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Richard Rorty
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Previous speakers have included: Examination is by a dissertation of
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Philosophy Now ISSUE 118 Feb/Mar 2017
Philosophy Now, EDITORIAL & NEWS
43a Jerningham Road,
Giles, Paul Gregory, John Heawood 28 “Will the real Mr Bowie please stand up?”
US Editorial Advisors Stefán Snævarr uses Parfit to see Bowie, and vice versa
DETAIL OF ALADDIN SANE ALBUM
News
• Derek Parfit and Zygmunt Bauman dead •
News reports by Anja Steinbauer and Katy Baker.
Derek Parfit (1942-2017) Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) option of studying philosophy and educa-
The philosopher Derek Parfit died on New Zygmunt Bauman, a prolific Polish-born tors are also exploring the possibility of
Year’s Day, aged 74. Parfit is best known intellectual, has died at the age of 91 at his establishing philosophy for children as a
for using imaginative thought experiments home in Leeds, England. Bauman’s work subject within primary schools.
in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons to explored ideas about identity, consumerism
show problems with the concept of and globalisation. He was a controversial Textbook Troubles
personal identity. One thought experiment figure in Poland for having served as an In Morocco a new school textbook caused
looks at what might happen if you were to officer in a Stalinist-era military organisa- a stir by describing philosophy as a
step into a teletransporter. In this device, tion, the Internal Security Corps, but perversion and blasphemy. A passage in
your body is first scanned atom-by-atom gained a worldwide reputation as a versatile Manar At-Tarbia Al-Islamiya, intended
and then completely destroyed. But the and humane interdisciplinary thinker. for first year baccalaureate students,
information is transmitted somewhere else, Bauman wrote more than fifty books, all refers to philosophy as “a production of
say to a corresponding teleportation device strongly philosophical in approach, human thought that is contrary to Islam”
on Mars, where you are exactly recreated including Modernity and the Holocaust, in and as “the essence of degeneration.”
using local materials. Some people might which he described the Holocaust as an Philosophy teachers reacted with outrage
see this simply as a way of travelling at vast outcome of industrialisation and ratio- and organized protest sit-ins, according
speeds; the person on Mars who is just like nalised bureaucracy: “It was the rational to moroccoworldnews.com. The Education
you, is so because they are you. Not so, says world of modern civilization that made the Ministry defended the book, saying that
Parfit. To explain he asks us to imagine Holocaust thinkable.” Bauman’s concept of the controversial passage was intended as
that you go into the device again, except ‘liquid modernity’ was an attempt to part of a reasoning exercise
this time it malfunctions. You appear on account for what he believed to be a loss of
Mars as normal, but the device on Earth identity in our contemporary world. Animal Persons
fails to destroy your body and it now seems Constant change means that individuals are A judge in Argentina has ruled that a
as if there are two of you. This also opens without frames of reference or lasting chimpanzee has rights under the law. The
up the possibility of there being hundreds human relationships, as Bauman described judge consequently ordered Cecilia the
of replicas of you, with no way for us to say in publications such as Liquid Times and chimpanzee to be released from Mendoza
which is the ‘real’ you. Each shares all your Liquid Modernity: “In a liquid modern life Zoo, where she lived without a
memories, which is a blow to the idea that there are no permanent bonds, and any companion. The Association of Profes-
memory anchors identity. Parfit aims to that we take up for a time must be tied sional Lawyers for Animal Rights
show that any time we try to produce a loosely so that they can be untied again, as (AFADA) had filed the case, arguing that
criterion for personal identity, it fails and quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when the conditions of Cecilia’s confinement
what matters instead is the relation of circumstances change.” were damaging to her health.
mental continuity and connectedness. This is an historic judgement in recog-
Reasons and Persons focused on personal Teaching Philosophy in Ireland nising the rights of apes. AFADA had previ-
identity, rationality and ethics. Later Parfit Irish President Michael D. Higgins has ously sought a court ruling to release Sandra
continued to write on ethics in On What done something very few politicians do: he the orangutan from Buenos Aires Zoo,
Matters, an objective theory of ethics that has given the thumbs-up to the value of arguing that she was a ‘non-human person’
involved a synthesis of three major ethical philosophy in schools. Referring to it as a due to her advanced mental abilities. This
theories (Kantianism, consequentialism “path to a humanistic and vibrant demo- reasoning, and therefore the potential status
and contractarianism). The book became cratic culture,” Higgins and his wife of ‘non-human personhood’ would arguably
well known and much discussed while still Sabina, a philosophy graduate, have called extend not only to other great apes
circulating in manuscript form before it for the expansion of the curriculum to (orangutans, gorillas and bonobos), but also
was finally published in 2011. include philosophy. “The teaching of to cetaceans (whales, dolphins and
On the subject of his death Parfit philosophy,” Higgins said in November, porpoises). Professor Thomas I. White of
wrote: “My death will break the more “is one of the most powerful tools we have Loyola Marymount University explains:
direct relations between my present expe- at our disposal to empower children into “The scientific evidence is so strong for the
riences and future experiences, but it will acting as free and responsible subjects in intellectual and emotional sophistication of
not break various other relations. This is an ever more complex, interconnected, dolphins that there simply is no question
all there is to the fact that there will be no and uncertain world.” that they are ‘nonhuman persons’ who
one living who will be me.” (R&P, 281-82) Irish 12 to 16-year-olds now have the deserve respect as individuals.”
A
few months ago there was a spate of headlines equivocation, however, because legal human rights and natural
announcing that the UN had made internet access a rights are different sorts of moral entities, with different roles.
human right. It turns out that this claim was rather We can therefore ask both whether there is a natural right to
misleading. What the UN did was pass a resolution internet access and whether there ought to be a legal human
emphasizing the importance of internet access for the fulfill- right to it.
ment of many human rights. The resolution called for states to As said, natural rights are universal moral rights thought to
take measures to work towards universal access to the internet, be held by all humans simply in virtue of their being human. As
and it condoned heavy restrictions on access to content on the such, they must be grounded in some morally relevant feature(s)
internet as a violation of human rights (see article19.org/data/files/ of what it is to be human. Although there is no consensus on
Internet_Statement_Adopted. pdf). However, it does not follow what these features are, the dominant and most plausible view
from this that there is now a human right to internet access. is that natural rights are grounded in fundamental interests
Something can enable the fulfillment of human rights without shared by all, or at least the vast majority, of humans. On this
itself being a human right. For example, having shoes enables view, there is a natural right not to be arbitrarily killed, because
a number of human rights, such as the right to freedom of move- everyone has an important interest in not being killed; there is
ment and the right to an adequate standard of living; but it a natural right not to be tortured, because everyone has an impor-
would be very strange indeed to say that there is a human right tant interest in not being tortured; there is a natural right not
to shoes. Conversely, interference with people’s enjoyment of to be forced into slavery, because everyone has an important
some good can constitute a violation of their rights without that interest in not being enslaved; and so on.
good being a human right. For example, it would be a violation With this in mind, it’s difficult to see how there could be a
of the right to privacy if the government read people’s credit natural right to internet access, because the interest in having
card bills without their consent; but there is no specific human access to the internet is not sufficiently fundamental. How could
right not to have one’s credit card bills read. Nonetheless, if it be, given its historical contingency? Thousands of years ago,
internet access really is as important as the UN resolution sug- humans had interests in not being killed, tortured, or enslaved,
gests, maybe it should be considered a human right. Popular and it’s reasonable to suppose that humans will have such inter-
opinion seems to support this view. According to a survey con- ests thousands of years from now (assuming there still are any
ducted in 2012 by the Internet Society, 83% of the more than humans). But it’s a stretch to say that the ancient Greeks, for
10,000 respondents from twenty different countries agreed that example, had an interest in having internet access, given that
‘Access to the internet should be considered a basic human right’ they couldn’t even conceive of this technology. And we can’t
(internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/ GIUS2012 -GlobalData- know whether humans in the future will have such an interest:
Table-20121120_0.pdf). they might not if the internet is replaced by some other, more
Despite popular opinion, I doubt that access to the internet powerful, technology. Natural rights are supposed to be held
can appropriately be characterized as a human right (let alone universally by all humans simply in virtue of being human. It there-
a basic one). To see why, we need to consider what human rights fore doesn’t make sense to say that there is a natural right to
are and how they’re justified. internet access.
Interestingly though, it doesn’t follow from this that there
Natural & Legal Rights shouldn’t be a legal right to internet access. Unlike natural rights,
We can begin by clearing up an ambiguity in the use of the term legal rights are social constructs. Natural rights either exist or
‘human right’. Sometimes when people talk about human rights, they don’t. There is no sense in asking whether there ought to
what they’re referring to are the legal or quasi-legal rights artic- be a particular natural right, since this is not up to us to decide.
ulated in international human rights documents, such as the Natural rights have a moral reality that is beyond our ability to
United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the manipulate. By contrast, the content of legal rights is up to us.
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Of course, not all of us have a say over what legal rights there
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural are, but the point is that their content is decided by people, not
Rights. Let’s call these ‘legal human rights’. Other times when discovered. So even though a right to internet access isn’t cur-
people talk about human rights, what they are referring to are rently included in international human rights legislation, it nev-
natural rights – the universal moral rights taken to be held by ertheless makes sense to ask whether there ought to be one. And
all humans simply in virtue of being human. Much of the time in order to ascertain whether there ought to be a legal human
people talking about human rights are actually equivocating right to internet access, we need to consider how the contents
between these distinct concepts. It’s important to avoid this of legal human rights are justified.
C
hina has long been a soft target for Western human Three Ways to Think About Human Rights in China
rights activists. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, How to make human rights discourse intelligible and construc-
between 1966 and 1976, was attacked at the time and tive in China is a serious challenge not only for international
is still demonized today for the innumerable viola- lawyers and heads of state, but also for human rights philoso-
tions of fundamental human rights that then occurred. In 1989 phers. Different philosophical approaches to solving this conun-
the Western media reported how the pro-democracy protest in drum have been put forward over the years, albeit with scarce
Tiananmen Square was allegedly crushed by tanks of the Chi- results, at least so far.
nese army, with great but unknown human costs. And Western One approach is to accept that ‘human rights’ is fundamen-
political leaders rarely miss an opportunity to raise human right tally a Western concept, but notwithstanding its origin, one that
concerns with Chinese counterparts during rounds of diplo- has universal validity and appeal.
matic talks. But as illustrated by the 2016 meeting between Pres- The idea here is for the West to unapologetically stick to its
ident Obama and President Xi Jinping during the G20 summit philosophical guns and hope that through a mix of globaliza-
in Hangzhou, these talks continually fail to generate consensus tion and intercultural education the Chinese authorities and
on the question of human rights, despite productive agreements people will one day see the light and embrace the human rights
being reached on many other issues. It is as if the Western lan- project. If education can do all – l’éducation peut tout, as Helvétius
guage of human rights is untranslatable or unintelligible to the famously claimed in 1772 – imagine what human rights educa-
Chinese; or as the Chinese proverb says, it’s a case of a hen talk- tion could achieve in China.
ing to a duck – ji tong ya jiang, 鸡同鸭讲. That human rights as we understand them in the West are
essentially a Western construct cannot be denied. Yet accepting
DUCK PROTESTING TO FOUR HENS © FEDERICO DE CICCO 2017. TO SEE MORE OF HIS ART, PLEASE VISIT ZUMAR7.COM
A
t one time international recognition of a right against of human dignity. However, just because something is particu-
torture was considered one of the best, if not the sin- larly bad does not mean that it cannot be justified in any cir-
gularly best, triumphs of the human rights regime. cumstance. The view that torture ought to be prohibited
However, since the US implemented its enhanced absolutely in principle is especially problematic for those who
interrogation program in the wake of the terrorist attacks of acknowledge that war can be justified in principle. Given that
9/11, the consensus of a human right against torture seems to war inherently involves widespread suffering, exploitation and
be in tatters. The new President of the United States and his violations of autonomy, it is hard to acknowledge an in-princi-
choice for National Security Advisor have both endorsed inter- ple right to war without acknowledging an in-principle right to
rogational torture, and a majority of Americans support using torture as well. As a matter of consistency, advocates on an in-
interrogational torture on suspected terrorists (Chris Kahn, principle prohibition of torture should probably be pacifists.
Reuters, 30 March 2016; see reuters.com/article/us-usa-election- War can only be justified, if it ever can be, on the grounds
torture-idUSKCN0WW0Y3). What was once unquestionably that large-scale violent coercion of a morally-innocent enemy
taboo is now largely a matter of partisan politics. Apparently civilian population (which is what war usually involves) is neces-
robust signs of widespread support for the legal prohibition of sary to preserve the greater good. But it seems that in principle
torture, such as the UN Convention Against Ali Shallal al-Qaisi this basic ‘lesser evil’ justification could equally
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrad- being tortured apply to interrogational torture in counterter-
ing Treatment, now seem hopelessly vague. in Abu Ghraib rorism operations. This raises a fundamental
The demarcation between torture and ‘cruel, challenge for those who claim that war can be
inhuman or degrading treatment’ remains both justified in practice but torture cannot: Is tortur-
controversial and fundamentally important, ing one innocent person really worse than the
since if an act is categorized as ‘torture’ it is harms inflicted on many innocent people dur-
always illegal, but if it is categorized as ‘cruel, ing the course of a war? If wars can be fought in
inhuman, or degrading treatment’ it can some- order to protect innocent people, then why not
times be legal in some countries if it can be also allow torture in order to protect innocent
shown to be instrumentally necessary. people? But this analogy might not carry through
Perhaps as a result of the contours of the polit- for in-practice justifications for torture compared
ical and legal debate, ethicists thinking about with war.
this issue seem preoccupied with explaining The critical move of those who advocate the
whether or not torture is so bad that it ought to be categorically admissability of torture, is to think of in-principle hypothetical
prohibited regardless of its efficacy. The fault lines tend to be cases, and then to say these principles apply to actual cases. ‘Tick-
between deontologists and consequentialists. Deontologists – eth- ing time-bomb’ scenarios often fulfil this role. The harrowing
ical theorists who maintain that actions are right or wrong inde- scenario is of an imminent terrorist attack that threatens thou-
pendent of the consequences – tend to advocate an absolute in- sands, if not millions, of lives; say, of a dirty bomb hidden some-
principle human right against torture. Absolute in-principle claims where in a city. Authorities detain a culpable terrorist who has
such as this assert that certain acts are so wrong that they cannot information that could prevent the attack, but the detainee will
be justified under any circumstances, regardless of the conse- not willingly divulge the information. Torture is the only way
quences. And if an act is absolutely prohibited in principle, then to coerce them to provide the information in time. Therefore,
it follows that it must also be absolutely prohibited in practice. torture is the only means capable of stopping the attack, and
On the other hand, consequentialists – ethical theorists who hold saving many innocent lives. Surely, if torture is the only way of
that consequences determine the rightness or wrongness of actions coercing a culpable terrorist to give up information that can save
– tend to advocate a human right against torture that admits of millions of lives, then that justifies its use?
both in-principle and in-practice exceptions. A third camp admits However, one might agree with this reasoning and yet deny
the possibility of an in-principle justification for torture while that such ticking time-bomb cases ever actually exist, or at least
denying the possibility of an in-practice justification. Here I want argue that they have an extraordinarily low probability of occur-
to support this third camp, and argue that the human right against ring. Critics like me of the use of hypothetical ticking time-bombs
torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment is best under- to justify torture, say such thought experiments fail to apply to
stood as admitting of a necessity justification in-principle which real life because they add or leave out features common to actual
however cannot be satisfied in practice. cases. For example, in reality authorities often mistakenly detain
Many people assert that torture is absolutely in-principle innocent suspects; guilty and innocent detainees alike frequently
morally wrong because it is a particularly egregious violation lack the information authorities need to act effectively; and acquir-
H
uman rights are, of course, rights of a certain kind, in many countries, were only enforceable if written.
and rights are specific kinds of moral, political or If all rights were conventional, then what rights people have
legal claims. Consider the following cases. Sup- would depend upon what conventions particular communities
pose I lose my wallet and won’t be able to get home or groups had adopted. What appeared on a list of rights and
unless I come up with $5.00 for the train. I might ask a col- who had them would depend upon particular and changeable
league for a loan, pointing out that, were he to agree, he would conventions.
display the virtues of generosity and kindness, and would also Champions of human rights aim to avoid this contingency.
promote utility, since his $5.00 would create more happiness There are, many of them claim, rights which are not contingent
in my hand than sitting unused in his wallet for the night. How- upon conventions, but instead are rights that people have simply
ever, I cannot insist he help me, even if I am right about what by virtue of being human, and so which cannot be removed by
virtue and utility recommend. He has no duty to make the loan. contingent practices or institutions.
Suppose alternatively that discovering the absence of my It is easy to see why this idea is attractive. If such rights exist,
wallet reminds me that last week I lent $5.00 to another col- they provide a basis for claims on peoples’ behaviour that hold
league on the condition that she would pay me back today. I go no matter what particular conventions particular communities
to her office and ask her for the $5.00. Given our agreement, I adopt. These rights will be universal, in the sense that they will
have a right to the money, and she has a duty to give it to me. apply to all people, no matter where they are or to what con-
On this account, rights-based claims – by contrast with claims ventions they happen to be subject.
based on utility or virtue – are always accompanied by correla- Such rights would also provide a perspective from which one
tive duties. If someone has a right, then some other person or could criticize and assess particular conventions. For instance, if
group of persons has a duty to give or allow the rights-holder there are human rights to education, to the absence of discrim-
to have or do that to which the rights-holder has a right. ination, to access to adequate health care, or whatever, then any
I was able to demand my $5.00 ‘as of right’ because my col- social conventions that deny those things to some members of
league and I had entered into an agreement. My right depended the communities they govern will fail to respect the human rights
upon a convention or practice and we can easily imagine the of those people, and those people will be able to identify duty-
convention being different. It could have been the case that holders and demand that to which they have a human-rights-
promises to repay loans, like contracts for the purchase of land based claim.
WWW.CHRISMADDEN.CO.UK
CARTOON © CHRIS MADDEN 2017
”
protected by appropriate (perfect and imperfect) duties. This
imprison my mind. approach, Sen maintains, frees human rights from reliance on
legislation, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Mahatma Gandhi
and also from reliance on whatever ethical values happen to be
popular at the time, since the arguments that survive open public
H
ave you ever heard of someone loving and hating action. Analysis proved that it was a time bomb precisely set so that
something at the same time? It can lead to madness, the explosion could not occur before the personnel had left. To no
or at least, to profound anguish. The situation avail: Yveton was arrested, sentenced to death, a reprieve was refused,
becomes worse if that thing is one’s motherland. he was executed. Not the slightest hesitation: this man declared and
Jean-Paul Sartre was in such a situation. He was a French proved that he did not wish to kill anyone, but we wanted to kill him,
philosopher against France. Philosophical offspring of René and we did so without wavering.”
Descartes and admirer of Honoré de Balzac, he fought for France
in WWII, and was a prisoner of war in Germany; but after the According to Sartre, France was no longer a champion of
war he turned into a bitter critic of French policy. Why? freedom; on the contrary, it was against freedom. France was
Sartre had witnessed how France – the land of liberty, equal- playing a double game, trying to take a leading role in the human
ity and fraternity – had acted as a colonial predator in Algeria, rights discourse and at the same time repressing native people
Cameroon, and Indochina. In the first editorial of his journal in its colonized territories. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s 1961
Les Temps Modernes in 1945, Sartre and the phenomenologist book The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre says that France should
Maurice Merleau-Ponty declared that members of the French rid itself of France. That is, the ideal free France should sepa-
Resistance who had fought to liberate France during WWII, rate itself from the colonial France.
and who were now in Indochina, were like the German soldiers René Cassin, a French law professor, was the French repre-
fighting for fascism. Paris was to him the symbol of freedom sentative on the committee drafting the Universal Declaration
against the machinery of fascism (see The Liberation of Paris, of Human Rights, and worked to revise its first draft in the years
1945), but barely a week after Hitler’s death, the same city of after the war. A wave of nausea would have engulfed Sartre if he
romance and freedom sent troops to commit a bloody massacre had seen that draft, for it declared that human rights presup-
in the Algerian market town of Sétif, slaughtering thousands of pose a high degree of civilization, and so do not apply to people
Algerians. In the years that followed, civilized France contin- in ‘primitive’ stages of development. Such statements indicate
ued to brutally repress the growing anti-colonialist movement, that human rights are not for all humans, only for those who
frequently sentencing people to death in military courts. This are more human. (Remember the declaration of the pigs in
led Sartre to declare, “we are all murderers” in an article of that Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals
title published in Les Temps Modernes, No.145, 1958: are more equal than others.”)
In any case, Sartre oscillated for three decades towards and
“In November 1956 Fernand Yveton, a member of the Combattants away from the idea of human rights, because he was doubtful
de la Libération [a guerrilla group established by the Algerian about the honesty of human rights theory towards those
Communist Party] planted a bomb at the Hamma power station, an wretched so-called ‘uncivilized’ peoples. If the Declaration was
attempted sabotage which can in no way equate with a terrorist passed by colonial empires such as France and Britain, would it
really be peaceful, decent and well-intentioned? Behind this
lovely humanitarian smile, was there a set of sharp teeth?
Sometimes Sartre defended the Declaration, because he saw
that despite its limitations, it promoted basic rights that every
person must enjoy. In his statement ‘On Genocide’ at the Second
Session of the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes
Tribunal in 1967, he showed his profound concern for univer-
sal human rights, condemning the United States for violating
them in Vietnam.
Yet as a Marxist, Sartre also worried about what he saw as
bourgeois elements implicit in the Declaration, particularly
extreme individualism. He criticizes ‘the bourgeoisie’ for using
an analytic method to explain everything; every composite real-
Sétif, site of a
massacre by the French ity must be reduced to simple elements. Like water that is
in May 1945 reduced to oxygen and hydrogen, bourgeois analysis wants to
reduce human society to isolated individuals. In Introducing Les
F
or his 1993 Oxford Amnesty Lecture, the American ‘metaphysical comfort’. However, Rorty wants to persuade us
philosopher Richard Rorty presented a paper that that we can gain something better. What?
would become one of his most popular texts: If we give up the notion of knowledge as representation,
‘Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimen- we can think of a more useful paradigm of knowl-
tality’. In it he argued for the following ideas: 1) We edge. In the first volume of his Philosophical Papers
cannot justify human rights; 2) Reason is a useless (1991), Rorty proposes that we should substi-
apparatus to promote human rights; 3) We tute the representationalist paradigm for an
should concentrate our energies instead on sen- anti-representationalist one. He argues that this
timental education. new paradigm would renew our sense of com-
munity and would be more useful for achiev-
The Contingency of Reason ing our social aims. In this sense, Rorty sees
To understand what Rorty meant by this, we need philosophy as serving political purposes: if our
to go back to his first original book, Philosophy and Richard Rorty political values, inherited from the Enlighten-
the Mirror of Nature (1979). In it Rorty offered an (1931-2007) ment, are to create a more democratic society and
analysis of the philosophical context of the second half to promote human solidarity, then a non-representa-
of the Twentieth Century. According to him, ever since tionalist or pragmatic paradigm will be more useful in achiev-
Descartes, Locke, and Kant in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth ing them than a representationalist one.
Centuries, philosophy has been centered on questions about
knowledge (as the relation between humanity and reality), and Rorty’s Pragmatic Approach to Rights
in the study of the mind (as the entity able to establish that rela- These are the most important of Rorty’s ideas. But how can we
tion). From this perspective, knowledge is a matter of estab- apply them to the matter of human rights? Rorty does so in
lishing a representational relation between ideas and reality. As ‘Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality’ (published in
Rorty writes, “to know is to represent accurately what is out- the third volume of his Philosophical Papers, 1998). His central
side the mind” (p.3). Rorty says that this is the core of the rep- goal is to show that a pragmatic paradigm would be more effi-
resentationalist paradigm, and that analytic philosophy is the heir cient for promoting a ‘human rights culture’ (Eduardo Rabossi’s
of this paradigm. However, Rorty uses Twentieth Century term) than projects that try to give rights a foundation in objec-
developments in the analytic tradition (by the later Ludwig tive truth. Let’s see how he does it.
Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, W.V.O. Quine, and Donald Firstly, for Rorty, ‘foundationalist’ philosophers like Plato,
Davidson, among others) to argue that the representationalist Aquinas, and Kant tried to find premises about human beings
paradigm is merely contingent, and so philosophically optional. capable of being known to be true independently of our moral
Language plays an important role here. For Rorty, language intuitions and capable of justifying those moral intuitions. But
is not merely a medium between the self and reality. Language as we saw, from Rorty’s perspective we cannot find such foun-
has, rather, a constitutive role in thought: it determines the way dations; rather, our moral community determines what is
we think. The availability of particular words or a specific gram- morally good, and we can’t go beyond our language and our his-
mar, for instance, sets how we think about reality. And language torical conditions to find moral Truth-In-Itself. In that sense,
use is ubiquitous. We cannot access reality without it. That
means we can’t know if the language we use accurately repre- “the most philosophy can hope to do is to summarize our culturally
sents the world. To use Hilary Putnam’s expression, we cannot influenced intuitions about the right thing to do in various situa-
step outside language to see the world from ‘a God’s-eye point tions. The summary is effected by formulating a generalization from
of view’. In this sense, our language is contingent: we use a cer- which these intuitions can be deduced… That generalization is not
tain language for accidental reasons, and not necessarily because supposed to ground our intuitions, but rather to summarize them.”
that’s the way the world works. After all, as Rorty said ten years (Philosophical Papers III, p.171).
later in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, “the world does not
speak. Only we do” (p.6). Secondly we must keep in mind that Rorty is a pragmatist –
This philosophical position means that we have to give up his main concern is not with proving moral statements to be
the project of philosophy as the search for Truth. We are stuck true, but about finding what works, and in this case about how
in our historical conditions and our contingent language, and best to fulfill the utopian vision sketched by the Enlightenment:
we cannot expect to step outside them to reach absolute Truths
or Reality-In-Itself. Ultimately, we cannot offer any absolute “If the activities of those who attempt to achieve this [foundational-
foundation to our beliefs, nor can we can find absolute justifi- ist] sort of knowledge seem of little use in actualizing this utopia,
cations which would be able to persuade every reasonable person that is a reason to think there is no such knowledge. If it seems that
that we are right. It means giving up what Nietzsche called most of the work of changing moral intuitions is being done by
Appeals to reason and knowledge have little effect in Rorty’s This would correspond to what the ethicist Annette Baier
thought. We have to concentrate on what works, he says, and his called “a progress of sentiments” – which progress is towards
conclusion is that “the emergence of the human rights culture increasingly seeing the similarities between ourselves and others
seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and every- instead of the differences.
thing to hearing sad and sentimental stories” (p.172). Since there Finally, as an anti-foundationalist, Rorty doesn’t think of ‘bad
is probably no knowledge of the sort Plato imagined, it’s useless to people’ as being deprived of moral knowledge. Instead, he thinks
point at rationality as the thing we all have in common. Rorty uses that a well-functioning human rights culture results from two
the examples of the Serbian torturers who didn’t recognize their conditions, security and sympathy:
Muslim victims’ humanity, or the Nazis in relation to the Jews:
“By ‘security’ I mean conditions of life sufficiently risk-free as to make
“[I]t does little good to point out to the people I have just described one’s difference from others inessential to one’s self-respect, one’s
that many Muslims and women are good at mathematics or engi- sense of worth… By ‘sympathy’ I mean the sort of reactions Athenians
neering or jurisprudence. Resentful young Nazi toughs were quite had more of after seeing Aeschylus’s The Persians than before, the sort
aware that many Jews were clever and learned, but this only added to that whites in the United States had more of after reading Uncle Tom’s
the pleasure they took in beating such Jews. Nor does it do much Cabin than before, the sort we have more of after watching television
good to get such people to read Kant and agree that one should not programs about the genocide in Bosnia.” (p.180)
treat rational agents simply as means. For everything turns on who
counts as a fellow human being, as a rational agent in the only rele- Rorty for our Current Crises
vant sense – the sense in which rational agency is synonymous with Rorty’s account is particularly relevant in our day. The recent
membership in our moral community.” (p.177) surge of xenophobic movements in Europe, the hostility to immi-
gration in many countries, and all the polemic surrounding the
Thirdly of course we should remain profoundly grateful to giving of support to desperate refugees – none of this is indepen-
Plato and Kant, “not because they discovered truths but because dent of the current global economic crisis. People didn’t suddenly
they prophesied cosmopolitan utopias” (p.173); but if we put become more ignorant concerning human rights, they simply
foundationalism behind us, we could “concentrate our energies feel more insecure, and that’s an obstacle to more sympathy. As
on manipulating sentiments, on sentimental education” and that Rorty says, “The tougher things are, the more you have to be
would be the best way to promote those cosmopolitan utopias: afraid of, the more dangerous your situation, the less you can
afford the time or effort to think about what things might be like
“That sort of education gets people of different kinds sufficiently for people with whom you do not immediately identify.” (p.180).
well acquainted with one another that they are less tempted to think This is why Rorty’s account is so interesting. On the one
hand, his idea of contingency
liberates us from the endless
quest for Truth, Certainty, and
Nature. On the other hand, it
liberates us from the burden of
CARTOON © BILL STOTT 2017 FOR MORE, PLEASE VISIT WWW.BILLSTOTT.CO.UK
O
ne of my favorite things about the this was in fact impossible. Why impossi- thing on a voluntary basis. When some-
history of philosophy is finding out ble? Well, even the most pious mendicant thing is transferred into your possession,
that ideas we now take for granted has to eat, since starving yourself would be you can decline to take ownership, so that
originally emerged in surprising ways. I can suicide, which is a sin, and it makes no sense the original possessor can demand it back
think of no better example than the notion to claim that you don’t own the food you at any time. This applies even to goods that
of a right to own property. Not that we can eat. Even if it is charitably donated to you, are destroyed in the process of using them,
take it for granted that we have such a right, once it passes into your possession, it must, such as food. The generous noblewoman
if we consider the history of communism in well, be your possession. It is your owner- who allows a friar to eat the bread she has
the Twentieth Century. Still, it seems such ship that gives you permission to destroy donated continues to own the bread even
an obvious concept that it must surely the food by eating it. as it is being consumed. Or, if she volun-
always have been with us. But you can make The mendicants gave this problem deep tarily gives up her rights over the bread,
a good case that it was first explicitly artic- thought, and not only as it applied to food. then the bread belongs to no-one. The
ulated in the later Middle Ages. And here’s Ironically, their orders had become very mendicants’ opponents found this absurd,
the surprising part: the thinkers who first wealthy thanks to the generosity of pious but Marsilius could point to a precedent in
explored this notion were actually con- Roman law. Antique jurists had developed
cerned with their right to own nothing. the idea of a res nullius – something owned
They were members of the mendicant by no-one. Marsilius gave the example of a
orders, especially the Franciscans. Follow- fish in the sea, which belongs to no-one. If
ing the example of their founder, Francis of a mendicant catches it but voluntarily
Assisi, Franciscans argued that spiritual per- Francis declines to own it, so that he acquires no
fection requires the voluntary embrace of of Assisi legal right over it, it keeps on belonging to
poverty. Like Blanche in A Streetcar Named by Giotto no-one even as the friar grills and eats it.
Desire, they depended on the kindness of With arguments like these, Marsilius
strangers, living on charitable donations. and other theorists of voluntary poverty,
Hence the term ‘mendicant’, meaning, such as Peter Olivi and William of
‘given to begging’. Christ and his Apostles, laypeople, with libraries full of books, and Ockham, articulated a right of ownership
the Franciscans argued, had shown the way buildings in which to live and work. But precisely in order to deny that the men-
by giving up all their possessions. Further- they argued that these things did not belong dicants were exercising such a right. After
more, ownership of property is a conse- to the individual friars, they belonged to all, in the normal case, people do consent
quence of the Fall. In a state of innocence the church, and the mendicants were just to own what is given to them, or what
there would be no need for possessions, using them. Therefore, to respond to crit- they purchase, and when they do so they
since by generosity of spirit all things would ics such as Pope John, Franciscans and their acquire a special right over these things.
be shared. However, as well as an individ- allies had to work out a sophisticated Not only a right of use, since that could
ual religious commitment, the embrace of account of the difference between mere use be present even without ownership –
poverty amounted to an implicit and some- and actual ownership. everyone uses the air they breathe, but
times explicit political critique, since the The distinction is actually rather plausi- no one owns the air. Rather, this is a new
medieval church as an institution most cer- ble. You might be reading this magazine kind of right that imposes obligations on
tainly did not embrace poverty. The men- without owning the copy you’re perusing. other people. If you own bread, I can’t
dicants’ very existence was a rebuke to the Perhaps you’re at a bookshop and haven’t just eat it without your permission, as I
opulence and worldliness of the papal court yet paid for it, or perhaps you borrowed it legally could if you were a mendicant who
and the rest of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. from a friend. Although you are using the denied that it is his property. We might
At first, the church grudgingly accepted magazine, you do not own it, as shown by say, then, that property ownership is a
the mendicants’ lifestyle nonetheless, and the fact that you have no legal rights over right that was discovered precisely in the
criticism initially came from rival theolo- it. If someone steals the magazine you’ve process of dis-owning it.
gians at the university of Paris rather than borrowed, it will be its true owner and not © PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2017
the papacy. But in the early 1320s Pope John you who has legal recourse against the thief. Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
XXII declared the Franciscan stance inco- On behalf of the mendicants, the anti- Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1, 2
herent, and even heretical, since it falsely papal polemicist Marsilius of Padua argued & 3, available from OUP. They’re based on
claimed that Christ owned nothing, when that one can only take ownership of some- his popular History of Philosophy podcast.
T
he quaint-sounding term ‘moral certainty’ dates to me that we may believe, by a highly probable guess, that in the
back to c.1400. The Oxford English Dictionary void all speeds would be entirely equal.”
defines it as “a degree of probability so great as to
admit of no reasonable doubt.” In the seventeenth Galileo’s methodological continuum has been called the first
century it became an important term in the law; according to a principle of relativity. In a thought experiment in 1632, Galileo
commentator in 1677 it meant “such a certainty as may war- realized that a sailor working below deck on a windowless ship
rant the judge to proceed to the sentence of death against the traveling on a perfectly smooth sea would not be able to tell
indicted party.” By the eighteenth century ‘moral certainty’ had whether the ship was moving or stationary. And by similar rea-
become interchangeable with ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ not soning, he suggested, it would make no difference to our expe-
only in the law, but also in philosophy and polite conversation rience whether the Sun revolves around the Earth or the Earth
– even in religion, where it was argued into the nineteenth cen- revolves around it. This in itself didn’t prove that the Earth
tury that the truth of Christianity could be proven “beyond a ‘moves’, but it made the idea less counterintuitive, just as watch-
reasonable doubt” (see p.31 of Barbara Shapiro’s paper refer- ing ships disappear over the horizon had made it less counter-
enced at the end). intuitive that the Earth might be round rather than flat.
Of course, if you’re not sure whether guilt has been estab-
lished beyond a reasonable doubt, it might not help much to
Beneath decks on a
ask whether it has been established to a moral certainty. Then calm sea, could you
again, it might, for the two phrases have somewhat different tell whether you are
connotations. One goes to the idea of external, objective proof, in motion or at rest?
the other to the subjective question whether one feels able in
good conscience to convict and sentence a fellow human being.
DNA evidence today is capable of satisfying both criteria; but
of course this is a relatively recent development, and I’m get-
ting way ahead of myself.
We speak of a scientific revolution in the seventeenth cen-
tury largely because of a paradigm shift from qualitative to quan-
titative thinking. Aristotle had understood science as the study
of qualitative causes, and this idea became set in stone for some
2,000 years until Galileo declared in 1623 – in a remark so famil-
iar it’s in Bartlett’s – that the universe is written in the ‘language’
of mathematics, without which we cannot understand a single
‘word’ of it.
Another difference was that Aristotle and the scholastics had
seen the world in terms of either-or dichotomies: true or false,
hot or cold, motion or rest. By contrast, Galileo saw rest not as
the opposite of motion, but as the lowest degree of slowness (a
speed of zero). His idea of a scientific law was a mathematically
ordered continuum leading to an ideal limit-case, something
we never expect to be reached. Aristotle defined science in terms
of what occurs “always” or “for the most part” (Metaphysics
1027a20); Galileo’s view was that it deals with what occurs at
the ideal limit, and so never (Carey 2012). In his last work Two
New Sciences (1638), he gave this account of his law of falling
bodies (1974, p.76):
“If we find in fact that moveables of different weight differ less and
less in speed as they are situated in more and more yielding medi-
ums: and that finally, despite extreme differences in weight, their
diversity of speed in the most tenuous medium of all (though not
void) is found to be very small and almost unobservable, then it seems
Mr Bowie
please stand up?”
Stefán Snævarr explores Derek Parfit’s ideas about
the self, and how they might apply to the complex (of)
personalities of David Bowie.
D
avid Bowie (1947-2016) was a man of many faces, The objection to 1) is that I would survive if just one half of
even many selves. He was baptized David Robert my brain had been successfully transplanted. People are known
Jones, but changed his name and his self by becom- to have survived even though half of their brains were destroyed.
ing David Bowie. Then Bowie adopted the personas The last possibility is not a coherent option, since the logic of
of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke, and identity – that a thing is itself and not two things – excludes the
so on. In his song ‘D.J.’ from the album Lodger, Bowie sings “I possibility of there being two things that are both identical with
am a D.J., I am what I play.” Contemplating Bowie’s life raises one original thing, me. By the same token, it does not really make
a number of philosophical questions concerning the self. Are sense to say that either 2) or 3) are true, since both surviving broth-
we what we do, as he hints at in ‘D.J.’ and as Jean-Paul Sartre ers are exactly like me – are me for all intents and purposes.
said explicitly? Can we be the authors of our selves, as Friedrich Parfit argues that this thought experiment and its possibil-
Nietzsche and Michel Foucault maintained? Did David Jones ities show that identity in the logical sense is not what matters
truly recreate himself as David Bowie? Did David Bowie in his for the self. What matters here is psychological continuity: if the
turn recreate himself as Ziggy Stardust? And do Aladdin Sane’s resulting person is sufficiently strongly psychologically con-
multiple personalities include those of Bowie, Ziggy and the nected to me as I was before the transplantation, then it makes
elusive Mr Jones? Will the real Mr Jones please stand up? sense to say that the resulting person is me: not necessarily that
In this article, I will focus on Oxford philosophy professor the resulting person is identical with me, rather that there are
Derek Parfit’s analysis of the self in his book Reasons and Per- enough overlapping psychological facts about me and that later
sons (1984). I’ll begin by giving a short explanation of his person to say that they’re continuous with me. We might for
approach, then proceed to critique it. I’ll put forth some criti- instance share a host of memories. More precisely, for psycho-
cal arguments of my own, then discuss criticisms of Parfit made logical continuity, there must be what Parfit calls ‘strong con-
by Paul Ricœur and Marya Schechtman criticisms of Parfit. nectedness’ between the current me and a past person. He says
we have a case of strong connectedness when at least half the
Parfit’s Continuity number of psychological attributes that hold at any give time
Born in 1942, Parfit, who died on New Year’s Day, was a British for a given individual are maintained at a later time. This would
philosopher of the same generation as Bowie. They evidently be true for someone when asleep and when he wakes, for instance.
shared an interest in the questions of selves and identities. Continuous personal identity over a lifetime is then defined in
In Reasons and Persons, Parfit argues that it isn’t true that every terms of overlapping chains of strong connectedness. Moreover,
human individual must possess one and only one self which per- a person at a given time is either strongly connected to a per-
sists through his or her (adult?) life-time. He also tries to show son who existed earlier, or is not. There is no middle ground.
that the concept of personal identity is empty. To vindicate these Furthermore, personal identity is an all-or-nothing relation:
theories, he conducts some mind-blowing thought experiments either Adam and Brian are the same person, or they are not.
of the science fiction kind. Let’s take a look at Parfit’s ‘My Divi- Let us assume then that Adam’s brain-halves are transplanted
sion’ thought experiment (pp.253-266). Suppose I am one of into the bodies of Brian and Charlie. Then, given psychologi-
identical triplets. My brain is surgically removed and divided cal continuity, both Brian and Charlie are identical with Adam.
into two halves. Each half is transplanted into each of my broth- However, Brian and Charlie are not identical with each other.
ers, who have had their own brains removed to make room for Doesn’t the non-identicalness of Brian and Charlie create prob-
mine. Both the resulting persons remembers my life, has my lems for the psychological continuity view? Parfit tries to avoid
personality, is psychologically continuous with me, and believes the problem by modifying the definition of identity. He main-
that he is me. Now, what has happened to the ‘real’ me? tains that personal identity is constituted by non-branching psy-
There are only four possibilities: chological continuity, such that Adam is the same person as Brian
1) I do not survive; only if Adam is psychologically continuous with Brian and nobody
2) I survive as one of the two people; else. In other words, if Adam is psychologically continuous with
3) I survive as the other person; both Brian and Charlie, and Brian and Charlie are distinct, then
4) I survive as both. Adam is not the same person as either Brian or Charlie.
Y
ears ago I was attending a conference in Honolulu siveness that I am primarily thinking about, but rather the char-
when one morning on Waikiki Beach I experienced acter of shared vs solitary experiences. Are my experiences not
the most beautiful sunrise. Alone. It was a stunning good enough on their own?
sight, and it made me feel terrible. How could this I have previously written in Philosophy Now (‘Atheist in a Fox-
be? How could a lack of companionship transform an other- hole’, ‘The Party Without Me’) that the meaning of life, as I see
wise beautiful event into a depressing experience? it, resides with our shared experiences. Our loved ones are the
As we travel through life we learn more about ourselves and objects of our affection as well as partners on life’s journey. In a
who we are. These insights come to us in bursts as we enjoy certain sense, a life fully lived is in part lived through others. I
and cope with life’s highs and lows. Particular events force us have argued that this is what we are left with if we reject an
to question and answer who we are. But such understanding appeal to a higher power to give our lives meaning. But perhaps
doesn’t exist in a relational vacuum. We understand ourselves I might be overstating my case if there is a wide range of psy-
in part by recognizing how we are similar and different to oth- chological dispositions towards shared experiences.
ers. The sad sunrise made me realize my deep need for shared Indeed, there is a broad spectrum of experiences that people
experiences, but it has just dawned on me that we are not all find valuable and which give their lives meaning. A brisk walk
like this. Some people seem perfectly fine on their own, while through an enchanting forest, the smile on your friend’s face, pride
others need company to accentuate an event, or perhaps to even on your graduation day. Clearly not all valuable experiences need
enjoy it at all. Is this just a difference of character traits among to be shared, although many by their very nature do. But irre-
people, or is one disposition better than the other? At first sight spective of what we value, the experience gets amplified if it is
it would appear that an inability to be satisfied with one’s own shared, albeit at different intensities. As such, sharing experiences
experiences is quite an existential handicap. makes them more significant, makes them more meaningful.
Recent psychological research suggests that shared experi- Nevertheless, the sharing of an experience is not only about
ences are amplified – both the good and the bad. For example, amplification. Many of our most valuable moments are special pre-
the sweetness or bitterness of a piece of chocolate is intensified
when shared and compared with someone else. But such research
is narrow in scope and masks both differences in types of expe-
riences as well as individual differences in the magnitude of
PHOTOS © BROCK ROSEBERRY 2007
T
experience can be distinguished from the initial experience. Bit- homas Paine was exactly the sort of revolution-making rights-
ter chocolate might taste more bitter when shared, getting busted loving do-gooder that Edmund Burke found tiresome. But lots of
with your friend might be a nuisance in the moment; but the other people liked him. Paine was born to be a revolutionary –
lasting impression is sweeter by having been through it with which was lucky, because there happened to be two jolly good revolu-
someone else. As such a shared experience need not only be tions during his life-time.
viewed in terms of circumscribed moments in time, but may With Benjamin Franklin’s help, the British-born Paine emigrated to
also be viewed more broadly. Together with the select few (or the American colonies in 1774 to rouse the rabble to overthrow the
special someone) who accompany us through life, there is a yoke of British oppression. Paine’s book Common Sense (1776)
sense that more than you alone are bearing witness to your exis- explained to the still politically-undeveloped Americans why they were
tence. By sharing our experiences there is someone other than justified in telling King George III to shove off. The book became an all-
ourselves who is aware of the sum total of our journey. time American bestseller. Fellow Founding Father and second Ameri-
This temporal dimension of shared experiences also has the can President John Adams even said that without Paine there would’ve
virtue of being one of the few ways we can become immortal. been no revolution (he might’ve added that there’s no revolution with-
Because a shared experience doesn’t belong to us alone, it has the out pain!).
quality of living on once we are gone. By living on in the memo- Having sorted out the Americans, Paine headed off to France to
ries of those we leave behind, we do not get a new lease on life, take care of the revolution there. In response to Burke’s hostile Reflec-
but in a certain sense, the lease on the life we have had gets extended. tions on the Revolution in France (1790), he penned The Rights of Man
So is there something wrong with me, or you? Clearly being (1791), in which he explained how it is that everyone comes to have
dependent on others to heighten our experiences and make lots of rights to lots of things (thereby laying the groundwork for the
them more meaningful makes us psychologically vulnerable. ‘Me generation’). He claims that human rights come to us from nature
Our state of mind is not within our sole control, but contingent – we’re born with them – and if the sovereign isn’t doing a good job in
on being accompanied. protecting our rights and providing us with what we need, one of those
There are ways of mitigating this vulnerability. For exam- rights says we can get ourselves a new sovereign.
ple, meditation techniques can allow us to find contentment in Paine spent most of the 1790s living in France, even being elected
our own headspace. Finding peace of mind in solitude can help to the revolutionary National Convention. Then the usual story: he joined
us be less exposed to the contingencies of life. But such solitary the wrong group of revolutionaries, the revolutionary leader Robe-
solace surely cannot itself be what fundamentally brings our spierre took a dislike to him, and he was arrested and imprisoned. He
lives meaning. only just managed to keep his head. Robespierre lost his in the mean-
If our lives have meaning it resides with us, but not necessarily time, effectively saving Paine’s. Paine (possibly) finished writing The
as isolated islands of self-contentment. Rather, validation is pro- Age of Reason (1794) while in prison.
vided by our companions. Our most memorable moments, the When not stirring up revolutions, Paine was just your typical humble
terrific and the tragic, are shared. The need to share experiences corset-maker, which it was his right to be.
makes us vulnerable, but it might also be the meaning of life. © TERENCE GREEN 2017
© DR DAVID RÖNNEGARD 2017 Terence is a peripatetic (though not Peripatetic) writer, historian and
David Rönnegard has a PhD in Philosophy from the London School lecturer. He holds a PhD in the history of political thought from
of Economics, and is a researcher and teacher in corporate social respon- Columbia University, NYC, and lives with his wife and their dog in
sibility in Stockholm. Wellington, NZ. He blogs at hardlysurprised.blogspot.co.nz
W
e can only guess at the lurid
thoughts pulsating through her
mind; and the dog’s owner is
just as mysterious. My photograph taken
on a Prague street gives no reliable access
to the thoughts of the two walkers. In fact,
we don’t always know what we ourselves
think, let alone another human being. As
Sigmund Freud puts it, a person “is not
even master in his own house, but... must
remain content with the veriest scraps of
information about what is going on uncon-
sciously in his own mind” (A General
Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 1920).
Incidentally, Freud is honoured by a
strange statue in Prague, it being the sort
of city where you just don’t know what lies
around the next corner (or in Freud’s case,
hangs by one hand from a long pole over
the street). But if we are not even transpar-
ent to ourselves, what hope have we of
understanding another person?
With non-human animals, such as the
dog in the photograph, our difficulties are
even greater. In his book Mortal Questions
(1979), American thinker Thomas Nagel
asks, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’. We can
just about visualize being a human trapped
in a bat’s body, but that’s not an authentic
bat in all its battiness. It’s less easy to imag-
ine hanging upside down from a church
belfry, eating a moth that you tracked
down by echolocation, then urinating on
the archdeacon, unless it’s a hazy memory
of a drunken initiation ceremony for the
Society of Sonar Engineers. But even if
you can imagine this, the experience is that
of an intoxicated Homo sapiens in a bat cos-
tume, not the genuine schtick. Along simi-
lar lines, Ludwig Wittgenstein claims that
“if a lion could talk, we would not under-
stand him.” (In my daydream, the lion says:
“I don’t understand Wittgenstein either.”)
The point is that the world-views, con- say. Furthermore, we can sometimes figure dream. To help us to rove mentally, we can
cerns and experiences of bats and lions are out what’s on the minds of our fellow also roam physically. The French poet
so far removed from our own that we human beings. But occasionally our Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) invented
would struggle to find common ground thoughts and feelings are so fugitive that the term ‘flâneur’ to describe those who
with them, and having some shared nobody could keep up, not even ourselves. habitually take unhurried, purposeless
assumptions is a prerequisite for meaning- We flit from one topic to the next in an strolls through the city streets.
ful communication. unpredictable way, like a moth dodging a Becoming a flâneur or flâneuse is a way
However, many dog owners claim to bat. of encouraging our minds to wander.
experience a rapport with their pets that Bringing a dog along would probably only
bridges the species gap, so that they do Wandering Aimlessly limit our movements (as well as intruding
know what Lassie is feeling. And Lassie, in One time our minds drift freely over ran- upon our thoughts when she encounters
turn, knows what mood they are in, they dom thoughts and feelings is when we day- another dog with an alluring scent).
R
udolf Carnap has a major place in the history of analytic Berlin to work on wireless telegraphy.
philosophy. He was entranced by the promise that During the war he married Elizabeth Schöndube. They had
Bertrand Russell’s and A.N. Whitehead’s Principia Math- four children, but divorced in 1929. In 1933 he married Eliza-
ematica (1912) seemed to hold out for creating a logical foun- beth Ina Stögren. This second marriage flourished, lasting until
dation for mathematics, and by extension, philosophy. He was her death in 1964. The couple addressed each other as Carnap
even more excited by Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External and ina, the latter to be always written in lower case. Carnap
World (1914), in which Russell called for a reconstruction of all hated the name Rudolf and refused to be so called; ina just wanted
knowledge on the basis of our sense experiences alone, and to be different.
urged a search for the narrowest selection of basic concepts In 1918, at the war’s end, he returned to Jena to resume his
needed for this purpose. Carnap accepted this immense chal- studies. A combination of poverty and the chaos in post-war
lenge ,and produced Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928, trans- Germany made it impossible for him to find the books for his
lated as The Logical Structure of the World, 1967). His ideas were proposed field of research. He was rescued by an extraordinary
enthusiastically taken up by positivist philosophers, and the Auf- act of kindness by Bertrand Russell. The impoverished student
bau is often regarded as the quintessential statement of a posi- wrote to Russell describing both his proposed research topic
tivistic approach to the philosophy of science. Like Principia and his inability to acquire a copy of Russell’s Principia. Russell
Mathematica, the Aufbau is now considered a heroic failure, but replied by sending him a lengthy manuscript in which he had
one that has had a huge impact on philosophy. personally copied out and annotated all the relevant parts of that
Carnap’s second major undertaking, to develop a sound basis work. Vastly encouraged, and now suitably equipped, Carnap
for scientific reasoning, occupied him for most of the rest of his set out to write a dissertation, Der Raum (Space), in which he
working life, and represents his greatest achievement. showed that the contradictions in the theories of space main-
tained by mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers were
Early Life caused by their use of entirely different approaches while all
Rudolf Carnap was born on 18 May 1891, in Ronsdorf, near using the same terminology.
Dusseldorf, then in the Rhine Province of Prussia. His father When he submitted his thesis, the Physics department said
Johannes Carnap came from a family of poor weavers, but after it was too philosophical and the Philosophy department said it
long and hard work became the prosperous and respected owner was all physics. Both rejected it. Carnap had the good sense to
of a ribbon-making factory. Rudolf’s mother Anna (née Dorpfeld) swallow his pride, re-write it using a conventional Kantian
was a teacher and an aspiring author. As he watched his mother approach, and re-submit it to the Philosophy department, which,
write, the young Rudolf became fascinated by what he came to suitably mollified, accepted it. He had by now seen how to for-
regard as the magical activity of putting words on paper. Few mulate a positivistic approach to philosophy, but had received a
philosophers have imbibed at such an early age what was to warning that it would not be easy to communicate and promul-
become their major preoccupation: how do we create reliable gate his ideas in the way he sought.
descriptions of the world? At a conference in 1923 he had the good fortune to meet a
Rudolf had one sister (whose name he neglects to mention kindred spirit in Hans Reichenbach. Reichenbach introduced
in his autobiography!). Their mother obtained permission to him to Moritz Schlick, and in 1926 Schlick offered him a posi-
teach the children at home, but did so for only an hour a day. tion in the University of Vienna. Carnap moved to Vienna and
His father died when he was only four years old. Then the fam- became a member of the Vienna Circle.
ily moved to Barmen. He attended the local school, where both
mathematics and Latin attracted him, one by the exactness of The Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism
its concepts, the other by its expressive but rational structure. The Vienna Circle was a group of like-minded philosophers
In 1909 the family moved to Jena, where Carnap entered the who sought to establish philosophy on solid logical foundations,
University. Physics and philosophy became his major fields, and in a way that would allow all its conclusions to be rigorously
the pattern of his intellectual life, and the problems it would verified. They called their approach ‘Logical Positivism’
bring him were beginning to take shape. At that time Gottlob although a more accurate name would be ‘Logical Empiricism’.
Frege (1848–1925), one of the greatest of all logicians, was an It offered the beguiling prospect of banishing all metaphysical
associate professor in Jena, and Carnap attended his lectures speculation; but this prospect vanished when its fundamental
on conceptual notation (Bergriffsschrift). He became fascinated principle of verifiability proved untenable.
by their intellectual implications, and the course of his philo- The Circle developed in the University of Vienna under lead-
sophical life was set. ership of Schlick, who had succeeded the great scientist and pos-
The outbreak of war in 1914 proved a traumatic experience. itivist philosopher Ernst Mach in 1922. Its guiding ideas had
Although viscerally opposed to war, Carnap accepted a duty to emerged from discussions starting around 1907 between the soci-
serve his fatherland, and volunteered to serve in the German ologist Otto Neurath, the physicist Philip Franck, and the math-
army. After three years in the front line he was transferred to ematician Hans Hahn. As it developed, the Circle attracted the
participation of philosophers with a training in, or an attraction Positivism, Verification and Falsification
to, logic, mathematics, or science. The Circle sought to show Our knowledge can only be of three kinds:
that the various types of scientific activity had a common intel-
lectual structure, and argued that philosophy should be re-cast • Innate, deriving from our genetic inheritance (breathing, bal-
in this scientific form. In its early stages the Circle attracted the ancing, walking…);
attention and participation of many leading philosophers, includ- • Derived from our sensory experience; and
ing Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, A.J. Ayer and Alfred Tarski. • Derived from thought.
Hello Anthony. in the period. On the other hand, because and done such harm; and the apparent
I found your new I’m not writing primarily for academics, absence in his character of malice, self-
book The Dream of Enlightenment: The I’ve felt free to give much less than the regard, or any of the destructive
Rise of Modern Philosophy to be an usual amount of space to Bishop George passions. I also admire Hume for his
enjoyable and informative introduction to Berkeley, who for various reasons still genial, affectionate nature, his even
Enlightenment philosophy. Can you please looms large in university courses, but is temperament, and his preference for
tell us a little about its aims, the period it rather an oddball, even by the standards gentle persuasion rather than confronta-
covers, and what motivated you to write it? of philosophy. tion and bludgeoning.
It’s the second installment of a chrono-
logical history of Western philosophy. Do they have anything in common? Do you perceive a trajectory in thought as
The first ran from ancient philosophy to One thing the main characters in The the Enlightenment progresses?
the Renaissance, and this new volume Dream of Enlightenment have in common The radical and most creative work
covers philosophers from René is a desire to supplant traditional ideas done in the span covered by my book
Descartes and Thomas Hobbes in the inherited from ancient and medieval came early on, with Descartes, Hobbes
Seventeenth Century to just before thinkers and to explore the implications and Spinoza, in the first three-quarters
Immanuel Kant, whose main work was of Galileo’s ‘new philosophy’, as they of the Seventeenth Century. This is the
published in the late Eighteenth called it – we call it the ‘Scientific Revo- period of the so-called ‘pre-Enlighten-
Century. A third volume will run from lution’. One outlier who doesn’t quite fit ment’ or ‘early Enlightenment’. I think
Kant to the present day. The overall aim this pattern is Gottfried Leibniz, who that a lot of what came afterwards, in
of the project is to engage readers with aimed to find compromises between the the Eighteenth Century, was a matter of
some of the main ideas and arguments of old and the new, even while he himself digesting, assimilating, and coming to
Western philosophy in a way that played a big role in advancing the new. terms with these early ideas.
requires no prior acquaintance with it. I
began this enterprise when I was science Which thinker’s philosophy do you particu- What do these thinkers have to say to us
editor of The Economist. My hope was to larly agree with or relate to? today?
do for philosophy what we tried to do in I usually found much to appreciate in If one were to try and identify the core
the magazine for science – that is, to the perspectives and achievements of values of the thinkers in my book, some
explain it in a way that was accessible, yet each one of my subjects, even though of the things that spring to mind are the
also rigorously accurate. there was plenty of passionate disagree- questioning of intellectual authority –
ment between them. Like many of and particularly the dictates of religious
What criteria did you use to choose which today’s professional philosophers, establishments – and a keen sense of the
philosophers you would discuss? though, I am particularly keen on David weakness of the human mind. I’d say
To some extent the agenda was set by Hume. If I had to pick a favourite, it that these values are needed as much
tradition, because I wanted to provide a would be him. This is largely because I today as they have ever been.
deeper understanding of ideas that were share not only many of his attitudes – his
already in wide circulation. Many people naturalism and agnosticism, for instance What did you personally learn when writing
have heard a bit about Descartes and – but also many of his philosophical this book?
Hobbes, for example. My aim is to tell interests – in the limits of scepticism, I came to have a much greater apprecia-
them more about the classic works they’ll and in the nature of causation and prob- tion of Thomas Hobbes, whose work is
see alluded to in works of history or popu- abilistic reasoning, for example. more wide-ranging than popular
lar science. But I’ve also introduced some accounts suggest, and more sympathy for
less familiar figures, whose work either Which of these men do you particularly Leibniz, who I think was rather traduced
played a significant role in the develop- admire as a human being? in Bertrand Russell’s influential History of
ment of philosophy or is of particular Bertrand Russell famously wrote that Western Philosophy. One general lesson I
interest to me – histories of philosophy Baruch Spinoza was “the noblest and hope I learned is a keener appreciation
are always idiosyncratic to some degree. most lovable of the great philosophers.” of the importance of context when inter-
Thus in the new book I have a short I fell under Spinoza’s spell, too, as many preting the thought of early-modern
chapter on Pierre Bayle, who was widely do. There’s the humble simplicity, self- philosophers. PN
read in the early Eighteenth Century – lessness and dedication of his life; the
and rightly so, in my opinion – but is brave originality of his take on religion, Grant Bartley is an Editor of Philosophy
almost forgotten now, even by specialists which he thought had led many astray Now.
The Views On Nowhere anybody to start supposing that, as the Later on, however, his discussion reverts
DEAR EDITOR: I don’t often write to idea of ‘spirit’ goes out of fashion, the to a more traditional use of the word
you, but Nick Inman’s lively article conscious self has ceased to exist and ‘me’ when he reports the commonly-
‘Nowhere Men’ (Issue117) just hit the become an illusion. (Who, by the way, is held view that “half of me does not
point which was then bothering me, supposed to be having that illusion? Isn’t exist” – implying that he’s now referring
namely: Why are some philosophical illusion, like measles or a bad temper, to himself as a whole entity, of which
superstitions apparently incurable? Why something which must be had by a sub- only half is the person in question.
for instance can’t today’s materialists ject – a particular person?) There is still However, Inman is consistent in his
(now of course duly called ‘physicalists’) less excuse for saying that when we talk assertion that subjective experience is
get over their mind-matter dualism? If about this familiar self, nature – or the only possible via immaterial activity.
the idea of mind makes them so uneasy, brain, which is now the more frequently That we experience mental processes
why can’t they see that the idea of mat- chosen quasi-agent – is ‘pulling a confi- seems all the proof he needs that there’s
ter is every bit as awkward? Since the dence-trick’. Trying to pretend that one something apart from matter at work in
two were designed to fit each other, they is not a subject – that one has no inner the human person. This unjustifiably
have, in fact, both got to be rethought. self – is just thought-free nonsense. And dismisses the complexity that material
Dualism was devised in the Sixteenth when Inman reports that “many of our processes are capable of, in favor of the
Century as a way of keeping modern greatest contemporary thinkers” are now preferred explanation that human beings
physics out of the way of traditional doing this, he is in fact reporting the transcend physics. This belief is never
Christianity. Since Christianity and ideas of a set of simple-minded dogmatic convincingly proven, just repeated.
physics were then the only two intellec- materialists, skilfully disguised as sages. EUGENE FRANKLIN, USA
tual patterns available for highbrows in MARY MIDGLEY
Europe, confusion between them could NEWCASTLE Metaphysical Foundations
have had bad social, and indeed political, DEAR EDITOR: Issue 117 has been
effects. The old names of ‘spirit’ and DEAR EDITOR: One difficulty I come another fascinating read. The list of
‘matter’ were therefore adopted for this across in Nick Inman’s ‘Nowhere Men’ metaphysicians discussed suggests that
new confrontation, and were supposed to piece is the inconsistent use of language. the answer to your front-cover question
allow the two sides to fit together. When he asks “Am I me?” and “Do “Is metaphysics out of date?” is: “Yes it
Unluckily, however, this arrangement I…exist?” it becomes clear that by ‘I’ is; it is stuck in a time when nobody
was then treated as if it involved a form of and ‘me’, he doesn’t mean what we nor- knew or cared about the metaphysics of
chemistry that linked two distinct sub- mally mean. When we use the word Buddhism, Taoism etc.” Berkeley,
stances, stuffs that must not be mixed, ‘car’ to refer to a four-wheeled transport Spinoza, Epicurus are all very well, but
chalk or cheese. Everything, it seemed, machine, we’re using it as a conve- they did not solve the problem of real-
must be made entirely either of matter or nience. One could say that there really is ity. Surely it is time to move on.
spirit. Thus, the fact that the same person no such thing as a car. What there is is a However, I would like to thank Peter
could have both a body and a soul [or collection of parts: a frame, an engine, a Adamson for his excellent and useful
mind] has been seen – and is still seen – as transmission, et cetera; and even these article on metaphysics, which seemed to
posing a specially ‘hard problem’, because components are made up of smaller me to contain more good sense than
these items have been deemed incompati- pieces. For convenience, we sum it up many whole books on the topic. He
ble, even though that same person’s hav- into a collective thing and label it a ‘car’. proposes that metaphysics is the most
ing (say) both a profession and a national- Pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘me’ do the general and fundamental part of philos-
ity, both a destiny and also a reputation, same thing; they allow us to take a ophy. While this should not need say-
has caused no more alarm than their hav- whole creature into account without ing, somehow it does. There is nothing
ing both a size and a weight. tediously naming the biological compo- more depressing than seeing philoso-
People still do not seem to understand nents. When using such a holistic term phers theorising prior to establishing
that the language of body and soul, mat- as ‘I’, there’s no point questioning any metaphysical foundation. It’s like a
ter and spirit – outer and inner – does not whether, say, I exist, because if I didn’t, house-builder working on the roof
invoke separate substances but merely there’d be no one to ask the question. before the footings. The result is bound
draws attention to distinct aspects of a But Inman’s not asking about a whole to be about the same.
complex whole. The unit is always the person. He’s restricting ‘I’ and ‘me’ to PETER JONES
whole person. There is thus no need for an immaterial personal identity here. HOLMFIRTH
On Bowie ble and reflexive art form. With Bowie, as styles through a process of “inhabitation,
by Simon Critchley with Andy Warhol, there is the sense that imitation, perfection and destruction”
literally anything is potentially useable for (Critchley likens this to Gustav Metzger’s
WHEN I STARTED MY the artist, and that any censorship is to be on idea of auto-destructive art). Critchley
Philosophy degree in the artist’s own terms. But the question explores how all these strategies relate to the
1983, if someone asked me remains: how did Bowie, more than any media-dominated speed, unreality, contin-
what music I liked, my other rock star (in both my and Critchley’s gency, even absurdity, of life today and to
proselytizing reply was “Bowie, Bowie, and view), and with commercial success, manage the transience of experience.
Bowie!” Over the years little has changed. to so consistently transcend the mundane? Critchley also writes at length about
From this the reader may discern that I have Critchley talks about Bowie’s repeated Bowie’s strong interest in religious ideas.
a certain amount in common with the use of Warhol’s aesthetic – the sense of an Whilst Bowie had very strong spiritual lean-
philosopher and Bowie fan Simon Critch- ironic self-awareness for both artist and ings, he was deeply critical of organised reli-
ley, author of On Bowie, a short, personal and audience, born of repeated inauthenticity, gion, perhaps of Christianity most of all. It
penetrating book on this pre-eminent artist that is facilitated using obvious fictions and is perhaps not surprising that he had a life-
and song-writing phenomenon. David characters, the use of fictions within fictions, long interest in Buddhism. Critchley notes
Bowie – born David Jones – sadly died a year and the exposure of artifice. Bowie’s lyrics how often the word ‘nothing’ appears in
ago, aged 69, still at the very top of his game. often display his sense of being inside his Bowie’s lyrics;. This tends not to involve the
In twenty-five concise essays Critchley takes own movie, or reveal himself as the writer. usual meaning (complete negation) but to
us on a journey from his own reaction to first Critchley also covers Bowie’s conversion, via lean more towards a “restless nothing shaped
seeing Bowie on TV in 1972 to his reaction William Burroughs, to Brion Gysin’s cut-up by... our fearful sickness unto death” or
to Bowie’s death. During this journey he’s technique – literally the cutting up and rear- something like the Buddhist notion of a self-
essentially asking, what is it about this artist, ranging of passages of text to create lyrics or less meditative state on the path to enlight-
his personas, and his work, that manages to musical ideas. Bowie was terrifically success- enment, which within Bowie became
have such a hold over so many? Of course, ful with this technique. “mobile and massively creative.”
quite early on there was the gender-bend- But Bowie’s ability to excel didn’t just The brevity of this book belies its scope.
ing, the outlandish appearance, the youth- stem from applying art theories and tech- Critchley covers various of Bowie’s themes:
antheming; but there must be more to it than niques. One of Bowie’s many tools Critch- mortality, transformation, transcendence,
that. And Critchley, as a philosopher, is well ley identifies is his use of notions of personal humour, utopias, dystopias, madness, alien-
placed to probe this further. identity. Most people, and most song lyrics, ation, Nietzschean sensibility, imaginary
assume that identity has a natural narrative pasts and futures, Hamletesque characters
Philosophy & Art unity. Bowie played with ideas that are more and reflections, fear of isolation, yearning
Bowie evidently had some sort of relation- sophisticated and liberating and, claims for love or connection. He talks of how
ship with philosophy, which fed strongly Critchley, more in line with his own view of Bowie permits a “deworlding of the world”
into his craft. I’m not saying that Bowie was identity being “at best a sequence of episodic where we acknowledge disconnections in
a philosopher in the conventional sense, blips.” This is said in connection with David order to see things afresh.
only that he had a certain depth and breadth, Hume’s idea of the self as being a discon- The highlight of the book for me was the
and a visceral reaction to the broader philo- nected bundle of perceptions, and with a notion that “authenticity is the curse of
sophical landscape. This included aspects of belief, such as Simone Weil’s, in “decreative music from which we need to cure
aesthetics, of course, but also involved writing that moves through spirals of ever- ourselves.” I think Critchley’s really on to
exploring contemporary issues of the human ascending negations before reaching ... something here, at least as far as popular
condition and the blasted terrain of modern nothing.” music is concerned. Although he writes in a
spirituality. non-technical manner, I think he’s driving
Bowie also maintained a lifelong interest Disconnection & Exploration at ideas of cultural authenticity from exis-
in the visual arts. Clearly he saw himself Once these major influences, tools, and tentialism and aesthetics, as relating to
more as an artist in the theatrical or fine-art objectives are looked at together, one starts notions of street credibility and of authen-
mould than as a conventional rock star. In to see some obvious marriages between ticity of expression – of an artist being faith-
comparison to the visual arts, most popular them, especially (as Critchley notes) that the ful to himself by portraying situations or
music tends to be terribly constrained. But Gysin cut-up technique and Warholian emotions realistically. There is much good
for anyone with a foot in both camps it must irony blend perfectly with Bowie’s oblique music that does comply with these notions
seem perfectly natural to try and get some of strategies in tackling notions of fragmented of authenticity. However, by allowing
the freedom of the former into the latter; in identity and fragmented lives. Bowie himself a “variety of identities” placed in a
other words, to turn pop music into a flexi- famously had a tendency to quickly change “confection of illusion… at the service of a
Omnidirectional Bombardment
So how did Bowie manage to so consistently
transcend the mundane? Critchley answers
this question in a cumulative, integrated and
sophisticated way, but the answer is also
worth stating more bluntly. In essence, and
quite at variance with the notion of laid-back
cool so often adopted by artists, and often by
Bowie himself, he excelled through a canny
combination of raw talent, wild imagination,
cross-fertilisation, wise collaboration, fero-
cious ambition, enthusiasm, dedication, art
theory and techniques, open-ended curios-
ity, restless experimentalism, artistic fear-
lessness, unsentimental productivity, global
art and culture, philosophy and spirituality,
esotericism, science fiction, future nostalgia,
and more besides. Bowie basically chucked
everything but the kitchen sink at his art!
Under this omnidirectional bombardment,
mundanity was all but buried.
I would recommend this book to all
David Bowie Bowie fans with intellectual leanings who
portrait by seek a deeper understanding of how Bowie
Gail Campbell managed to weave his magic, for Critchley
2017 here has done much of the spade-work anal-
ysis that people like me always meant to do
but somehow never quite got round to. It’s
felt... truth” Bowie managed to produce art this sense Bowie’s art could be seen as a rarer, short, readable and a worthy take on a great
that responds not just to who and where we more sophisticated form of authenticity, artist who by comparison with other musi-
are, but also, and especially, to our yearnings which shows the simpler form of mundane, cians was both fascinatingly different and
for imaginary, sociological, and theatrical factual authenticity to be merely an artistic often the same but better – and thus overall
exploration. These yearnings are for limitation. To paraphrase Critchley, a true much, much better.
personal reinvention that can save us from artist requires sufficient elbow room to work © DARYN GREEN 2017
suburban boredom – or even “save us from their material, so as to produce a more inter- Daryn Green is a carer, and also works as a
ourselves, from the banal fact of being in the esting level of authenticity – as Bowie supply teacher in North London.
world.” In any case, for many of us, such himself repeatedly demonstrated.
yearnings are just as much a part of who we I was glad that Critchley also covered • On Bowie, by Simon Critchley, Serpent’s Tail,
are as the more mundane facts about us. In Bowie’s extraordinary artistic discipline – his 2016, £6.99, 192pp, ISBN: 1781257450.
because individual rights are inalienable tions undermining his position. For exam- ing themselves to blame – because they
and establish a space for the individual to ple, we can say that it was only by chance, didn’t try harder, for example. Or, if they’re
determine his own life course” (p.168). or perhaps by bad luck, that Walter never not seen as blameworthy, they are never-
What then are these basic freedom-sup- experienced the processes or influences that theless only entitled to minimal care.
porting universal rights? In summary, they would have provided him with what he Consequently, extreme inequality can
consist of rights to: security from physical would have needed to manifest his preferred result, with no moral objection being pre-
harm and illegal imprisonment; legal values, until it was too late. The operations sented to people increasing their advan-
equality; privacy; freedom of expression of chance didn’t provide him psychological- tages. So although Svendsen has given us a
and religion; own property; democratic ly with what he needed to engage in work- wealth of useful distinctions, arguments,
participation; freedom of assembly; a mini- ing more effectively to control his shame, and challenges to philosophical positions
mum standard of education, having the for instance. However, this factor of chance that anyone interested in free will would do
opportunity to develop one’s abilities; or luck means that we cannot simply or well to grapple with, his philosophy of free-
nutrition, shelter, and health; and to deter- blithely assess Walter as a morally deficient dom has also given us a moral and political
mine for oneself what gives life meaning criminal, rather than, say, an unlucky per- system whose intricate philosophical com-
without paternalistic interference. All these son of good character unfortunately unable ponents can be used to build a compassion
basic rights “are individually designed to to effectively control himself. extractor, in the name of morality.
promote autonomy” (p.171), and for The factor of chance or luck obscures © DR ALAN BRODY 2017
Svendsen are necessary for the proper the moral situation of human beings who Alan Brody has a PhD in philosophy and is a
operation of free choice. are subject to the vagaries of the universe, licensed psychotherapist and addiction specialist
despite their goodness. Furthermore, if living in Santa Fe.
Responsibility, Luck & Compassion society ignores the operation of luck, those
Unfortunately, Svendsen does not seem to in society who are less well-off can become • A Philosophy of Freedom, by Lars Svendsen, Reak-
appreciate how much chance has implica- regarded by the more fortunate as only hav- tion Books, 2014, 288pp, £25 hb, ISBN: 1780233701
T
wo trends from twentieth century they carry this feeling of isolation around reaching a midlife crisis he ventures to Japan
French philosophy have been within them as they walk the muzak- to shoot a whiskey commercial, with the sole
major influences on cinema: exis- infused corridors of the hotel in which intention of making his money then return-
tentialism and postmodernism. Sofia they are confined, sleepless and in search ing home. His plans begin to alter when he
Coppola’s 2003 film Lost In Translation of some kind of meaning. starts to get to know Charlotte.
reflects both. It explores what might be This meaning is not forthcoming from The two first see each other in an eleva-
called a warm Platonic love, as depicted in external sources. Neither speak the lan- tor, that perfect symbol of transitory space.
the relationship between Bob (Bill Murray) guage, and the scenes of traditional Japan – This initial contact is visually framed by
and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), set flower arranging, attending a shrine, the many others who are also crowded into
against the background of Tokyo. watching a geisha walk past – are as mysti- the elevator, strangers going about their
There is relatively little dialogue cal to Charlotte as the self-help audio daily business. And thus the Other is
throughout the film, but its beauty is in recording she’s listening to in search of her acknowledged and a relationship born.
how much is conveyed non-verbally, not ‘destiny’ while she absent-mindedly Their fleeting glimmer of recognition is
only through body language, but via cine- smokes the occasional cigarette. recounted later, once they have grown
matography, lighting, editing, and the close. “Did I scowl at you?” Charlotte asks.
soundtrack. Lost in Translation sums up the Convergence “No,” Bob replies, “you smiled.”
feeling of looking for your place in a world Charlotte has been married for a couple of
in which you do not automatically belong. years to John (Giovanni Ribisi), a photogra- Existential Drift
Coppola’s subtlety in depicting an elusive pher whose work has led him to Japan. A This postmodern romance is imbued with
connection that transgresses the usual cat- recent philosophy graduate with no idea the kind of existentialism developed by
egories of what a relationship might look what she wants to do with her life, she tags Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
like allows viewers to easily follow the along with him for a holiday, and while he Writing in mid-twentieth-century Paris,
story of Bob and Charlotte, existential works she spends her time seeing the sights Sartre and de Beauvoir insisted that there is
characters seeking authenticity and recog- of the city and staring moodily out of the no predetermined essential self for us to
nition in the eyes of the Other, as they find hotel windows over the unfamiliar cityscape. ‘discover’, and no preordained purpose to
themselves dislocated in Japan. Their exis- Bob is not faring much better. An aging our lives either. Rather, we are each free to
tential angst is reflected in the bright, actor, he has been married for about a create our lives as we wish, according to
flashing lights of a city that feels foreign to decade, and has a couple of children whose values we ourselves choose. As we con-
the two Americans. Yet at the same time, birthdays he tends to forget. Just as Bob is struct ourselves to be who we desire to be,
I
mmanuel Kant (1724-1804) has had refusal to separate objective reality from Kant’s World
scarcely a walk-on part in this column. subjective experience, and Sebastian Gard- Anyone who knows anything about Kant
This is a serious omission: the Sage of ner’s engrossing, closely-argued Guide to knows that his central idea is that the mind
Königsberg has a position in European phi- Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1999), which structures our experiences. And since (he
losophy similar to that occupied by Johann I have just finished. argues) all our knowledge begins from expe-
Sebastian Bach in Western classical music. The latter made clear something that rience, the world we take account of in our
Like Bach, Kant in some sense gathered up may justify Kant’s virtual absence from lives is also shaped by the mind. We do not
all that came before him and has been a deci- Wonderland. His thought is not only sub- have access to ‘things-in-themselves’ –
sive influence on all that followed him. tle, complex, and profound, but also densely denizens of what he calls the ‘noumenal’
His work has been an important presence interconnected. His arguments about the realm – reality as it is independent of our
in my life since my teens. My paperback nature of reality and the limitations of our experience of it. We have access only to
copy of the classic Kemp Smith translation access to it, about the self and its freedom, what he called the ‘phenomenal’ world of
of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), pur- about ethics, and about political philosophy, our experience. Still, we know that there
chased in the late Sixties, shows signs of are all of a piece. You cannot fully under- must be things-in-themselves providing the
intense study. Much sellotape has been stand any part of the mature Kant, without ultimate ground of our experiences, under-
applied to the cover, the spine is wizened by engaging with the whole. Not a philosopher pinning them. By proclaiming the existence
cracks, and every page bears biro marks of to be trifled with, then, in a column of 1,800 of this underlying reality, Kant distanced his
intense attention – underlinings and words. ‘transcendental’ idealism from the straight
marginal notes and explanations to self. Even so, I cannot resist sharing some idealism of Berkeley, for whom the world
Reading the Critique was clearly an impor- thoughts I have had recently, provoked in consists simply of perceptions and per-
tant experience to me, though, disturbingly, part by a conversation with Sebastian Gard- ceivers. (Berkeley’s ideas were superbly
I remember nothing of it. ner that led me to his Guide. It took place summarised by Hugh Hunter in ‘Berkeley’s
Over the subsequent half-century, other mostly at Venice Airport, and it is a miracle Suitcase’ in last issue’s Philosophy Now.)
writers have prompted me to engage indi- that we did not miss our plane. Our dialogue There is much that is intuitively attractive
rectly with the Critique. Highlights include is still ongoing, and I will focus only on the in Kant’s arguments. It is obvious that we are
P.F. Strawson’s famous response The Bounds question that has prompted it because I not just passive recipients of what is ‘out
of Sense (1966), Quentin Meillassoux’ pene- haven’t fully digested Sebastian’s responses, there’, transparent lenses through which
trating analysis After Finitude (2008), where and would almost certainly misrepresent reality passes en route to a mind that is effec-
Kant is rejected for his ‘correlationist’ them if I attempted a summary. tively a plane mirror. And his argument that
what is really real may be entirely unlike the
deliverances of ordinary experience is hardly
shocking to anyone accustomed to the
world-picture of physics, according to which
what is out there is profoundly different
from anything we would recognise from
daily life. Even so, Kant reaches some
strange, indeed outrageous, conclusions,
based on his view of the degree to which the
mind shapes its own experiences. The shap-
ing activity works at two levels: the imposi-
tion on our sensations of what he calls ‘the
forms of sensible intuition’ to make them
into representations of external objects; and
the imposition of the so-called ‘categories’ of
understanding on our experiences.
Immanuel Kant, His boldest claim is that space and time
the Sage of are neither substances in themselves nor a
Königsberg set of relations between pre-existing
objects, but are the forms of sensible intu-
Philosophy Now has been published since 1991, so it is hardly surprising that
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S
imone Weil was one of the most remarkable thinkers of tary systems without breaking them. Revolutionary movements
the past century: a philosopher, a mystic, and a political gave us the illusion of power only by destroying the last ves-
activist. Born in France in 1909, she grew up with a Chris- tiges of feudalism and establishing capitalism either in the
tian outlook even though her parents were Jewish agnostics and shape of private enterprise or in the shape of the state, as hap-
her brother André a mathematician. pened in Russia.”
She was above all an outsider. Critical of institutions, she stated “But the revolution in Russia appeared to be a completely
that “the task of the intellect requires complete freedom.” She new beginning,” I say.
never joined any party or church. She argued against Trotsky in “Yes, ‘appeared’ to be. The truth is that the privileges the
print and in person, saying that elite communist bureaucrats could Party abolished already no longer had any social reality, they
be as oppressive as the worst capitalists, and was one of the rare existed only through the exercise of traditions, while the real
few who held her own with the Red Army founder. She came powers – I mean the great industry, the police, the army, the
into contact not only with Plato and Kant, but also with Eastern bureaucracy – not only were not destroyed by that revolution,
culture, including the Bhagavad Gita, and learned Sanskrit as well but thanks to the revolution, they became even more powerful.”
as Greek. She taught philosophy at a secondary school for girls, “Is it true that when you were ten you considered yourself a
considering school a political place, where one comes into con- Bolshevik?”
tact with all social classes. She tried to offer her pupils “the nec- She smiles at me, amused: “I was born into an open-minded
essary tools not to become victims of propaganda.” On leave from family.”
teaching, she worked in a factory to understand the workers’ con- “You certainly grew up with a strong sensitivity for social
dition. Although she professed herself a pacifist, she fought in justice.”
the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. She died in 1943, “My brother taught me to read when I was five, at the out-
when she was only thirty-four. Her most famous works were pub- break of the First World War. Each child adopted a soldier, and
lished posthumously. sent him gifts and letters. I soon received my exchange letter
Weil’s philosophy is difficult to grasp since it’s expressed in from the front. This destroyed the innocence of my childhood.”
fragmentary way, but her deep engagement with the theory and “I guess it helped you develop a consciousness of others’
practice of caritas (charity/love) in all its myriad forms func- sorrows, which later led you to make unusually generous
tioned as a unifying force in her life and thought. Some of the choices, such as in the war against Franco in Spain? I know you
other key concepts of her philosophy are good and evil, grav- were there in theory as a news correspondent, but in actual fact
ity, the void, grace, beauty, suffering, attention, and waiting for you’d joined a group of activists.”
God. She’s concerned with respect for the individual, society, “As you certainly also know, everyone else in that group
one’s roots, work, and dignity, and focused on the oppressed, died. I was safe because of a wound I received from a fire, and
on slavery. Today, when hidden forms of slavery are widely was forced to leave.” We remount our bikes and start peddling,
spread, her thought seems extraordinarily up-to-date. Simone talking as we ride along.
Weil’s deep engagement, in an idiosyncratic, tough-minded way, “It wasn’t the only time you lived out your sympathy for the
with the theory and practice of compassion and generosity, led working class.”
Albert Camus to call her “the only great spirit of our times.” “If you’re talking about my factory work, it was only normal
Weil’s words in the following story are taken from her own to want to have that experience. It didn’t last long, as I was
books. The dialogue is loosely based on my novel Living Is Not unwell. But I was to be forever marked by that experience. I was
Enough. branded a slave. You may think it’s weird, but my strongest feel-
ing was resignation. I got so used to feeling like a slave that I
A
t the break of dawn the village is wrapped in silence, a would find it normal if somebody had ordered me to get off the
hamlet on a hill cocooned in sleep. At the edge of the bus and walk. I am not proud to confess this, but I felt the sub-
village I find my bike and ride to our meeting place. mission of a beast of burden. It’s the sort of suffering which no
Simone is waiting for me at the crossroads. I can see her tall, labourer will talk about, for it’s too painful to even think about.”
slim silhouette in the distance. “Did you get anything positive from the experience?”
“Revolution,” she says as I arrive, turning to look at me: “Well, I felt as though I were outside every abstract world,
“It’s a word for which you kill, you die, you send masses to in contact with real life, side by side with real men and women,
their deaths. But it doesn’t have any meaning.” regardless of their being good or evil. They were authentic.”
“It’s a word capable of giving us hope,” I answer. “Your works say to me that without a vision of real life it’s
“What we ask of revolution,” she goes on, “is the end of impossible to act incisively.”
social oppression – of slavery. But experience has shown us “Whenever something external prevents us from fulfilling
that a revolutionary party can seize the bureaucratic and mili- our wishes, we soon look for imaginary satisfaction. This is loss
of energy. Since we are made unreal by our imagination, which increasing the burden of social oppression to the same degree,
is a deteriorated form of energy, we badly need to become flesh.” as if human freedom were balancing on a mysterious scale…”
“You went to Germany in 1932. What struck you most there?” “How can the down-turn be avoided?”
“At the time, the German working class was the most orga- “I don’t have any recipes, only intuitions. Nothing can
nized in Europe. I was struck by their blind faith in Nazism. A impede man from feeling himself born to freedom. He can
violent hatred towards the establishment attracted them to it, never accept his slavery because he is able to think.”
without them realizing that National Socialism was strong “Not always! Sometimes he can’t see beyond his slavery.”
exactly because it belonged to the class that oppressed them.” “We don’t live in perfect freedom, but we must try to envision
“After that journey you wrote Considerations On The Causes Of it, so that we may hope to reach a less imperfect freedom. We
Freedom And Social Oppression. What was the fundamental ques- can reach for an ideal. The ideal is as unreachable as a dream; but
tion in that work, would you say?” unlike the dream, it has a relationship with reality. The most
“The puzzle I was trying to solve was understanding the sacred need of our soul is for it to be protected against the power
link between social oppression and the improvements man had of falsehood and suggestion. The need for freedom necessi-
been able to reach in regards to his relationship with nature. It’s tates our protection against propaganda and the power of sug-
as if man cannot free himself from his natural needs without gestion. Whatever is going to influence public opinion should
Christian, and I’ve always been faithful to it, so to speak.” Near the rocks that limit the beach there’s a strong scent of
I object, “But your father was an atheist. Even if your family seaweed. Simone is silent for a while, then gazing at the hori-
had Jewish origins, you didn’t have a religious upbringing!” zon, she says: “The Christian way of life was to me the best
“Ever since my adolescence I thought we don’t have an perspective to consider the problems of the world. Since my
answer to the question of the existence of God. The only way childhood I had the notion of charity towards one’s neighbour,
of avoiding a mistake – which is what should be avoided the to which I gave the beautiful name ‘Justice’.”
most – was not to ask the question. So I didn’t ask. I neither “What’s the relationship between charity and justice, in
affirmed nor denied.” your opinion?”
We leave our bicycles, and walk towards the sea. Our feet “The Gospels don’t make any distinction between them.
sink in the sand. There is nothing awkward in Simone. On the We invented the distinction, and it’s not difficult to see why –
contrary, there is elegance in her every gesture. As if she has because giving is therefore considered a good deed rather than
sensed my thoughts, she smiles, her large eyes shining. I think a requirement of justice. But only the absolute identification of
about her, a good-looking woman who has denied herself her justice and love makes compassion and gratitude possible.”
own beauty, all her life hiding behind glasses, baggy dresses, and “Yet you refused to become a member of the Church, in
hats. She certainly considers vanity a form of idolatry. spite of Father Perrin’s invitation.”
9781350016613
Paperback & eBook £21.99
Translated
Translated
l t d into
i t English
E
Eng for the first time
Ivan Segré, celebrated international philosopher
and scholar of the Talmud,
Talmud, reclaims
reclaims Spinoza as a
faithful interpreter
interpreter of the revolutionary
revolutionary potential
contained within the Old d Testament.
Testament.
www
w.bloomsbury
y.com/spinoza17
.com/sp
@BloomsburyPhilo
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