Descartes in love

Descartes is bugging me. In the second meditation, he argues that because he is able to perceive and judge that he perceives wax, this demonstrates (1) that he exists, and (2) that his knowledge of himself is more certain than his knowledge of the wax. Whether or not he perceives and judges the wax accurately, that he perceives and judges shows that he must be capable of so doing, and therefore, that his mind “exists.”

I understand the argument for (1) as a proof that subjectivity as such must be, in order for there to be experience, sensation, perception, judgment, etc. One could be deceived by absolutely everything that one encounters, but never be wrong in concluding that one has a subjective being, because otherwise, one could not be either wrong or right, about anything. This position opens the door to transcendental philosophy, and seems to me simply to be the correct position. I cannot fathom an alternative to the transcendental philosophical idea that there must be a subject for whom there are experiences, in order for us to make sense of any experience, or in order for us to understand anything about understanding or knowing.

But the argument for (2) is unclear. In Cress’ translation: “… if my perception of the wax seemed more distinct after it became known to me not only on account of sight or touch, but on account of many reasons, one has to admit how much more distinctly I am known to myself. For there is not a single consideration that can aid in my perception of the wax or of any other body that ails to make even more manifest the nature of my mind.” Descartes does not claim merely that he knows that his mind exists, but that he knows about it more than he knows about the wax, and this seems also to be the case regardless of whether he is deceived about his supposed perceptions of supposed external objects. Now, what exactly tells him this?

Let’s imagine that Descartes has badly misconstrued his experience, and that he is nothing other than a figment of the imagination of his notorious “evil genius.” The argument for (1) is that, if he can be deceived in this way, and if he can undergo being deceived, he must exist as, minimally, something that can be deceived: a mind. But the argument for (2) seems to me to say that he knows about himself more than about any of his experiences, on the basis of this same evidence. How can he know that he is not a figment of the evil genius’ imagination? What about his experience, his subjectivity, could tell him so?

This is the starting point of Hilary Putnam’s “brain in a vat” image. Putnam proposed this as a challenge to the unity of mind and body: if we can imagine ourselves as properly hooked-up brains in vats, through which hookings-up these brains are fed what they interpret as “experiences” of wax, fires, copies of Descartes’ Meditations, or whatever, then we will have a hard time proving that our minds/brains are “in” our bodies.

But Putnam is not answering the more fundamental question, which is, what is the source of, the evidence for, and the basis of judgments about our self-knowing? Do we know our own minds?

One of my favorite approaches to this question is a very uncomfortable one. Every once in a while, we hear someone declare something like “I thought I was in love, but I was wrong.” Well, how about that?

Here you are, merrily going about your fawning and praising of this god in human form with whom you are thoroughly and terminally smitten, and then, one day, you awake to a different set of circumstances, a different alignment of stars perhaps, and realize that your undying love was in fact stillborn all along. How does that happen? Are you wrong about your judgment of the things—the person, that person’s charms, etc.—or are you wrong about yourself, about your judgment, about your own perceptions? What is the difference?

That we are capable of self-consciousness of our own subjectivity seems to me patent and undeniable. That we are capable of self-knowledge in any deep sense seems to me uncertain, at best.

Where does this leave old René? Those of us who read this crapola know that he will use the self-knowledge idea in order to construct “certainty” a bit later on in the text. Uh oh.

I used to think I was in love with Descartes.

the subject of pain

This is a proposal I wrote this morning for a book chapter. It’s for an anthology about phenomenology. 

While pain has been medicalized, pathologized, and subjected to normalization, the lived experience of pain has been pushed to the margins, misunderstood, and misrecognized. Pain remains mysterious even while its neurophysiological mechanisms are more precisely and intensively investigated. In part, this is because the predominant biomedical discourse all but eliminates the experiencing subject of pain.

Yet in counter-discourses, including those drawing from phenomenology, pain still presents mysteries. Pain seems to be most subjective, that is, most one’s own, least shareable, and almost inexpressible. It is perhaps the most indubitably and ineluctably certain embodied experience for oneself, but most doubtable and refutable to others, as Elaine Scarry proposed.[1]

In the accounts of many raised to be culturally North American or European, experiences of acute or chronic pain are described as an invasive assault. Strategies for living with chronic pain are struggles at this limit. Susan Wendell presents a strategy of distancing self from the body in pain, “objectifying” both, yet acknowledging this to be a “strategy of embodiment.”[2] Reinterpreting this strategy phenomenologically, what Wendell proposes reveals the paradox of the subject of pain. Pain appears as what is most one’s own, most intimate, but most alien. Pain threatens the sense of embodiment, and disrupts the appearance of body as organ of the Ego. Pain expresses a limit of embodiment as “I can”—the encounter with what the “I can” cannot master.

The subject of pain calls for reexamining this fundamental understanding of embodiment in the phenomenological tradition. For Edmund Husserl and for Maurice Merleau-Ponty, embodiment exhibits a typical and “normal” situation, the situation of “I can.” Against this normal situation, pain is represented as “abnormal” or as pathological (as is disability, among other conditions). Wendell’s strategy, and the struggles of many with chronic pain, could be not only a “renormalization” as reorientation to a “new normal,” but an encounter with embodiment as “I can’t.”

The classic texts of phenomenology offer only scattered hints of an approach to the embodied “I can’t” of acute or chronic pain and other limit-experiences. Further, by pathologizing pain (disability, etc.)—that is, by valorizing ability, mastery, and fluidity of the body-subject—the classic texts of phenomenology fail to account for limit-experiences as an ordinary, normal dimension of embodiment.

Without rejecting Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, and without rejecting the notion of the “I can,” I will offer a phenomenological account of embodiment as both “I can” and “I can’t,” avoiding the pathologizing tendency of both medical and earlier phenomenological discourse. From an initially paradoxical representation of the subject of pain, I will develop an alternative account of the experience of embodiment/embodied experience. I will conclude with a proposal for a new investigation of the normal and the abnormal as structures of embodiment and hermeneutic concepts in phenomenology.

           

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[1] Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

[2] Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body. New York: Routledge, 1996.

truth and falsehood or consequences for philosophy

I’m reading Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, a text not often discussed in Hegel literature, perhaps because it’s obscure, even for Hegel, and contains gross errors regarding scientifically explained phenomena—including mistakes about the science of Hegel’s day. Now, I adore Hegel for some perverse reason, and his errors are embarrassing.

That’s only a minor problem compared to Hegel’s racist and sexist comments, and those occur in texts that are taken seriously not just by Hegel scholars. For instance, his account of women in marriage as the material moment through which the ethical relation becomes manifest takes up a significant if small part of the Phenomenology of Spirit (the most-read book by Hegel in the English speaking philosophy world). Sexism and racism appear in the Philosophy of Right as well (probably second most-read).

I recently had a brief chat at a conference about this basic problem in the canon of philosophical writing. The woman I was talking to summed things up well by saying that if she stopped reading any philosopher who wrote something outrageous about women or that was racist, she’d have to give up reading philosophy just about altogether.

Since almost no one but academic philosophers reads books from the tradition of philosophy, this may seem like a picayune problem. People don’t seem to quit reading novels by racist authors, or stop looking at paintings by sexist painters. If there is a difference, it could be that unlike literature or art, philosophy is supposed to reveal the truth. Since we have rejected the notion that the truth could be racist or sexist, racism or sexism in philosophical writing could seem to undermine its status as philosophy altogether.

I don’t know if I believe that, in part, ironically enough, because of the influence of Hegel on my thinking about philosophy. Hegel’s concept of the truth as “the whole,” which would include “moments” of would-be truths that turn out to be false—indeed, which at times Hegel writes includes the false. If racism and sexism are false, they nevertheless are moments in the development of truth, in the same way that an immediate sensation of something, while not taking in the “whole” of it and thus false, must still be part of knowing that something. Put another way: philosophical texts that involve racism and sexism are necessary for the articulation of philosophical truth because we (philosophers, people) have been and are racist and sexist. That means that racism and sexism must be uttered, but not left simply posited. The positions of racism and sexism must be posited in order to be thought through, in the “labor of the negative” (Hegel’s so-called dialectic), to recover and bring forward what is true in racism and sexism. And that could turn out to be that the opposite of racism and sexism is the truth of racism and sexism.

That’s not to defend Hegel’s racism and sexism, because, at least as I read him, he posits racist and sexist ideas and leaves them standing. To refer to his own language, Hegel commits falsehood whenever he fails to undermine these positions. In as much as the truth and the revelation of the truth would require that negation, Hegel’s books do not tell the truth.

All that is preface to the question of the day, which is what the relationship is between philosophy and truth. Is that a strange question? Anyway, I have two ideas in mind.

First is whether philosophy or philosophers should tell the truth. I think that by reputation, philosophy and philosophers are very much concerned with truth, even dedicated to it. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates seems to prefer the truth to everything, even life itself. (Everything except for hot guys, that is. In the dialogues, Socrates unfailingly prefers hot guys to the truth.) All the same, Socrates lies, a lot. Plus, if philosophy and philosophers should follow Socrates’ lead in the practice of recognizing our own ignorance, philosophy  and philosophers should be reluctant, even reticent, to posit anything as true. (Hegel was hip to this, and as much as said that every position is untrue, just because no position can propose or state the whole that is the truth.)

Second is whether philosophy or philosophers should be held to a standard of truth or truth-telling. Here I mean something like whether philosophy or philosophers that cannot tell the truth should be ejected from the canon. For instance, if a philosopher’s work was based on patently false premises and obviously faulty reasoning, should that disqualify that philosopher from the traditional canon? By analogy with sciences like physics or biology, in which theories are not taught that have been demonstrated to be false, should philosophical works also be excluded? If not, then should those works not be presented as falsehoods, in the manner in which one might tell a biology class about Lamarck’s surmise about evolution? Perhaps no one should read Hegel, given his works’ repetition of bad (or evil, depending on your point of view) ideas. Or perhaps, like a joke in the old Monty Python’s Flying Circus series, we could read it, provided we understand that he was wrong. In that case, what does the tradition of philosophical texts amount to? I hate to think that it is nothing but a special form of literature, having as its differentia specifica that these are texts that pretend to the truth—or are just very badly plotted novels.

pain and language

What I’m reading about pain keeps coming back to the inexpressibility of pain. This is not to say we lack words to describe pain, but that none of them can, that there is always a remainder, a (somewhat) unsharable, incommunicable something that is only subjectively undergone. I don’t know whether I agree with that as such, but taking it up for now, why should this only be true for experiences of pain? Why is it particularly problematic for experiences of pain?

Of course, pain is often urgent and problematic, and that brings about situations in which the expression of pain is at issue. For instance, when the ER nurse asks you to rate your chest pain on a 1 to 10 scale, this obviously crude device produces data for medical interpretation—reporting 10 will be taken to indicate heart attack and the need for certain types of intervention, but a 3 or 4 is ambiguous. The reason why they don’t ask for more description is that it would be still more ambiguous and would require time, attention, empathy, communication, interpretation, and understanding that cannot be afforded.

But why wouldn’t the same basic problem exist for feelings of pleasure? Imagine being asked at some appropriate moment (or inappropriate, depending on how you feel about it) to rate your pleasure from 1 to 10. Anyway, we like more florid language evoking pleasure, and take our time with it, because we can usually afford to, and because we like it. Nonetheless, the remainder remains, I would say, and there is no language sufficient to express to you just how I undergo pleasure. (It’s peach season!)

David Biro suggests that we express pain by way of metaphor because there is no other, more direct, literal language for it. That is, the linguistic expression of pain is catachresis: terms are used that are somehow out of context, or fit together in ways that aren’t “right.” (The Merriam-Webster online dictionary offers as an example: “blind mouths.”) Merleau-Ponty says, “A language which only sought to reproduce things themselves would exhaust its power to teach in factual statements. On the contrary, a language which gives our perspectives on things and cuts out relief in them opens up a discussion which does not end with the language and itself invites further investigation.” (“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 77)

What makes pain unique (if pain is unique) is not its confounding of language. All experience confounds language.

"Whatever," says an exasperated and quite dead Wittgenstein, because the problem of how language expresses experience is not a problem, since language doesn't do that in the first place. The linguistic expression of pain, like the number scale, expresses pain because we take it to express pain. How do we know it works? Because it makes people do things like give patients nitroglycerin, or give philosophers peaches. And as the punchline to the joke goes...

care

From the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, the ethics of care was a predominant theme in feminist ethics. Based ultimately on an essentialist view of femininity, the ethics of care focused on human relationship, need, and care responses, as an alternative to the Western philosophical tradition's rights and law based approaches.

It might be expected that, raised masculine in a patriarchal society, I would think about ethical responsibility in terms of my autonomy and authority, and I do. But for me, this is not entirely a matter of gender. I was raised also to think of care as an alarmed response to an abnormal situation, rather than an ongoing, basic response to the ordinary human condition of need and interdependence. Seeking care, that is, admitting need, initiated a conflict or crisis, and the response was to that immediate emergency. Once resolved, the moment passed, both need and the care response were considered settled and finished.

While this may be underlying the patriarchal masculine notion of autonomy and independence, I also know that my own upbringing was profoundly lacking in ordinary and ongoing care. It was always better to remain in need than to ask for care. Admitting need is, for me, admitting pathology and vulnerability. Need exposes me to harm, terror, and chaos. Metaphorically speaking, sirens would blare, everything would need to come to a halt, until the care was provided.

My response to need is similar. Although I am better at caring than being cared for, my caring is still based on sensing the situation as abnormal. I worry over making sure I have provided the proper care for the particular need of the moment. I am driven to reach the point when care is done.

Of course, the feminist ethics of care tells us that care is never done, because care and need are ordinary, everyday, and fundamental to the human condition. It took reading Susan Wendell's chapter on care and disability in The Rejected Body for me to realize this about myself, and about what I had not really understood about the ethics of care.

It's really awfully sad, isn't it? Oh well.

(By the way, The Rejected Body is very good, and although the care discussion makes it rather dated, I plan to use it in Bioethics next year. My undergrad students won't have read any feminist ethics, so it won't be dated for them.)

Hegel's super-skepticism

At the end of the preliminary, critical section of the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel notes that what has just transpired -- to wit, a thoroughgoing criticism of the history of philosophy of logic and ontology in 100 pages -- could have been achieved through skepticism about all presuppositions. In other words, instead of the detailed work Hegel has done, he could have begun by saying something like "hey, kids, you know what? Everything you thought you knew about logic is wrong. Now let's start over."

Why not just make that quick move? There's a pretty strong history of throwing out presuppositions and re-starting ontology. It's a move that allegedly permits foundational certainty, that means our knowing will be complete, real, 100% knowing, not only organic but also pesticide free and shade-grown, etc. Presuppositions, you see, are the genetically modified organisms of ontology. You're never entirely certain what they're made of or that they're going to work out the way you planned, and by the time you realize it, they've already irreparably mutated and cross-bred with everything you're growing. The skeptical move in ontology is the insistence that we start with virgin soil, virgin seeds, the pure sun, and water from untainted mountain sources. Start over again, you see, after razing what had been there before.

Hegel says doing so would be "sad," but more to the point, redundant, because the approach he's going to take to systematically construct ontology will do that work along the way. There's a constant negation of half-thought half-logic, abstraction and incompletion in Hegel's system. It picks up every single philosophical idea and perspective, both historically and systematically, and subjects each one of them to this negation. I can try to explain this basic move in Hegel's thought with the example of "immediate knowing."

Hegel says that one position on knowing is that we immediately know: this knowing cannot be justified in terms of what else we know, or in terms of our evidence, or anything. It is exactly like faith. This form of knowing isn't unfamiliar. Take this: "I know that this dog is speaking to me with the voice of god." Now, a claim like that cannot be given evidence. It cannot be justified in terms of other things the speaker knows (you can't say, "... and I know this because..."). This idea can only be asserted as true, and this assertion can only rest on itself. Immediate knowing, as a position about knowing, says that knowing cannot be tested or proven.

The skeptical move here would be to say that we shouldn't believe anything merely asserted, because it presupposes that the speaker isn't crazy, that a dog could possibly speak, that there is a god who could and would speak through a dog, etc. etc., and thus debunk the claim to know.

Hegel's claim is this: not only can't there be evidence either for or against a claim to immediate knowledge, but the claim to immediate knowledge can't be immediate. If "I know this dog speaks to me with the voice of god" can only be asserted as immediate knowing without any justification, that assertion, to have the content that it has, to have the meaning that it has, cannot be asserted immediately. "I know that this dog is speaking to me with the voice of god" requires that the proposition itself, to have any meaning at all, says something that even the speaker must be able to evaluate the truth or falsity of -- or else it is not a claim to know, at all. In other words, it can't be immediate, because it is in relation to something else that would be able to tell us whether the sentence is well-formed, says something predicable, etc.

What I think this means, about Hegel's view of philosophical positions about knowing, is that every positive stance about knowing that commits the error of being one-sided is not merely false (which they are, because they are one-sided), but that none of them can be meant as they are meant. Every philosophical position-taking is hypocritical.

Every philosophical position-taking is hypocritical.

"Except Hegel's?" you're asking. Or your dog is asking.

Yes, except Hegel's... insofar as Hegel doesn't take a position. The truth is the whole, if played out consistently, means that he can't take a position (or, technically, that if and when he does, he then undermines it).

So, skepticism isn't skeptical enough, because it's only skeptical that positions are true, or that any position could be true. Hegel's skepticism is that the position isn't what it is, and the position-taker can't take the position.

Far frickin out.

"an observer's attitude"

Susan Wendell, in her article "Feminism, Disability, and the Transcendence of the Body," discusses her strategies for living with chronic pain. "Living with" is already saying something about her experiences and strategies that may not fit. Somewhat contrary to what I wrote about embodiment and non-ownership, she says she adopts a stance of treating her pain as "a physical phenomenon to be endured until it is over and not taken seriously," which suggests a form of embodiment that induces a relation, a regard, and thus a separation of the living, conscious ego from one's body.

Wendell says her mood is improved when she can say to herself, "My body is painful (or nauseated, exhausted, etc.), but I'm happy." Her illness and pain lead to depression, for which she has a similar strategy. She says she enhances the quality of her life when she can say to herself, "My brain is badly affected right now, so I'm depressed, but I'm fine and my life is going well." Leaving aside the need to develop a fuller account of depression (not her task in the article), this suggests a state of mind and a form of experience in which one's own mood is separable from oneself, or at least from what she continues to call her "life." ("Life" may or may not mean "lived experience" in a phenomenological way.)

In sum, she says, most surprisingly, "I am learning not to identify myself with my body, and this helps me to live a good life with a debilitating chronic illness." This is surprising given the trajectory toward holistic embodiment models of consciousness and life in "continental" philosophy (which would appear to be Wendell's intellectual home turf).

This seems almost like a return to dualism, of the kind that allegedly dogged Husserl's first attempts toward transcendental phenomenological philosophy. That contintental philosophers keep returning to this theme suggests to me that there is a lot yet unthought about the basic move of transcendental egoism, and perhaps also still about Descartes' dualism. (I always wear my Hegel glasses when I think about this stuff: all dichotomies are false, and the truth is the whole.)

Wendell's strategies also complicate further the notion of one's "own" body or consciousness. I am totally unsure what to make of the way she displaces depression. This could be for personal reasons, namely that I experience depression as existential mood, and find it difficult to displace, and especially to say to myself, "I am depressed, but my life is good." To me, the phrase that follows naturally from "I am depressed" is "and therefore my objectively good life is crappy."

ownership

I suppose most people have had the experience of a word losing meaning after incessant repetition. Sometimes philosophy feels like deliberately inducing this experience.

One concept I struggle to understand is ownership, especially in relation to two related philosophical discussions: ownership of our bodies, and ownership of consciousness. (This has come up because I've just read an article with my Bioethics class about end-of-life decision making that raises the question whether we own our bodies.)

In everyday life, things do appear to me as mine. What I experience as most mine is what I pick up most often, what I touch, and what figures into my doing and dealing with the world. The nearer and more constant this touch, the more my own these things seem. Things are more or less mine. Almost nothing is more mine than the computers and keyboards I touch daily. Oddly, the guitar I touch daily is less mine. This is because it resists in ways the computers don't. The more mine something is, the more accessible it is to my touch, and the more I take it up into an overall movement, without resistance. The same thing can be more or less mine over a brief time span. My bicycle, most mine as I crank at high speed and blow through stop signs, can instantly be less mine when the brakes fail to respond or the gear slips.

I experience ownership of these things, through their intimacy, but also through their difference from me. As familiar as it is, the keyboard still is not my fingertips, but belongs to my fingertips. As fluidly as playing the guitar sometimes is, the guitar is always present in relation to my fingers and ears and eyes, etc. (Unlike Merleau-Ponty's famous blind-man's stick, these things I own are not extensions of my body, not appropriated into embodiment.)

So, owning my body strikes me as strangely distancing. Even when I touch my body, I don't touch my body the same way I touch things, and it is not, for me, accessible, near, nor even intimate. There is a divisibility of time and space in the relation of ownership that is not present in my embodiment. This may be a badly strained analogy, but I'll go with it anyway: if ownership is like time, embodiment is like eternality. (And for now I'll sidestep the question of embodiment sub specie aeternitatis.)

Even when my body is objectified and obtrusive, in pain or disability, I say "mine" about my body metaphorically or by extension from the way I say the guitar is mine. I say "my feet hurt," but my feet are not in relation to me the way my bicycle is. I don't feel that I approach the world through my feet or my hands, or walk or touch with them. They are my walking or touching, and in condition of pain or disability, they are the pain-and-walking or the unable-and-touching.

Still stranger to me is the notion of consciousness as ownership. In Husserl's account of the phenomenological reduction, the Ego appears, and with it, the Ego's "own" experience. When I first read this, I was stumped by it, and I still am. Husserl seems to need the Ego and its experience to coexist in this little copula, "own," in order to find a way toward a transcendental ego. Many phenomenological philosophers would be gravely concerned by the notion that the transcendental ego just is experience, and I'm not sure I would advance that proposition (at least, in public), but that would be the parallel construction to the above notion of being the body.

philosophical habits of mind

A grad school professor of ours used to compare himself to an extraordinarily widely published friend of his, by way of Isaiah Berlin's distinction of intellectual foxes and hedgehogs. "Joe's a fox," he would tell us, "and I'm a hedgehog." The fox had a quick wit, and always seemed to grasp intuitively and immediately the scope and significance of any philosophical discussion. He responded brilliantly to questions. The hedgehog was plodding and specialist in a small area of philosophy to which he devoted years of study, ultimately to formulate one or two nearly dogmatic assertions.

I always thought our professor implied that the more properly philosophical approach was his -- the hedgehog's. What he told me about philosophical study over the years perpetually returned to the theme of focused study on one area, or at most three great philosophers. About these, the hedgehog admonished us to read practically everything published. He was a model of constancy and determination.

But I admired the fox and had a natural affinity for him. (The fox had charm that the hedgehog lacked, and was also nicer.) He seemed to be aware of every trend in academic philosophy, as well as being in the vanguard of a few. He entered any debate with goodwill and heart, and apparently without a shibboleth he felt the need to protect. I have a vague memory of him at an academic conference, mid-debate with an adamant, opposed interlocutor, suddenly shrugging and saying, "oh, yes, you're right, and I'm completely wrong about that."

In fact, I thought that the fox was more truly philosophical. The hedgehog was a scholar, practically a monk. He seemed not only to think more slowly, less broadly, but less freely. This could also make the hedgehog appear less intelligent, certainly less bright.

I know, therefore, that my bias regarding the necessity of philosophical intelligence is that it model the fox's quickness and brightness, rather than the hedgehog's diligence and tenacity.

what are the requirements of being a philosopher?

[No comment on my lengthy sabbatical from writing in this space.]

About a month ago, I started to ask myself whether someone has to be "smart" to be a philosopher. The canon of the history of western philosophy is peopled entirely by smart people (okay, except for Kant). But a philosopher is not just a smart person, obviously, and the kinds of smartness philosophers exhibit seem like they have a particularity to them that you don't necessarily find among other people, smart or not.

I know lots of really smart people, lots of people with doctoral degrees who do scientific research or academic scholarship, and teach at universities. The way philosophers are smart seems different to me than the way other people are smart. Others notice this too, or seem to, whenever they raise eyebrows at the kinds of questions philosophers raise. How much of this is the smartness, and how much if it is the particularly forms of reflection philosophers are prone to?

Here's a first hypothesis. There are pretty obvious cultural and ethnic attributes exhibited by philosophers trained in the western canonical tradition, and those both favor and contribute to the development of a certain kind of smartness. So, the relation between smartness and philosophy is at least partly culture-bound, and not necessarily essential to philosophy as such.

If we strip away the culture-bound aspects, would there still be a smartness pertinent to philosophy as such?

morality, justice, and suffering

I'm reading Martha Nussbaum's book Frontiers of Justice, which is pretty good. She criticizes the worthy and prominent theory of justice of John Rawls, which draws from a long tradition in philosophy of looking at justice as if societies were formed through contractual agreements. The basic idea is that we can understand justice by imagining that societies are supposed to be mutually beneficial to all who would choose to join them. Rawls' theory of justice is probably the most robust and interesting version of the social contract, as Nussbaum argues, because it includes a moral concept: we would have to consider these contractual agreements under a "veil of ignorance" preventing us from knowing how to rig the contract to our own personal advantage. So, the terms of the deal would have to be such that anyone could be benefitted, not just oneself. Egoism is not possible in this scheme.

Cool, but not cool enough, Nussbaum says, because it has a limited view of human life, and a limited view of how the social contract would affect those who don't get to negotiate its terms because they aren't "normal" in their capacities for reason. Nussbaum goes a different way, saying that the contractarian idea has to be thought of in terms of human capabilities that are basic to human dignity. In other words, instead of self-interested negotiation, we should think about social justice by asking whether a society provides for each and every member the means and opportunity to live decent, dignified human lives. She lists 10 capabilities that are essential to dignified lives, and gives very general definitions of each. (I'm not going to go into these. My favorite is the capability to play.)

Very cool, but I'm not convinced by one thing Nussbaum does. She makes the case well for using capabilities instead of rights as a way to think about justice. She also argues against using suffering as a way to think about justice. She does so, in part, because capabilities are more fully representative of human dignity, but I think also because it's more positive. She also says that suffering is too minimal a standard, and reduces suffering to sentience, meaning something like the capacity to be aware of harm, injury and harmful, injurious conditions.

Through roundabout associations as I was reading this morning (arguments about the moral wrongness of lying, leading to considering how odd it is that lying is rejected not only tout court but tout suite by principlist moral philosophy, considering its such a fundamental kind of behavior, leading to considering a statement made by an erstwhile pal of mine that he would much rather be lied to compassionately than told the truth righteously), I started to consider whether suffering could be the basis for a theory of morality or justice. I don't think suffering is taken very seriously in Western philosophy, neither in general, nor as a basis for understanding morality and justice. But maybe it should.

First of all, suffering is universal, and I think it could be argued that it is more universal than rights or capabilities. A suffering-based theory would not have to justify why "human dignity" is the right standard, nor define dignity, though it would have to articulate and justify the standard of suffering itself (i.e., how much is acceptable, maybe also from what, etc.)

One reason suffering isn't taken seriously, ironically enough, is that it is universal: our intuition is that animals too suffer, and a suffering approach, some might say, begs the question whether animal suffering ought to be important, or whether human life, morality, and justice ought to be weighed in terms of something that non-humans are also subject to. Nussbaum wouldn't want to accept these claims, really, since she's also interested in understanding our relation to non-human animals in terms of justice. But it is clear that Nussbaum's dismissal of suffering is too quick. I say she reduces it to sentience, to mere sentience, and that this ignores the dimension and texture of suffering. Though universal, suffering happens to us in every way we connect to the world, and in the same depth. Suffering is different for different beings, varying in one way because we have different learned capacities for connecting to the world: some of us can suffer aesthetically in ways others of us don't, or at least not as much.

I'm pretty sure a phenomenology of embodiment would provide some key insights for an account of morality or justice on the basis of suffering -- in fact, I know a few people have worked on this. There's also some obvious, if superficial, analogies to Buddhist ideas. In any case, it's a thought I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, and reading Nussbaum has helped me see more clearly why it's appealing to me.

philosophical problems

I suppose my post yesterday could have suggested I agree with whoever it was who said that life would never have posed any philosophical problems -- meaning that the tradition of Western philosophy is a history of self-invented puzzles and linguistic foibles. (I think it was G.E. Moore.) I don't think I mean that. It depends.

(1) If we stick to the strict language of philosophical problems, and consider philosophy to be a search for solutions, then I do mean that. Life's problems are not philosophical. I don't think philosophy is a solution-machine, either.

(2) If we broaden the terms, and say ask whether life poses philosophical questions, then I think it does. And I think this is where philosophy is at home, answering, and wondering, in response to questions.

I'll illustrate this with a brief look at a motivating moment in Plato's Republic. The passage I have in mind is when Socrates responds to Thrasymachus' claim that justice is the advantage of the stronger. Thrasymachus is not clear about this, his position ends up being incoherent, but what it amounts to is the view that the best life is one spent using power and wealth to acquire more power and wealth, and to hell with everybody else. Socrates demonstrates many problems with this position (for instance, what happens when another tyrant comes along, or when the people you depend on to produce the wealth you steal become totally corrupt or die out), but Thrasymachus doesn't care. In this, Thrasymachus is consistent. The ethical, political, and practical faults in his position don't matter to him. One imagines that, when these arise, he'll be happy to smash opponents, buy new slaves, build an arsenal of drones, secure his southern border, make war for oil, etc.

Socrates does not effectively refute him, in my view, because the argument doesn't continue. Glaucon and Adeimantus take it up, clarify it and try to make it coherent,¹ and demand Socrates to show how it could possibly be better to have the reputation for total vice and be punished and persecuted for it despite being good, than to have the reputation for goodness and be rewarded and praised for it despite being wicked.²

Two ways to look at this. One is as an allegedly philosophical problem: the problem of how to get people to be good, or of how to be good, or of how to have a good life. In my view, Socrates necessarily fails to solve this problem, because it's not a problem that can be solved by philosophy. How do I know? Big hint: Thrasymachus has left the building! Socrates talks up Glaucon and Adeimantus, while the problem, Thrasymachus, is off gleefully beating people up and stealing their money doing high-finance deals beating people up and stealing their money.

The other way to look at it is as a philosophical question: the question of the meaning of virtue and vice, the meaning of a good life, and of why people like Thrasymachus seem so happy when the rest of us poor slobs aren't. Now we're talking -- literally, since that's exactly what they do. And they have a good time, and they don't hurt anybody while doing it.

Life poses philosophical questions (or perhaps this is better phrased as opportunities for philosophical questioning) all over the place, all the time. The question of the good can pop up with the toast out of the toaster. Which is great for us, because it offers consolation when people like Thrasymachus beat us up and steal our money.


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1. Mistake #1. Thrasymachus' position is most accurately put incoherently, because he doesn't give a shit about listening to reason. Having power means you don't have to listen to reason. So, they've distorted his position, and the entire business thereafter is based on the mistaken notion that his position requires a rational defense.

2. Mistake #2. Another distortion of Thrasymachus' position. Having sufficient power means that your reputation doesn't matter. In fact, having a reputation for violence, wickedness, irascibility, and rapaciousness is good for people who have those characteristics because it makes people afraid of them and more compliant. DUH!

philosophy is unnecessary

We don't need philosophy.*

The American philosopher John Dewey proposed that genuine inquiry could only arise as a result of a real, practical problem, and could only last until some solution to the problem arose. Most of the history of Western philosophy has pursued two kinds of problems: problems about knowing, and problems about doing. Let's call those epistemology and ethics.

In everyday life, in our dealings with the world, in our conduct toward one another, no problems arise that would call for the study of epistemology or ethics. That's not to say we have no problems when it comes to knowing or doing. In fact, we spend a lot of time and resources trying to solve them or dealing with the fallout when, instead of solving them, we act without thinking and create big messes. But the problems are not philosophical. They don't call for a philosophical study of epistemology or ethics.

Here's an example. I recently wrote email to a listserv about the response I got to a paper on faculty ethics and tenuous employment status. The paper was philosophical. It was asking about what ethics could mean, given that the kinds of ethical codes traditionally written and applied to professional work just don't fit tenuous faculty work. I proposed a way to consider the work of ethics, drawing from Michel Foucault, as a way faculty could consider who they themselves are, what kinds of moral subjects they might be or become, and on that basis, make a deliberate choice about the moral regime or code they would follow.

Someone responded by taking exactly the wrong bait (granted, this person never actually read my paper, so she was only taking the wrong bait of the email description of the response I got, and was writing from a position of ignorance). She said, more or less, that the tenure-track faculty should answer for their crimes, and that this, obviously, was what an "ethics" discussion of tenuous faculty would call for.

This illustrates very well the kind of problem people want ethics to solve, and why philosophy is unnecessary. She wanted to blame people, at the very least. She wanted philosophy -- or something -- to provide her a tool or an excuse to blame the people she wanted to blame. But philosophy doesn't do that. It's useless for the kind of moral judging, shaming, persecuting, and executing that people want ethics for. (What she really needed was sophistry or rhetoric.)

Another, much briefer illustration. Every so often, sciences get into tangles about their own basic systems of belief. Laws that had predicted and understood natural phenomena lo these many years sometimes go kaflooey, and then the sciences freak out, because they need a basic system of belief in order to do science work: running experiments, collecting grants, inventing new ways humans can fuck things up, etc. Where do the sciences go when their basic systems of belief go kaflooey? Not to philosophy, and for good reason. Philosophy would start theorizing about concepts like certainty and truth, their connection to perception, the connection between all that and what we mean when we say the world or the universe. That's not the problem of knowledge the sciences undergo.

Where does this leave philosophy? What is it? It looks like an extravagant, excessive, willful diversion from problems.

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* This might be my answer to the question I posted in March: How can anyone take philosophy seriously?

normal, abnormal, and problems

From the standpoint of persons who regard themselves as normally sexed, their environment has a perceivedly normal sex composition. This composition is rigorously dichotomized into the ‘natural,’ i.e., moral, entities of male and female. 

For such members perceived environments of sexed persons are populated with natural males, natural females, and persons who stand in moral contrast with them, i.e., incompetent, criminal, sick, and sinful. 

The members of the normal population, for him the bona fide members of that population, are essentially, originally, in the first place, always have been, and always will be, once and for all, in the final analysis, either 'male’ or ‘female.’

      -- Harold Garfinkel, "Passing," in The Transgender Studies Reader, pp. 59, 62, 62

This illustrates starkly why normality matters. I assume that, 53 years after Garfinkel published “Passing,” a sizable minority of the population of the US understands that the characteristics of sexed bodies range along spectra of both genotypic and phenotypic traits, as well as that sexual behavior is wide-ranging. This seems pertinent to a slight shift in attitudes toward sexual variation and what I am sorry to have to call tolerance toward abnormalities. (Easy, I suppose, for the polymorphously perverse to say.) The assumption of sex binarism remains powerfully normative.

So when Husserl analyzes the “normality” of the prevailing surrounding world, as the background horizon of all our everyday activity, it’s hard to avoid reading that word in the same sense as Garfinkel’s usage—which I think is basically also Foucault’s, and Sara Ahmed’s. Foucault’s work on power/knowledge, particularly The History of Sexuality, is usually interpreted as a critique of institutional normalization as a process of the production of regimented bodies. Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology, develops a quasi-phenomenological critique of the phenomenology of orientation and normality. Looking back from this standpoint on Husserl’s presumably phenomenological account of normality, I see a very strange equivocation, or possibly an ambiguity.

Normality can be analyzed on three levels, to start. In my language for these, purely subjective normality is the level of my own perceptual/embodied being in the world. It would entail all that is unique to my own perspective, being six feet tall, of very acute hearing in the left and some deafness in the right ear, of very myopic but focused vision in the right and less myopic but poorly focused vision in the left eye, etc. For me, my aural, visual, etc. perception is normal as per these peculiarities. What is abnormal for me is distortion in the perceptual field, for instance when I first put on new glasses, or when there’s water in my ears from swimming. As I adjust to the new glasses, the anomalous motivates a reconstitution of the normal, that is, a new normal, which then prevails, becomes sedimented as “just how it is for me,” and disappears into the horizon.
Intersubjective normality pertains to the everyday world shared with others. For Husserl (in contrast, I think, ultimately, with Heidegger), the intersubjectively normal surrounding world involves actively as well as passively shared meanings, events, constructions, etc. Communication and community are whereby there comes to be a real world, an objective world for us, and it is in reference to this real world that intersubjective normality has its crucial significance. This is one level at which the idea becomes important that the real world is corrective.

Were I to exist solus ipse, my purely subjective normal perceptual life would obtain, always and everywhere—given the caveat that distortions, error, etc., serve as self-correctives, in reference only to purely subjective further intendings. But, obviously, others’ perceptual lives and their actions matter to me and are part of my own experience. Intersubjective normality is there for me because others are. Were I to perceive and act as if trees were murderous, or as if human beings should wiggle on the ground to get around rather than ambulate, it would matter for others that I did so, and it would matter for me that others did not. My abnormal perception and action would appear as abnormal for me and for others. How?

If we stop right here, we have the problem of normality and abnormality: for us, intersubjectively, the presence of abnormality produces a mini-crisis of meaning and the presumptive unity of the world. We are motivated by the real-world assumption to wonder and problematize the abnormal, and to seek some correction, as Husserl says. Now, Husserl resolves this problem, in all I’ve read on the matter, too quickly, in turning to what I consider a third level of normality. To me, the problem of normality and abnormality is most acutely present at this intersubjective level. A person directly in front of you, terrified that the tree is going to kill him, or you, matters right now for you and for that person. You are motivated to correct and to restore the presumptive unity of the real world, because it matters whether this person is right about the trees, and because it matters that this person in front of you has this belief, because this person’s conduct takes place in the same world. (Isn’t that how it is that “crazy people” are terrifying? They induce crises, that we must resolve, by some alteration of our concept of the world, or at the very least in our own conduct—avoiding them, helping them, realizing they are right, etc. For those moments, the real world, the horizonal context of all our everyday activities, is shaken, if only just a little.)

One way to resolve the problem of normality and abnormality is in reference to a standing tradition, or culture, and this is what Husserl does. l want to call this sedimented normality to refer to its being in the ground of so much of the real world as such, and also to allude to the use of the term sedimented in phenomenology as the institution of passively accrued meaning, via actively lived experience. This also helps articulate why I think Husserl jumps the gun: if the intersubjective problem of normality is active, present, here and now, his resolution by reference to sedimented normality reverts to a passively accrued “there is.” Adjudicating the problem of normality through sedimented normality really just ignores the problem. Maybe Husserl is right about this, when he says about understanding the foreign, that because he is raised European, German, and as a small-city resident, the foreign person’s lifeworld will only be understandable in analogy to his own. That is to say, the sedimented normality of the presumptively real European, German, small-city world obtains, because it is there.

In some ways, and to some extent, Husserl does have to be right about this. I can not undo my being raised as I was. But it does not help explain how that way of life, and that tradition, became. The sedimentation of tradition is going on, incrementally, in those minute intersubjective dealings, it seems to me.

And, obviously, traditions are revised with each generation. Normality shifts, slowly, or there is a more significant crisis, and tradition loses its traditional status as it becomes an object of deliberation, critique, understanding, revision. There is a moment in Husserl’s analysis for this critique, and he acknowledges this even though he does nothing much with it. That’s when the equivocation or ambiguity of normality matters. In that intersubjective, problematic moment, we are confronted by the fact that normality is constituted, and re-constituted, and open-ended.

abnormality, universality, reality, world

Abnormality is a serious problem for a philosophy that grounds objectivity and truth on intersubjective reality, as does Husserl's phenomenological philosophy. (Let me boil this down. In Husserl's view, I think, there's objective empirical science, and truth, because there is a world that is universally real for all people. That means, in short, that our actions always being motivated by and directed toward that same world. In turn, there is such a world because, between us, our community, our communication, and our being human is based on our being with one another and recognizing one another as human. So, the very fundamental basis of objectivity and truth is our being interconnected and sharing this common world of experience.)

If there's abnormality, as Husserl says himself in the texts collected in Husserliana XXXIX -- Die Lebenswelt [The Lifeworld] -- there seems to be contradiction within this common, universal world. In that case, its unity, and hence its universality, would seem to fail. Now, if that fails, so to does the ultimate warrant of addressing objectivity or truth.

Husserl addresses this in terms of there being normal and abnormal experience. His example in text number 16 of Die Lebenswelt is about the normality of color-sightedness and the abnormality of color-blindness. They each deal with the world in terms of their own way of seeing, even though this seems to mean the world they share in common harbors a contradiction. Husserl's extremely dissatisfying answer, in this text, is, that they acknowledge that each sees the same world, the same things, but differently. Oooooo-kay, but this isn't really resolving anything. His examples are so general that they're superficial, almost meaningless.

This matters to me as an intriguing philosophical question. But it matters more as a practical problem in the world. I'll get at this two ways, one through more academic philosophy, the other through everyday life.

I now read almost all philosophy through Jean-François Lyotard's book The Postmodern Condition (1978). In this book, Lyotard asserts that the current state of knowledge is characterized by "incredulity toward metanarratives" that serve to give warrant to the discourses that generate knowledge. In effect, his claim is that the connection between reality itself and the discourses that claim to tell us about reality is one that is now doubtful. Physics, for instance, used to be grounded in a claim either to be able to present the whole truth about the reality of bodies in motion, or to be able to make life better for us by making nature our servant. Neither of those are claims that physics can make for itself, because they aren't claims about bodies in motion, but claims about what the study of bodies in motion can do. So, they are not scientific knowledge claims, but narrative knowledge claims -- stories about the role of physics in the world. But those stories are no longer credible, the first because physics itself has led to the discovery of the limits of objective knowledge in physics (viz. Heisenberg), the second because physics has allowed us to build bombs that threaten to blow up the world and all the physicists with it.

Here's why, in everyday life, this matters. In the postmodern condition of incredulity toward metanarratives, we have technological apparatus of scientific knowledge, including all the stuff we make out of it, but without the grounding of those claims on a reality principle. So, we live in a world of competing and contradictory claims about reality. The simplest example of this is the "debate" over global climate change. In this debate, there are 97% or so of people with backgrounds in science discourses, who all agree that there is global climate change, that it is a problem, and that human activity contributes to this change. Then there are 60% or so of US Republicans, who do not believe in global climate change, regardless of their backgrounds. Rich members of this latter group fund "research" institutions that generate "knowledge" that climate change is not real, or not significant, or not caused by human action, or not a problem, or caused by trees, etc. (I note in passing the lovely Democritean skepticism of this argument. It's like Metrodorus' On Nature: there is no global warming; if there is, we can't know anything about it; if we can know anything about it, it's not important; etc.)

Under the postmodern condition, with the connection between knowledge-generating discourses and reality severed, these competing, contradictory knowledge claims co-exist, but their co-existence is untenable. They cannot both be correct. (This is assuming that the climate change detractors are not cynically pursuing profit, which is certainly possible.) It matters very much who is right, and so it matters very much that we have some way of addressing this contradiction.

We don't. We vote on it, which is as absurd as voting on whether the things we perceive have color or not. Reality being intersubjectively grounded does not mean we vote on what's real. It means that there is a reality, a universal world, to which we can all refer for adjudicating our differences, and toward which each of us is directed, and in reference to which a perspective is normal or abnormal. Or else.

And so far, Husserl's response to this major problem is, yeah, we deal.