Zen and Grammar

I was walking to get coffee one day (in the not-so-merry month of December), and I realized that there is a similarity between Zen and the relation between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. (Yes, I know, everyone's thinking it these days – I'm a little slow on trends.) So, descriptive grammar would say that whatever people say is what is grammatical. After all, what is understood is what is understood, and language is what actually communicates and not merely what the grammar books say ought to communicate. “They” is a single, gender-neutral pronoun in additional to a plural one, and the phrase “I could care less” is meaningfully its opposites.

On the other hand, prescriptive grammar would hold that there are correct ways of speaking. How prescriptive one wants to get may differ, but there at least are some norms of speaking which are correct and deviances from this norm which are incorrect.

I don't wish to get into debates over which is correct (especially because the answer is obviously descriptive grammar), but I wish to point out that there is a tension between the two. In my daily speaking, I resist the use of the word “irregardless”. It is meaningful, because it means something. Even people who detest the word know what was intended by its use. However, I do not use it, preferring the more aesthetically pleasing “regardless”, and this alone already influences the linguistic world around me. I will also mark it on students' rough drafts, perhaps point it out to other people when I feel snobbish, and so on.

In any case, I can't help but talk in one way rather than another, and this influences the speech patterns of other people. So even while everything that communicates, communicates (and so absolutely everything that is not babbling, and perhaps even that on occasion, is grammatical in a sense), I naturally choose some ways of communication over others (and so make a prescriptive choice).

Similarly, in Zen, everything is already as it is. It is ultimately Parmenidean – what is not, is not in any way, so why talk about it? If everything truly is one, there is nothing to talk about or reject concerning this ultimate truth. However, we still act in some ways instead of others. We have natural dispositions and practical situations,. Until we are dead and so no longer agents we will choose some ways of acting over others, even if this is the decision to not act.

Everything therefore is perfect in being “imperfect”. When I am hungry, I do not exist less; however, my state of being hungry is not something to be held on to, either. It is self-obliterating. When I am hungry, I go and get myself some pizza and so cease to be hungry. So everything is lacking and incomplete, because of the fact that it is what it is. Hunger is not hunger, because it essentially drives us to become full, and therefore it is hunger. So this lack, this drive to eat which makes itself cease, is its own perfection: I am perfectly hungry in ceasing to be hungry.

So too in language. My grammar is perfectly descriptive in being prescriptive. My use of words is not a static dictionary of meanings, but is what it is in influence, change, and force. My prescriptive changing of linguistic norms is the descriptive state of things, despite the fact that there is no single prescriptive reality. No matter what "grammar" actually is on a descriptive level, we are still caught up in the midst of things and working things out in our own conversations.

Similarly, a fire is not a fire, therefore it is a fire. It is entirely outward-focused: it is fire not because of anything in itself, but because of how energy is given off to everything around it. It is what it is only because of how it affects the world around it; that is, insofar as it makes what it is not what they are. The eye does not see itself, therefore it is an eye; it is how the eye responds to what it is not that makes it what it is.

So too is language descriptive in not being descriptive. Precisely because it is the ebb and flow of meanings can we have descriptive grammar. If we tried to be grammatical according to a descriptive grammar, it would become prescriptive. After all, grammar books start off talking about how language is actually spoken; it is after that they become bulwarks against the change of words. Grammar is descriptive because it is prescriptive. But it is also prescriptive because it is descriptive: we have the power to change language, and so prescribe something within our own conversations, precisely because there is a way of speaking which is beyond any of these norms we are trying to enforce. The norms we enforce aren't bootstrapping themselves, but rather rely on the changeable nature of language to change from something to something else.

The Fact of Fiction

The following can be traced back to a conversation between Nate and myself. I thought that it should be written down at some point, some point being now. I can't remember whose part was whose, and furthermore I don't think it matters in matters of philosophy – chalk it up to the speech of Aletheia, if you must have a source. The question is, what is it that distinguishes fictional entities from real things?

The first answer might be to say, real things exist. But what does it mean to say that things exist? That I can touch and feel them? This might be true for physical things, but it at least makes logical sense to say that non-physical entities exist (does the number 2 exist? How about consciousness?). How about that there is something true about them? But it is true that Santa Claus rides his sleigh around the world, in a fashion of speaking. Social constructions such as Santa Claus have their own specific sort of existence in our shared stories, though I am not saying that I could wake up in the middle of the night and discover him on my roof after the rising of such a clatter. Maybe you don't want to call this “existence”, but then we need to see what existence is, as well as how “non-existent” things can have anything at all true about them.

We proposed the following: real entities are complete and consistent, while fictional entities are not. By complete I mean this: ask whatsoever question you will that is applicable, and there shall be an answer. If I ask about the mating habits of the rarest species of beetle, there is some truth to the matter. If I ask about the mating habits of dragons, however, I may very well be at a permanent loss. We encounter this phenomenon all the time when reading stories – we speculate about what happens, where the characters are coming from, what happens in the middle of plot holes, and we get frustrated when no answer in forthcoming. Think of a murder mystery that never reveals the killer. We feel that there must be an answer, but it may simply be unanswerable – there is a killer, this is true, but there is no truth to the matter about who the killer is.

Consistency may be a bit more tendentious, but I shall proffer it anyhow. I may read one story, and vampires melt when exposed to sunlight. In another story, which I shall now invent and which I have certainly never encountered through any medium, they glitter. Do vampires then melt or glitter in the sunlight? Both, it seems. Now, it might be argued that vampires melt in the first story and glitter in the second, and so there is no contradiction. But that would be saying that there are two sorts of vampires. The oddness of the second story comes about not because we are encountering a second sort of vampire, but because there is one sort of vampire, and they melt. And yet they glitter, too. There would be no possibility of cognitive dissonance without there being one entity between the different stories which has both the essential property of melting and the essential property of glittering without melting. Fictions can therefore be contradictory in a way that real things cannot.

But fictions are beings that are not, beings that are false. The opposite seems to hold as well: all of our falsities and delusions are fictions of a fashion. What is “being” then, by contrast? It is uncreated and imperishable, not one of our unstable fictions; whole and of a single kind and unshaken and perfect. It never was nor will be, since it is now, all together, one, continuous (Parmenides, Fragment 8, KRS). If it is complete, it is whole and does not exist as something that was and now is not (since answers to our questions about the past are currently answerable – history is a viable study), nor similarly is it something that will be yet now is not (the very power of prediction proves the possibility of encountering the future now). If it is consistent, it is all together, one, and continuous, since nothing contradicts anything else.

If this is correct, then the status of fictional entities is more than a study of books and legends. Fiction is the way we live life when it does not align with the above picture, whereas reality by contrast is something unitary and whole and the fertile ground out of which all of our fictions spring – since they too are part of reality in their own way.

What is "Non-conceptual"?

In my posts on religious experience, I had been focusing on how there might be dialogue about non-conceptual experiences specifically. As was pointed out to me, however, it is far from clear what "non-conceptual" might be. On the one extreme, it could refer to any experience. I cannot tell anyone what "red" is - they must see it for themselves. So if "conceptual" implies "communicable by means of speech/concepts alone", then most things (or perhaps all) would be non-conceptual.

That doesn't seem to help us too much, though, since there appears to be some content to "non-conceptuality". What about the nature of (fill in goal of particular religion here)? That is something neither experienced in this life, nor is it something we could put together from anything in this life presumably (heaven would always exceed our expectations, for example). Or how about "go to church/synagogue/mosque/temple/etc. and your life will make sense"? This one is more difficult. Presumably we will eventually be able to form concepts of an afterlife, and so it is only accidentally non-conceptual. The directive to do something for life to make sense is, by contrast, a command cloaked in the language of a statement. There might be a concept associated with it, but there is also a dissociation between the concept and the experience which one has by following the directive. This is actually a quite interesting topic, especially since it relates to much more than a rather specific form of experience such as I am discussing here. But it is not yet the type of non-conceptuality I am interested in.

I was talking with someone yesterday about math, and I think that there is something there which can come closer to what I am talking about (for a more detailed discussion, see here and perhaps here). We talk about infinite numbers in mathematics, but there is a sense in which all that they show is that we never really talk about the infinite. There is always a larger "infinite" numeral, in fact an "infinite" number of them (whatever that might mean). Any attempt to capture the infinite fails to truly capture it, but must always delimit it in some fashion. Our actual references to the infinite does not refer to the infinite in itself, but rather to the way in which we find that everything that we encounter in insufficient. We are always referring to finite things in describing the "infinite" (and even to talk about describing it is to allow an infelicity of speech).

In this sense, we never have a concept of the "infinite" in itself. Similarly, Heidegger's discussion of the "nothing" is not of an object (since it makes no sense to make "nothing" an object since it is not a thing), but rather of the "nihilation" of beings - that is, we are talking about a particular manner of what is, of how meanings slip away and things recede from us, and only in talking about beings can we in circumlocutions talk of "nothing". There is no way of having a referential concept of the "nothing" or of the "infinite".

So what would a "non-conceptual experience" look like? Not being a practicing mystic myself, I cannot quite say (although they say that they can't say either). Maybe we could think of it like this: even though we never truly find the mathematical infinite, we have some intuitive grasp of the paucity of concepts - not just of the concepts we do have, but of any possible concept we could have. There is a part of us that jumps out of the particular way of thinking about things and takes hold of the whole, even if only to immediately lose it. Any attempt to describe this whole then fails, and we can only think about it by looking at the parts, in their difference, their strife, and their lack. Even in having the experience, then, one does not have something they can conceptualize and refer to. Two mystics can refer to "the mystical experience", but any conceptual content even for them will still be of what happens to beings, to the finite, etc., and not of the ultimate and infinite. So perhaps "non-conceptual" would mean that, even if there might be a concept of it in a sense, such a concept has for content something other than its purported "referent"?

Cultural Values

The other day, I was talking with some people about foreign education. In particular, do we as Americans step in and give them our own educational system when we see fit? Or do we let them develop their own culture? I tended toward the latter option, and although it would need numerous caveats in a concrete situation (for example, would it be all right to give funding for them to develop their systems, and other issues), it made me think of broader cultural concerns.

Basically, the position I want to put forward is this: every culture has its own genuine vantage point on reality, and we need to work with that (if anyone is interested in listening to theoretical justifications for this, it is based on Parmenides and Neoplatonism – but that is a different post). When Americans champion values of freedom and independence, there is an actual good in that. We have seen something real about the world. There would be no way of subjectively and relativistically realizing anything unless reality allowed it – freedom could not be seen as a good, even "subjectively" - unless it actually does something for human, social reality. But at the same time (as I have been forced to acknowledge against my American intuitions), other societies that champion communal values and concrete regulations for guiding action have their own insights into reality which we often lack and which generally conflict with ours.

So there is room to say that American education should grow American values – there is something there worthwhile – but at the same time there should be, say, Islamic education growing Islamic values. There's good stuff within their own framework, and Muslims should be looking to their own roots (sometimes in recovering what has been left behind, such as struggling/ijtihad over legal canons, but still in a way genuinely Islamic).

Part one of the thesis, then, is that every culture has its own truth, or perhaps its own finite witness to truth if that is better - a truth neither fully absolute nor merely conventional, but real nonetheless. Part two is that it is better to work within a tradition than to syncretically combine them. Different traditions and cultures have spent hundreds and thousands of years melding material together. Sometimes this is done more effectively than others, but there is still more of an organic unity between elements of an established culture than one put together from whatever novelties excite people. Now, cultures are living and growing, and can incorporate new elements. But this still isn't done randomly. New elements must be grafted in to the old tree, worked in so that they work with the whole. Throwing American models of government into the Middle East causes problems, whether or not they are better models of government – they have consonances in the Euro-American system (including thought about the nature of the person, responsibility, role of government, states of nature, dissemination of knowledge, economics, etc.) which are completely lacking in other areas of the world. It is similarly difficult applying insights learned from other cultures to a contemporary American environment (for example, how hard is it to convince people of the benefits of available health care and public transportation?).

Part three is that, since cultures have their own witness to truth by their relation to reality (and so to Being), cultures that negatively define themselves lack a witness insofar as they negatively define themselves. Terrorist groups have relatively little cohesion outside of fighting against some common enemy. There might be some such cohesion, and to this extent they get something about the world, but a negative and merely relative identity keeps them from having anything to develop. Taking ones own race as the master race in opposition to all others is, again, merely a relation against others.

Sentient Cuttlefish: The Novel?

I've mentioned on this blog thoughts on intelligent cephalopods a few times. The concept fascinates me: here is a group of animals at a completely different spot in the evolutionary chain from ourselves, lacking our mammalian social instincts, but yet with a high degree of intelligence. What if they were to cross some threshold and become self-aware? What would this look like? I've played with the idea of sentient dolphins also, but that seems more boring: they'd look like cavemen of the sea at first, and then build up something like an underwater, mammalian society, not too different from what humans would do. It would be a good test case in how a different environment can shape intelligence, but cephalopods are cooler. So, I want to start writing about them. Maybe a short story, maybe a novel, maybe an epic poem, but I want to make this happen, and I'm looking for input.

I'm still working on the setting. These beings lack social instincts, and this will change them at their very core. What does reason look like for them? Language? They don't use language primarily to communicate, so where does it come from? I'm thinking that it will arise from evolutionarily beneficial mnemonic systems, with perhaps some adaptation to rudimentary communication (such as "stay off my territory"). This entails that writing comes before speech for them.

They would also be solipsistic in a sense since they would have no innate feeling for others. But they wouldn't even have a well-defined sense of themselves, since there would be no other over which they could define themselves as separate individuals. Ethically, they would appear amoral, not having basic social feelings, but it's not as though they would actively try to be bad, either - they just wouldn't recognize each other. They would in some ways be more like those with extreme autism than, say, psychopaths, except that their entire evolution would have been guided by this.

Could these beings ever have anything remotely resembling a society? It would still be beneficial to them, but then how would they maintain it? Would they end up like Vulcans of a sort? What would happen if they encountered human beings (or sentient dolphins)? Just some of the ideas with which I am playing.

On Human Nature

I have been grading many essay questions on the topic of whether human nature is good or bad according to Chinese philosophy, and I thought that I would weigh in on the question since I've been forced to think through it fifty times.

On the side of Mengzi (Mencius): there are roots in human nature which give us the capacity of being good. Further, when left to themselves, they make us actually good. For example, according to Mengzi, if we see a child stuck in a well, we will save the child. This is the case even if the child is not ours and we expect no reward from saving the child.

Roots like this sense of compassion are how we could ever get any virtuous qualities. Because we naturally feel compassion,* we can actually be benevolent. The alternative would be that we would have a set of rules instructing us to act in a benevolent way, but without anything being internalized beyond these rules.**

We cease being good by failing to reflect on these roots in our nature. We naturally feel compassion for those close to us. As we reflect and nourish the feeling, it grows outward, encompassing more and more people. External forces can push us away, however. For an illustration, a starving person will eat whatever is offered to her, though her nature distinguishes between tasty and disgusting food when left to itself. Similarly, conditions such as oppression and poverty can distort our natural judgments.

For Xunzi, on the other hand, human nature is bad. We are born and our nature is only concerned with ourselves. A baby feels its own hunger, not that of another. Each of us starts by seeking our own immediate advantage and this alone. We need to be shown a way out. This requires a virtuous role model (the sage) with her standards and practices for reaching the good life.

This good life is peace and harmony in society for Chinese thought. As long as we seek our own immediate benefit, we cause disorder and disharmony. This is why human nature is bad, not because of some arbitrary command from on high decreeing it to be such. We can recognize the need to be better, since such a disharmonious society is bad for everyone involved at some level, but without the external force of the sage we cannot escape. The Achaeans in the Iliad honoured warriors and those who could accumulate wealth, even while realizing that a life of war is horrible for human beings. We need (a) a model to see to give us possibilities, (b) a set of practices to follow to discipline us against seeking our immediate benefit, and (c) our own deliberate effort to become good.

The problem is, who is right? Contemporary science backs Mengzi to an extent (see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/morals-without-god/ for a quick view of some of the issues). If there were a race of sentient cuttlefish, they would have an entirely different nature and set of ethics.*** However, human beings are mammals and so have social natures. Living together is something hard-wired into the vast majority of us. We naturally feel empathy, fairness, altruism, etc., and not just our own immediate, purely self-focused benefit.

Still, this only helps part of Mengzi's argument. We do not seem to naturally keep extending these roots out further and further, since whatever is according to nature (or the way of heaven, or however one wishes to put it) happens always or for the most part. We stop at a given point where we feel comfortable, with whatever tribe is relevant in our context. Genocides and general dickishness seem to be a natural trait of human beings as much as anything else. Is there some other basic component of human nature we need in order to account for this?**** Are there always external forces resisting our natural impulses, always shortages of resources that cause societies to go wrong at some point? Does our intrinsically social nature work against us as much as for us, depending on the society into which we are born?

Addendum: perhaps the entire problem is that we are starting off with the evaluative terms "good" and "bad". If we were to stick with simple descriptions, some of the problems disappear. Human nature is intrinsically social, and geared toward benefiting those around us. This is simultaneously good and bad, depending on what we are looking at any given time. Starting with the issue of good/bad is therefore trying to cut against the joints of reality, which of course will lead to contradictory conclusions.

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* Note that "feeling" is not opposed to "thinking" in Chinese thought. There is simply the xin, the heart/mind/all inner states together, and feeling correctly is an important part of thinking correctly.

** Which rules out a divine command ethic. Even if God commands it, this does not mean that it is anything that would be good according to our natures.

*** Which is why I find the concept of cephalopod intelligence so fascinating. They are already intelligent creatures, but from an entirely different region of the evolutionary chain and without our social instincts. I really want to write something about a cephalopod (anti-?)civilization at some point.

**** Of course, someone is responding at this point with the theological answer of "sin." But it seems that this is a cheap answer, when there are genuinely explanatory and natural accounts available. Evolutionarily speaking, communities which preserve each other against competitors survive. Aggression helps creatures survive. Even atrocious acts such as rape are found within the natural order (go research ducks - nasty things), and there seems to be no reason to explain them as a result of some fall rather than a brutal way for nature to accomplish its purposes of perpetuation. "Sin" only makes sense if you expect that everything should be perfect in the first place and then find that it isn't. But I have yet to see one iota of evidence for such an expectation unless one has already assumed a set of theological claims, or is expecting a different sort of perfection than one which would mean anything for the daily lives of human beings.

Non-conceptual Religious Experience: Continued

I had started a discussion of non-conceptual religious experience earlier (http://pulpitumvulpei.blogspot.com/2010/09/non-conceptual-religious-experience.html), and started to think of an alternative way around the issues involved. I'm currently working on the paper supporting that conclusion, so I figured that I would post the sequel here as well.

Traditions of any sort, let alone religious traditions, are not actually closed off from each other. They do engage in dialogue, and they do find similarities amongst themselves and occasionally borrow practices and modes of expression. This is as much a part of the formative influence on experience as anything else. We must also look at ways in which the different religions talk about their experiences amongst each other. This will not always lead to similarities - indeed, a good deal of the time such discussions turn polemical - but sometimes it does, and both these elements (of similarity and of dissimilarity) must be preserved in order to do the traditions justice in their own self-conceptions.

Starting from the external aspects of experience, we are not stuck in externals. We can look at the way in which a given tradition shapes both the experience itself and its interpretation, but the experience is no longer interchangeable as it would be under the theory of extrinsic evidence. Once it can be matched up with elements from a different tradition, the experience gains a certain level of independence from the tradition which shaped it and provides some measure of evidence for something in itself. This, however, does not lead to the theory of intrinsic evidence insofar as the experience is not completely independent from the tradition either.

As an illustration, we can look at the Pythagorean theorem. There still can be seen to be some experience associated with "discovering the Pythagorean theorem". Similar enough experiences were encountered in the Greek, Indian, and Chinese traditions, each using different mathematical methods and different standards of rigor. In particular, the Greek tradition focused on strict logical proofs, while the Indian and Chinese traditions resorted to more empirical methods with more of a communal sense of how one goes about doing math. These different practices lead to a different characterization of "discovery of the Pythagorean theorem", to the extent that Indian and Chinese methods may not be appreciated as mathematical by someone steeped with the Euclidean Greek tradition.

One could then quibble with the Indians, and say that their discovery of the Pythagorean theorem could not be the same as that of the Greeks', since an essential element of the former is a strictly rational basis while the former uses empirical methods of proof. The contradictory phenomena would supposedly disprove any similarity of experience. Despite this logical analysis, however, the different traditions have been able to come together and agree that they have something similar in this theorem. Therefore, precisely through the assessments within the traditions and their own practices and not by presupposing some a priori realm of mathematics, we can talk about a shared experience not reducible to any single tradition even though descriptions of it within the different traditions conflict.

The conceptualizable portion of the evidence is still something mediated by the traditions. We still cannot look directly at a non-conceptual experience and have support for concepts. It is only in looking at the ways in which similarities appear across the traditions and as mediated by them that we can have any idea of what evidence the experience itself provides. As a result, the experience itself is never directly rendered conceptual, nor is it ever exhausted - it is always possible that something similar enough would show up in a new tradition with its own sets of practices and beliefs through which it understands the experience.

Proclus and Relativism

In my last post, I argued that relativism may actually entail objectivity. In trying to think through what sort of objectivity would be entailed and how it comes about, I found myself thinking back to Neoplatonic models. So my purposes here are twofold: (1) to analyze the case of spatio-temporal relativity and show in what since space-time exists, and (2) to attempt to rehabilitate Neoplatonic modes of expression to show that they do in fact have sense and are not merely outdated linguistic games.

In Proclus' system, there are triads consisting of Unparticipated-Participated-Participant, or, perhaps better, Unpossessed-Possessed-Possessor. There is some Form, say of human being. It may be helpful to spell out what this Form is not. It is not a human being itself (and so escapes Aristotle's "third man" argument). It is not the universal "human being", which is a concept derived from our abstracting from individual human beings. The Form of human being is called by the name "human being" because it is their (formal) cause, and not because of what it itself is. It is not some abstract Form that could exist without concrete human beings, floating ethereally up in some Platonic heaven. It always exists along with participants; what is at question is the formal priority.

However, this Form itself is Unparticipated/Unpossessed. This is not the humanity of any particular human being; it is the formal cause of humanity as a particular reality. The humanity of any particular human being is the participated/possessed form. Every human being has their own humanity. The concrete human being is then the participant/possessor of the individual form.

How does this relate to spatio-temporal relativism? Let's start backwards. There are concrete physical entities inhabiting what we call time and space. These are the participants/possessors. Now, we can talk about their particular locations in time and space, which are the possessed/participated spatio-temporal frameworks. All actual spatio-temporal frameworks are (a) relative, and (b) based on concrete beings. (In addition, there are spatio-temporal frameworks which are purely formal and mathematical, which correspond to other features in Proclus' system which I will not explain here). There is no space-time existing apart from these frameworks, but rather, space-time is always a specific space-time for each being.

However, it is not as if we were purely equivocating on space-time for each individual. There is some reality there which allows for them all to join together in a spato-temporal reality, even though they participate in different frameworks. This would be the unparticipated/unpossessed Form. It itself is not space-time, or spatio-temporal; whatever involves space and time must exist in some given perspective. In other words, space and time are realities that we experience as located in given perspectives and make no sense without being perspectival. Space-time is always space-time as experienced by some entity.

However, there is something which allows all of the different perspectives to be. It cannot be space-time in general (which is merely an abstraction, since real space-time is always in a given perspective), nor can it be the space-time of any individual perspective (since this would only exist for that perspective). Instead, it is the formal cause of the space-time for all perspectives, as a particular formal reality which is not itself space-time. It is that ground upon which relative spatio-temporal frameworks can take place.

Why posit this ground, then? Why not just stop at the different relative positions and be done with it? The different relative positions (as determined by concrete, actually existing entities, and not first and foremost as mathematical forms) are still the only fully concrete realities in the Proclean model. However, they do not explain themselves. There is a community amongst them that needs to be explained, and if we stop at mere individuality, it is difficult to see how we do this. By positing an unparticipated Form of space-time, we can explain the spatio-temporal openness of one entity to another even though space and time can only exist and be described according to individual frameworks.

Relativism vs. Subjectivism

Concerning ethics, I think that there are lot of people who have a knee-jerk reaction to relativism. As far as I can tell, this is because they think that this reduces morality to something subjective, and hence something arbitrary. But this need not be the cause, and perhaps is actually something incompatible with relativism. For an analogy, let us take the case of space-time relativism in physics. This does not mean that there is no space or time; on the contrary, Einstein thought that by showing the relativity of space and time to individual perspectives, he had proven their objectivity. If they truly were subjective, then a single individual perspective should account for them (such as Euclidean mathematics in Kant's system). But the fact that space and time can only be viewed within given perspectives, and yet these perspectives hang together, show that space and time are something real outside of any one given perspective.

Similarly, why is there a problem in saying that moral claims are relative to a given perspective? This is not to say that they are merely individual, but rather that we can only know claims from a given standpoint. Or, to put it another way, we can only be virtuous within our given contexts. For an example, the virtue of generosity requires some sort of wealth to give away. It only makes sense within a certain context of having something to give away. Other contexts demand different virtues. If you don't have any wealth, you can't engage in the same activities as those who are independently wealthy. So in the same way the practices involved in living in a Chinese society may differ from those involved in living in an American society, based on what is available, how things will affect the persons around oneself, etc. It is not clear that there need be general moral rules guiding these practices for them all to be the best ethical practices, other than some basic sense of "the good". (Edit: where "the good" would seem to entail some knowledge of the natures of whatever we are talking about; the good for human beings is what lets human beings be most human, and so on. This may be relative to whatever is talked about, or there may be some general sense of goodness/aesthetic sense applicable to different cases with practice and insight.)

Further, it is not clear that there need to be extrinsic moral principles to say that some systems of ethical behavior are inferior. The Nazi regime doesn't seem to be self-sustaining. What happens when all of the current "others" are sent off to concentration camps? Either a fundamental shift in ethics must take place (which should have existed in the first place), or there will be a need for a new superior race and hence inferior differences. The cycle must continue, and there cannot be a stable society. So the system falls apart internally. Now, psychology and sociology may be able to supply a better story for why this would happen than the naive one I present here, but the point remains the same. A society that exists by setting itself from others cannot exist apart from some sort of others.

If all of this is correct, then relativism is a form of moral realism; in fact, it may be a better form than moral absolutism. Why? Because absolutism (saying that there are these specific moral absolutes) still feels the need to posit the absolutes; there would not be morality unless we take an active stance in making morality exist. Relativism lets things be what they are, and trusts (hopefully rationally and empirically) that morality will really arise from the natures of things. And if it cannot arise from the natures of things, in what sense could it possibly be objective?

Thoughts from Preparing Class Readings

In preparing readings for my Intro to Philosophy course which I am teaching, I noticed that there seem to be two points running through every single thinker, no matter how diverse their views are on other topics. One is that we ultimately need to understand things on our own, and that explanations and teaching can only point us in the right direction; we must utilize our own power to see the truth for ourselves. The other is that the things we encounter in our daily lives are only means and must be treated as such, without attachment. Plato, Aristotle (albeit to a lesser degree), Augustine, the Confucians, the Daoists, and the Buddhists all hold these things. What points does anyone consider to be important, and pretty universal despite different narratives legitimating them? To what extent do the stories we tell surrounding these basic points matter (asked as a legitimate question and not merely as a dismissal of detailed thinking)?

Are there Atoms?

Or, alternatively, what does it mean for something to be false, or explanatory, etc.? Parmenides holds that what is, is, and what is not, is in no way at all. Which seems to be pretty straightforward, and I've been thinking that there is something right on and profound here. It has sometimes been applied to the problem of evil: evil is a privation of being (what "is not") and so does not actually exist. It is like the hole in an umbrella: you feel the rain falling on you, but not because of what is there. Put in another way, any reality evil has is relative, and not absolute. Even a dictator is still pursuing some good in oppressing subjects; pursuing evil purely for its own sake would be nonsensical on this view.

But I don't wish to discuss traditional accounts of the problem of evil; the relation between goodness and being is not straightforward. I am bringing this illustration up for the sake of another issue: what is truth? What does it mean for something to correspond to reality? A statement is true if it says of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. But what is not, is in no way at all; so how does it even make sense to talk of what is absolutely false?

In order to try to understand the problem here, let us take scientific theories: specifically, are there atoms? On a simple view, we say that atoms exist and make up the world. There are carbon atoms and oxygen atoms and gold and hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, etc. But then we turn around and see that these are constructs, models we make in our understanding to navigate the world, and so do not actually exist in the world, but are merely tools for us in our thinking, arising out of specific historical circumstances.

I am proposing that we take another step, which I've suggested before on this blog. The problem is that both of these views assume that there must be some sort of correspondence for there to be truth. What is explained and the explaining are two distinct things which must match up. But why not say that the explaining, the unifying of experience, is itself the explanation? Insofar as atoms unify our view of the world, they exist. They do not exist because they unify our worldview; this unification is their existence, where this sort of explanation and unification takes place in our ongoing interaction with the world and not with us on one side and the world on another.

If this is right, then falsity is relative as well as non-being. Statements come from a context and speak to that context; some better than others, to be sure, but there is also some explanatory power of statements and so some way in which they have truth, since a contextless and therefore non-unifying statement is meaningless. Even a con artist or conspiracy theorist needs to make statements that resemble the truth, and so to that extent cannot be purely false; it's just that closer examination would find much better explanations (that is, ones that unify experience more and that unify more experiences; namely, the experience that you will lose your money to the con artist and sanity to the conspiracy theorist).

What about fictional characters? They would exist as well, but only in their own fashion. Santa Claus must exist, as a fictional character; the notion of "Santa Claus" pulls together various social narratives and practices and children's games, and so is real precisely insofar as it does this. It is not real insofar as we would expect to come upon a sleigh with flying reindeer on Christmas Eve. Insofar as the notion would include this, it would create disunity with our experience.

Non-conceptual Religious Experience?

I was getting into a conversation the other day about religious experience, and in particular about whether anyone could have a non-conceptual, direct experience of the Trinity (or, if you prefer, God in general, Brahman, Thusness, etc.). I held that it is always an experiencing-as, an experience that also has an interpretation (not that the experience and the interpretation are two different realities), and the response I got back was that this was a result of a Western split between reason and faith/theology/the non-rational, and doesn't come up elsewhere.

But this doesn't seem to work. Just because another group believes in square circles doesn't mean that they exist, and I am holding that a non-conceptual experience that nevertheless legitimates a particular view is similarly nonsensical. If the experience itself is non-conceptual, it does not provide intrinsic evidence for anything articulable. If it could, it would have to already have some conceptual structure to it.

So does it provide any evidence at all? It seems that it could provide extrinsic evidence, by which I mean this: I join up with a group, the group tells me that I will attain a certain experience by following certain steps, and lo-and-behold I have that experience. Considering that the group has been right about this, I have some prima facie evidence for accepting their interpretation of the experience. The experience itself may be non-conceptual, and so there would still be nothing within the experience to give evidence in itself, but there could still some reality that actually occurred during the experience which is articulable about which the group is right.

So my experience of God may itself be non-conceptual, the experience itself not giving me grounds for saying that it is of God as opposed to of a tree, but it could still be that I had actually experienced God rather than a tree and I would now have some extrinsic evidence of this because of the methods of practice and interpretation of the group at hand.

However, different groups have their own non-conceptual experiences, and offer different interpretations. An interpretation of the experience as one of the Triniarian life is not the same as a recognition of divine Tawhiid (unity/unification) or of ultimate Shunyata (emptiness). The experience doesn't validate the group; the group simply helps to give an interpretation to the experience (although, this is not something separate from the experience and is part of the prerequisites for experiencing it at all).

So, to what extent could religious experience actually give evidence that a given religious group is right? It appears that the only thing that it can do is to suggest that a group with its traditions, etc. has a sort of efficacy. It says absolutely nothing about whether that group is right compared to other groups. Experience can tell us that a given path is worthwhile, but says nothing about whether there are other paths. In fact, if we take other people's experiences seriously and not be ad hoc about our own, religious experience would seem to entail the positive conclusion that there are multiple worthwhile paths.

How to Stay Excited about Pointless Stuff

Continuing from the last post, how is it that we hold excitement for any given idea, culture, or whatever? I remember starting off in philosophy, thinking about all the grand ideas and the exoticness of it all. I was enthralled. But I gradually started losing that fervor when I saw it in perspective. Maybe we can't actually get metaphysical knowledge, and maybe it isn't really all that important anyhow. And maybe we need to be concerned with the little things and not always with the big questions.

This perspective is good, I think, but I also became pretty apathetic about what I do. I started churning out work because it was what I do, not because I had any love left for it; after all, what in the material actually made it worth that love? Beauty always seems to be something which exceeds that which we call beautiful; there is no explanation for it in the subject matter (or the pretty face) itself.

But I think that view is wrong as well. We can realize that our favorite subjects aren't really as important as we make them out to be. However, why shouldn't we get excited about what we can? There may be absolutely nothing objective about this excitement, but who cares? Let someone get excited about it, so that someone may devote their time and attention to making that portion of our discourse better.

How is it that we can hold to our own ideas, to make our own philosophical arguments? We hold our positions in order to give them their dues. Think of a sports game: two teams are playing, and what really matters is that there is a good game. But there cannot be a good game unless each team is trying their best to win, even though the goodness of the game is not dependent on any specific team winning. We can attach ourselves to our philosophical theories in a like spirit. We could be wrong; what really matters at the end of the day, though, is that the truth is found, and perhaps the "team" for which we are rooting will lose. Nevertheless, if there are no advocates of a given position, or no advocates who sincerely argue for it, it cannot be be given its due, it cannot put up a fair fight. So we hold to what portion of reality we can see and we articulate it as well as possible so that on the whole the truth may be discovered. We attach ourselves to the position for the sake of the whole and not for the sake of the part.

To some extent, I think this is what the mystics mean who say that love/the good/the beautiful is beyond being and reason. Now, they are considering some absolute beauty/goodness, but an absolute that must of necessity shine through in every individual thing. Reason itself, and pragmatism itself, gives no ultimate basis. We must take a step and simply want something for its own sake before we have anything about which to reason or be practical. Without something pulling us forward, there would be no world in which we could work.

One issue that remains: this is all well and good, but it is still the musings of a priveleged white male with the leisure to write a philosophy blog. Maybe some of us can devote our time to pursuits such as metaphysics, but what about those starving on the streets or fighting for basic rights? And this is a terrible situation, one which we must not make light of. If we are caught up in our ecstatic visions and someone needs a cup of water, give them the water. But there is also the respect in which we feed people and secure rights for them not as ends in themselves, but so that we can shore up the deficiencies of our society and procure for all of its inhabitants the most authentic human life possible, one which can be concerned with the matters I'm talking about here and not with worrying about basic needs. So we must take care of those who need care, but without some final goal in sight for why we are doing such, we will dissolve into aimlessness and bickering.

Contra the Symposium

I'm back, and hopefully will start posting more often again now that I'm not stuck in Arabic prison. I have been putting together readings for my Philosophy of Human Nature class, and in re-reading Diotima's speech in the Symposium I was struck by something which I would like to discuss. Here's a nice summary paragraph given toward the end of the speech:

He who, ascending from these earthly things under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair bodily forms, and from fair bodily forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair sciences, until from fair sciences he arrives at the science of which I have spoken, the science which has no other object than absolute beauty, and at last knows that which is beautiful by itself alone.

There are two ascents here: one from the physical to the intellectual, and another from what is particular to an individual to what is universal and general. Now, I'm not sure that I need to quibble too much with the first ascent. I can imagine two women, for example, the first of whom I find merely physically beautiful, and the second whose character I admire. Even when I find the latter physically beautiful (and I may even find her strikingly so), this is mediated by my appreciation of who she is, which is primary in value and (for me at least) is part of what makes me consider her physically beautiful. Overall, this makes her an order of magnitude more beautiful than the woman I merely consider to be physically beautiful. And from reading through the Symposium and the Phaedrus, I think that Plato likewise allows for lower orders of beauty being caught up in the higher, even if the higher are valued more. Socrates never does seem to get over his appreciation for pretty young things, after all.

My problem is with the ascent from the individual to the universal, or at any rate with stopping at the universal as Diotima appears to do. I think that this first step makes a lot of sense: it is silly to pretend that one person is the only truly beautiful person in the world, either in looks or in character. That's merely blindness. So we can recognize that there are many beautiful people (and societies, etc.) out there, and this is in itself a healthy step: your own local circumstances and your own loved ones are not the only reality.

But at this point, I'm reminded of the Elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, or perhaps a woman he was talking to. In either case, the point was that it is easy to love "humanity", but those who love "humanity" in the abstract can find it all the more difficult to love particular human beings. So I think that we need a descent as well on Diotima's ladder of beauty: we need to rise up out of our particular circumstances, recognize that we and our loved ones are not the center of the world, but then also realize that this is our portion of the world to tend. We take care of particular, concrete human beings, and we serve this and that segment of a real society. Rather than avoiding attachment to anyone in particular, we attach ourselves to individual people in light of the whole, as our specific way of helping out the whole shebang (to use Fr. Jones' technical phrase) and our own specific recognition and contemplation of beauty.

Does Seeking Truth Lead to Understanding?

The second idea I wanted to jot down while I remember it is this: Does truth-seeking always lead to the truth? I've been thinking through a counter-example recently, in which seeking an accurate assessment of the world in the short-term hinders long-term understanding, and I think it raises interesting questions.

I've been taking up dancing. First, I started with east coast swing about three months ago. Now, I hadn't really danced at all before this, so I was blissfully ignorant of how bad I was when I started. Because I didn't realize this, I was better able to be confident, to keep going through mistakes, and to actually learn and understand the dance better. By contrast, once I started understanding what I was doing, and also when I started taking up blues dancing, I have found it harder to progress because of a more accurate assessment of where I am.

So it seems that, by understanding where I am currently better, I have trouble progressing in the understanding of this particular art form. Seeking the truth prevents me from reaching the truth, as it were. As a friend pointed out to me, William James seems to have a similar example: If I have to jump over a precipice, and I believe that I can make it, this belief changes the world. My confidence that I can make the jump helps me actually make the jump, while a lack of belief may keep me from doing so.

I think that the situation that I raise is different from James' in an important way, though. Once you jump over the precipice, you are done. In dancing, by contrast, I have danced many dances and have had the opportunity to see my ability. It is not merely a matter of having confidence, but of inaccurately assessing my current state which helps me to improve, of at least ignoring bad dances if not telling myself they were good. Now, too much inaccuracy also hurts; we can all think of truly inept people who cannot assess themselves at all in their given fields. But too much accuracy also keeps one from moving forward.

Perhaps one could say that I am equivocating on "truth". An accurate assessment of where I am right now is what is true, whereas it is merely a matter of practical concerns and my desires as to whether or not I reach my goals. So truth may not be practical, and not merely for Machiavellian reasons. This would still be an interesting question, though: is a short-term disregard for truth a prerequisite for attaining certain worthwhile ends? Is it a worthwhile means to such ends?

But there is also the problem that there is a certain sort of understanding involved, which I can only get if I put aside the concern for truth to an extent. Seeking understanding now gets in the way of it later. If we truly want to understand, there are some things it may be better to not understand. Although, how can we know what these are, until we're on the other side of matters?

And with that, I'm off to become a hermit for a couple months. Feel free to leave comments, I'll probably check occasionally, but I'll only be responding at best once a week.

Philosophy and Search Algorithms

I'm at Madison now, ready to officially start my immersive Arabic program tomorrow. Or rather, not ready, but being pushed off the cliff anyhow. So I have a couple ideas that I want to get out before I am unable to use English or be around large amounts of English-speakers for two months (mercifully I have Friday nights off, at least, but I don't plan on writing philosophy then). First, I've been thinking that philosophy (and truth-seeking in general) is a lot like computer search algorithms, and that the analogy can help us to understand the place of the history of philosophy.

One can use simple search algorithms, called hill-climbing algorithms. The point is simple: you look everywhere around your current position, and you find the direction that takes you higher (where what counts as "higher" depends on what you are searching for; in this case, perhaps it is what is more rational/coherent/explanatory/pragmatic/all of the above). You take this step, and you repeat the procedure until you find a maximum.

It's nice, it's simple, it gets some results, but the problem with the hill-climbing algorithm is the same as with many thinkers: if you only look from within your own position, you are as likely as not only going to find a local maximum. That is, you found your own little hill in the search-space, but it is quite possible that you are surrounded by the Himalayas. Or plains, for that matter. The fact that you found a local maximum has absolutely nothing to do with the surrounding terrain. That's the problem with "faith seeking understanding": if you start with some ground that you refuse to question, you may get interesting results, but that says absolutely nothing whatsoever about what is ultimately true.

One solution to the problem with the basic hill-climbing algorithm is to start searching at multiple points. There's still no guarantee of finding a global maximum, the absolutely highest point present on the search-space, but one increases ones chances greatly. Even if one doesn't find the highest point, one at least has multiple local maxima to compare. One has a better chance of finding oneself to be in the Himalayas, even if one doesn't find Mt Everest.

Similarly, in philosophy, studying multiple styles of philosophy and assorted thinkers is necessary, not to find the global maximum (the absolute truth), but at least to have different local maxima at hand. Such an endeavor must be done sympathetically, though; if one can't actually see the world through the eyes of different thinkers, then one has not actually searched through the world with them.

One type of search algorithm that enables one to search multiple points is the genetic algorithm. One starts a pool of strings encoded with information. They are tested via a fitness function, and the fittest are allowed to pass on to the next generation. Further, the fittest strings are also mixed up to create new strings with information taken from multiple old strings, thereby enabling change to occur so that new areas on the search space can be explored.

This is how I think that the history of philosophy can work. There is (1) progress, which (2) needs what was done in the past and (3) which doesn't necessarily lead to "the truth" (since we can't necessarily know when we've actually hit a global maximum). We take the "memes" given by other philosophers, ancient and contemporary, and we remix them in our own persons. Some combinations will prove fitter than others, and there can be overall progress. Nevertheless, we never get rid of the past, since it is part of our own intellectual makeup and is a constant source of ideas to stimulate our own searches. Also, the diversity of philosophies is what enables the search to continue and possibly hit better and better local maxima. It isn't about getting it right once and for all, but rather it is about participating in the communal effort for truth as it gradually improves over time.

The Status of Religious Experience

Does religious experience (whatever you may count that to be) indicate anything about the world, or not? I've been thinking that, before we can answer this question in any way, we need to be clear on what is being asked. There are at least three different questions: (1) does r.e. point to anything real? (2) can r.e. be reduced to anything else? and (3) can r.e. be translated into anything else?

The first question is whether r.e. gives evidence for anything real. Does it indicate something about the world as it is? It seems that the answer to this question is clearly yes. Even if religions are merely about wish-fulfillment and social cohesion, then they are still concerned with features of us as psychological and sociological beings. We actually have to deal with our minds and our societies as structures of the world given to us, and so they are real. If r.e. is anything more, then it is all the more real.

The second question is whether r.e. is reducible to any other field of experience. R.e. may indicate something real, but this reality may be merely psychological features of experience. I would argue that r.e. is not merely reducible to these other areas of experience, although this may not be quite as clear as my answer to the first question. What is experienced in r.e. is experienced in a different way than anything in any other area of experience. The religious believer is not experiencing exactly the same thing as the psychologist or the sociologist. At very least, the religious believer is concerned with the phenomena as presently experienced, while psychology and sociology are concerned with the phenomena as caused and related to factors of mind and society. The perspectives are different.

I don't regard that as necessarily saying too much, though; I'm highly resistant to reducing any area of experience to any other. Even if there is a sense in which chemical laws are reducible to physical laws, the way we experience chemistry is not merely the way in which we experience physics, and so as domains of human experience the one is not reducible to the other. So to say that r.e. is not reducible to psychology or sociology does not mean that r.e. gives evidence for what the religious believer wants, but merely that it has its own legitimate field of empirical inquiry.

So there needs to be a third question: is r.e. translatable into another field of experience? While chemistry may not be reducible to physics as a domain of human experience, there is a sense in which it seems that chemical laws are shorthand for physical laws (something I'll assume for the time being for the sake of illustration). Statements about chemistry can be translated into physics, although not all statements about physics can be translated into chemistry; therefore, we consider physics to to more basic. So the real question about r.e. is whether it is translatable into any other area of experience. Can religious statements be translated into psychological and sociological statements? Can the reverse be done? Does r.e. have something of its own, fundamentally distinct from anything presented anywhere else?

I'm not sure how to answer this last question. I'm also unclear on whether analyzing the experience itself could tell us anything one way or another. On the one hand, it seems perfectly coherent to say that, no matter what the believer experiences, her account of her experience could be completely false and self-delusional as well as brought about by perfectly natural causes. This explanation may or may not be true, but there seems to be nothing impossible about this hypothesis (and in many cases, I admit that it seems quite plausible). On the other hand, I do want to preserve the uniqueness of all experience, and there does seem to be something qualitatively different about r.e., some peculiar stance in relation to the mystery of being that sets it apart. This is in part due to phenomenological concerns (from looking at the experience) and in part due to metaphysical concerns (from reasoning about the world). So for the time being, my hunch is to say that r.e. is untranslatable, though this still does not entail that it means what people think it means. Looking at the experience itself may give grounds for establishing its uniqueness, but cannot in itself tell us how that experience relates to other aspects of our experience.

Teaching Phil 1001

I'm not sure yet what I'll be teaching next semester, but I need to start planning out some course ideas since I won't be able to do much work on it for a couple months coming up. So, here's some preliminary ideas of have for how to structure a course on "Philosophy of Human Nature," and feedback would be appreciated.

There are two threads running through the course. One is the subject matter: the notion of the self. What is the self? Is there any actually existing self? Am I primarily an individual shaped by my circumstances, or primarily a human being with rationality/freedom/whatever else that might entail? How does my identity relate to society? And stuff like that.

The other thread is the overall structure of the course (the formal cause, as it were). One of the problems in teaching an introduction to philosophy is that the students get overwhelmed by the number of views, and lapse into relativism, skepticism, or dogmatism to cope, or simply declare that it is all opinion. So I want to structure the course around the development of different notions of the self in order to show how we work through philosophical problems and the tools we have at hand for dealing with differences.

The current structure of the course would then be the following: I will look at three different traditions. The first will be the Platonic tradition: Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine (and despite differences, Aristotle is sufficiently responding to Plato to be placed within the Platonic tradition as far as I am concerned). This tradition largely sees the individual as an individual, rational substance, with will brought in with Augustine. The second will be the Chinese tradition: Confucius, Daoism, and Neo-Confucianism. This tradition focuses more on social forces, tradition, and ritual, whether the particular thinkers are for them, against them, or synthesizing these different aspects. The third will be Buddhism: Siddhartha Gautama, either Madhyamika or Yogacara, and Zen. This tradition does away with the idea of a subsistent self. (So there is individual-self, social/natural-self, and non-self). A final section will deal with how we can start to interrelate the different traditions from our own standpoint.

Since I am focusing on a specific topic, I think that the number of thinkers should be manageable. My misgivings are twofold: I am not including any early modern thinkers (largely because, while they are historically important, I just don't find them interesting other than as a bridge between the scholastics and the German idealists) or existentialists (who would normally be considered to be somewhat important on issues of selfhood). Also, it will be heavy on "Eastern" thought, including things that students will not necessarily encounter in their other courses, which might make it a poor introduction to philosophy in general. However, I think that the different thinkers and movements which I am presenting do bring up really interesting and relevant issues and so are good from a topical point of view.

Any thoughts?

Random Points for Discussion on Mongolia and Autism

A less technical post today, just a few points which I was pondering while watching a documentary last night and which I want to write now so as to postpone grading. The gist of the show was this: a couple had a severely autistic kid who was pretty much non-functional. They discovered that their child tended to calm down around horses, on the one hand, and on the other, the father had been a journalist who had covered many stories on traditional shamanistic healing thought that it was worth a try. So, where do horses and shamans intersect? Mongolia, evidently, so they took a trip out there to see what could be done for their child.

The first point concerning which I would like to have discussion is, to what extent do we need to actually understand the world to get around in it? This family went to Mongolia, saw the shamans, and after a trip to a tribe which herds reindeer, the child came away significantly better. Is it because of the shamans? Or because of the adventure taking him out of his normal circumstances? Both, perhaps? The family had a rather pragmatic attitude about it: it worked, and how it worked didn't really matter. To what extent would such pragmatism justify taking a mythical view of the world (which, for purposes of discussion, I am leaving vague)? And where do we draw the line for evidence for a belief? The child who regularly had temper tantrums and incontinence issues eerily got better after seeing the reindeer tribe shaman, but this is still only a single sample however striking and mixed with all sorts of other factors potentially responsible for his improvement.

Second, some of the experts on autism raised the point that there is a reason for genes related to autism: in limited manifestations at least, it is important that the human race have some autistic individuals. These individuals can do things that other people cannot in mastering immense amounts of details about very specialized topics, and having some people like this is an advantage. Now, if we were to have genetic engineering such that we could choose what our children would be like, we probably would not want them to be autistic. Similarly, it may be that most genetic expressions that we consider to be detrimental exist for some evolutionary reason, and while we don't want any given individual to have them, human society as a whole needs such individuals. So if we could choose what our children would be like, would this entail the eventual collapse of society?

Third, the documentary noted that most shamans had undergone a period of sickness, often with neurological symptoms. They were people on the margins of society, but their societies have places for them. By labeling all sorts of mental disorders and then institutionalizing programs and medicating individuals, do we lose out on being able to utilize human diversity? Even when we champion things like autism awareness, do we really create spaces in our society for such people to not only function in spite of their nature but to flourish because of it?

Isomorphisms and Essences

I do want to follow up on the previous post; I think that there are some interesting ways in which the notion of chance in the third case can be applied to other situations, such as Advaita Vedanta and Neoplatonic emanation to help make sense of them (I know you're all terribly excited by the prospect). But, I was thinking about Avicenna's notion of essence today, especially as worked out by certain Scholastic thinkers, and I think that I made sense of something and I wanted to jot it down while I remembered it.

For Avicenna, essences exist either in reality or in the mind. I can talk about real, individual horses, or I can talk about the concept "horse" in my mind. Now, these can't be the same. If the essence of horse as it exists in the world were what it really is to be a horse, then horse would have to be an individual; but the idea of horse applies to many individuals. Similar considerations prevent us from taking horse as it exists as an idea in the mind to be what horseness really is. So, there is some way in which we can consider "horse" in itself apart from either real individuals or general concepts. But "horse" only exists in one way or the other. So what could we mean by horse in itself?

I thought, as usual, about mathematical systems. Let us take the natural numbers (N), that is, all whole numbers from 1 on up. Let us also take just the even natural numbers (2N). We'll just be adding numbers; other operations would make this more difficult. We can take any natural number x and transform it into a 2N number y using the formula x*2, and we can take a 2N number y and turn it into a regular natural number x using the formula y/2. It doesn't matter whether we add first and then switch systems, or switch systems then add. For an example, take 1 + 2 = 3:
1 + 2 = 3; 3*2 = 6
1*2 + 2*2 = 2 + 4 = 6
And similarly if we wanted to go in the opposite direction. This is a mathematical isomorphism between N and 2N under the operation of addition.

What the isomorphism means is this: there is the same structure between N and 2N under addition. On the one hand, it doesn't make any sense to say that this structure exists independently of some system; the structure simply is the way the different symbols interrelate and it makes no sense without such symbols. But there is still a sense in saying that there is a structure which is in both N and 2N. This seems to me to be the same logical move as Avicenna is making with essences, and as there is nothing wrong with it in the mathematical case (it at least makes perfect sense to me), the are grounds for thinking that it is intelligible in the metaphysical case as well.

On Chance

Last night, I was watching a show (Flash Forward) in which the premise is that, one day, everyone blacks out and has a vision of their life at some point in the future. Now, of course, people are going to be acting to either meet that future or avoid it, which brings up all sorts of issues with determinism and the like. The point of interest in the episode I saw last night, though, was how some people had avoided things that were supposed to happen. People were supposed to die at some time, avoided it, but then some of them ended up dying anyhow. One of the characters tried to pass it off as an accident, but another replied that there are no accidents. But what does this phrase mean? It comes up in other contexts, such as with those who believe that God (or the universe, or whatnot) doesn't do coincidence. It seems that there are at least four different ways of looking at the reality of chance, though: (1) chance is a necessary explanatory principle, (2) chance is a property of events, (3) chance is a mode of consideration of events, and (4) chance has no place at all.

In the first case, chance is a necessary explanatory principle. What do I mean by this? I mean that, if we have all of the determinate causes for an event, we still don't have a full explanation. Something utterly random could happen, and this randomness is simply a brute fact of the world which comes into play. There would be something profoundly unintelligible about the event, not just from our standpoint as limited human knowers, but even if we were to have perfect knowledge. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics may flirt with this approach, but that would get us involved in too many issues for the present post.

In the second case, chance is a property of an event. Let us say that I throw a stone, and that you throw a stone, and the two stones hit. I didn't mean for the stones to hit, and you didn't mean for the stones to hit, but they did so anyhow. The event was a chance occurrence. However, unlike in the first case, chance is not a cause of the event; we can completely explain the event by talking about how I threw a stone and you did the same. It is the intersection of these causes which is chance, since there is nothing in the causes themselves to lead to the chance event when regarded apart from each other.

In the third case, chance is merely a mode of consideration, but a mode of consideration made possible by the way the world is. So let us go back to the example of throwing stones again, and this time, let us assume that the world is entirely determined by the laws of mathematical physics (or substitute your own form of determinism if you prefer, and make the throwers zombies lacking free will but with wicked cool cybernetic rock-launchers). So I throw the stone, and you throw yours, and they hit again. There is still an element of chance here, since my throwing and your throwing do not in themselves contain the fact that the stones will hit. But, at the same time, we can find some prior state of affairs such that all of this is determined already, perhaps at the big bang if necessary. There is some point in time such that, if we but work out what it means for everything to exist as it did then, we would see that I must throw the rock, you must throw the rock, and they must intersect. Therefore, the event is not a chance event in itself, but only when we consider the relation of causes abstracted from their context. Chance is therefore an illusion, one which arises because we were not looking at reality according to its own structure, but an illusion which yet has some basis in reality. We have this particular illusion because the world is a certain way, and we bring our own set of expectations which cut against the grain of the world, and chance is where our expectations and reality's structure fail to line up.

In the fourth case, there is no chance whatsoever. This is what seems to be entailed by those who claim that there is no coincidence at all. But the way in which it is intended has to be stronger than the third case: when we think of two events having happened together, there is no chance involved. In the third case, there is still a basis in reality for my thinking that the stones hitting is a chance event when I simply think about my act of throwing the stone and yours. In this fourth case, even that event is not accidental. A character in the TV show who is supposed to die from a car accident, who survives past that day and later gets hit by a car anyhow, does not experience any chance event in any consideration.

I'm not sure that the fourth case is actually intelligible when analyzed. Denying that chance is a real feature of the world doesn't mean that there isn't some conceptual and relative reality to chance when I measure up the world compared to human ends, including my own needs and interests. I can affirm the third case, say that the world is entirely determined in one way or another, and still say that the relation of two events pulled from the larger context (which I am incapable of truly understanding) is a chance relation.

Even if I were to believe that there were a benevolent deity running the universe (and I think that http://thomstark.net/?p=834 has some good points to raise about that, h/t Daniel), then I still end up with case three. Let's say that God has some end in mind, such as self-glorification. God needs to accomplish two other ends to meet this end (pick whatever you want), x and y. Now, x requires some means to accomplish it, and y requires some means to accomplish it (not that God would need to work this out step by step or think through it discursively, but there is some logical order in the structure of the realization of the action). The means for x and the means for y, then, considered in themselves and abstracted from the context of God doing something for his ultimate end, are related by chance. They only lose that aspect of chance when regarded as both leading to that ultimate end. What this means is that the means for x and the means for y may have nothing to do with each other in themselves, and so even in the case of God's providence, there still would be coincidences of the third case sort.

In sum: even if there is no real chance in the universe, coincidences generally have absolutely nothing to do with you.

Critique of Plato's View of Art in the Ion

Since I presented on Plato's view of art earlier in the semester, I've had some thoughts running around in my head. One such thought concern his critique of the rhapsode Ion, concerning how Ion (and also Homer) have no real knowledge but only present appearances. Now, I think that there is a very real problem here, but there is also an extent to which the criticism is misplaced.

To summarize the Ion: The rhapsode Ion, a professional performer of Homer, tries to engage Socrates in a discussion about Homer. Socrates declines, but tries to understand which sort of skill Ion actually practices. Ion doesn't really understand poetry, since then he should be able to talk about Hesiod as well, but Ion just falls asleep when listening to all poets other than Homer. But Ion doesn't really seem to have any knowledge of what is in Homer's poetry either, since it is unclear that Homer himself understands anything about which he speaks. For example, when Homer talks about divination or charioteering, then we still would need to check out the passages with a diviner or a chariot driver to know whether these passages accurately describe those skills. Homer himself cannot be relied upon directly for knowledge of these activities. Ion makes an amusing attempt to say that he has the skill of being a great general because he knows Homer, but Socrates also shoots this down: you don't hire a performer of poetry to lead your army simply because they recite poetry well. In the end, Socrates says that Ion must either be a lying scoundrel, or inspired by the gods, since Ion himself certainly doesn't know anything. Ion prefers the latter option, since it is more beautiful.

My concern is with the Platonic idea that, beyond the appearances which the poet and the rhapsode present, there is some reality that people who actually engage in skills understand. I have no problem with saying that some people understand things better than others, or even that the poets and playwrights (or in our age, perhaps political speakers, news journalists, and pastors) are often not reliable for helping us understand the world better. What I wish to argue against is the suggestion that the poet has the appearances while the skilled worker has the reality. The skilled worker merely has more appearances with which to work, and I think this has an implication for the knowledge provided by art.

Homer presents the appearance of a chariot race in the Iliad. Socrates holds that Homer may have no actual knowledge of what is involved in chariot racing, and that one must go to a real chariot driver to find out the truth. But insofar as Homer gives a coherent account, he has something to say about chariot driving. He may simply have a very good imagination; think of The Red Badge of Courage, which is supposed to accurately depict a wartime situation even though the author Stephen Crane never participated in war.

It is the coherence of the account which gives it validity, and which perhaps simply is its validity. The actual chariot driver merely has more appearances which must be drawn up into the account. This may require some adjustments; perhaps Homer's imagination doesn't cohere well with the chariot driver's actual experiences. Then again, perhaps Homer's imagination presents something upon which the chariot driver's own experiences founder; perhaps the chariot driver has never made the same sort of risky maneuver recounted in the Iliad. But in either case this is not due to anything beyond the appearances, but merely due to the unity and coherence amongst the appearances themselves.

Therefore, insofar as there is any coherence and unity in art, it gets at something in the world. It may not get at it in the best possible way (although again, in might), but there is not a strict dichotomy between the artist and the person who actually understands; there is merely the differing degrees of coherence and the number of appearances which need to be made coherent.

Thoughts on Interpretation of Art

I've been shadow teaching a philosophy of art class this semester, and today the issue of the interpretation of art came up. Now, it seems that this often in practice gets reduced to the two following options: either the artist's intent determines the meaning of the artwork, or because we can't get into the artist's mind, it's all about the audience. Granted, this is an oversimplification, but what about the artwork itself? Why do we need to go beyond it to either the artist or the audience? Alternatively, what sense could it make to say that interpretation is left largely to either the artist or audience?

Any artwork is already delimited, structured in some way. Even if I only mark a black line on a piece of paper, I still have structured that line and that paper in a given way. Even if I have left the paper blank, the paper is then blank rather than filled. So every artwork, in virtue of being an artwork, is already structured, some (like a Mozart symphony) more so than others (like John Cage's 4'33").

Any artwork is also by its very nature public. The marks, the texture, the rhythm of an artwork is something that's been put out there in some shared space using, to at least some extent, some shared symbolism or set of markings. If I write a poem, I am using language to write it. This language is not my own, but part of a larger context. The act of putting down words creates something that goes outside of myself; it means something regardless of my intention. I can write a poem and discover a meaning which I did not intend, and this seems to be a legitimate meaning of the poem. This does not mean that there is a completely determinate reading of the poem, or that there even in principle exists a definitive interpretation (there can be irreducible ambiguity and underdetermination), but merely that there is this particular form put down, one which is shared in the community, rather than some other form.

Any interpretation of an artwork must be of the artwork. If I am sitting down and watching The Purple Rose of Cairo, and I turn to a friend to talk about it, and she responds with an analysis of Jedis and the Force, then she is not giving me a bad interpretation of a Woody Allen film; she is giving me an interpretation of a different film altogether. If any artwork has a certain structure, then an interpretation must be of that structure, whether it be a line or a portrait or a blank canvas, a chant or a concerto or a folk song, etc., and so on down to the details of the individual artwork.

The biggest problem is finding the proper context of the artwork. Language is public, so if I write a poem, I have written down something with a meaning beyond what I or the audience want. But what happens when the language changes? This becomes a difficult issue, because I can no longer simply say that the author wanted the artwork to be a certain way and so that is how we should take it. The artwork is the starting point of analysis, and it is here and now this public, structured object.

For example, take the line from The Tempest: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in 't!" What is the meaning of "brave"? If I were to take it in a modern context, it would mean something like "courageous", but this word meant "good, splendid" in Shakespeare's time (cf. the Italian "bravo"). One option would be to use the context that gives the artwork the most force (admittedly a notion that needs much more development): I use the standard of Elizabethan English in interpreting Shakespeare because his plays make more sense that way. I know what a splendid world would be, and this suits Miranda's amazement in the scene in which she speaks this sentence, but I have no idea what a courageous world is and the sense I can make of the phrase doesn't fit the play.

A Bach fugue, as a Baroque piece of music, would have used terraced dynamics in its time period; that is, the individual instruments don't get louder or softer, but instrumentation is added and reduced to change the volume. But unlike the Shakespeare example, it seems possible that using later notions of dynamics in which individual instruments change volume may constitute a more powerful (more aesthetic? more coherent? I'm still searching for the right word) rendition of the score. It may not, but the possibility is open, in which case it would seem at least that there is some aspect, some potentiality of the score which Bach himself might not have noticed. The reason why this seems more likely in music than in literature may be that language is a highly complex phenomenon and changing the rules (say, by going from Elizabethan to Modern American English) is most likely going to reduce the coherence of a given piece.

The nature of interpretation will change from artwork to artwork as well. It does not need to be conceptual and linguistic. The interpretation of Stravinsky doesn't have to be a dissertation; it can simply be a certain playing of the score. Any interpretation of a painting will be, at some level, simply an appreciation of the specific way in which the brush strokes have fallen. Interpreting the artwork on these non-cognitive levels doesn't mean that there can't also be cognitive interpretations as well. In fact, on my current proposal, any way in which one interprets the given artwork (which, remember, necessarily entails that one pay attention the publicly given structure which is the artwork) is a legitimate interpretation of that artwork.

Negative Epistemology

Is epistemology about building up our knowledge? I would like to put forward an alternative: the goal of understanding is to reduce our knowledge; or rather, to reduce our habitual sedimentations and programmed responses to the world. It is not something we hold on to, but a clearing away and a freeing up.

For example, I can come to the world conditioned by a good number of anti-Islamic attitudes, conditioned by society. I can then approach scholarly research which points out a number of ways in which I am just wrong about the Islamicate world. What have I learned? Well, there have been facts involved, and it can be helpful to keep them on hand as tools for various purposes, not least of which is helping other people come to the same point. But what I have really gained is a removal of old habits and a new openness to people and society. Even if I forget everything I read, I keep this new freedom unless old habits find ways of re-asserting themselves.

So when I approach philosophy from an historical angle, I should sometimes remember the arguments; they are essential for publishing and teaching, and therefore securing a job. But the mere memory of ideas is not necessarily what I am after. Of what use is mere accumulation of knowledge, other than as a mere pastime? I want to free my thinking, to see how I have become blind to my own presuppositions, and to how I already hedge in the possibilities of the world.

Now, one might say that there certainly seem to be times at which we want to have knowledge, and we mean by that that we are actually building up facts about the world. Granted. To this end, I distinguish two types of knowledge. One the knowledge of means to a given end, and in this case we want positive knowledge of how to go about achieving our end. But how do we pick an end in the first place? How do we come at the world in general, aside for using it for our own purposes? It is in situations like these where I would suggest that a negative epistemology might be in order, at least as an interesting thought experiment.

Fractal Knowledge

What would a perfectly ordered world look like? I think that there is a tendency to think that it would be decomposable into nice, neat conceptual parts, amenable to our thought. But perhaps the opposite is true: perhaps the world which is rationally broken up for us is really arbitrary, while one which is perfectly ordered down to the very depths would forever defy our reasoning.

I bring up the analogy of a fractal. See here for an example. A property of the fractal is that it is infinitely self-similar (more precisely, quasi-self-similar): no matter how far you zoom in, no matter where along the boundary you look, you will find something which is in its own way similar to the whole. So the fractal is my paradigm of perfect order, down to an infinite precision and covering the entire figure.

Imagine living on the fractal. You are trying to make sense of the twists and turns which you encounter. You get a sense of order; it is indeed ordered. Parts do look like each other. But every time you think you have it down, you go a little bit further along the boundary, and something throws you off. You didn't get it quite right, so you have to go through your concepts and reanalyze the world. Since every part in its own way contains the whole (that is, it is in a way self-similar to the whole), you do gain some understanding of the entire fractal from each piece. But you also can't really get any part of the fractal unless you were to grasp the entire thing all at once.

So an infinite order would entire that we could understand something, and understand everything in understanding something, but no understanding would be unrevisable. No set of concepts, no affirmative propositions could be held for any length of investigation.

By contrast, what would a world be like which we could break down into nice, neat concepts? At first, such a world appears ordered. But then we turn to the concepts themselves. Why is green what it is? Just because. Why a straight line? Just because. This "just because" is the only answer givable to any such question, no matter what the basic concept or simple nature at hand is. In the end, we have to posit an Intelligent Kludger to put the mess of arbitrariness together, because there's nothing in the parts themselves to suggest order; only in the arrangements.

The Purpose of Inconsistency

Why would one would consider contradictory speech to be philosophically appropriate? Given that contradictions can be meaningful, why would one use them? First, it may be that one believes that all systems are going to be inconsistent at some point anyhow. If this is true, then there is relatively little value in ironing out all of the wrinkles of discourse instead of simply investigating what one can. Also, if I have doubts about any given chain of reasoning or system, I have much less reason to follow it through consistently. It may be far better to pursue many lines of reasoning, even if they are mutually inconsistent, since then I may hit the truth on a couple points at least.

Second, one may be strongly convinced by both the arguments for x and the arguments for not-x. The contradiction does not mean that there isn't some y which is coherent with x but which is semantically and practically similar to not-x. This is the problem with some ad hominem attacks: showing that a given person is inconsistent shows nothing about whether a better version of their views could succeed, entailing that they really were close to being right in the first place. In the meantime, holding on to the contradiction may be the most intellectually responsible choice, while pursuing a research program of eventually resolving the contradiction while keeping the insights.

Third, it may be that certain mystical views can only be couched in contradictory terms. If there is some reality utterly responsible for absolutely anything, then language which can only look at certain things at any given time will encounter difficulties. Contradiction shows language's (and thought's) breaking points, and it is the fact of breaking which points to what is to be communicated.

Fourth, one may be holding to a dialectical tension. This I think is closest to what I am talking about with skepticism. On the one hand, I think that everything is doubtable (and once this is realized, also already doubted, for those familiar with what I've said before on this blog). But I also think that we should continue investigating the truth. Should I throw one side or the other away because I can't unite them at one time? No; I continue in a constant back-and-forth, which seems to accomplish a number of aims (including understanding) better than any single idea or system.

But if nothing else, saying that someone is being contradictory is a paltry criticism. It contributes nothing to discussion; it merely wins points in debate. It is therefore sophistry and not philosophy, unless it is accompanied by substantial interaction. Show how some premise is wrong, show how my understanding is off, show some alternative, but show something of value.

Common Sense and Explainability

We should be skeptical of a belief given by common presuppositions in the case that they can be explained by some reason other than their veracity. If we can explain how a habit forms (say, the belief in external objects, that historical events are actual, or within a given religious context that certain dispositions are sinful and that we have an innate conscience) and give an adequate account of how it comes to be, why do we need to assume that it also gives us a direct window on reality? Belief in external objects comes about in early stages of development as we learn to deal with the bloomin' buzz and confusion around us, to organize it so that we can make sense of it. It it a very practical habit to believe that our blankie is still existent when it is put behind the pillow, even though we cannot see it.

Reality is such that the belief is practical. But this does not mean that reality is as the belief holds. I see a green leaf; the leaf itself is not green (at least while I'm taking off my idealist hat for a moment and speaking from the perspective of the realist), but is a physical object that reflects the light of a given wavelength such that it hits my eye, where due to a complex interaction of rods and cones and processing in the LGN followed by assimilation in the visual cortex I experience the qualitative experience of green on a leaf shape. The belief that the leaf is green is not caused by the leaf's actually being green, though the reality is such to produce that belief, produce it regularly, and make it a helpful belief for navigating the world. Similarly, belief in external objects can be caused by some feature of the world that is not the actual existence of external objects.

But if this is the case, why believe that there are actually external objects? I have explained why there is a wide-spread habit pertaining to them (and there is the experimental data to further substantiate my claims), and there does not appear to me at this point to be anything left unexplained. So why do we assume some mystical sense which gives us real knowledge of the way things are? There is no facet of our experience otherwise unexplained which needs such a faculty. Therefore, positing such a faculty is arbitrary, merely a means of allowing us to hold to the same things we have always held instead of actually trying to think through them and explain them. There is as little reason to assume that faculties of this sort exist, as that a misargued mathematical theorem gives us probable mathematical knowledge. But if such a belief only arises from practical engagement in the world, then it is hard to see without further argument how it could even possibly have metaphysical value unless as merely a different dimension of the same world.

There is a positive side to this, though. While it seems utterly arbitrary to multiply entities beyond what is needed for explanation (not that the simplest theory must be true, but that whatever is posited must play some explanatory role not otherwise accounted for in order to have any meaning), if we avoid doing such, then typical skeptical arguments melt away. Take Hume, for instance: Hume doubts causation, as to whether it is anything more than constant conjunction, but then returns to billiards where natural impulses make him believe in causation again. On my view (which likely is a repetition of the work of others who have explored this much more deeply), Hume isn't merely caused by natural impulses to believe in causation and so engage in self-deception. The language of causation is rooted in empirical life as a way of organizing it. Talk of one billiard ball causing another to move is perfectly legitimate; when we are talking about causation in billiards, we are not referring to features such as necessity, or universality, or quantum mechanics. We are explaining that aspect of our experience which involves the balls hitting each other regularly, enabling us to play the game, without thought of what might be causing this; there is continuity in practical discussions of causation even as philosophy and science radically change our understanding of it. To self-reflectively talk about causation is to enter into another context, and in this context causation as a general principle may be doubted, and may even be meaningless, but this self-reflection is not a feature of most everyday accounts of causation. This philosophical context is not illegitimate, but its concerns are not the concerns of the billiard player, and its accounts of causation get at something else. Now, for the philosophical billiard player, these two accounts may be entangled, or one may take priority; it depends on the specific context and the specific person, but there is nothing that says that different language games are hermetically sealed from each other.

Let us take Descartes as well. Descartes postulates an evil genius which could be messing with his mind. On my view, this is irrelevant. Concepts are taken from experience and explain experience. If that experience is of an evil genius messing with us, whether we know it or not, then these concepts explain that experience of human-nature-being-messed-with. They are concepts forged from inconsistent memories or other tricks which are thrown our way, but this does not make them false; they merely describe a rockier terrain than one in which we would have perfect memories and veridical habits. Similarly, if we were in the Matrix, our concepts would describe the world of the Matrix, again whether we would realize we were in it or not. It would be the world of our experience, and thus what concepts would arise from and refer to.

I do not mean by our "experience" merely the world of sense-data, but absolutely anything experienced. Consciousness, imagination, and our conceptual life seem to be legitimate realms of experience as well. If there is some Agent Intellect beaming intelligibles into our minds, then this is a part of our experience. The worlds of the poet are just as much experienced, even in the wildest cases. Skepticism isn't about strictly rationing our intellectual diet; it is about clearing away sedimentations and ossifications which obstruct living.