special kind of truth would be, and relativists are strangely
silent on this core issue.
No Third Way
Remember that moral relativism has two ingredients: there
is the denial of any objective moral truth, and the assertion of
some other kind of moral truth. Suppose that moral disagree-
ment does raise doubts about the objective truth of any moral
code. Does it follow that moral codes are true in some other
sense? No, for perhaps it means that no moral statements are
true in any sense. Perhaps people disagree here because they
have been acculturated in different moral cultures, but all the
moral beliefs or standards of all cultures are simply false. So
the argument from disagreement might be an argument for
moral nihilism rather than for moral relativism.
How do relativists hope to establish their positive thesis,
that moral statements are sometimes true without being objec-
tively true? I am not aware of any compelling arguments for
that idea. On the contrary, relativists tend instead to argue in
great detail for the negative thesis, that morality is not objec-
tively true, as if that alone were sufficient for their relativistic
conclusion. Thus Prinz says that moral judgments are based
on emotions, that reason cannot tell us which values to
adopt, and that even if there is such a thing as human nature,
that would be of no use, since the mere fact that we have a cer-
tain nature leaves it an open question whether what is natural
is morally good. Let us grant all of this, and grant for the sake
of argument that it does raise a real doubt about the objective
truth of moral beliefs. In the absence of any account of the
special kind of truth that is supposed to lie somewhere
between mere belief and accurate representation of objective
reality, why then should we think of moral judgments as truths
of any kind? Why not simply say that all moral codes are false?
It would seem reasonable for a philosopher who thinks of
moral reasoning in this way to view moral beliefs in the same
way that atheists view religious ones as false.
I suspect the reason few philosophers have been willing to
draw this nihilistic conclusion is simply that, like most people,
they have some strongly-held moral beliefs of their own. They
think that it is morally wrong to rape children, for example,
and so they do not want to say that that belief is false. For how
could they continue to believe it, while also believing that what
they believe is not true? This unhappy compromise is not ten-
able. If there is no objective moral truth, there cant be some
other kind of moral truth.
JULIEN BEILLARD 2013
Julien Beillard teaches philosophy at Ryerson University, Ontario.
Herodotus famously noted the
difference in burial rites across
Greek and Persian cultures
24 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 25
C
onsistency doesnt guarantee truth, but as ancient Indian
and Greek philosophers realised, it helps. Socrates, both
in person and in his incarnation as the main character in
many of Platos dialogues, was famous for his trademark method
of posing questions to his interlocutors in order to tease out
contradictions in their thinking; but it was in one of Platos stu-
dents Aristotle that consistency found its champion.
Aristotle & Barbara
Aristotle (384-322 BC) identified a number of rules of rea-
soning he termed syllogisms, which were later given charming
names by medieval philosophers. It would take too long to
describe them all, but heres an example called Barbara:
Premise 1: All mammals are vertebrates.
Premise 2: All cats are mammals.
Conclusion: Therefore all cats are vertebrates.
Barbara has nothing to do with the taxonomic classification
of living things. If we replace the first premise with all mam-
mals are aeroplanes the conclusion would be that all cats are
aeroplanes. This is not true, but only because the new premise
is false; theres nothing wrong with the logic of the argument.
Consistency
Underpinning Aristotles logic was the Principle (sometimes
Law) of Non-Contradiction two contradictory statements
cannot simultaneously be true and the similar, but rather
more contentious, Law of the Excluded Middle two contradic-
tory statements cannot simultaneously be false. In Aristotles
own words: It is impossible for the same property to belong
and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in
the same respect (Metaphysics, IV). To Aristotle, the principle
of non-contradiction (PNC) was not only self-evident, it was
the foundation of all other self-evident truths, since without it
we wouldnt be able to demarcate one idea from another, or in
fact positively assert anything about anything making ratio-
nal discourse impossible.
My favourite justification of PNCs special status in logic
comes from the philosopher and polymath Avicenna (c. 980-
1037), who had this to say about PNC sceptics in his own
Metaphysics: As for the obstinate, he must be plunged into
fire, since fire and non-fire are identical. Let him be beaten,
since suffering and not suffering are the same. Let him be
deprived of food and drink, since eating and drinking are iden-
tical to abstaining.
Non-Contradiction in Practice
The famous Paradox of the Stone asks whether God could
create a stone so heavy that He couldnt lift it. If God is all-
powerful, then He should be able to do anything; but either
He cannot create such a stone, or else having created it, He
cannot lift it; either way we seem to have discovered some-
thing He cannot do, so He is not all-powerful. One resolution
of this paradox, favoured by Ren Descartes, is to say that
Gods omnipotence gives Him such power that He can make a
stone too heavy for Him to lift, and He can also lift it.
If you think Descartes answer seems a bit suspect, youre in
good company: over the years the majority of theologians and
philosophers have preferred the solution provided by St
Thomas Aquinas, who held that omnipotence cannot confer the
power to do logically incoherent things, such as draw square
circles, or make rocks too heavy for omnipotent beings to lift.
In the philosophy of science, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716) applied PNC to the laws of physics, and concluded
that even God couldnt create a world where nature contradicts
itself. Today, experiments in quantum mechanics routinely pro-
duce completely different outcomes depending only on how
measurements are made; but it is telling that no matter how
baffling such observations become, there is no contradiction. So
even quantum mechanics is only paradoxical in the sense of
being counterintuitive. Our common sense may be offended,
but Leibnizs self-consistent universe survives intact.
For a full-blown contradiction in physics, consider time-
travel. Relativistic time dilation, which facilitates travel to the
future by slowing down time for the traveller, is well established
by experiment, and introduces no danger of inconsistency. But
travel to the past, or to the present from the future, opens the
door to a number of nasty paradoxes a classic example being
that if you kill your past self at a time before you stepped into
the time machine, you will not be alive to travel back in time
and pull the trigger. Having dodged the bullet, you do survive
to travel back in time and kill yourself and so on.
Much ink has been expended analysing such situations, and
since backward time-travel doesnt necessarily result in contradic-
tions, there may be some possible worlds in which it is achiev-
able. Nevertheless, taking Leibniz and Aristotle as our guides,
backward time-travel is inconsistent with self-aware creatures
capable of freely interacting with their surroundings. If you
believe the universe contains the latter, you cannot also believe
in the travel backwards in time and remain consistent. (Here
One Law to Rule Them All
Tim Wilkinson tries to chart our quest for consistency without contradicting himself.
Could an
omnipotent
God create
a stone
too heavy
for Him to lift?
free interaction presupposes no controversial philosophical
notions such as strong versions of free will; it requires only that I
could locate my past self and kill him.) Although solutions to
the equations of general relativity that appear to allow travel to
the past have been found (coincidentally, some of them were
found by Kurt Gdel, of whom more later), in this case Aristotle
trumps Einstein. Solutions to mathematical equations cannot
be realised if they pave the way to internally-inconsistent config-
urations of reality. Consistency for time-travellers can be
restored by placing absurd restrictions on free interaction, pos-
tulating parallel timelines or other sci-fi contrivances, but time-
travel as commonly understood, namely visiting our own actual
past and freely interacting with people who really are our own
past selves or our ancestors, is out of the question. Stephen
Hawking has gone as far as to propose a Chronology Protection
Conjecture, to the effect that physics cant allow travel to the
past except in special cases incapable of generating paradoxes.
Considering that Hawking has also recently written that philos-
ophy is dead (see Hawking Contra Philosophy, Philosophy Now
issue 82), its refreshing to note that, like omnipotence, even
physics must yield to logic.
Consistency in Ethics
How should we treat each other, and why? Many different
ways of tackling this problem have been advanced. The differ-
ent approaches sometimes result in agreement on what is good,
and sometimes not, but within any given theory consistency is
crucial. Consistency in ethics is perhaps most evident in the
principle of the Golden Rule the idea that we should treat
others as we would consent to be treated in similar circum-
stances. The Golden Rule has to be wielded carefully since
nave application can easily lead to absurdities. Properly under-
stood however, its consistency criterion is an incredibly powerful
ethical tool, even though it doesnt actually tell us anything
about what is right or wrong; we have to work that out for our-
selves by applying the rule in conjunction with other considera-
tions, such as ideas of how people might like to be treated.
Consistency in Mathematics
Around 300 BC, Euclid of Alexandria wrote his Elements, one
of the most influential works in the history of mathematics. The
Elements is usually remembered for its rich geometry, but it also
contains a proof of the fact that there are infinitely many prime
numbers a theorem which ranked third in a poll ran by the
journal The Mathematical Intelligencer to discover the most beau-
tiful results in mathematics. (Incredibly, the top two results, and
three of the top five, were the work of the same mathematician,
Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), but thats another story.) The
proof that there are infinitely many primes usually given today is
not quite the one in the Elements, but the idea is the same.
Roughly speaking, todays proof involves assuming that there are
only a finite number of primes, then considering what happens
if theyre all multiplied together and one added to the result.
Either this new number is prime, or if not, it must be divisible
by a prime number not on the original list. Both outcomes con-
tradict the original supposition that it is possible to produce a
finite list of all the primes. So the original supposition that there
are only a finite number of primes must therefore be incorrect.
Not only is this one of the most famous results in mathe-
matics, its also an excellent illustration of the method of proof
known as reductio ad absurdum (reduction to absurdity), where
one temporarily assumes the opposite of what one is trying to
prove, then shows by rigorous deduction that this assumption
leads to a contradiction. So important is the reductio method
to mathematics that G. H. Hardy (1877-1947) was moved to
write that reductio is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a
chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece,
but a mathematician offers the game (from A Mathematicians
Apology) that is, the validity of such proofs rests on the con-
sistency of mathematics as a whole. We shall briefly return to
Hardy later, but for now, notice that without PNC, not only
would the proof about prime numbers not work, it wouldnt
even make sense to discuss the matter, since the finite and the
non-finite (infinite) would be the same.
Danger of Explosion
In the centuries that followed Aristotle, statements includ-
ing and, or and if then were incorporated into logical
theory, and by medieval times we had something recognisable
as the precursor to what is today called propositional logic this
being the study of how true propositions can validly be com-
bined to produce new ones. Upon developing propositional
logic, medieval logicians noticed something interesting: if they
allowed themselves just one contradiction, they seemed to be
able to arrive at any conclusion whatever.
Writers on logic often refer to this notion that anything
follows from a falsehood but rarely explain why this is the
case. Heres a modern version of the medieval idea: suppose we
would like to prove the proposition that Bugs Bunny is an
alien. First, notice that if A is any true statement, and B is
any other statement, whether true or false, then the combined
Euclid by
Raphael
26 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 27
statement either A is true or B is true is true, because A is
true. Second, if we know that either A is true or B is true and
we discover that A is false, then B must be true. These rules of
propositional logic are known as disjunction introduction and dis-
junction elimination respectively. Suppose next that the Earth is
flat, and also that it isnt flat (a contradiction). Since the Earth
is flat, the statement Either the Earth is flat or Bugs Bunny is
an alien is true, by disjunction introduction. But if Either the
Earth is flat or Bugs Bunny is an alien is true, since we also
know the Earth is not flat, then Bugs must be an alien, by dis-
junction elimination. We can also prove Bugs is not an alien
by a similar argument. Allowing a single contradiction thus
results in logical Armageddon, where everything is true and
everything is false an idea that came to be called the principle
of explosion or ex falso quodlibet, anything follows from a false-
hood (strictly, from a contradiction).
If its not possible for two contradictory statements to be
simultaneously true, theres no need to worry about a truth
explosion. But the explosion seems entirely contrary to intu-
ition anyway: the geometry of the Earth surely has no bearing
on whether Elmer Fudds nemesis is of extraterrestrial origin,
for instance. Indeed, if you dont suffer from the handicap of
having studied classical logic, you might say that to assert that
anything follows from a falsehood is positively illogical, because
it opens the door to fallacious arguments where the premises
are totally irrelevant to the conclusion.
Consider the self-contradictory statement known as the Liar
Paradox: This statement is false. On the face of it, the Liar
Paradox appears to be false if its true, and true if its false. Per-
haps then its both? If so, how do we avoid explosion?
In order to deal with this kind of problem, twentieth century
philosophers developed so-called paraconsistent logics; for exam-
ple, by forbidding use of the rules of inference that lead to the
explosion, or by introducing relevancy conditions that prevent
conclusions being drawn from irrelevant premises. It is impor-
tant to stress that the development of paraconsistent logics has
not led to a disintegration of the distinction between true and
false. Quite the reverse: paraconsistent logics prevent harmless
contradictions from resulting in logical explosion into areas
where they are not relevant, and as such these logics are useful
in circumstances where some philosophers think there is good
reason to relax PNC slightly and regard certain special types of
statement, such as the Liar Paradox, as being both true and
false a minority philosophical position known as dialetheism.
Modern Logic
Impressive as Aristotles logic was, his syllogistic rules were
insufficient to capture the arguments in Euclids Elements, let
alone in the rest of mathematics, science and philosophy. Leib-
niz realised the inadequacy of Aristotelian and medieval logic,
and began to construct a more comprehensive framework.
Leibnizs project finally reached fruition two hundred years
later with the development, chiefly by Gottlob Frege (1848-
1925), of a symbolic notation for logic generally, of which an
important special case is known as first-order logic.
First-order logic can be thought of as an enhanced version
of propositional logic, expanded to include quantifiers such as
there exists and for all, and capable of creating complex
symbolic statements which can be said to be true or false. In
his 1929 doctoral thesis, Kurt Gdel (1906-1978) showed that
when bundled together with a formal language and axioms
(premises) in certain types of formal systems, first-order logic is
complete in the technical sense of being sufficiently powerful to
deduce all the logical consequences of the axioms. Of particu-
lar interest is the formal system known as Peano Arithmetic,
named after the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano (1858-
1932), which can be thought of as a formalisation of elemen-
tary arithmetic, and which we discuss a little below. But
Gdels completeness theorem applies to many other impor-
tant mathematical systems as well.
Consistency and Incompleteness
Gdels completeness theorem was impressive enough, but
there was better to come, in the form of his incompleteness theo-
rems, in which confusingly the meaning of the term com-
plete is quite different. The completeness theorem shows that
in certain systems, all logical consequences of the systems
axioms can be deduced using first-order logic. Gdels incom-
pleteness theorems talk about incompleteness in the sense that
formal systems sometimes contain statements that cannot be
proved, or disproved, from their axioms at all.
One important aspect of the incompleteness theorems that
is often neglected is that they act as a bridge between consis-
tency and completeness. The incompleteness theorems can be
formulated in many ways, but to make the connection with
consistency explicit, consider the following versions:
1.) Given a formal system F containing a certain amount of
arithmetic, there exists a true sentence of F that is not provable
in F, if and only if F is consistent.
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2.) For any formal system F satisfying certain conditions, the
consistency of F cannot be established within F itself if and only
if F is consistent.
Gdels incompleteness theorems are widely misunder-
stood, and their consistency conditions often overlooked. As a
result, one frequently finds them being deployed well outside
the confines of mathematical logic, where almost invariably
the result is utter nonsense. For examples of the myriad ways
in which Gdels theorems are misapplied, I recommend the
reader to the wonderful book by Torkel Franzn (1950-2006),
Gdels Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to its Use and Abuse (2005).
One of Franzns targets is a claim one reads with depressing
regularity, to the effect that all logical systems will generate
propositions that they cannot prove, but which humans can
see to be true. Maybe this is so, maybe not; but it doesnt
follow from Gdels theorems, because it ignores the consis-
tency condition. To emphasise, Gdel showed that certain
formal systems contain true statements they cannot prove if
they are consistent. For the common claim to follow from the
first incompleteness theorem, humans would need to be able
to see, or better still prove, the consistency of any given
system. But how do we know whether formal systems are con-
sistent or not? Consider Peano Arithmetic: there are several
proofs of the consistency of Peano Arithmetic that mathemati-
cians find compelling, but such proofs are highly technical,
and have to take place within some sort of framework (which
cannot be Peano Arithmetic itself, in view of Gdels second
incompleteness theorem), the consistency of which can itself
be called into question However, as an alternative to formal
proof, it is relatively easy to convince oneself of the consis-
tency of Peano Arithmetic by merely reflecting on its axioms
and rules of inference.
While this approach does have some merit, it can lead to
problems. Nobody expected to find a contradiction in set
theory, until Bertrand Russell famously discovered the one
that now bears his name (Is the set of all sets which are not
members of themselves a member of itself?). In the light of
Russells Paradox, set theory had to be hastily patched up to
banish contradictions; and to Freges dismay, Russells Paradox
also demolished some of his work on logic and arithmetic.
Even if we take the consistency of Peano Arithmetic as
beyond doubt, it is only one, very simple, system. There is no
reason whatever for supposing that humans can know the con-
sistency of every formal system no matter how complicated.
Yet merely saying that humans know that formal systems can
state truths they cant prove if they are consistent amounts to no
more than a repetition of the first incompleteness theorem, and
not to a convincing demonstration that humans can always
recognise truths that formal systems cannot prove.
Consistency and Minds
Following the work of the brilliant Alan Turing (1912-1954),
it became clear that consistency, completeness, and other proper-
ties of formal (logical) systems are closely connected with the
capabilities of computers. Since Gdels theorems say something
about the limitations of formal systems, and hence of computers,
perhaps this paves the way for them to say something significant
about how computers compare to the human mind?
The philosopher John Lucas has written a number of fasci-
nating papers exploring such ideas , starting with Minds,
Machines and Gdel (Philosophy, XXXVI, 1961), and summarised
in his book The Freedom of the Will (1970). Unfortunately,
although Lucas has responded carefully to criticisms of his
argument, he has not yet managed to produce a version that
has convinced a majority of philosophers.
The mathematician and physicist Sir Roger Penrose has
written several books expanding on Lucass theme, and has
suggested that it might be better to apply Gdels theorems to
the human mind indirectly. Gdel noted that his incomplete-
ness theorems show that no fixed-axiom structure can com-
pletely codify all mathematical truths. Of course, no human
can know all mathematical truths either if only because we
dont live long enough but neither do we seem to be con-
strained by a fixed set of axioms. In fact, most of the time
human mathematicians dont pay any attention to axioms at all,
and when I know something, I certainly dont seem to be
merely manipulating axioms in a formal system. So it is
unclear how far Gdels theorems apply to the workings of the
human mind, even when the humans are doing mathematics.
These are deep and important philosophical waters, but
regrettably it would take us too far from our discussion of con-
sistency to navigate them further. Personally, I hope and
expect we will one day show that the human mind does exceed
computer logic in many important respects. Unfortunately,
no-one has yet found a way to translate Gdels theorems into
a slam-dunk demonstration that mind exceeds machine,
despite the sterling efforts of Lucas and Penrose.
Consistency of Mathematics Revisited
Where does all this leave the consistency of mathematics?
It is undeniable that we cannot prove the consistency of math-
ematics to everyones satisfaction; but to my mind, to attempt
to do so is to put the cart before the horse. Consistent mathe-
matics seems to be the most useful and interesting kind, so,
armed with the PNC, thats what mathematicians have been
searching for these past 2,500 years. Hardys quotation about
offering the game almost makes proof by reductio sound risky,
but in fact theres no real danger in gambling the whole of
mathematics on its own consistency, because pruning away the
inconsistencies is one of the objectives of mathematicians in
the first place. Is there a risk that if all the inconsistencies were
to be removed, then nothing would be left? Only the same
risk that one equals zero; and if thats the case, then anything
you can think of is true; and false; and neither; and both.
Far beneath the surface layers of mathematics, philosophy,
and science, lies logical bedrock, where the word Aristotle is
carved into the stone. We live in the shadow of Aristotle and
Gdel, striving for consistency, and believing reason will guide
us to the most irrefutable truths we will ever know. As Mark
Knopfler of Dire Straits sang: if two men say theyre Jesus, at
least one of them must be wrong. You just cant argue with
logic like that.
DR TIM WILKINSON 2013
Tim Wilkinson used to teach mathematics at the University of Newcastle
-upon-Tyne, and is now a writer in the North East of England.
28 Philosophy Now

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July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 29
I
n November, news broke concerning an exciting develop-
ment in neurology. Via fMRI (a brain scanning technol-
ogy), a vegetative patient , who suffered serious brain
damage in a car collision years ago communicated to doctors
that he is not in pain. Scott Routleys vegetative state meant he
had emerged from a coma, and appeared to be awake, but he
showed no signs of awareness. However, a new technique pio-
neered by Prof. Adrian Owen and others, at the MRC Cogni-
tion and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge and the Brain and
Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario, has
allowed Routley to convey significant information.
Before analysing these findings, lets not forget whats most
important here: Scott Routley is not in pain, and Prof. Owens
technique will allow more vegetative patients to help doctors care
for them. I wont call any of this into question. However, the
reporting of Routleys communication has, perhaps inevitably,
taken a misleading form, and stands in need of a bit of philo-
sophical clarification to dispel the seductive notion that neurol-
ogists can discern specific thoughts by examining brain states.
Casual followers of Routleys story can be forgiven for a
number of misapprehensions. News papers have run headlines
announcing that Routley has said Im not in pain. Only in the
loosest sense is this true. Of course, Routley does not have the
ability to vocalise his thoughts, but this is not the point . Rather,
Routleys communication involved no vocabulary or syntax at
all. Instead, Routley was instructed to think about playing tennis
when he wanted to convey no, and to think about walking
around his house when he wanted to convey yes. This distinc-
tion is relevant for understanding the nature of the achievement.
Patients such as Routley can only answer questions with a very
limited number of responses. Happily, when Prof. Owen asked
Routley if he was in pain, the fMRI scan matched earlier
instances of Routley thinking about playing tennis: the part of
the brain typically involved in such thought, the supplementary
motor area, was shown by the scan as being active. This result
corresponded to a 'no' response.
The distinction between saying and indicating is relevant
for understanding the nature of how brain activity relates to
thought and language. Some philosophers and cognitive scien-
tists believe that all human thought comes in the form of men-
talese, an internal mental language, which consists of explicit
structures that bear linguistic-type meaning. (Jerry Fodor, for
example, has pioneered this position.) Others question the
necessity for representational systems of thought to have lin-
guistic properties. Languages themselves rely on beliefs that
do not have any explicit structure: brains do not code most
trivial beliefs, such as There are more than four-hundred
people in the world, yet still we speak meaningfully. So, per-
haps meaningful thought takes place without explicit coding of
everything that makes the belief meaningful. If one were under
the misapprehension that doctors read complete propositional
thoughts sentences such as I am not in pain into Routleys
neural activities, this would however favour the presupposition
that thoughts take place in explicit mentalese. The connection
between the brain and thought is not so straightforward.
Not Reading Your Mind
A thought experiment used by neuroscientists and philoso-
phers illustrates how even the most comprehensive knowledge
of a brain would not translate to an understanding of that brains
thought. Imagine a cerebroscope, a device capable of reading
all neural activity, both at the level of the neuron, and at the level
of systematic groupings of neuronal activity. Unfortunately, if
we try to imagine a device that could also then translate the
cerebroscopes data back into what is being experienced, faith-
fully reporting the experience of, for example, an oncoming red
bus, our fantasy runs into problems. For a start, contingent fac-
tors influence the associations of neurons, so that one persons
coding for the image of a bus will be not be another persons. It
is true that different brain regions specialise in different things;
it for this reason that doctors have been able to treat Routleys
communication as genuine. Even this regionalisation, however,
only holds contingently. Damaged brains can rewire themselves
dramatically, resulting in an organisation radically different from
normal brains. Function is not tied to a particular brain struc-
ture. It follows that any given thought has multiple possible
structural realisations. For example, the thought I am reading
this article will have one physical instantiation in your brain,
and another, perhaps quite different, in someone elses. So how
can we translate from data to experience?
What about a device that could read our neural activity
from birth? It might seem that this would suffice for providing
for the translation of its data into thought, but this does not
follow. A cerebroscope that read all neural activity from birth
onwards could report the activation of structural systems that,
for example, enable thought about an oncoming red bus. It
could not however, convey the content of that thought, which
depends on connections and associations based on an inher-
Good News from Neurology
But Dont Get The Wrong Idea
Francis Fallon thinks about the difficulty of deciphering thought in the brain.
30 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
ently idiosyncratic encounter with the world.
Sticking with the example of the oncoming red bus, imagine
that the cerebroscope has been implanted in the brain of a busy
London pedestrian. She regularly experiences looming buses,
and she consistently reacts with a reflex to navigate to safety
without inconveniencing others. Let us say for the sake of argu-
ment that her experience of the bus always correlates to Brain
State X, and her response always correlates to Brain State Y.
Even granting this oversimplification, the cerebroscope only
measures brain states, and therefore never infers beyond them
to their content. So in our idealised example, the best the cere-
broscope could do would be to give reports taking the form
Brain State X tends to be followed by Brain State Y. But the
nature of the experience of looming buses associated with Brain
State X is a matter of contingency, an historical fact totally
unavailable to the cerebroscope. For example, if the pedestrian
always had a particular fear response before moving to safety
(which includes a Brain State F occurring at the same time as
X) the cerebroscope could not distinguish the two types of
experience according to content. Even given the most futuristic
science, this kind of mind reading remains impossible.
Movies In The Mind?
Another moment of scientific progress has received mislead-
ing press in much the same way as Routleys communication. In
September 2011, Prof. Jack Gallant of UC Berkeley ran a star-
tling and impressive experiment. The steps proceeded as fol-
lows: (1) Subjects watched movie trailers while an fMRI
recorded their brains responses. (2) A computer organised the
findings, creating a model for each subjects brain responses to
images. (They vary.) (3) Subjects watched more movie trailers.
(4) The computer was given the fMRI results of the latest view-
ings. (5) From these fMRI results the computer reconstructed
the images that subjects had seen using a database of footage
drawn from the internet. The images match, if a little crudely.
Headlines announced this as Mind-Reading and Looking
Inside The Brain; articles reported it as Recreating Images In
The Brain. Gallant himself discussed internal imagery and
movies within the mind with interviewers. Once again,
though, this language assumes things that philosophers and
cognitive scientists question. The notion of mind-reading
implicitly relies on mentalese, which we have seen is controver-
sial. Even the commonplace phrase mental imagery becomes
controversial under scrutiny. Some philosophers and cognitive
scientists cite our inability to report details from our mental
images as evidence of their metaphorical rather than their lit-
eral existence. To treat images as simply inside the brain pre-
sumes a viewer inside the brain. The idea of a movie-in-the-
mind poses the same problem. Both expressions evoke a
Cartesian theatre a place in the brain where images flow
past a homunculus (a little man) who watches them. This
account is famously problematic, largely because it seems to
lead to infinite regress. (If the little man or his equivalent in
your brain sees an image, then to account for him seeing that
image, an even littler man in his brain would have to see it, and
so on.) Nothing in Gallants experiment says anything about
any of these debates. Instead, the experiment finds and exploits
a statistical regularity in the individuals primary visual cortexs
responses to types of visual stimuli. Perhaps not the stuff of
headlines, but at least this description has accuracy on its side.
Lessons For Thinkers
These distinctions may strike some as needlessly theoreti-
cal, but such a criticism cannot attach to evaluating Routleys
mind. Owen and his colleagues have taken care to include
controls based on previous work. Only patients who respond
to the instruction think of tennis differently from the way
they respond to the neutral she played tennis are taken to
show genuine responsiveness. Routleys communication most
likely is not the product of chance, but this does not necessar-
ily mean that he is conscious in the normal sense of the word
(whatever that may be). Owen claims that Routley chooses to
answer the questions, for example, and that he knows who and
where he is, but the evidence for this is indirect. Even if we
grant this, it does not tell us about the richness of Routleys
experience. If consciousness were an all-or-nothing affair, then
to interpret the fMRIs of patients like Routley as evidence of
consciousness would indeed be simplest and best, as Owen
claims. But consciousness may not be an all-or-nothing affair.
People in trances, sleepwalkers, and the heavily medicated, can
respond to linguistic prompts without enjoying full conscious-
ness. The fact of Routleys communication does not support the
assumption of his conscious awareness in the normal sense.
The positive lessons to take from exciting advances in neu-
rosciences are often clear enough. Scott Routley has communi-
cated to doctors via a new fMRI technique that he is not in
pain, and he may be able to communicate still more informa-
tion. The negative lessons are more difficult. Routleys com-
munication did not rely on his use of language, nor on reading
his neural activity as a form of language. Moreover, the kind of
communication involved in Routleys case does not necessarily
even indicate full awareness. Consciousness does not work so
simply. The lesson here is that we should not let learning about
developments in the field of neurology stand in the way of our
understanding the relationship between thought and the brain.
FRANCIS FALLON 2013
Francis Fallon was at Lancaster University at the time of writing.
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July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 31
O
f all the crimes a
late eighteenth
century German
cultural thinker could
commit, none carried a
stiffer sentence than Not
Being Goethe. Klopstock,
Mser, Sssmilch,
Reimarus, Herder... all
names blasted out of our
common cultural memory
by their proximity to the
towering poet of Weimar.
Yet while there probably
isnt anybody weeping torrents over the loss of Sssmilch, the
obscurity of Johannes Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is actually
rather tragic. Consistently two centuries ahead of his time, his
ideas about linguistics and comparative history had to wait
until the twentieth century for a rebirth, while his reflections
on cognition are shockingly prescient of developments in
modern neuroscience. How was it that such an original and
deep thinker became so utterly lost to us?
The real problem is that he wasnt so much lost as dismem-
bered. The whole Herder is a creature hardly seen in nature
before it is set upon and harvested for organs by whatever aca-
demic faction happens to be hungry for provenance at the
time. The Romantics took his stance against Pure Reason,
chopped it up into a few ringing phrases, and used it as a part
of their more general campaign against the Enlightenment.
And so the nineteenth century came to see Herder as a great
irrationalist, in spite of his many writings praising reason and
science as crucial paths to the self-realization of humanity. The
twentieth century, when it bothered to notice him at all, saw
only his comments about the cultural specificity of language,
and heralded them as precursors of Quinean relativism, conve-
niently ignoring the parts of his work which stress the unifying
nature of human cognitive processes. What has come down to
us, then, have been a series of partial Herders hitched to the
wagons of fleeting philosophical and cultural movements
caricatures so broadly drawn that they understandably failed to
outlive their revivers. Here I want to sketch an image of
Herder worth remembering.
Man Manifest
Johannes Herder was born in Mohrungen, East Prussia (now
in Poland), a town of about a thousand souls, known for the pro-
duction of cattle and theologians. Shaking the dust of that small
town from his boots, he ended up, at the tender age of eighteen,
in Knigsberg. Knigsberg was the place to be for a budding
thinker, offering the chance to study not only under the great
champion of holism, Johann Georg Hamann, but also under a
promising up-and-comer by the name of Immanuel Kant.
Herders first writings were in the field of literary criticism,
and flew in the face of pretty much every major school of
thought at the time setting a life-long precedent of rubbing
the philosophical establishment the wrong way. While
Enlightenment thinkers were seeking to find universal laws for
drama and aesthetics, Herder came out hard for evaluating
each work against the historical standards and practices of its
time and culture. Rather than denigrating Shakespeare for not
being Voltaire, he argued, oughtnt we consider what his work
means in the context of Elizabethan society and concerns?
Common sense now, perhaps; but revolutionary stuff for the
Enlightenment with its mania for universal systems.
More astounding still are the thoughts he put to paper in
response to a Berlin Academy essay competition of 1769. The
theme was the origin of language, a topic up to that time dom-
inated by two warring camps: the first held firmly to the idea
that language must be of divine origin, while the other held
that it is already present in animals, evident in the growl of the
lowliest town mutt. Herders argument ran counter to both
these schools, and in the process very nearly created modern
Trying Herder
Dale DeBakcsy listens to the lost voice of the Eighteenth Centurys greatest
Twenty-First-Century thinker.
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32 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
linguistic and neural theory in eighteenth century Prussia.
For Herder, language was a distinctly human phenomenon,
born from mans unique cognitive practices: language is in the
very structure of how we approach and perceive the world.
Moreover, in a move that anticipated discoveries in neuro-
science made only within the last half century, Herder identi-
fied reflection, networking, and plastic association as the hallmarks
of human cognitive life. What separates man from animals,
Herder believed, is mans capacity for reconsidering ideas
(reflection), for using multiple parts of his mind in evaluating a
passing idea (networking), and for holding onto an idea while
considering its relation to other facts of the world (plastic asso-
ciation). Some poetic turns of phrase aside, Herders focus on
the centrality of reflection belongs solidly in the twenty-first
century: Man manifests reflection when the force of his soul
acts in such freedom that, in the vast ocean of sensations which
permeates it through all the channels of the senses, it can single
out one wave, arrest it, concentrate its attention on it, and be
conscious of being attentive. He manifests reflection when,
confronted with the vast hovering dream of images which pass
by his senses, he can collect himself into a moment of wakeful-
ness and dwell at will on one image, can observe it clearly and
more calmly (Essay on the Origin of Language, 1772). Herder
found the root of language in these uniquely human capacities,
and in doing so, somewhat astoundingly, described for us the
functions of the lateral prefrontal cortex before it had even
been discovered. Fast forward two hundred and fifty years, and
neuroscience is just now showing us that the possession of a
prefrontal cortex in primates is what allows working memory to
function holding an idea and considering its connections to
other ideas without being externally stimulated to do so and
that, further, this area of the brain is where our linguistic pro-
cessing modules are found.
Positing working memory rather than pure reason as the
root of human language and even humanity was a stroke of
genius too far ahead of its time to succeed; but Herder didnt
stop there. Facing an intellectual culture that was trying to
split human thought and action into the purely reasonable or
the purely emotional, Herder replied that, If we have grouped
certain activities of the soul under certain major designations,
such as wit, perspicacity, fantasy, reason, this does not mean
that a single act of mind is ever possible in which only wit or
only reason is at work; it means no more than that we discern
in that act a prevailing share of the abstraction we call wit or
reason (Origin of Language). It took humanity two and a half
centuries to come back to the truth that you cant wall off parts
of the mind from each other. As weve since come to discover,
even our simplest thoughts or actions require the networking
of multiple brain centers and functions in exquisite unison,
crafted by the neural connections determined by genetics and
experience.
The Flow of Language
The influence of experience was a theme to which Herder
would return to repeatedly in his historical and linguistic work.
In a move that anticipated Julia Kristevas semiotic theory, he
argued strongly that words must not be considered purely
from the point of view of their logical structure, but also in
terms of their rhythmic, emotional, and other experiential ele-
ments. As he rather fancifully put it, This weary breath half
a sigh which dies away so movingly on pain-distorted lips,
isolate it from its living helpmeets, and it is an empty draft of
air (Origin of Language, Section One). The sound and rhythm
of language, which hold so much of the meaning of words in
their spoken contexts, are largely left behind on the printed
page. And as we lose touch with the situation in which our
words were originally formed, so do our words taste increas-
ingly artificial on our lips. They become the worn-beyond-
recognition coins that Nietzsche would make famous a century
later. This was particularly a problem, Herder saw, for his own
profession as a preacher: The most meaningful sacred sym-
bols of every people, no matter how well-adapted to the cli-
mate and nation, frequently lose their meaning within a few
generations. This should come as no surprise, for this is bound
to happen to every language and to every institution that has
arbitrary signs as soon as these signs are not frequently com-
pared to their objects through active use... as soon as [priests]
lost the meaning of the symbols, they had to become either the
silent servants of idolatry or the loquacious liars of supersti-
tion. They did become this almost everywhere, not out of any
particular propensity to deception, but out of the natural
course of things (Ideas Towards a Philosophy of History, 1784).
Such considerations of the particularity of linguistic and cul-
tural practice made Herder a fierce champion of the right of
each nation to find happiness through its own means, to be
How did language
emerge?
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Philosophy Now 33
evaluated on its own terms, and to hold with whatever religious
notions make sense in its own language and tradition. He
despised colonialism and the forcible conversion of native
people. He would have none of any system of classification
which attempted to posit a scale of perfection with modern
humanity sitting regally at the top. Just as Shakespeare was not
Eurpides Done Wrong, neither is India merely Ancient Greece
Done Wrong. To posit a happiest or best civilization is to
establish a scale of comparison, whereas in fact there are just
people working after whatever satisfaction their situation can
afford them. No one in the world feels the weakness of gener-
alizing more than I... Who has noticed how inexpressible the
individuality of one human being is how impossible it is to
express distinctly an individuals distinctive characteristics?
Since this is the case, how can one possibly survey the ocean of
entire peoples, times, and countries, and capture them in one
glance, one feeling, or one word? What a lifeless, incomplete
phantom of a word it would be! You must first enter the spirit
of a nation in order to empathize completely with even one of
its thoughts or deeds (Another Philosophy of History, 1774). And
lest his contemporaries believe they had a real chance to fully
understand and therefore judge a culture by reading about it in
an open and empathetic spirit, Herder gleefully yanked the rug
away by pointing out the utter hopelessness of genuine transla-
tion: Those varied significations of one root that are to be
traced and reduced to their origin in its genealogical tree are
interrelated by no more than vague feelings, transient side asso-
ciations, and perceptional echoes which arise from the depth of
the soul and can hardly be covered by rules. Furthermore, their
interrelations are so specifically national, so much in confor-
mity with the manner of thinking and seeing of the people, of
the inventor, in a particular country, in a particular time, under
particular circumstances, that it is exceedingly difficult for a
Northerner and Westerner to strike them right (Origin of Lan-
guage, Section Three). You will always miss something, and
there is no way of knowing whether that something was
insignificant, or was, after all, the most important part of the
concept you were trying to nail down.
Which brings us to George Orwell. Because, not content
with establishing a network theory of cognition, a semiotic
theory of language, and a comparative approach to historiog-
raphy and literature centuries before their time, Herder, like
Orwell, also analyzed the role of linguistic association in mass
politics before mass politics really even existed. Take a look
at this, written in 1772:
What is it that works miracles in the assemblies of people, that pierces
hearts, and upsets souls? Is it intellectual speech and metaphysics? Is it sim-
iles and figures of speech? Is it art and coldly convincing reason? If there is
to be more than blind frenzy, much must happen through these; but every-
thing? And precisely this highest moment of blind frenzy, through what did
it come about? Through a wholly different force! These tones, these ges-
tures, those simple melodious continuities, this sudden turn, this dawning
voice what more do I know? They all... accomplish a thousand times
more than truth itself... The words, the tone, the turn of this gruesome
ballad or the like touched our souls when we heard it for the first time in
our childhood with I know not what host of connotations of shuddering,
awe, fear, fright, joy. Speak the word, and like a throng of ghosts those con-
notations arise of a sudden in their dark majesty from the grave of the soul:
They obscure inside the word the pure limpid concept that could be
grasped only in their absence. (Origin of Language, Section One).
This is politics as the art of using tone and rhythm to recall
primal past experiences and therefore elicit the desired present
emotions quite irrespective of the actual content of the words
being spoken. Somehow, sitting in an autocratic Prussian state
almost devoid of mature political institutions, Herder man-
aged to piece together the notion of subliminal messaging and
its potential use in mass media politicking.
This isnt to say that Herder was always so prescient or rev-
olutionary. His explanation of suffering is little different from
the colossally unconvincing argument St Augustine trotted out
thirteen centuries earlier. But these half-hearted gestures pale
next to the monumental leaps of imagination with which he
enriched the late eighteenth century, and, if we are willing,
with which he will enrich our own. Many of his ideas we have
since rediscovered, but loaded down with such onerous and
generally unenlightening jargon (Im looking at you, Carl
Jung) that the scope and profundity of these ideas have been
drastically and tragically narrowed. A return to the source is in
order the whole Herder: often fanciful, sometimes deli-
ciously nave, but never more relevant than at present.
DALE DEBAKCSY 2013
Dale DeBakcsy is a contributor to The New Humanist and The
Freethinker and is the co-writer of the twice-weekly history and philos-
ophy webcomic Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable Comedy.
Church at Bckeburg where Herder preached
34 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
F
ive centuries ago this year, at the height of the Italian
Renaissance, an unemployed former civil servant sat in
the study of his modest country farm in the tiny village
of SantAndrea just south of Florence, pouring everything he
knew about the art of governing into a long pamphlet. He
hoped that by making a gift of it to Lorenzo de Medici, the
new ruler of Florence, it would win him back the job he pas-
sionately loved. But it was ungraciously brushed aside by a
prince who had little interest in the musings of an obscure,
exiled bureaucrat on the principles of statecraft. The pamphlet
was eventually published in 1532, five years after Niccol
Machiavellis death, as Il Principe (The Prince).
Machiavellis Devotion
For fourteen years Machiavelli had worked tirelessly and
with utter devotion for his native city of Florence as a diplomat
and public official, travelling constantly on its behalf to the
courts and chancelleries of Europe, where he met Popes,
princes and potentates. He witnessed the political life of the
Italian Renaissance first-hand and up-close. It was an age of
very high culture and very low politics, of Michelangelo and
Cesare Borgia both of whom Machiavelli knew personally.
An intensely patriotic Florentine, he spurned an offer to
become an advisor to a wealthy and powerful Roman noble-
man at the generous salary of 200 gold ducats because he
wanted to serve his native city. He had recently worked as
Head of the second chancery, Chancellor of the Nine (the
body that oversaw Florences militia), and Secretary to the Ten
that supervised the citys foreign policy. Not that this made any
difference to the Medici family, who in 1512 had overthrown
the Florentine republic Machiavelli had so loyally served.
Machiavelli was promptly dismissed, arrested, tortured, and
exiled from his native city. The torture, six drops on the strap-
pado in which he was raised high above the ground by his tied
arms, dislocating his joints he took admirably well, even writ-
ing some amusing sonnets about it. He only narrowly escaped
execution; then a general amnesty was granted after Lorenzos
uncle was elected Pope Leo X in March 1513.
Machiavelli appeared to hold few grudges. Being tortured
was fair play in Renaissance politics, and he would advocate far
worse in The Prince. But being forced out of the life of politics
that enthralled him, and banished from the city he loved more
than my own soul was almost more than he could bear. He
confessed to his nephew that, although physically well, he was
ill in every other respect because he was separated from his
beloved native city, and he complained to a friend that I am
rotting away in exile. He desperately missed the excitement,
risks and stimulation of city life, and was bored senseless by the
dreary routines of domestic life. To fend off the monotony he
spent his days reading and writing, chasing thrushes, and play-
ing backgammon with the local inn-keeper. Although living
only a tantalizingly short distance from the hub of Florentine
government, the great Palazzo Vecchio (where a bust of
Machiavelli stands today), Machiavelli might as well have been
living on the dark side of the moon. Although he enjoyed a
partial rehabilitation near the end of his life, when he was again
working at the Palazzo Vecchio, it was in the very limited role
of secretary of the Overseers of the Walls of the City, responsi-
ble for rebuilding and reinforcing Florences defences.
In a letter written shortly before his death he signed himself
Niccol Machiavelli, Historian, Comic Author and Tragic
Author. According to a popular legend, he had a dream while
on his deathbed in which he chose to remain in Hell discussing
politics with the great pagan thinkers and rulers of antiquity
rather than suffering the tedium of Heaven.
Machiavellis Ethics
Machiavelli was not a philosopher in the narrow sense of the
word, or even a particularly systematic thinker, and The Prince,
which was written hastily, is not a rigorous philosophical trea-
tise. Yet because of its many penetrating insights into the
nature of political life in general, and the striking boldness and
originality of Machiavellis thoughts on, for example, the
nature of power or the relationship between ethics and politics,
it has long enjoyed an exalted place in the small canon of great
works in the history of political philosophy.
The popular image of Machiavelli is of a brutal realist who
counseled rulers to cast aside ethics in the ruthless pursuit of
power. This view is not without some basis in The Prince,
which condones murder, deceit and repression as essential
means for rulers to retain their grip on power. Machiavelli says
repeatedly that given that men are ungrateful, fickle, liars and
deceivers, fearful of danger and greedy for gain, a ruler is
often obliged not to be good. So it is vital for statesmen not
only to learn how not to be good but also to know when it is
and when it is not necessary to use this knowledge. History is
littered with failed politicians, statesmen and rulers who lost
power either because they did not appreciate this hard fact of
political life, or were unwilling to act on it when they did. For
Machiavelli, being insufficiently cruel is a sure path to eventual
political defeat which in Renaissance Italy was often the path
to an early grave as well. What was shocking about The Prince
was not the deeds he recommended, which were common
enough in the politics of the day, but the brazen directness with
which Machiavelli advocated expedients such as, for example,
wiping out the entire family of a ruler.
However, Machiavelli does not simply argue that political
expediency requires that ethics be set aside. Rather than being
amoral or immoral, as commonly assumed, Machiavelli was an
ethical consequentialist, who thought that the end justifies the
means. He argued that, in the normally brutal world of real pol-
itics, rulers are often forced to choose between two evils, rather
than between two goods or between a good and an evil. This is
the classic dilemma of political ethics that is often referred to as
the problem of dirty hands, in which politicians are often con-
fronted with situations in which all of the options available to
them are morally repugnant. In such tragic circumstances,
choosing the lesser evil over the greater evil, however cruel and
Niccol Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Graeme Garrard on one of the few writers whose name has become an adjective.
Brief Lives
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 35
repugnant in itself, is the ethically right thing to do. In his Dis-
course on Livy, written shortly after The Prince, Machiavelli states
this problem and his attitude towards it very succinctly: if his
deed accuses him, its consequences excuse him. When the con-
sequences are good, as were the consequences of Romuluss act,
then he will always be excused. Indeed, a hard-nosed ruler
who is willing to commit evil acts (deception, torture, murder,
for example) in order to prevent even greater evil may deserve
moral admiration and respect. The truth of this was made
apparent to Machiavelli when he visited the town of Pistoia in
Tuscany in the opening years of the sixteenth century, which
visit he recounts in The Prince. The town was torn between two
rival families, the Cancellieri and the Panciatichi, and the con-
flict risked escalating into a bloody civil war, so the Florentines
sent Machiavelli in to broker a settlement. When he reported
back to Florence that things had gone too far and that they
should step in forcefully, his advice was ignored for fear that it
would lead to a reputation for brutality. Machiavellis fears
were soon realised when further talks failed and Pistoia degen-
erated into chaos, causing much more violence and destruction
than if the Florentines had taken his advice and intervened
harshly, which would have been the lesser evil. As the philoso-
pher Kai Nielsen has put it, where the only choice is between
evil and evil, it can never be wrong, and it will always be right,
to choose the lesser evil.
Machiavellis Princely Virtues
One of Machiavellis most important innovations in The
Prince is his redefinition of virtue, which he equates with the
qualities necessary for political success including ruthless-
ness, guile, deceit, and a willingness to occasionally commit
acts that would be deemed evil by conventional standards.
The classical ideal of virtue Machiavelli rejected was
expressed by Cicero (106-43 BCE), whose De officiis (On
Duties) was read and copied more frequently during the
Renaissance than any other single work of classical Latin
prose. Cicero argued that rulers are successful only when they
are morally good by which he meant adhering to the four
cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, restraint and courage, as
well as being honest. For Cicero, the belief that self-interest
or expediency conflicts with ethical goodness is not only mis-
taken but deeply corrosive of public life and morals. In
Renaissance Europe this idealistic view of politics was rein-
forced by the Christian belief in divine retribution in the after-
life for the injustices committed in this life, and the cardinal
virtues were supplemented by the three theological virtues of
faith, hope and charity.
Machiavelli believed that the ethical outlooks of both Cicero
and Christianity were rigid and unrealistic, and actually cause
more harm than they prevent. In the imperfect world of poli-
tics, populated as it is by wolves, a sheepish adherence to that
kind of morality would be disastrous. A ruler must be flexible
about the means he employs if he is going to be effective, just as
the virtue of a general on the battlefield is a matter of how well
he adapts to ever-changing circumstances. Machiavelli asserts
in The Prince that a ruler cannot conform to all those rules that
men who are thought good are expected to respect, for he is
often obliged, in order to hold on to power, to break his word,
to be uncharitable, inhumane, and irreligious. So he must be
mentally prepared to act as circumstances and changes in for-
tune require. As I have said, he should do what is right if he
can; but he must be prepared to do what is wrong if necessary.
By doing wrong, he means in the conventional sense of the
word but, in reality, it is right, even obligatory, sometimes to
commit acts that, while morally repellent themselves, are
nonetheless good in their consequences because they prevent
greater evil. That is why Machiavelli calls cruelty well-used
by rulers when it is applied judiciously in order to prevent even
greater cruelty. Such preventive cruelty is the compassion of
princes the cruelty that saves from cruelty.
Machiavellian virtue is harsh and realistic, appropriate for
the kinds of rapacious, predatory creatures who populate the
political world as Machiavelli saw it. It is also masculine, just
as fortune is feminine (lady luck), and usually fairly benign.
However, in Machiavellis hands she becomes a fickle and
malevolent goddess who delights in upsetting the plans of men
and leading them into chaos and misery. However, whereas
Christianity preached resignation to the whims of fortune,
Machiavelli argued that a virtuous ruler could impose his will
on it, at least to some degree. The Prince notoriously depicts
fortune as a woman whom the vir, the man of true manliness,
must forcibly subdue if he is to impose his will on events.
Machiavelli was one of the first writers in the West openly
to state that dirty hands are an unavoidable part of politics, and
to accept the troubling ethical implications of this hard truth
without flinching. Politicians who deny it are not only unreal-
istic, but are likely to lead citizens down a path to greater evil
and misery than is necessary. That is why we ought to think
twice before condemning them when they sanction acts that
may be wrong in a perfect world. A perfect world is not, and
never will be, the world of politics.
DR GRAEME GARRARD 2013
Graeme Garrard is Reader in Politics at Cardiff University.
Brief Lives
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who go after Machiavelli obviously have never held a goddamned office or
tried to run a country. Machiavelli was a diplomat, and he had the experi-
ence to write about what he knew. International politics hasnt changed one
iota since he wrote in the early sixteenth century. Not one iota. Sure, the
players have changed, but the rules of the game are exactly the same. So,
considering that, what the hell is wrong with what he argued? Nixon
asked, counting his next points on his fingers.
He says that leaders should act decisively as soon as they detect a threat; he
says that they should be capable of using cruel and inhumane methods to
maintain the state, which we disagree with now, but back then that was neces-
sary to hold the goddamned places together; and he says that appearances are
whats most important. Machiavelli must have foreseen the importance of televi-
sion! He would have been the first to call [media strategist Roger] Ailes! (p.346).
There is a certain aptness in Nixons advocacy, for 2013
coincidentally also marks the 500th anniversary of Machiavellis
writing The Prince.
Nixons fascination with The Prince does seem quite fitting.
Indeed, during his long political career, from serving in the
U.S. Congress as both a Congressman and Senator, to his eight
years as Vice President under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his
own tortured term in office as President himself, Nixon was
often referred to as Machiavellian, and not in a complimen-
tary way. But it may be that this was inaccurate, for, while he
certainly seemed to have a good grasp of Machiavellis views on
foreign policy, Nixon does not appear to have really under-
stood, or at least did not follow, the main point of The Prince:
how to gain and keep political power. Machiavelli, who himself
fell from power when the Medici family took over the govern-
ment of Florence in 1512 (but who, unlike Nixon, ended up
spending time in prison after his loss), wrote The Prince in part
at least to try to get into the good graces of the Medicis by
giving them sage advice on how to maintain the power that
they had achieved through force. It would have behooved
Nixon to have more carefully read this work before he gained
the Presidency rather than after resigning from that office, for
it is chock-full of practical strategies for holding onto ones
position of power regardless of the forces allied against you.
To be sure, Nixon was certainly good at Machiavellis first
topic, how to gain power, and he had an almost uncanny ability
to pop back up just when you thought he was out for good. As
Jeffrey Franks new book Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Politi-
cal Marriage (Simon and Schuster, 2013) points out, Nixon was
nearly kicked off the ticket as Eisenhowers running mate in
1952 when a secret fund by his supporters was discovered, but
he managed to remain on it by going on television and revealing
his complete financial history (as well as immortalizing his dog
Checkers in the process). After his defeats in the 1960 Presiden-
tial election and the 1962 Gubernatorial election in California,
Food for
Thought
Tim Madigan asks how Machiavellian Richard Nixon really was.
I gave them a sword and they stuck it in and they twisted it with relish. I
guess if Id been in their position, Id have done the same thing.
Richard Nixon to David Frost, 1977
T
he year 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of
Richard Milhous Nixon. Yet, unlike other such anniver-
saries for former U.S. Presidents, this one has not been much
commemorated. No doubt this is due to the fact that, almost
twenty years after his death, Nixon remains a controversial
figure, with a rather tainted legacy (to say the least), being the
only occupant of the Oval Office to have resigned in disgrace.
Nixon spent the two decades after his resignation in an odd
sort of netherworld, trying to gain back public respect by travel-
ing, lecturing and authoring a myriad of books and articles.
(Luckily for him, having been pardoned by his successor Gerald
Ford for any offenses against the United States which he may
have committed during his time in office, he didnt have to hide
out from the sheriff.) One of Nixons last personal assistants,
Monica Crowley, wrote a book describing the final four years of
this strange mans private life, entitled Nixon in Winter: His Final
Revelations about Diplomacy, Watergate, and Life Out of the Arena
(Random House, 1998). In it, she reveals that Nixon was a vora-
cious reader (and that he had a lot of time to devote to reading
since he often had no visitors), and that he dedicated a good deal
of attention to classic philosophers. He read and reread these
works, she writes, usually by sectioning them according to
theme and by underlining important phrases that he could com-
pare with his own political thinking (p.340). Given the fact that
it was Nixons abuses of power that led to his downfall, I found
this particular passage in Crowleys book quite fascinating:
I decided to reread some of Machiavellis stuff because he is by far one of
the more interesting philosophers. As we sat in his office on January 14,
1993, Nixon picked up his briefcase and removed a small volume. The
Prince, he said, waving it in the air. The ends justify the means thats
all most people see in Machiavelli. Ill bet thats pretty much all most
people are taught about him. That line is, of course, central to his argu-
ments, but his stuff is far more complex than that one thing...
In fairness to Machiavelli, I should add that it is debatable
whether or not he ever really wrote (or intimated) the end
justifies the means; but no doubt the former President is cor-
rect in his assertion that that principle is probably what most
people would identify with the author of The Prince. Crowley
goes on to say of Nixon that:
He viewed The Prince both as a handbook for statesmen and as an analytic
work relevant to the modern world. Its lessons clearly resonated with
Nixon, who defended even its morally ambiguous assertions. The critics
July/August 2013
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Philosophy Now 37
his political career seemed over, but he managed to come back
in triumph in the 1968 Presidential election, and won a
resounding landslide re-election in 1972. It was never wise to
consider him down for the count. In one of the most memo-
rable sketches in Saturday Night Lives history, Death to
Watergate, Christopher Lee portrayed a vampire hunter who
attempts to drive a stake through the heart of Richard Nixons
memoirs. But Nixon, in Dan Aykroyds over-the-top perfor-
mance, simply starts writing the book again from scratch. The
chilling message is that Nixon is the beast that would not die.
Hatred, Lies & Audiotape
It was with the second principle of The Prince concerned
with how to keep power that Nixon could have used Machi-
avellis help. For instance, although Machiavelli famously stated
in Chapter XVII that it is better for a Prince to be feared than
to be loved, he clearly held that, all things considered, its best
to be both feared and loved. Nixon, however, was one of the
most unlovable public figures of recent times. Some argued that
even his own dog didnt particularly care for him. His public
persona became so reviled that even before the revelations of
the Watergate scandal, he often spent much of his time hidden
in the White House or his other residences to avoid being
jeered at or booed. It is imperative, Machiavelli stresses over
and over, for a leader to avoid being hated. To be brief, he
writes in Chapter XIX, a Prince has little to fear from conspir-
acies when his subjects are well disposed towards him, but when
they are hostile and hold him in detestation, he has then reason
to fear everything and every one. Hatred provides a strong
motivating force to unite ones enemies against you, and will
likely lead to attempts to overthrow you. So by constantly pro-
voking his old enemies and creating new ones through his
secretiveness and seeming disregard for niceties, Nixon com-
mitted one of Machiavellis cardinal sins, by creating a mass of
critics dedicated to removing him from power.
In Chapter XVIII, Machiavelli advises the Prince to always
be thought of as honest and trustworthy. While of course its
often expedient not to actually be so, you should never encour-
age a reputation for being duplicitous, since then your every
word will be scrutinized, and you will not be generally
respected. The man who became known early in his career as
Tricky Dick, and for whom the admonition Would You Buy
a Used Car from This Man? stuck to him like glue, never
managed this. And one can only imagine what Machiavelli
would have thought of a leader who publically announces I
am not a crook. Talk about damning yourself!
Unable to get people to love him, Nixon isolated himself
and surrounded himself with aides who catered to his darkest
wishes. Beware flatterers and sycophants, Machiavelli warns,
for they will likely only tell you what you want to hear, not
what you need to know. Nixon, instead, spent hours with
Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Colson and Dean, rambling
on about his bigoted views on race, religion, gender and other
matters, as well as discussing illegal operations, expecting
them to fervently agree on every point. As if thats not bad
enough, he surreptitiously taped their conversations, thus
leading to many of them (unlike himself) serving prison sen-
tences because they had unwittingly incriminated themselves
on tape. This was a very un-Machiavellian maneuver. As
Nixon so memorably phrased it in the opening quote, he gave
his enemies the sword they used to destroy him. Surely, above
all else, Machiavelli let alone Roger Ailes would have
advised him to never tape yourself committing a crime, espe-
cially when you dont have ultimate control over those tapes.
Always anticipate what your enemies are likely to do and fore-
stall them, Machiavelli stresses: dont ever give them the upper
hand or a sword, for that matter.
Whenever I teach a course on Political Philosophy I usually
have my friend Richard M. Rosenbaum come to lecture to my
class. Its good, I tell my students, to have someone talk to them
who (unlike me) actually knows what goes on behind the
scenes in the world of politics. A long-time advisor and confi-
dant to such Republican stalwarts as Nelson Rockefeller (for
whom he served as right-hand man and chief political advisor
during his time as Governor of New York and Vice President of
the United States), Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George
H.W. Bush, Rosenbaum has also served in many political capac-
ities and branches of power, including State Supreme Court
Justice, and Chairman of the New York State Republican Party.
He knew Richard Nixon and respected his intelligence, but not
his astuteness.
Dick has written
his own primer
for politicians,
entitled No Room
for Democracy: The
Triumph of Ego
Over Common
Sense (RIT Press,
2008), in which
he gives what he
calls Advice from
an Old Lion
(Who Still Has His Teeth), including this time-honored
maxim: Never write when a word will suffice. Never speak
when a nod will suffice (p.256). He might have added,
NEVER tape yourself doing anything incriminating.
Although Richard Nixon was not a very successful Machi-
avellian, surely there was an associate of his who both under-
stood and put into practice much of the Florentines wisdom.
Henry Kissinger, Nixons National Security Advisor and Sec-
retary of State, not only survived the whirlwind of Watergate,
he emerged even stronger from the debacle of the Nixon res-
ignation, and has remained near the seat of power ever since.
Ninety years old and still going strong, Henry Kissinger, the
astute courtier and diplomat, deserves the appellation the
Modern Machiavelli much more than does his fallen Prince,
Richard Nixon.
DR TIMOTHY J. MADIGAN 2013
Tim Madigan is a U.S. Editor of Philosophy Now. He teaches
Philosophy at St John Fisher College, Rochester, New York.
Tim would like to thank Bob Sansone, who studied Political Philosophy
with him this year, for pointing out the dual anniversaries mentioned above.
Nixon and
Rosenbaum
38 Philosophy Now
l
July/August 2013
Philosophical Zombification
DEAR EDITOR: There is a flaw in Philip
Goffs analysis of the zombie threat to a
science of mind in the last issue. The
flaw comes from thinking within a con-
ceptual model that implies determinism
but then neglects deterministic logic.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
Goffs analysis requires determinism,
because admitting free will rules his
whole argument out of court. Suppose I
had my own philosophical zombie whose
behaviour was identical to my own but
who lacked consciousness, and therefore
lacked free will. Then the effect of my
free will on my behaviour is clearly
nonexistent, as the zombie is behaving
identically without it, and a free will that
has no effect is paradoxical.
So philosophical zombies cannot be
discussed without the assumption of
determinism. But the logic of determin-
ism demands that everything that hap-
pens has to happen, and it is not possible
for anything to happen if it does not
happen. So on this logic, if there are in
fact no philosophical zombies, there is
no possibility of there being philosophi-
cal zombies, otherwise, there theyd be!
In a deterministic universe the project of
physicalism is to explain what is happen-
ing, not to explain what might have hap-
pened but didnt.
In short, Philip Goff is discussing the
implication of alternative possibilities
within a model that logically excludes
alternative possibilities. I believe the
physicalists may proceed with their work
undisheartened.
DAVE MANGNALL
WILMSLOW, CHESHIRE
DEAR EDITOR: Regarding the last issue, I
first encountered zombies while reading
David Chalmers The Character of Con-
sciousness, where, as in Philip Goffs arti-
cle, philosophical zombies (from here on
called zombies) are proposed as a
counter-example to the mind-brain iden-
tity thesis. This famous thesis comes
down to consciousness being nothing
more than some vastly complex interac-
tion of brain-states: having the brain-
states is equivalent to being conscious,
and there is nothing added to the collec-
tion of brain-states that is consciousness.
If zombies are conceivable, goes the
argument, then we can infer that con-
sciousness must be additional to brain-
states, and cannot be reduced to them in
the way heaps of sand can be reduced to
the grains composing them (Chalmers
uses most of the book to make this case).
Chalmers argument is well made, and I
am not a mind-brain identity advocate,
but I simply do not understand the value
of a counter-example whose possibility is
one of the very things at issue in the the-
sis being refuted. The mind-brain iden-
tity theorist must surely hold that if there
is a duplicate me who has all my brain-
states (duplicating mine moment by
moment), then that subject will actually
be conscious, just as I am. His propensity
to report consciousness will not be an
empty behavior, but indicative of real
consciousness: every bit as real as mine.
Whether this would be the case or not is
the very issue in question. The mind-brain
identity view is precisely the view that zombie
exact duplicates are not conceivable: if the
lights are on, somebody will, of necessity,
be home. For the mind-brain identity
advocate, the zombie counter-example
can have no more force on our world
than the conceivability of a green swan
would have to a proposition about the
actual color of swans.
MATTHEW RAPAPORT, BY EMAIL
DEAR EDITOR: Call me a physicalist if
you like, but Im struggling to imagine
how a philosophical zombie can use its
five senses to negotiate the world around
it just as I do, yet lack consciousness.
How can it use its sense of sight yet not
have the sensation of seeing, use its sense
of taste yet not taste the brains, etc?
Using the senses without sensation would
appear to be a logical impossibility. Hav-
ing sensations without consciousness also
seems to be impossible, unless there is
some kind of zombie use of the five
senses which does lack sensation. Perhaps
with his knowledge of zombies Dr Goff
could throw some light on this. How-
ever, if the philosophical zombie lacks
the five senses, then it is not an exact
replica of me, even if it mimics my
behaviour perfectly. If the criterion for
being a philosophical zombie is that it
resembles me even down to having
senses, then it must have consciousness,
and so it ceases to be a zombie.
SHEILA LOCKHART, INVERNESS
A Theory of Animal Justice
DEAR EDITOR: I enjoyed Ziyad Hayatlis
witty review of John Rawlss A Theory of
Justice: The Musical! in issue 96, alarmed
though I was to see Nozick and Rand
sharing a dance. Another thing that
struck me was the description of Rawls
veil of ignorance, behind which individ-
uals did not know who they would be
(male or female, an animal, someone
poor, part of the upper class, etc)
(emphasis mine). A major problem with
Rawls work is that non-human animals
are noticeably absent from his account.
Martha Nussbaums impressive Frontiers
of Justice (2007) considers this problem
at length, attempting to address three
issues that create difficulties for Rawl-
sian philosophy disability, nationality,
and species membership. I suspect that
she will not have the last word on the
matter, and that we will see non-
humans considered in discussions of
political justice more and more in years
to come. So I suspect Rawls work will
be ever more readily challenged for its
apparent failure.
JOSH MILBURN, LANCASTER
Afflicted by Science
DEAR EDITOR: Once a scientist, always
a scientist seems to be an affliction I
suffer from. Although I have recently
gained a number of postgraduate quali-
When inspiration strikes, dont bottle it up!
Write to me at: Philosophy Now
43a Jerningham Road London SE14 5NQ, U.K.
or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
Letters
July/August 2013
l
Philosophy Now 39
fications in Philosophy, it seems that my
initial training as a biochemist has
embedded a pragmatism that ruins my
ability to think more philosophically. A
great recent example came whilst reading
Peter Bensons article The Ontology of
Photography in Issue 95. I found myself
intrigued and fascinated as I pondering
the difference between analogue and dig-
ital pictures before my scientist head
kicked in. More specifically the part of
me that processes X-ray diffraction
images collected on CCD detectors.
Here I regularly find myself analyzing
the distribution of pixels in order to dis-
tinguish between background levels and
the intensity peaks that represent my
data. As soon as you start performing
analyses at this level, you quickly dis-
cover distributions of pixels in real digi-
tal images that would be extremely diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to fake, even with
the best Photoshop skills. So although
Peter Benson may not be able to distin-
guish a good fake digital photograph
from a real one with his eyes, Im pretty
convinced I could distinguish it rather
easily using a couple of histograms.
Here we have what I perceive to be a
problem with philosophy, especially onto-
logical arguments. Philosophers come up
with some great ideas that catch the imag-
ination; however, a weekend with a sci-
ence textbook often seems to deflate such
arguments rather depressingly. Its one of
the reasons I have moved into ethics,
because here at least philosophical think-
ing can occupy its own space without
making claims that can be ruined by
some simple mathematics or inconve-
nient observations that everyone except
the philosophers seems to know about.
SIMON KOLSTOE, BOTLEY
DEAR EDITOR: I would like to thank
Anthony Moore (letters, Issue 96) for his
response to my article on photography in
Issue 95. He puts his finger on the central
question, which is whether the difference
between analogue and digital photogra-
phy is one of degree (as he believes) or of
kind (as I contend). However, I would
like to emphasize that my argument is
not primarily based on any claim that
analogue images are less malleable than
digital, nor that they represent reality
more precisely. My concern is with the
nature of the relation (both causal and
ontological) between reality and its
images. An analogue photograph is pro-
duced by irreversible chemical changes in
the film emulsion, caused by the light
reflected from the object. A digital image,
on the other hand, is a matrix of numeri-
cal values for colour and brightness at a
large array of points. These may have
been accurately measured by a digital
camera, but could equally have been set
blind by a computer program. My claim
is that this matrix of numbers, once
recorded and stored, is cut off from its
origin and retains no trace of its cause.
Finally, it is ironic that Mr Moore should
draw attention to the dangers of binary
either/or thinking. Digitalisation per-
forms exactly such a reduction of every-
thing to binary, coding the whole world
as zeros and ones.
PETER BENSON, LONDON
DEAR EDITOR: I am astounded at some
of the views expressed by Pamela Irvin
Lazorko in her article Science and Non-
Science, published in your last issue,
containing highly critical comments
against numerous people who have a
God-given gift of being able to gen-
uinely assist others by means of clairvoy-
ance and/or astrology. Her deductions
are simply predicated on personal state-
ments that there can be no independent
test of their validity and the vagueness
of predictions avoids falsification pre-
cisely because they are ambiguous. I
suggest that her personal experiences in
these fields have been extremely limited
and that she should now, with an open
mind, seek wider knowledge and direct
participation in the presence of experts,
in order that she may test validity and
ambiguity in a reasoned manner. I have
no doubt that her views are likely to
change considerably.
MICHAEL HARRIS, EASTBOURNE
Deceived About Deception
DEAR EDITOR: In Lying to Mother
Teresa (Philosophy Now, Issue 95), Derek
Harrison convinces himself that his
diplomatic lie to Mother Teresa
harmed no one and was an act of good
will that may have achieved some benefit
in the connectivity it provided for her. I
am no Kantian on the issue of lying, but
why gratuitously lie when nothing of
great moment depends on it? This is not
a case like lying to Nazi soldiers as to the
whereabouts of Anne Frank. On balance,
the consequences may have been all to
the good, as Harrison suggests; never-
theless, the lie treats Mother Teresa as an
object of deceit and (very slight) manipu-
lation, rather than as a person deserving
an honest exchange that reflects the
respect due a rational and autonomous
soul. I suspect a simple, forthright state-
ment (e.g., Im very glad for the audi-
ence, but I really dont know what to say
to you!) would have elicited a more
meaningful exchange.
DON E. SCHEID,
ARLINGTON, MINNESOTA
Pragmatism In Practice
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 95, Tibor Machan
makes an unconvincing argument about
the impracticality of pragmatism. Gener-
ally, it is in the larger sphere of human
affairs that pragmatism is practical, such as
in open societies or democracies. Those
pragmatic institutions, where long held
principles dont necessarily have to be
abandoned but can coexist, are hard to
argue against. Machan focuses on ethical
pragmatism, saying that in practise it
wouldnt work. In doing so he is tossing
out the enhancing qualities of pragma-
tism, like giving a second chance, or not
destroying someone for the sake of a sin-
gle indiscretion. In former times one
would have been thrown in jail for life, on
principle, for stealing a loaf of bread to
feed a family, or have had ones life
destroyed by a foolish sexual encounter.
Pragmatism takes into account extenuat-
ing circumstances. And because pragma-
tism deals with dilemmas and contradic-
tions, it opens up issues for debate. The
alternative attitude shuts discussion down.
Machan didnt consider one ethical
issue that is currently receiving the prag-
matic treatment and is responding well
gay rights and same-sex marriage. Amer-
ica for one has become more pragmatic
and open about gay issues. This has not
necessarily come from a moral shift or an
abandonment of core values: it has come
from a greater sense of fairness and inclu-
sion. More importantly, this pragmatism
was born of economic sense. Gays and les-
bians are good for business: they are cre-
ative, responsible, and make ideal con-
sumers. Data also shows that people who
live together in a union and share benefits
as a couple (which same-sex marriages
would extend) are healthier and less of a
burden on the rest of society. This eco-
nomic argument may sounds crass, but it
does make pragmatic sense.
DAVID AIRTH, TORONTO
Letters
DEAR EDITOR: If Pragmatism is imprac-
tical, as argued by Tibor Machan in issue
95, what about the evidence of evolu-
tion? This has worked for thousands of
millions of years, developing practical
solutions without rules, and so Pragmati-
cally. Or have I missed something?
DR MARTIN WHEATMAN, BY EMAIL
DEAR EDITOR: I was disappointed in
Impractical Pragmatism, Issue 95. It is
astonishing to me this made it into your
publication. That pragmatism means
one thing to the lay public, and another
to (most) philosophers, is well known,
and pretty basic. But theres no compre-
hension of this difference in Impractical
Pragmatism, and it makes his whole
argument implausible. Is there anyone in
their right mind who thinks William
James would be stumped if presented
with this critique of Pragmatism? James
would be astonished at the notion that
he, as a pragmatist, had to deny the value
of basic principals and axioms! Absurd.
Further, that Pragmatism is not a tool
for all uses was a point made by William
James. But we dont say a hammer is not
of value because it fails as a saw.
DAVID WRIGHT, SACTO, CA
Heidegger Cant Hide
DEAR EDITOR: Sir Alistair MacFarlanes
Brief Life of Martin Heidegger (issue 94)
is informative, but contains important
errors of historical fact.
Sir Alistair states that Heidegger
joined the Nazi Party to allow him to be
put forward for the rectorship of the
University of Freiburg. This suggests
that Heidegger was reluctant to join the
Party and did so only to become rector.
In fact, Heidegger became rector and, in
a grand public ceremony, joined the
Nazi Party shortly thereafter. The point
is that Heidegger was a vociferous sup-
porter of Hitler and National Socialism
before he became rector, or even joined
the Party. Indeed, the inscription under
his official rectorial portrait helpfully
supplies the reason for his election: Im
Zuge der allgemeinen Gleichschaltung [As
part of the general bringing into line].
The Gleichschaltung was a movement to
bring all state institutions into line with
the requirements and ethos of National
Socialism, and Heidegger was among its
most enthusiastic prosecutors. Neither
did Heidegger resign as rector because he
refused to support the removal of two
anti-Nazi deans as Sir Alistair asserts. In
fact, Heidegger quit over the fallout
from his appointment of Erik Wolf as
Dean of the Faculty of Law. Wolf, a rad-
ical Nazi, was a disciple and friend of
Heideggers. Wolfs appointment as
Dean and his subsequent political
activism were opposed by other faculty
members. The faculty opposition, and
the alarm this caused within the local
Karlsruhe government, caused Heideg-
ger to resign. In other words, Heidegger
resigned because the university was not
radical enough and was resisting his
enforcement of the Gleichschaltung.
Sir Alistair states that by autumn 1944
Heidegger had fallen so far from favour
with the Nazi hierarchy that he was
humiliatingly drafted into the Volkssturm
(a sort of Nazi Home Guard)... This
also is misleading. In October 1944,
Hitler ordered the call-up of all men
aged between 16 and 60 who were capa-
ble of physical labour. Heidegger was
drafted along with myriad others. Unlike
the others, however, a letter for Heideg-
gers release from these duties was sent
on his behalf by Eugen Fischer, Ger-
manys leading eugenicist. Further, it is
worth noting that as late as mid-1943,
Heidegger remained so much in favour
with the hierarchy that the Ministry of
Education sanctioned a delivery of paper
to publish some of his lectures, and later
that year, even authorised him to travel
to Strasbourg on vacation.
Sir Alistair states about Heideggers
involvement with Nazism that he
realised he had made a terrible choice
[and] tried to recover from the conse-
quences. This is nonsense. In May 1934
shortly after Heideggers resignation as
rector the Commission for the Philoso-
phy of Law was established by Hans
Frank. Members of the commission were
chosen by Frank and included Heideg-
ger, Julius Streicher and Alfred Rosen-
berg. Frank, Streicher and Rosenberg
were all leading Nazis, and all were exe-
cuted in 1946 for war crimes. Heidegger
loathed Streicher, as did many Nazis, but
he remained a member of the commis-
sion until at least 1936. It is further
worth noting that Heidegger remained a
member of the Party after promulgation
of the Nuremberg Laws of September
and November 1935. These laws institu-
tionalised antisemitism and effected the
complete disenfranchisement of Jews
from German citizenship. In summary,
then, Heidegger was still consorting with
leading Nazis three years after his elec-
tion as rector of Freiburg University and
even after promulgation of the Nurem-
berg Laws. When these facts are set
alongside Heideggers long-term party
membership, his refusal to recant his
Nazism, and his silence over the Holo-
caust, it is clear that Heidegger was a rad-
ical Nazi, not a reluctant one.
DAVID CLARKE, HOBART, TASMANIA
Hi Literacy
DEAR EDITOR: I was quite pleased to read,
I Re-Read, Therefore I Understand by
Kimberly Blessing in Issue 94. As I am not
a student of philosophy, I was pleased to
find that within Descartes Principles of
Philosophy the steps one should take when
reading philosophy are exactly what I have
been doing: To read philosophy articles,
published journals and philosophers writ-
ings over and over until they become
clear. Little did I know I was following
the advice of such a great philosopher as
Descartes. Seemed like common sense to
me. Descartes approach to reaching
everyone has indeed reached me. If I can
eventually get it, there is, without doubt,
hope for everyone.
The author of this article rightly says
Its not an easy, passive activity. I have
taken up reading philosophy because it is
difficult. Somehow it helps organize my
brain; and then I apply this better focus
to all sorts of reading, accomplished
through extreme concentration. And I
have a whole new vocabulary and a list of
philosophers primary texts I enjoy
reading. Philosophy Now has turned out to
be my personal tutorial.
CHERYL ANDERSON, KENILWORTH, IL
Low Literacy
DEAR EDITOR: Reading Thomas Rod-
hams views on Jane Austens ethics in
Issue 94 was mostly interesting. I did
however cavil at his view that Austen
doesnt meet contemporary literary
standards as her characters do not have
the subtle psychological realism of mod-
ern novelists. If this were true, neither
probably do those of Tolstoy or Virginia
Woolf. Its a familiar modern moan, that
only todays standards have real value,
often translated as the Simpsons are
more reflective of, and so more relevant
to modern life, than Shakespeare. But
even more off the mark is Rodhams
belief that plot in real/modern novels is
40 Philosophy Now
l
July/August 2013
Letters
driven by the characters. Even if true in
some modern novels, this omits one of
the cornerstones of real life, namely, the
vagaries of chance that even fully
expressed modern characters must some-
times put up with, even when they think
they are driving the plot forward.
HOWARD DEWHIRST,
BURLEIGH HEADS, AUSTRALIA
Tallis Through The Looking Glass
DEAR EDITOR: As Raymond Tallis dis-
cusses in Draining the River and Quiv-
ering the Arrow, Issue 95, in order to
measure the flow of time we need some-
thing not caught up in that flow. The
paradox is that to measure time, we need
a device outside of time itself. Clocks are
our attempt to achieve this, and they
work using cyclical processes (the cycle
of the planets, mechanical movements of
pendulums, or the oscillations of atoms)
whose repetitions are largely unaffected
by the everyday flux of events.
If we now consider our subjective
experience of time, we also need a com-
ponent of our being unchanged by the
flux of events processed by our minds. I
only perceive the flow of time because I
am not part of it. Or, what T.S. Eliot
describes as the still point of the turning
world is the essential rock of psycholog-
ical stability about which the flux of
events ebb and flow. This timeless being
is not of course eternal, since eventually
we are overwhelmed by the flux. How-
ever, while it is present, we have this sta-
ble timeless (and using similar argu-
ments, spaceless) entity I call myself.
When the passage of time is derived
from this perspective, the philosophical
errors causing the issues described by
Tallis are exposed. They have occurred
because we have misplaced the actual
source of time to an object called a clock,
when the real source is me. Clock time
now takes its subservient place as a pro-
jection of our interior timeless state onto
the temporal world. The practical advan-
tage of clocks is we can all coordinate our
actions for our mutual benefit. The
philosophical error occurs when we try
to derive our subjective experience of
time from what that is merely a socially
useful projection of that experience.
DR STEVE BREWER, ST IVES, CORNWALL
DEAR EDITOR: Regarding Raymond
Talliss column on time in Issue 95:
Time is a notion conceived from our
observations of changes of condition:
lightning, rain, puddles evaporating, sun-
rise a host of different forms. Some
events pendulums, springs, atomic
vibrations we assume repeat invariably.
This fact provides us with the means to
compare all types of changes in units
accurately standardised to the distance
light travels in them, although they
themselves derive from the nearly-regular
Earth cycles of rotation and orbit.
We detect our surroundings using
sensory information. A clock bell chimes
across the meadow but is heard signifi-
cantly after the hammer strikes. The fur-
ther away, the more delay. Visually, this
applies to the clock face also, in nanosec-
onds. We each have a unique Tempo-
rama surrounding us: the further we look,
the longer ago. What we view now is a
stream of light-data about events else-
where, providing no certain knowledge of
the when of any event, unless we know
how far away it occurred.
Astronauts radio messages from the
Moon took just over a second to reach
Earth: reception of our replies was simi-
larly delayed. Doesnt such symmetry
suggest a common Now for both Earth
and Moon? Doesnt this also imply a
Cosmos-wide Now? And if far-off galax-
ies shine anciently from their positions at
the time their light we now see set out, in
a Cosmic Now, what is happening to
them Now (and where)?
ARTHUR MORRIS, EASTBOURNE
DEAR EDITOR: I would like to respond to
the article Raymond Tallis wrote on
Damien Hirst in Issue 93. I can under-
stand his frustration with Hirsts art, and
with the market such art is benefiting
from. However, it looks to me as if Tallis
misses the most important point which is
that fine art, as indeed literature, music,
and any other form of expression, is the
child of its culture. Thus in our History of
Visual Culture we say that in the period
from the end of the Roman Empire to the
early Renaissance, for instance, human
beings did not lose the ability to do art like
the Greeks or the Romans; rather they
were not concerned in making art like
that, as they were under different cultural
influences. However, in Renaissance times
Classical culture re-emerged, for various
cultural reasons.
Similarly, to me the art of today
should be analysed as being a product of
the culture of today. Ours is a culture
dictated, one might say, by consumerism
in general. That is what Hirsts art/phe-
nomena represents. In particular, the
cultural trends of today (and perhaps of
any era) are sponsored and so imposed
by the wealthy, who, having plenty of
money, can decide what goes on paper,
in books, into exhibitions, on TV, and so
on. This happens while those who do not
have money and time at their disposal
watch opportunities to develop their tal-
ent disappear behind their day-to-day
jobs, behind their struggle to survive. In
fact, the latter will have few possibilities
to do things against a culture that doesnt
represent them properly. But I guess that
everybody reading this would agree that
not everyone who writes best-selling
books, for instance, are the best artists in
their field. At the same time, not all
those who do not influence culture,
because of not having enough money
and/or time, lack the talent to make good
art. In fact their ideas may be better than
those promoted by the rich. This is the
paradox of human culture: sometimes
those who have the teeth do not have the
bread, and vice versa. But hey, perhaps
this is just the sad reality: the wealthy are
the ones who will impose culture, unless
one is ready to fight cultural battles with
little support. So I cannot really under-
stand why Tallis is puzzled by Hirsts
success, when such an artist clearly
adapts to, and is sponsored by, the whim-
driven rich. Its all part of the cultural
milieu of our times.
FABIO COPPONI, LONDON
More Fallacies
DEAR EDITOR: Oscar Pearsons letter on
the moral responsibility of individual
versus collective carbon emissions in
Issue 95 begs correction. His argument is
a variation of the fallacy of composition.
This fallacy is inferring that, since an
individual component on its own is not a
problem, then it isnt part of a problem
when all components are added together.
Kudos to Pearson for pointing out an
environmental obstacle invisible to
BBCs Total Wipeout producers in award-
ing him a free trans-Atlantic trip. But
will St Peter deduct points for his accept-
ing the trip, leaving him to ponder eter-
nally the harm to future generations of
carbon dioxides long tail, to which tail
he has contributed by flying, even if his
contribution is insignificant?
PETER SHEPHERD, TORONTO
July/August 2013
l
Philosophy Now 41
Letters
42 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
I
n One Dimensional Man (1964) and
Repressive Tolerance (1965), German
philosopher and political theorist
Herbert Marcuse claimed that developing
technology institutes new, more effective,
and more pleasant
forms of social
control and
social cohe-
sion,
making
totali-
tarian
control
through
terrorisa-
tion unnec-
essary.
Rather,
advanced
industrial society
creates false needs
which integrate
individuals into the existing system of
production and consumption via mass
media, advertising, and industrial manage-
ment. 15 Million Merits, the second
episode of British TV series Black Mirror
(Channel 4, 2011), co-written by Charlie
Brooker and Konnie Huq, presents a
perfect platform for exploring some of
Marcuses most prophetic observations.
Sex and the System
The tragic hero of this episode is Bing,
a man whose very name is an onomatopoeia
for something popping up on a screen.
Bing inhabits a dystopic future (or allegor-
ical present?) in which life has literally
been reduced to a vicious cycle of mean-
ingless drudgery, as the alienated masses
churn out their days on exercise bikes
which power the ubiquitous flat screens
whose contents are both products of this
endless labor and rewards for it. The
stream of images invades even the private
lives of Bing and his fellow drones, filling
the walls of their tiny sleeping compart-
ments. Similarly, Marcuse observed that
the modern apparatus of production and
distribution creates a total system that
obliterates the opposition between private
and public existence, and between indi-
vidual and social needs. It shapes the entire
universe of discourse and action, of intel-
lectual and material culture.
To make matters worse, in Black
Mirror, Bings watching is rewarded in
direct proportion to the exploitative insidi-
ousness of the content viewed. Not
watching pornography incurs penalties.
Gaming which involves obscene virtual
violence against the yellow-clad working
class is another popular way to earn
points. Marcuse argued that pornography
is a tool in the dominant economic
systems arsenal of repression, allowing
people a release mechanism for their frus-
tration with the system, thereby
preventing them from directing their
pent-up energies against it. It also reduces
sexuality to another commodity a
product that can be bought and sold.
Marcuse contrasted the desublimation
offered by sexual release through pornog-
raphy to Freuds sublimation. For Freud, in
for example Civilization and its Discontents
(1930), civilized society requires the indi-
vidual to sublimate his or her most basic
sexual urges repress them by channeling
them into socially acceptable romantic or
elevated forms. By contrast, Marcuse
argues that pornographic desublimation
pulls the instincts down and directs them
towards an artificial and dehumanized satis-
faction, fostering a kind of sexu-
ality that is
completely
detached
from
feelings of love or intimacy (see Herbert
Marcuses critique of happy conscious-
ness and consumer society, Janske
Hermens, 2009, p.7, from the net). Sexu-
ality has been reduced to a commodity
where it is for sale. It is controllable, and it
functions as an instrument to suppress
possible revolt against the establishment. In
this way pornography supplies the needs of
the dominant system.
Marcuse recognized that sublimated
forms of traditional sexuality like marriage
were repressive, in that property was passed
through male heirs, and marriage provided
free domestic labour and sexual release for
men, ensuring that they had just enough
comfort to remain productive, while
keeping women economically dependent
and confined to conventionally feminine
roles such as childcare and housework. But
he also believed that the apparently greater
liberty offered by desublimated forms of
sexual expression like pornography worked
for rather than against the status quo of
general repression: now sex is integrated
into all aspects of life and is thus made
more susceptible to being an instrument of
control. Moreover, it is gratifying to the
individuals being managed in this way,
since it is fun, which ensures their volun-
tary compliance, and creates a harmony
between the individuals needs and socially-
required desires and aspirations (see One
Dimensional Man: Studies in the
Ideology of the Advanced
Industrial Society,
1964, p.75).
Thus
Television
Terri Murray illustrates Marcuses critique of
technologised society using an episode of the
British TV series Black Mirror.
The
entertainment
industry
Herbert Marcuse
(1898-1979)
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Philosophy Now 43
this system of sexual freedom incorporates
sex into the system of commodity produc-
tion and exchange in a way which makes us
happy to submit and unlikely to protest.
Momentary Reality
Bing manages to avoid the more abusive
forms of controlled release for his sexual
and aggressive urges, and finally accumu-
lates a healthy 15,000,000 merits for his
hours of mind-numbing, soul-destroying
screen pedalling. Then one day his toil is
suddenly interrupted by something that
seems to transcend the system. Bing hears
the voice of fellow drone, Abi, beautifully
singing to herself in the unisex toilets at
work. Starved of all real human interaction,
Bing wants nothing more than to give his
15,000,000 merits to Abi so that she can
achieve the only ambition conceivable
within this totalitarian technocracy appear
on Hot Shots, an X-Factor-like talent show.
The lyrics of the song she sings on Hot
Shots foreshadow her fate. She sings, You
can blame me, try to shame me, and still Ill
care for you. You can run around, even put
me down, still Ill be there for you. The
judges recognize Abis talent but only as
more fodder for their oppressive machine.
They politely explain to Abi that she has
only one chance to make it she can only
save herself from the endless hamster wheel
by transforming herself into a hyper-sexual-
ized object. In a sinister twist, the judges
turn her lyrics back on her and do try to
shame Abi by pointing out that the millions
of consumers out there who are pedalling in
order to watch her sing deserve to have the
chance for success that only she has been
offered. Abis only reasonable option is to
submit to their desires.
As Marcuse points out, in advanced
industrial society the individual reproduces
and so perpetuates the controls exercised
by her society. Moreover, the dominant
system no longer needs to introject its
values into the individual from without,
since that implies the existence of an inner
dimension or conscience apart from, and
antagonistic to, the external pressures of
public opinion and behaviour. Today,
however, this private space has been
invaded and eroded through technology.
Advanced industrial society silences and
reconciles the opposition, transforming
reason into submission. The result is
mimesis: an immediate identification of the
individual with her society. And so Abi is
indeed still there for them but this
means for the system whose all-pervasive
artificiality had made her voice stand out
as something real. Now her entire identity
has been occupied and formed from within
the dominant system, with its constant
advertisements and manufactured shared
desires and beliefs. Her inner dimension
has been eradicated, replaced by the social
needs and public uses for her body and
mind. Soon Bing is forced to watch Abis
semi-nude body filling the screens in
pornographic poses while her voice is all
but silenced.
The Recuperation of Rage
Bing is the only person who can see how
perverted it all is. He plots his revenge,
patiently churning out another 15,000,000
merits to buy his way onto Hot Shots in
order to confront the panel of judges. Once
on stage during the live broadcast, he holds
a shard of glass to his own neck and begins
to rage against the machine, telling the
judges, All you see is not people, just
fodder fake fodder! Here Charlie
Brooker is evidently putting his own
protests about society on Bings lips: all we
know anymore is fake fodder, and the only
kinds of dreams we have are consumer
dreams buying a new app for our own
screen, for example. We also are becoming
too numb for anything free and real and
beautiful. Bing tells the judges, When you
find any wonder whatsoever you dole it out
in meager portions, where its augmented
and packaged and pumped through ten
thousand pre-assigned filters, til its nothing
more than a meaningless series of lights,
while we ride, day-in and day-out. Going
where? Powering what? All tiny cells and
tiny screens and bigger cells and bigger
screens and f**k you! F**k you for sitting
there and slowly making things worse!
After a pregnant pause, the Simon
Cowell-like Judge Hope (Rupert Everett)
delivers his solemn verdict. That was, he
says, without a doubt... the most heartfelt
thing Ive seen on this stage since Hot Shots
began. The crowd cheers. Bing, some-
what bewildered by this tolerance, is being
softened up for integration into the domi-
nant order of things. His anger, which
simultaneously expresses the repressed
anger of viewers and provides a nice, safe,
commercially-viable medium for its
catharsis, will be given a slot on one of
Judge Hopes streams. As such, his anger
will be managed, controlled and trans-
formed into a commodity. Bings rejection
of the system fits perfectly into the supply-
and-demand economy, and any threat it
might pose is absorbed into the dominant
system. Bings revolt is thus put to work
for the Establishment, and its popular
appeal will produce revenues to sustain it.
After all, as the Judge explains, Authen-
ticity is in woefully short supply.
In Repressive Tolerance (1964), Marcuse
explained that what is proclaimed as toler-
ance is often merely serving the cause of
oppression. New language and ideas may
be spoken and heard, but they are immedi-
ately evaluated in terms of public language
a language that has determined before-
hand the direction in which thought-
Television
Bing watching
Abi gyrate
processes will move. Bings attempts to
persuade viewers to an opposing viewpoint
is bound to fail because the avenues are
closed to ideas other than the established
ones. As Judge Hope explains to Bing,
people dont fully comprehend what it is
that Bing is saying about the whole situa-
tion, they just feel it; and since it feels
good, its the perfect product to sell back to
the people not as a danger to the estab-
lished order, but as yet more fuel for its
preservation. Thus the satisfaction of the
individuals need for protest has been
perfectly incorporated into the system that
keeps them oppressed.
The commercial and political method
used, Marcuse says, is to unify opposites
into a single dimension. So the media of
the established order exhibit anything that
contradicts that order as a token of its
truth, closing down any discourse that is
not on its own terms. The efficacy of the
system, says Marcuse, is that it blunts the
individuals recognition that it broadcasts
no facts that communicate its repressive
power. The concept of alienation seems to
become questionable when the individuals
identify themselves with the existence
which is imposed upon them he writes in
Repressive Tolerance.
Freedom is Control
Some might protest that surely this is
scaremongering that vastly overestimates
the indoctrinating power of the media.
Marcuse would say that this objection
misses the point. The mass distribution of
radio and television and the centralization
of their control is not the beginning of the
indoctrination: rather, it expresses and
perpetuates power relationships and class
distinctions that already exist only it
makes them invisible by flattening out the
conflicts that exist between satisfied and
unsatisfied needs. If everyone reads the
same newspapers, watches the same TV
programs and tweets in the same social
networks, this is not indicative of the eradi-
cation of class differences, but of the extent
to which the individual has been persuaded
to identify the needs of the technologised
establishment as his own. The technical
controls appear to be the very embodiment
of Reason for the benefit of all social
groups and interests, to such an extent that
all non-compliance seems irrational,
neurotic or impotent.
In 1948, the behavioural psychologist
B.F. Skinner published a sci-fi novel called
Walden Two, which envisages a socially-
engineered society in which systematically
altering environmental variables generates
unfree, but happy, citizens. The character
Frazie describes the determinants of human
behaviour to Castle, who foolishly believes
free will still exists. He says Castles
mistake is to imagine that physical
restraint, handcuffs, iron bars and force
exhaust the means of controlling human
behaviour. Force or threat is a poor way of
controlling human behaviour, he explains,
since the controllee knows he is being
coerced and doesnt feel free, therefore he is
not loyal to his masters. Frazie further
explains that positive reinforcement exerts
a subtler and more powerful control over
the individual. When an individual behaves
as the masters want him to behave, the
masters allow him to create a situation he
likes, or remove one he doesnt like. This
way the controllee feels as though he is
doing exactly what he wants to do. And
since the masters control the motives, the
desires, the wishes of citizens, although
theyre more controlled than ever before,
the controlled nevertheless feel free. This
being so, the question of their freedom
never arises. They dont revolt against the
very things that make them act the way
they do. They do not even have a vocabu-
lary of freedom concerning what they want
to do, since men only feel unfree when they
are up against police and jails. Frazie says,
What is emerging at this critical stage in
the evolution of society is a behavioural and
cultural technology based on positive rein-
forcement alone. Since positive reinforce-
ment (reward) works and the negative rein-
forcement (punishment) of the past doesnt,
explains Frazie, cultural design is now more
successful than ever before.
Charlie Brooker, who is a newspaper
columnist as well as a scriptwriter, has
important things to say about how tech-
nology shapes the universe of human
discourse and action how it institutes
new, more effective, and ever-more-
pleasing forms of social control. The title
of the series is a reference to blank TV and
computer screens. But Brookers black
mirror cannot fully reflect back to us the
terrifying image of what we have become
and how helpless we are against the totali-
tarian media manipulation of our needs and
desires by vested interests. This is because
the institutions he critiques have already
assimilated his message. In fact, what is so
remarkable (and depressing) about Black
Mirror is that these hour-long television
episodes constantly reference their own
impotence and obsolescence: they are
about how the system absorbs the very
energies that oppose it, eviscerating and
precluding any intelligent rejection, or
even widespread recognition, of its mind-
numbing, sense-deadening cycle of oppres-
sion. But Black Mirrors inability to tran-
scend the dominant industrial forces to
which he calls our attention is not some
failure on Brookers part. On the contrary,
his genius is to show us why the mirror he
holds up to our society cannot reflect
anything. The very fact that his project is
just another TV show, assimilated as
another enjoyable escapist product that we
want to consume another entertaining,
pleasant instrument of our systematic
repression and pacification makes his
mirror absorb all the light it might other-
wise shed on our reality.
DR TERRI MURRAY 2013
Terri Murray is a philosopher, author and
nerd. She has taught philosophy and film
studies at Hampstead College of Fine Arts in
London since 2002.
44 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
Bing and Abi reflect on
their situation
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Philosophy Now 45 Book Reviews

ANTIFRAGILE: THINGS THAT
Gain from Disorder (2012),
alongside Fooled by Ran-
domness: The Hidden Role of
Chance in Life and in the Markets (2005) and
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly
Improbable (2007) completes Nassim
Nicholas Talebs trilogy on disorder.
Whereas Fooled by Randomness focused on
our underestimation of chance, and The
Black Swan on rare events and our failure to
predict them, the focus of Antifragile is on
things that gain from the disorder cluster,
which includes elements such as random-
ness, volatility, uncertainty, disturbances,
and stressors in other words, antifragile
things are things that positively benefit
from being subject to a little chaos.
One of Talebs starting arguments here
is the idea that we live in a world which, due
to its complexity, not only we do not under-
stand, but could not possibly hope to
understand. Rather than despair at this
truth, Taleb proposes that we accept, love,
and learn to thrive in it: amor fati. This sen-
timent is captured in the Prologue, How to
Love the Wind, where one reads the rous-
ing poetic call: Wind extinguishes a candle
and energizes fire. Likewise with random-
ness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use
them, not hide from them. You want to be
the fire and wish for the wind. (p.3). This
demand for the revaluation of the random-
ness of life is based on his classification of
things into three categories: Fragile, Robust
and Antifragile. Fragile is what is harmed by
exposure to disturbances; robust is what
remains the same; and antifragile (a neolo-
gism), as mentioned, is what benefits from
an exposure to disruption. The legendary
Damocles, who dined with a sword over his
head hanging by a single thread of hair,
represents the ultimate fragile figure any
minute could have meant his death. The
mythological Phoenix, who was reborn
from his ashes, is depicted as a robust
figure, remaining the same through each
cataclysm. Hydra, the many-headed serpent
who grew two heads to replace every one
that was cut off by Hercules, is seen as the
ultimate antifragile creature, gaining
Books
Antifragile, by
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Eleni Panagiotarakou benefits from Nassim Nicholas
Talebs attack on the follies of over-cautiousness, while
Richard Baron inspects different ideas of the self.
tradition. This is anathema for Taleb
because not only does he reject the Enlight-
enment premise that the world is knowable
(much less malleable according to human
desires), he is also sympathetic to ancestral
traditions and religions on account of their
useful heuristics [rules of thumb] and social
codes heuristics and social codes, one
should add, that often elude our under-
standing. An example of this validation of
the enigmatic is found in the section Via
Negativa. After disparaging three-times-a-
day meal regimes, Taleb points out that
recent medical studies hailing the beneficial
effects of caloric restriction and intermittent
fasting for longevity and protection against
diseases, are validating ancient religious
fasting interdicts (p.361). Talebs fondness
for complex ancestral heuristics mirrors that
of Michael Oakeshott, for whom, as Taleb
says, traditions provide an aggregation of
filtered collective knowledge (p.258).
Ironically, Talebs caustic critique of the
Enlightenment with its over-focus on ratio-
nalism, traces its source back to the ancient
figure of Socrates. I write ironically
because Taleb holds a deep reverence for
ancient Mediterranean thinkers. Nonethe-
less, Taleb invokes Nietzsches acerbic
attack on (Platos) Socrates in The Birth of
Tragedy (1872), where Nietzsche makes the
accusation that Socrates disrupted the deli-
cate balance between the rational, self-
restrained, intellectual Apollonian forces
and the irrational, chaotic, passionate
Dionysian forces that characterized Hel-
lenic culture (pp.249-256). The ensuing
ascendency of the Apollonian spirit saw its
strength with each blow. Organic systems
are seen by Taleb as inherently antifragile.
Subject bones to (limited) strain and they
become stronger; deprive bones from all
stress and they become fragile. This is the
principle of hormesis: even if theyre harmful
in large doses, small doses of stressors stimu-
late an organism to increase its resistance.
By contrast, artificial, man-made systems are
seen as inherently fragile.
According to Taleb, one of the follies of
modernity is the deliberate repression of dis-
ruption in natural and non-natural systems
alike. The policy of wildfire suppression is
invoked as an example in the case of natural
systems. Until recently, all wildfires were
considered destructive to forest ecology and
were quickly extinguished. The folly of this
policy is becoming more apparent with the
publication of new ecological studies docu-
menting the previously-unknown beneficial
effects of small wildfires for fire-adapted
species. In the absence of frequent, small,
beneficial fires, that have been prevented by
human beings, flammable materials accumu-
late on the forest floor, paving the way for
the rare but ultimately inevitable large fires,
which are catastrophic. In other words,
extinguishing naturally-occurring small fires
in a system which has evolved symbiotic
relationships with small fires over the span
of millennia is not good stewardship: it is
humanity under the influence of modern
arrogance dressed up as reason.
Talebs arguments in such seemingly dis-
parate areas as banking, education,
medicine, nutrition and politics (to mention
but a few) are best understood within his
overall critique of modern
rationalising, and by impli-
cation, of the Enlighten-
ment. (To be sure, if we
were to classify ways of
thinking, modern reason-
ing would be assigned to
the fragile category,
Medieval European in the
robust, and Ancient
Mediterranean thinking in
the antifragile category.)
As we know, in embracing
the authority of reason,
the Enlightenment
rejected the authority of
Damocles
dining
dangerously
46 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013 Book Reviews

zenith in the Enlightenment during the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe.
The Complacency of Rationalism
One of Nietzsches projects was the
recuperation of the Dionysian spirit. This
also appears to be one of the unstated
objectives of Antifragile. I am not suggest-
ing that Taleb is rejecting rationalism
quite the contrary. His discourse on non-
linearity and the principles of convexity
(pp.263-300), along with the Appendix
(pp.435-480), which contains enough
graphs and technical discussions to trigger
an anxiety attack in a mathphobe, is imbued
with the Apollonian qualities of razor-sharp
concision and rigorous analysis. If the book
reads in a non-boring, enjoyable fashion,
the reader should not be fooled into think-
ing that this is a simple, shallow, unrational
book; Taleb makes Herculean efforts to
communicate clearly otherwise complex
theories. Rather, what he rejects here is
nave rationalism namely, the idea that
everything is understandable, and so con-
trollable, by our limited minds. This same
nave rationalism, which holds that our
world is understandable and hence manipu-
lable, has led to large-scale domination of
the environment, the systemic smoothing
of the worlds jaggedness, and the stifling of
volatility and stressors (p.108) which is
neither good nor desirable. As mentioned,
in the case of natural systems the suppres-
sion of small wildfires leads eventually to
destructive infernos. In the area of interna-
tional relations, support for despotic, unsta-
ble regimes in the Middle East equally pro-
vides only short-term stability. When the
inevitable revolutions finally take place,
theyre marked by a high degree of vio-
lence, as the unfolding events in Syria now
demonstrate. Likewise, in the banking
sector, support for near-collapsing, near-
insolvent banks eventually leads to blow-
ups. Higher degrees of suppression of
instability result in higher degrees of distur-
bance later. The lesson is that imposing sta-
bility for stabilitys sake often only worsens
a complex situation. Instead, long-term sta-
bility in complex systems is best attained via
frequent, small-scale volatility. In the world
of finance and corporations, the message is
that bigger is not necessarily better or, as
Taleb puts it, Size makes you fragile. The
same argument is applied to the realm of
political governance, where Taleb (who
identifies himself as a deontic libertarian)
argues for smaller-scale, decentralized gov-
ernment. The model of
ancient city-states is
seen as superior to that
of modern nation-states.
Behemoth states like the
former USSR are seen
as something to be
avoided, not emulated.
Their top-down models
are seen as devoid of the
hunger for trial and
error from which the
tinkering with and
improving of complex
systems stems (p.226).
The Wrath of Taleb
Taleb offers numerous suggestions for
making our world a less fragile place. He
argues that less is more: that, instead of
introducing thousands of pages of regula-
tion to institutions, we should instead be
adapting basic anti-fragile principles and
concepts. One such concept is the so-called
skin in the game an expression alleged to
have been coined by Warren Buffett to refer
to a situation where executives use their own
resources to buy stock in the company
theyre administering. Such involved inter-
est leads to greater levels of responsibility.
Moreover, Taleb calls the absence of skin in
the game the largest fragilizer for our soci-
ety, due to the ever-increasingly-opaque
environment in which players operate. He
argues that we have reached a point in his-
tory where people in power exert control
over situations where they can, and do,
bring great harm to others while they escape
unscathed themselves or worse, derive
benefits from the chaos. Culprits include
armchair warmongering journalists or
politicians with no relatives in war zones,
bureaucrats, CEOs, and bankers. Bankers,
who privatize their gains but socialize their
losses by transferring the downside to share-
holders and/or taxpayers, are singled out to
receive the bulk of Talebs ethical wrath.
Prompted, as it were, by his Socratic daimo-
nion, this flneur, himself a former financial
trader, argues that the asymmetric nature of
bonuses consisting of incentives for suc-
cess without a corresponding disincentive
for failure results in the build-up of
hidden risks in the financial system which
eventually leads to catastrophes. Bonuses
invite bankers to play the system by hiding
the risks of rare and hard-to-predict but
consequential blow-ups. The 2007 melt-
down of the subprime mortgage market in
the United States, which in turn caused the
global financial crisis, is given as an example
of such a blow-up. Turning his gaze to the
wisdom of the ancients, Taleb finds the
antidote in Babylonian and Roman practices
and laws that demanded accountability. For
example, the Romans used to oblige engi-
neers to sleep underneath their newly-built
bridges a rather good accountability strat-
egy, according to this author.
Talebs ethical cri de coeur against
bankers and others with no skin in the
game culminates in his Naming Names
section, where we see him verbally lashing
prominent politicians, academics, and
economists. He labels many of these fig-
ures Fragilistas, due to their tendency to
fragilize our society by depriving variabil-
ity-loving systems of variability through
their nave rationalism (p.427). But public
figures are not the only ones on the receiv-
ing end of his scolding. Neurotically over-
protective parents (soccer moms) are like-
wise castigated for sucking volatility and so
challenge out of their childrens lives
(pp.242-243). Prison-like structured sched-
ules for children, and medication for some
modern paediatric disorders such as
ADHD, often administered in complicity
with doctors and teachers, are cited as
examples of damaging Procrustean-like
actions depriving children of exposure to
risk, and so the chance to grow.
Talebs prose is discursive and flows in a
clear and pleasing manner. Taleb also
offers his readers plenty of nuggets of
wisdom gained from Mother Nature,
empirical science, and his own life experi-
ences as an ex-trader. Lin Yutang once
wrote: The wise man reads both books
and life itself. Antifragile is a product of
such wise reading.
DR ELENI PANAGIOTARAKOU 2013
Eleni Panagiotarakou is an Assistant Professor
at Concordia University, Montreal, where she
teaches Political Theory.
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Random House, 2012,
560 pages, $33.00, ISBN: 978-1846141560.
Books
Trading
floor
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 47 Book Reviews

within twenty miles of it.
Jane Heal opens the discussion of self-
knowledge by setting out some underlying
structures that might explain its special fea-
tures. We might reveal ourselves to our-
selves through how we perceive the world.
Alternatively, our expressions of our internal
states might be aspects of those states.
Annalisa Coliva and Akeel Bilgrami develop
the bold line that when someone expresses
her beliefs as things to which she is commit-
ted, those expressions have to be correct.
That is, they make an inviolable connection
between sincerely expressing a belief and
commitment to it. This connection reflects
norms of rationality, and does not leave the
expression secondary to the belief.
Lucy OBrien considers our knowledge
of our actions. She shows how problems
arise for the ideas that each action is pre-
ceded by trying to act and that this trying
grounds our knowledge of our action. She
generalises from this to discuss how a
mechanism that we construct to solve a
philosophical problem may bring more
problems in its wake a lesson worth heed-
ing. Another valuable lesson is taught by
Paul Snowdons discussion of claims like I
am in pain or This image (presented by
an optician) seems to me to be more
blurred than that one. Discussions of self-
knowledge often assume that the speaker
must know the truth of such claims.
Snowdon challenges this assumption. The
general lesson is that widespread assump-
tions are worth challenging.
The views expressed in this book are
wide-ranging, and some authors disagree
with others. Overall, the book gives a good
idea of what analytic philosophy is like these
days. There are lots of carefully-defined
views, and disagreements keep on emerging;
sometimes in ways, and for reasons, that one
would not expect, for example, when
Christopher Peacocke argues that fear is not
made up of an awareness of danger plus
some attitude, like anxiety about danger.
The reader who is already immersed in the
topic will recognize many of the views, and
will spot new moves in the debate. The
reader who is new to the field will have to
work hard to map out the different views
and the common themes, but that itself will
be a most rewarding mental exercise.
RICHARD BARON 2013
Richard Baron is a philosopher in London. His
website is www.rbphilo.com
The Self and Self-Knowledge edited by Annalisa
Coliva, Oxford University Press, 2012, 304 pages,
45 hb, ISBN 978-0-19-959065-0
Self-Knowledge
Moving on to our knowledge of our-
selves, there are several possibilities. One is
that we work out our beliefs, desires and
sensations by observing ourselves. Another
is that our beliefs, desires and sensations are
automatically presented to us, so that we
know we have them without our needing to
deliberately observe or work anything out.
So if you believe that Sacramento is the cap-
WHAT COUNTS AS A
person? We think we
know our own beliefs,
desires and sensations,
but what kind of knowledge is that? And
how secure is that knowledge?
These are big philosophical questions,
and this collection of essays by eleven lead-
ing philosophers shows just how much our
thinking about them has advanced in recent
years. Unfortunately, I only have space to
mention some of the contributors here.
If there is a theme through this book, it
is that to understand the self we need to
interweave several strands in our thinking:
for instance, that the concept of the self
has an ethical dimension, or that concepts
of rationality have special roles to play, or
that you only have beliefs and feelings if
you are disposed to state them.
The first of these strands is visible in
Carol Rovanes essay, in which she makes
use of her ethical criterion of personhood.
For her, a person is not necessarily a bio-
logical organism: a person is an entity that
pursues its own coherent projects as a sin-
gle entity, with one set of thoughts. A
group of people who all think individually,
and who might disagree, does not count as
a person on this criterion. But a tightly-
knit team of people who thought and acted
as one, could count as a person. One aspect
of the ethical dimension is that we should
respect peoples projects.
It is pretty radical for Rovane not to
start with the biological body as the basic
criterion of personhood. One reason why
it is so radical is that thoughts are in the
heads of individual bodies. Moreover, we
naturally think of persons as individual
bodies. But does that prove anything, or
could we just be making a mistake in our
natural intuitions?
Christopher Peacocke says that our
thoughts really ought to prove something.
He makes the point that how we think of
ourselves as ourselves ought to give us a
good general guide to what it is to be a
self. He reflects on how we file and inte-
grate our experiences, then goes on to rescue
the self from David Humes famous chal-
lenge to the whole concept. Hume claimed
in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that
when he looked within himself, he could find
only perceptions, not a self. Peacocke argues
that the self can exist as the subject of con-
scious states without itself being an object of
perception.
The Self and Self-
Knowledge, edited
by Annalisa Coliva
S
T
I
L
L
P
I
C
T
U
R
E
F
R
O
M
F
A
N
T
A
S
T
I
C
P
L
A
N
E
T

A
R
G
O
S
F
I
L
M
S
,

1
9
7
3
ital of California, or if you desire chocolate,
or if you have a headache, you just know that
you have that belief, or that desire, or that
headache, without having to make any
observations of yourself. A third possibility is
that if you sincerely express a belief or
desire, that means you have a belief or
desire. If I ask you about the shape of the
Earth, and you sincerely say I believe that
the Earth is round, then you have that
belief. All of these possibilities, and more,
are considered in this book, although the
idea that we look at ourselves and then work
out what we believe, desire or feel, gets short
shrift. The range of options reflects the need
to accommodate several points. We seem to
have rock-solid knowledge of our own states
of mind: you may not know the right answer
to some factual question, or what you ought
to want, but you must know what you think
is the right answer, or what you do want.
And it would be very odd to ask someone
how she knew that she was in pain; so that
kind of knowledge seems to be immediate
and incontrovertible. On the other hand, we
can sincerely say we think one thing, but act
as if we think something else. Someone can
sincerely say they believe that a volcano will
never erupt again, but always avoid going
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50 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
T
he other week at the Hay Festival
in Wales, I gave a talk Has Physics
Killed Philosophy?, arguing that
physicists need philosophers. Afterwards, I
had a conversation with a remarkable man,
Raja Panjwani, who, in addition to being
trained in physics and philosophy, is an
international chess champion. We got to
talking about one of the most striking and
disconcerting features of quantum physics:
the replacement of causation by probability.
At the sub-atomic level, the last vestige of
A causes B is replaced by patterns of events
whose statistics can be predicted with stun-
ning precision, although outside of the
many worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics, in which everything happens in
some world or other no particular quan-
tum event is obliged to occur. However,
there is a constraint on the frequency of
certain outcomes within a given range of
values over large numbers of events, this
frequency being what the most famous
quantum equations predict. Raja, perhaps
sensing that I was getting out of my depth,
turned the conversation to the staple of
probability theorists the tossing of a
coin which subsequently provoked the
thoughts that follow. The confusions, I am
confident, are mine, not his.
Imposing Patterns on Events
When you toss a coin, there are two
possible outcomes heads (H) or tails (T).
No outcome should influence its succes-
sor: there is no causal pressure exerted by
Toss 1 on Toss 2, as there is, say, from
the movement of the thumb to the move-
ment of the coin, so the chances of H on a
particular occasion are the same irrespec-
tive of whether its predecessor was H or T.
Improbable sequences such as 100
straight Hs do not defy or even bend the
laws of mechanics. But if the outcome of
Toss 1 does not influence the outcome of
Toss 2, such that there is no gathering
causal pressure for a T to follow a long run
of Hs, why dont we easily accept that the
series H, H, H could be extended indefi-
nitely? Why would an unbroken sequence
of 100 Hs raise our suspicion of a bent or
even two-headed coin?
Let us look a bit closer at the properties
of a genuinely random sequence. As we
extend the series of tosses, the number of
possible patterns increases enormously,
but the proportion of those that are signifi-
cant runs of Hs or Ts are vanishingly
small. There is a 1:4 chance of HH (the
other possibilities being HT, TH, and
TT), but 25 Hs in succession would be
expected to occur by chance only once in
33,554,432 throws. The longer any run of
Hs or Ts, the less frequently it will occur;
so the most likely outcomes will be those
in which runs of Hs or Ts are soon broken
up. This is how we reconcile the 50/50
chance of getting H on a particular toss,
irrespective of what has gone before, with
the growing suspicion that appropriately
greets a very long series of Hs and the
mounting expectation of a T.
This is all basic stuff; but let us dig a lit-
tle deeper. Well start by focussing on the
expectation that has been the ruin of many
a gambler. The key point relates to the his-
tory-so-far of Hs. It is this history that
makes us feel that the coin sooner or later
will feel obliged to come up T. We must
not, however, see the history-so-far as a
kind of pressure bringing about affirmative
action for Ts, so that they match the num-
Raymond Tallis thinks about probability and the frozen
world of quantum mechanics.
Could The Universe
Give A Toss?
T
allis
in
Wonderland
ber of Hs: a history of coin-tosses is not in
itself an event, even less a cause. Random
sequences do not have the kind of reality,
even less the causal efficacy, that individual
events have. A sequence, in short, is neither
an event nor a cause that can influence
what follows it. This may seem counter-
intuitive, but its true, because 50/50
equipoise or symmetry is an intrinsic prop-
erty of the (idealised) coin, and thats not
something affected by its history.
What makes a sequence seem like a
cause is our subjective expectation, which
turns a lengthening run of Hs into the idea
of a kind of pressure to produce a T. Our
expectation is, however, in no sense a force
out there. Rather, as David Hume
pointed out, our habits of expectation
often translate how things usually pan out
into how they are obliged to pan out.
While it is clear that our subjective
assessment of probability is not out there,
we still retain the idea of there being
objective probabilities out there based on
the expected relative frequencies of certain
kinds of events or sequences of events.
However, even probability understood in
this way cannot entirely shake off their
mental dependence. This is because a
sequence of events is not out there.
Firstly, it is only by remembering past
tosses, and gathering them up into a series,
that we are able to place actual sequences
into a fraction with a denominator corre-
sponding to the sum total of possible
sequences a 1 in 33,554,432 chance of 25
tosses all turning up heads, for instance.
(Moreover, collecting tosses for the
sequence will require ring-fencing of the
population we are drawing from: the series
we have just started, or all the tosses in the
history of the world, or something in
between.) It is the gathering together of
tosses that tells us that certain combina-
tions ought to be common or rare, so that
we should expect them to occur frequently
or infrequently. But the present existence
of no-longer-existent tosses is entirely
mental. They are not even present by
proxy as a cause of a present state of affairs,
July/August 2013

Philosophy Now 51
because, as we have said, Toss 1 does not
have any influence on Toss 2.
Immaterial Logic
Whats more, coin tosses have had to be
shorn of their material features and classi-
fied simply as H or T in order to be gath-
ered up into a sequence that feeds the cal-
culations of probability of what we think is
going to happen in future. Importantly,
those future possibilities have to be
defined as the branches of a fork, as the
mere instantiation of the logical alterna-
tives H or T. This crash-dieting of a
physical event to one of its characteristics
also warrants further examination.
Any actual coin-toss must have numer-
ous features additional to, and irrelevant to,
the dichotomy H or T: when the coin
lands head up it does so via a unique trajec-
tory, and is propelled by a unique force to a
particular height, to land on the ground, all
courtesy of a particular individual whom I
will refrain from calling a tosser. None of
these additional elements are criteria for H
or T. But in order for there to be an H, a
toss has to occur, and in order to occur, it
has to be more than H. Without these
additional features, the coin couldnt land
either H or T, in fact. Furthermore, for the
coin to fall either H or T, something has to
be bent in order to break the 50/50
equipoise or symmetry between H and T:
not necessarily a bent coin, but necessarily
a bent event. (Since nobody knows how to
bend the event, no caller has an advantage,
so the ethics are not bent: contingent influ-
ences are inescapable, but thats OK if
theyre hidden and cannot be manipulated.)
But this only highlights the fact that
describing any particular toss as H or T is
to strip it of numerous features necessary
for the full-blown event to happen to be
an H or a T. More broadly, material events
in a material world cannot be reduced to
forking branches of possible outcomes; just
as a victory for a football team like Arsenal
is not just a featureless V(ictory) as
opposed to a featureless D(efeat).
Any specific toss that instantiates H or
T will have a vanishingly small probability
of occurring as that specific event. Actual
events, specified precisely in advance, are
highly improbable. The circumstances that
produce a real event, even a little one like a
coin falling H, are in fact unique, because
each event has unique characteristics. The
more fine-grained the description of an
event, the more the improbability of that
event increases. If events had a million
either/or features, and each of the features
had a 50/50 chance of happening, then each
events individual probability would be 1 in
21,000,000, the denominator being a num-
ber greater than that of the number of
atoms in the universe. And there is in prin-
ciple no limit to the grain of the descrip-
tion, as no description captures an actual
event completely. However, this uniqueness
and improbability applies equally to all Hs
and all Ts any actual H is as unlikely as
any actual T which is why H and T are
equally likely to occur. In short, probabili-
ties apply not to specific actual events but to
types of events reduced, in the cases of
tosses, to the dichotomous possibilities H
or T. The mathematics of Either H or T
applies only to a future reduced to branch-
ing logical possibilities: a material future
reduced to a logical one.
While the probability of 50/50 Hs and
Ts is built into the job description of coin-
tossing, its realisation and the apparent
pressure for it to be realised is in events
that are in possible futures reduced to either
H or T. In addition, the past also has to be
present in the gathering up of these strictly
stand-alone events into a (retrospective)
series pointing to this prospective future.
The mobilisation of all three tenses of time
which do not have a foothold on the
material world itself betrays that with
probabilities we are a long way from the
material world. Material events are what
they are, and not what they were or will be.
Improbable Realities
In short, the mathematical logic of prob-
ability deals with events slimmed down to
forks of logical branches, and draws on ret-
rospective and prospective views that have
no place in the material world. Could this
be a source of some of the problems quan-
tum mechanics has with time and change?
When causation is replaced entirely by
probability, defined logically or mathemati-
cally, there is no obligation for anything in
particular to happen, because actual events
macroscopic, real events like real coin-
tosses are beyond the reach of probabil-
ity. A 50/50 probability of an event such as
H is not a 50/50 probability of any real,
messy, fat event. Real events are necessarily
more than logically defined possibilities
(though they can be logically reduced to
them), and they do not exist in sequences
that encompass past and present.
Many physicists trying to unite proba-
bilistic quantum mechanics with general
relativity lose time and change altogether,
instead envisaging a frozen 4D universe in
which nothing happens. Physicist Carlo
Rovelli has even welcomed the possibility
that quantum mechanics will become a
theory of the relations between variables,
rather than the theory of the evolution of
variables in time (Forget Time, FQXi
Essay, 24th August 2008): in short, a the-
ory of the eternal relations between kinds
of possibilities rather than between actual
events in time. If this were true, we would
be justified in concluding not only that the
universe couldnt give a toss about us, but
that it couldnt give an actual toss. The
lack of contamination by actual events is
the necessary condition of the purity of a
mathematical vision of the world based
upon probabilities. As mentioned, a
minority of physicists invoke a many
worlds version of quantum mechanics, in
which every fork of possibility is taken.
This seems a very expensive way of melt-
ing a universe frozen as a consequence of
replacing causation with probability. This
may be why a few physicists now think
physics need philosophy; although many
more would add like a hole in the head.
PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2013
Raymond Talliss new books are Reflections
of a Metaphysical Flaneur (Acumen), and
(edited with Jacky Davis), NHS SOS: How
the NHS Was Betrayed and How We Can
Save It (One World).
T
allis
in
Wonderland
Particle trails in
Large Hadron
Collider at CERN
52 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013
This Ones For You
T
here is no such thing as right or wrong! Three years ago
I made my constant readers heads spin when I first made
that claim in An Amoral Manifesto, in Issues 80 and 81 of
Philosophy Now. This was startling coming from me, not only
because the statement is startling in itself, but especially
because, for an entire decade, I had been writing a regular
column for this magazine called Moral Moments, in which I
pressed home the importance of moral reasoning in all facets
of life. Now, suddenly, that was down the tubes!
Well, not really suddenly. For at that point it was already
three years since I had had my original anti-epiphany, realiz-
ing that my commitment to morality was, despite my avowed
atheism, itself a kind of theism. I had only been a soft atheist
who, like most New Atheists, embraced Socrates idea (from
Platos Euthyphro dialogue) that morality was independent of
religion. Socrates argued that even to acknowledge God as good
and just implies our ability to know what these qualities are
prior to and independent of knowing God. But now I realized
that so-called secular morality is also a religion, which is, if
anything, on less secure ground than traditional theism,
because it purports to issue commands (moral obligations, pro-
hibitions, and permissions) without a commander (God). Thus
I became a hard atheist, in the sense of denying the existence of
both God and morality, or in a word, an amoralist.
The three-year silence preceding my public announcement
was due to my having to rethink absolutely everything about
my most fundamental ethical assumptions, both as a profes-
sional philosopher and as a person. I was not only struck dumb
by massive uncertainty about how to proceed, but also, frankly,
scared to utter some of my new thoughts. The only way for me
to work it all out was to write. And write I did. In a matter of
months I had composed a 100,000-word manuscript, whose
working title was Bad Faith: A Philosophical Memoir. By the time
I had finished that I was well on my way to finding my
amorality legs.
However, the resulting manuscript turned out to be unpub-
lishable, and for two reasons. One was that the work combined
autobiography with analytic philosophizing, thereby falling
between two stools. The other reason was that my philoso-
phizing had been done in blissful ignorance of an existing pro-
fessional literature. It was only when I came up for air after my
months-long immersion in figuring it all out for myself that I
noticed others who had written on the same subject, and in
particular Richard Garner, who is my soulmate in this regard.
So I started all over again. I felt that it made obvious sense
to begin by thoroughly acquainting myself with the on-going
discussion in my field. This led me eventually to refine my
original philosophizing in a new manuscript, called Ethics with-
out Morals. Because this one was a scholarly monograph, I was
able to find a publisher for it. That book appeared in print one
year ago.
However, Ethics without Morals far from exhausted the con-
tent of my earlier manuscript. For in the main Bad Faith had
been not so much a treatise as a memoir. I believed I had a
compelling story to tell about what it actually feels like to
undergo such a radical transformation of ones worldview.
Furthermore, and more urgently, I believed I had a compelling
idea to share with others not only fellow academics but also
the general public. I especially wanted to offer something to
the many Philosophy Now readers who had been asking me for a
more extensive discussion of amorality than the occasional
column permitted. Ethics without Morals did not fit that bill for
all of them, partly because of its specialist orientation, but
mainly because of its very high price (due to the publishers
marketing it to research libraries).
Therefore I sat down to write yet another book, this one
called Its Just a Feeling: The Philosophy of Desirism. Written for a
nonspecialist audience, this serves as a kind of primer of
amorality, with some theory but with emphasis on how actu-
ally to live an amoral life. And in order to get it out as quickly
as possible, I simply published it myself at CreateSpace/
Amazon. This also made it possible to price the book to be
within easy reach of anyone who wanted to read it. It is now
available everywhere as a paperback, and also as an eBook for
Kindle.
Finally, Ive also brought out, again with CreateSpace/
Amazon, the latest incarnation of Bad Faith, now duly pared
down to a more truly memoir form, although of necessity still
containing the kind of dialectical arguing that was raging in
my mind during that initial period.
So I have written what has turned out to be a trilogy of
amorality: a monograph (Ethics without Morals), a memoir/pre-
quel (Bad Faith), and a primer/sequel (Its Just a Feeling). One
way to think about their complementarity is to conceive Bad
Faith as my effort to persuade myself of amoralitys viability
and virtues, Ethics without Morals as my effort to persuade my
professional colleagues, and Its Just a Feeling as my effort to
persuade everybody else. I hope that I have now satisfied (if
not sated!) everyone who has been intrigued by my recent per-
sonal experience or the thesis I have been defending. And of
course I will continue to devote the occasional Ethical Episode
to further amoral ramblings.
PROF. JOEL MARKS 2013
Joel Marks is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of
New Haven and a Bioethics Center Scholar at Yale University. His
website is www.docsoc.com
by Joel Marks
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July August 2013

Philosophy Now 53
Waiter: Good evening, and heartiest congratulations
Monsieur Sartre!
Sartre: So youve heard about the little periodical me and my
friends are starting?
Waiter: All Paris must have heard by now. Since the news
broke, the patrons of Les Deux Magots have been asking me to
give you their good wishes.
Sartre: (Smiles sardonically) Im sure there are many whod
gladly send me their ill wishes, for having rattled their cages.
Waiter: Oh not at all monsieur. They may not agree with you
at times, but they do respect you.
Sartre: Hmm! Ive seen them all too often cross to the other
side of the street from me.
Waiter: Nevertheless, why do you think we have so many
visitors here? Ill tell you why. To catch a glimpse of Jean-Paul
Sartre, Frances most famous philosopher!
Sartre: Tut tut Roberto. What they glimpse is not me, but a
figment of their own fabrication. Besides, theres Camus and
Merleau-Ponty. And next year there will be a new flavour of
the month.
Waiter: But none like the legendary spokesman for France,
for the workers, for the Resistance, for freedom! That is what
they come to glimpse.
Sartre: Thank you Roberto. Now Ill have that coffee while
Im waiting for madame to join me.
Waiter: Sure monsieur. And perhaps a little cognac on the
house to celebrate?
Sartre: Just coffee will do fine.
Waiter: I insist monsieur. After all, it is a special occasion.
Sartre: Okay. But just un peu. Ill need my wits when the
reporters arrive to grill me.
(Waiter nods, disappears, then returns with tray containing a coffee
and a cognac.)
Waiter: You did right, monsieur, to leave teaching. Its
energy-sapping.
Sartre: Odd as it may seem, I enjoyed it perhaps too much.
But youre right. The work-load was punishing. Perhaps my
post as Editor of Les Temps Modernes will give me more time
for my philosophy.
Waiter: Indeed monsieur. Still, Im sure it wasnt an easy
decision.
Sartre: Ill admit it cost me some sleepless nights. On the
other hand, had I stayed put, Id live to regret it. (Raises the
brandy glass.) So, heres to an exciting new venture.
Waiter: And to success!
(Roberto clinks a glass of water with Sartres cognac.)
Sartre: So what does the future hold for you, Roberto?
Waiter: The usual. Nothing very spectacular.
Sartre: And youve no desire to move on, to progress?
Waiter: Absolutely none. This is all Ive ever expected.
Sartre: So will it be Les Deux Magots til youre carried out
feet first?
Waiter: Hopefully. When I die, let it be on my feet, here in
my ancestral habitat, where, according to a Buddhist patron, I
may well have been a waiter in a previous existence.
Sartre: There are worse ways of dying, admittedly. But there
have to be better ways of living.
Waiter: (Shrugs, then shakes his head.) Not for me, monsieur. I
live to work here as much as I work to live here.
Sartre: And youve never thought of doing anything else?
Waiter: Never. Waitering is in my blood!
Sartre: Really? (Smiling) When did it become infected?
Waiter: My father was a waiter, and his father before him. For
me to do anything other than be a waiter would be
unthinkable. Its my destiny.
Sartre: (Frowns) Not necessarily. Maybe you do not have a
destiny.
Waiter: No?
Sartre: Highly unlikely. Id prefer to think that you simply
stepped into your fathers shoes.
Waiter: And whats so wrong about following in his footsteps?
Sartre: Figuratively speaking, his shoes are many sizes too
small for you.
Waiter: (Laughs) So far I havent suffered any discomfort in
them.
Sartre: Id suggest you cast off those old shoes if you want to
grow. You need bigger shoes, Roberto.
Waiter: Im a waiter, not a shareholder. As for growing pains,
Ive had my share of them.
Sartre: Theres no growing without them. And if breaking the
cycle of your inherited immobility means having to go
barefoot till you get on your feet, then so be it.
Waiter: Barefoot! Do you want my girlfriend soon to be my
wife to show me a clean pair of heels?
Sartre: I cant very well see her objecting to you blazing an
exciting new trail.
Waiter: So what are you proposing, Monsieur Sartre?
Sartre: To put it bluntly, youre capable of a more creative
Sartre & The Waiter
Frank OCarroll observes a liberating encounter in a French caf.
career than waitering. It will only be a matter of time before
you go to seed in this comfort zone. Bright people like you
need to be intellectually challenged in order to flower.
Waiter: Merci for your concern, but am I not blossoming now?
Sartre: Youre smart Roberto. Youve read my novels. You go
to the cinema. You converse intelligently with foreigners, day-
in, day-out. Being the bright boy of your class that you were,
you have a duty to fulfil your talents.
Waiter: The trades thats where my family come from.
Survival was their priority, not fulfilment. Id much prefer to
flourish in Les Deux Magots like a song bird in captivity, than
risk failure as a freebooting intellectual. This is why I carry
around this tray contentedly and (smiling) also for my sins.
Sartre: You mustnt mistake Les Deux Magots for a cage, or forget
that to be what you are not, you must not be what you are.
Waiter: But why should I not be what I am, when Im
comfortable with it? After all, I am what I do.
Sartre: You are not. You are a lot more than that.
Waiter: But youll agree Im good at it.
Sartre: Much too good. In fact, that tray you carry around
like the world on the shoulders of Atlas is like an extension of
you. You give one the impression that if you were to drop it,
the laws of gravity would collapse.
Waiter: On the other hand Monsieur Sartre, it wouldnt do if
I were to drop its contents on that expensive new dress you
bought Mademoiselle de Beauvoir last week.
Sartre: However, a robot could do it as well as you, and may
well do so in the future.
Waiter: Ah but Monsieur, a robot cannot chat to the people
who come here to escape from their loneliness, their
unrequited loves, their misadventures, the sense of loss from
the death of a loved one. And there are others who feel the
need to have their hunger for gossip fed by waiters like me, or
to off-load their problems to a sympathetic ear. Les Deux
Magots is many things to many people. Rest assured, its not all
about carrying around trays of food to the bourgeois of Paris or
to rich Americans. Besides, where else could I hope to wait
upon the illustrious Monsieur and Madame night after night
and then brag about it to my friends?
Sartre: Satisfying though your vicarious life may seem to you,
theres no denying that youre selling yourself short. In fact, I
see no reason why you couldnt be a journalist, and use your
knowledge of food and caf life to write a column for some
Parisian paper. You have the inside story.
Waiter: I may have the gift of the gab, but I dont know if I
have the gift of ink. Quite frankly, you over-rate me,
Monsieur Sartre.
Sartre: Not as much as you under-rate yourself. Youve got to
be prepared to reinvent yourself from time to time. Otherwise,
youll atrophy from routine, and, perhaps worse, youll be lying
to yourself about who you are and who you could be.
Waiter: As long as I wake up tomorrow the same person as I
am today, Ill be happy.
Sartre: Have you forgotten, Roberto, that for us
Existentialists, existence precedes essence? This means that
tomorrow calls for a new self.
Waiter: (Shakes his head.) Im afraid youre looking at a
finished product. I already have what I want: a decent job in a
famous caf that attracts the stunning belles of Paris, who have
me dancing like Fred Astaire to their rapturous attention. Not
to mention the appreciation of celebrities of the theatre and
cinema, who tip me royally and give me free tickets for shows
on my nights off.
Sartre: But arent there also those winter evenings when the
tourists have gone, when things get a bit stale, when you feel
the need for new pastures? If you take a leaf from my book
and change your life, you might well become a celebrity
yourself. Remember that Ive taken one of the biggest gambles
in my life by packing in a well-paid, highly respectable job, to
edit a radical magazine.
Waiter: But that is what youve always wanted. And you have
what it takes for the task.
Sartre: I hope so. Time will tell.
Waiter: Time will confirm that you are the man for the job,
Im certain of it.
Sartre: How about this for a suggestion for you? Suppose I
start you off with a monthly column in the magazine? All going
well, I can then arrange for you to write for one of the dailies.
Waiter: Will I have to give up waitering?
Sartre: Not initially. But you may be able to dispense with
your tray when you eventually become a famous food critic.
(Pause.) So, are you prepared to step out of your fathers shoes
and have an article ready for me by the end of the month?
Waiter: Ill think about it. I only hope the proprietor of Les
Deux Magots doesnt think Im using the job for my own ends,
should I decide to take on your offer.
Sartre: He doesnt own you! In any case, a celebrity waiter
can only be good for business. Then in time you can shake the
dust of Les Deux Magots from your shoes, and tour the cafs of
Europe as a writer. So, are you prepared to take a risk?
Waiter: I can give it a try. Though taking up your footloose
agenda is going to put me through a huge bout of angst.
Sartre: Good. Now youre being true to your authentic self.
So, let us drink to that.
(Signals the other waiter for two more cognacs.)
Sartre: To freedom!
Waiter: To freedom!
FRANK OCARROLL 2013
Frank OCarroll, a retired teacher, is an ongoing extramural
philosophy student at Trinity College, Dublin. He has three books of
short stories published, as well as some poetry.
54 Philosophy Now

July/August 2013