The difference between preference and hedonic utilitarianism, and why hedonism prevails

The difference between preference and hedonic utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the view that an act is morally good insofar as it maximizes utility. The best act in any given context is that act which maximizes utility, the worst act is that which minimizes utility, and each other act can be ranked somewhere between best and worst. The preference and hedonic variants of utilitarianism disagree on the nature of utility. Preference utilitarians think utility is sum total preference satisfaction (minus sum total preference frustration); hedonic utilitarians think utility is sum total pleasure (minus the sum total suffering). The disagreement regards the source of goodness and badness in the world: whether they are intrinsic to the satisfaction/frustration of agent goals, or whether they are intrinsic to certain experiential states. It is an axiological dispute.

At first glance it is odd to ask what differentiates preference from hedonic utilitarianism because it is obvious: one cares about preferences, the other about pleasures and sufferings. All we need to do to show the difference between these views is consider a case where satisfying somebody’s preference, all else equal, yields less pleasure than not satisfying somebody’s preference. Suppose somebody prefers vanilla icecream over chocolate even though the latter provides them more gustatory pleasure. In that case, hedonic utilitarianism would counsel choosing the chocolate and preference utilitarianism would counsel choosing the vanilla – the two frameworks straightforwardly differ.

The hedonic utilitarian, at this juncture, will point out that the agent choosing ice cream should (and would) come to the conclusion that they prefer chocolate to vanilla ice cream, were they better informed. Given the intrinsic goodness of pleasure, says the hedonic utilitarian, an agent who tried both chocolate and vanilla ice cream and found the former more pleasurable would (and should) prefer chocolate to vanilla ice cream. As such, the hedonist continues, the thought experiment as initially formulated is malformed – there is no case where a rational agent would prefer a less to a more pleasurable experience, all else equal.

From actual to ideal preference utilitarianism

To further motivate the preference utilitarian to accept this hedonic conclusion, the hedonist will point out that surely the preference utilitarian does not accept actual preference utilitarianism. Actual preference utilitarianism is the view that utility is sum total actual preference satisfaction. By actual preferences I mean the preferences which agents actually have. Suppose an agent has the mistaken belief that the glass of clear poison in front of them is a glass of water, and forms the preference to drink the liquid in the glass. Actual preference utilitarianism would counsel that, all else equal, the world would be better off if the agent satisfied their preference to drink the liquid – the agent should drink the liquid. But clearly this is false, because if the agent satisfied their preference they would experience severe pain and die.

The preference utilitarian should instead adopt ideal preference utilitarianism. Ideal preference utilitarianism is the view that utility is sum total ideal preference satisfaction. The nature of ideal preferences is contentious, but a workable definition is that they are preferences agents would have if they were rational and had deliberated about all the relevant facts. The goal is to avoid endorsing cases like drinking poison on the basis of mistaken beliefs.

Taxonomizing hedonic and preference utilitarianism

It is at this juncture that hedonic and preference utilitarianism seem to blend together. Because the hedonist thinks pleasure just is intrinsically good (and suffering just is intrinsically bad), the hedonist will argue that an agent with ideal preferences (i.e., an ideal agent) will just form preferences for actions which maximize pleasure and minimize suffering. Agents will do this, the hedonist claims, because experiences of pleasure just are the basis for goodness and experiences of suffering just are the basis for badness, so it is no surprise that an ideal agent will prefer to maximize net pleasure experiences. For the hedonist, there is no other ultimate basis for making a rational decision based on all the facts. At this juncture the preference utilitarian has three options:

  1. Deny that ideal agents should (or do) form preferences based on pleasure-maximization and pain-minimization.
  2. Accept that ideal agents should (or do) form preferences based on pleasure-maximization and pain-minimization, but claim that intrinsic goodness derives from the satisfaction of those preferences rather than the experiential quality of pleasure- and pain-states.
  3. Same as 2, but accept that intrinsic goodness derives from the experiential quality of pleasure- and pain-states.

3 just is hedonic utilitarianism, so the interesting options are 1 and 2.

Option 1 can be further broken down depending on whether the proposed alternative basis for preference-formation involves experiential qualities. The preference utilitarian might disagree with the hedonist because they think there are other experiential qualities which are intrinsically good and bad apart from pleasure and suffering, and that ideal agents should form preferences on the basis of the intrinsic normative qualities of those experiences. Call this 1a. I think the hedonic utilitarian will be quite satisfied if the preference utilitarian takes option 1a. The disagreement between the hedonic utilitarian and the 1a preference utilitarian, if there even is a disagreement, is whether there are experiential states with intrinsic value apart from states of pleasure and pain. Really, this is no longer a disagreement between a preference and hedonic utilitarian – it is an internecine dispute between two hedonic utilitarians who disagree on which experiential states are intrinsically valuable.

The other variant for Option 1 — call it 1b — is that the alternative basis for preference-formation does not involve experiential qualities. This is a real dispute, because a hedonist must think that normative value ultimately derives from experiential qualities. In this sense 1b agrees with 2 that intrinsic good does not derive from any experiential quality.

The new taxonomy is in terms of experiential versus non-experiential bases for intrinsic value or ideal preference formation. Hedonic utilitarians (1a and 3 above) argue only experiential states are intrinsically valuable, and that ideal preferences are formed on the basis of those experiential states. Non-hedonic utilitarians (1b and 2 above) argue experiential states are not intrinsically valuable, and ideal preferences are formed on the basis of something else (or, alternatively, the satisfaction of ideal preference is good even if that satisfaction is not accompanied by any positive experiential states whatsoever).

Motivating hedonic over non-hedonic utilitarianism: the case of P-zombies

Here the hedonist, I think, has the decisive argument. Consider first the case of P-zombies, which are entities identical in all respects to humans except lacking any experiences. They look and behave just like people, but are “dark inside.” P-zombies, just like humans, have preferences – they set goals (e.g. winning the writing competition) and prefer that those goals be satisfied (e.g. they form a plan and invest effort into writing a winning entry). The argument I have in mind asks us to consider whether there is any value in P-zombies satisfying their preferences (and the conclusion I will suggest is no, there is not). Getting to this argument first requires some conceptual machinery.

Distinguishing psychological and phenomenal mental states

The reason p-zombies can have preferences is because preference is, at least in part, a psychological rather than a phenomenal state. David Chalmers usefully distinguishes between psychological and phenomenal states of mind. A state of mind is psychological insofar as it plays the right causal role in explaining behavior. A paradigm psychological state is learning – for an organism to learn something just is “for it to adapt its behavioral capacities appropriately in response to certain kinds of environmental stimulation.” (Chalmers, The Conscious Mind pg. 11). A state of mind is phenomenal insofar as there is a certain way it feels. A paradigm phenomenal state is seeing red or smelling a rose.

The case of pain and nociception can be useful in disambiguating these two different concepts of mentality. Strictly speaking, pain is a phenomenal state: it is the unpleasant experience often accompanying tissue damage. Nociception is a psychological state: it is the neural process of encoding and processing noxious stimuli (like tissue damage). While pain and nociception often present together, and are both subsumed under the colloquial concept of “pain,” they can come apart empirically and are distinct conceptually. (See Loeser and Treede, “The Kyoto protocol of IASP Basic Pain Terminology,” Pain 137 (2008) 473-477). For clarity, I will use “pain” to refer to the colloquial mental concept of pain (which conflates or combines its functional and phenomenal properties), “phenomenal pain” to refer to the unpleasant experience of pain, and “nociception” to refer to pain as a psychological state.

The reason pain is bad, argues the hedonist, is because it feels bad. Pain is only bad insofar as it is phenomenal pain. Actually, pain is quite good (instrumentally) insofar as it is a psychological state: it causes and trains our body to avoid harmful stimuli. A world where people were only ever in the psychological state of pain, and never had any experience of phenomenal pain, would be better than our world where the two are mostly coupled: people would avoid harmful stimuli just as well as they do now, except their avoidance would not be accompanied by any bad feelings.

The moral value of satisfying P-zombie preferences

What is so good about satisfying preferences? The hedonist will argue that, if anything is good about satisfying preferences, it is the positive experience – pleasure – which accompanies preference-satisfaction (and the avoidance of the negative experience – suffering – which accompanies preference-frustration). The preference utilitarian, unless they are happy to accept 3 above and become hedonic utilitarians, must deny that the goodness of preference satisfaction stems from any experiential quality of preference satisfaction.

The distinction between phenomenal and psychological mental states introduced in the previous section is helpful in understanding this dispute between the hedonic and preference utilitarian. The hedonic utilitarian thinks that preference-satisfaction is valuable insofar as it is a phenomenal state. The preference utilitarian thinks that preference-satisfaction is valuable insofar as it is a psychological state. So, for the hedonic utilitarian, there is no moral value in P-zombies satisfying their preferences; for the preference utilitarian, there is moral value in P-zombies satisfying their preferences.

Which view is correct? At this point, we may have reached intuitional bedrock. As for myself, I have the strong intuition that preference-satisfaction is good because it feels good, and preference-frustration is bad because it feels bad. This is analogous to my strong intuition that pain is bad insofar as it is a phenomenal state (i.e., insofar as it feels bad), intrinsically morally neutral insofar as it is a psychological state (i.e., insofar as it re-orients an organism’s behavior and cognitive state to avoid the pain-causing stimulus), and instrumentally morally good insofar as its psychological properties might help an organism avoid future phenomenal pain states.

More generally, it seems to me that psychological states have no intrinsic moral value whatsoever. When a living person is unconscious – not experiencing anything, as in a dreamless sleep or under total anesthesia – there are a number of psychological states that person is in. They still have memories, beliefs, and dispositions insofar as those are cognitive features of their brain-states. But there is nothing intrinsically valuable about those unconscious memories, beliefs, and dispositions. By analogy, consider a basic handheld calculator. A calculator also has memory and can perform certain cognitive operations. But, assuming for the sake of argument that the calculator has no phenomenal states – it does not experience anything – it does not seem there is any intrinsic moral value in the calculator’s performing various operations on the numbers stored in its memory. A P-zombie is just a much more complicated version of the handheld calculator, and it is unclear why added functional complications would generate intrinsic moral value.

If, after reading this, the preference utilitarian still insists that a P-zombie has identical intrinsic value to its experiencing counterpart, I still have two more moves. First, I would ask them to consider whether they would accept the following deal: they can either receive a hundred dollars and become a P-zombie (losing all future phenomenal states they might otherwise experience), or pay a hundred dollars to avoid becoming a P-zombie. In the former case, they will surely be able to satisfy at least one more preference than in the latter case – they will effectively have two hundred more dollars to work with! Under preference utilitarianism, the former case should strictly dominate the latter case. And yet, I get the feeling they would be willing to pay more – a lot more – to avoid becoming a P-zombie, and for good hedonic reasons.

The second move is to consider the case of the Unlucky Competition Winner.

The Unlucky Competition Winner – why psychological preference-satisfaction doesn’t matter

Imagine G has entered a writing competition with the goal of winning. They prefer to win the competition, and work very hard to write a good story. They submit the story on the deadline before the competition closes, and the judges have a week to return their verdict. On the last day of judging, the judges decide G has won the competition. They publish their results online at Time 1. Straightforwardly, G’s preference has been satisfied at Time 1 because G’s preference was to win the competition, and G has won the competition.

At Time 1, G does not yet know they have won the competition, because they have not yet checked the competition results. Suppose at Time 3, G checks the competition results and discovers they have won. They are elated that their hard work has paid off, and feel great about their achievement.

Now suppose instead that G is unlucky, and dies at Time 2 before checking the competition results. Call this the Unlucky Case. Here is the question: is G’s life better because their preference has been satisfied? It seems the preference utilitarian must say: yes! But this seems very strange indeed. Because consider the case where G has not won the competition, and similarly dies at Time 2 before learning about the results. Call this the Unluckier Case (it’s even unluckier to lose the competition and have died). This case is identical, from G’s perspective, to the previous case. G has lived exactly the same life in the Unlucky Case and the Unluckier Case. And yet the preference utilitarian must say G’s life has gone better in the Unlucky Case than in the Unluckier Case, even though – from G’s perspective – there is absolutely no experiential difference between the two cases. How can somebody’s life have gone better for them as a result of something they never experience?

Recall that we are talking about intrinsic value here. From one perspective, G’s life has gone better in the Unlucky Case – namely, from the perspective of those who learn about G’s accomplishment and think better of G’s literary talent posthumously. But what we are concerned with is G’s perspective, because we are concerned with what makes a life intrinsically more valuable to the person living it: preference-satisfaction or pleasure.

The hedonist has a ready answer to the Unlucky Case and the Unluckier Case. They deny that G’s life is better just because their preference has been satisfied at Time 1, since at Time 1 G has not yet learned they have won the contest. Therefore, they can reject the unintuitive conclusion that two experientially equivalent lives can have different intrinsic values.

The preference utilitarian might say that G’s preference is satisfied only when G learns that G’s preference is satisfied. This is false. G’s preference is to win the contest, not to learn that they have won the contest. If G learns they have won the contest, but later founds out this was an erroneous announcement, they will not think their preference has been satisfied.

The preference utilitarian might revise their theory to say that what is really intrinsically valuable is not satisfying one’s preference, but learning that one has satisfied a preference. At the very least, this is much less plausible than their original theory, and they would have to offer good reasons for why learning about one’s preferences being satisfied is intrinsically valuable. These reasons could not involve any phenomenal state of pleasure accompanying learning that information, because then their theory would just amount to hedonic utilitarianism.

Conclusion

Hedonic and preference utilitarianism disagree on the ultimate source of the good. Chalmers’ distinction between phenomenal (experiential) and psychological (cognitive-functional-causal) mental states helps clarify their dispute. Hedonists think the ultimate source of the good is in positive phenomenal states, or pleasure. Preference utilitarians think the ultimate source of the good is in psychological states – specifically in states of preference-satisfaction. I have argued that preference utilitarians are committed to the moral value of experienceless P-zombies. They are also committed to the view that two lives can be experientially identical (as between the Unlucky Case and the Unluckier Case), but one can be intrinsically more valuable than the other. Because these conclusions are implausible, hedonic utilitarianism is more plausible than preference utilitarianism.

A brief dilemma on the nature of law

The nature of law, broadly speaking, has been conceived of in two ways: through positivism and through naturalism. The former holds that law is the set of decrees lain out by legislators, interpreted by judges, and enforced by armed men. The latter contends that a law is the set of just decrees lain out by legitimate legislators, interpreted correctly by judges, and enforced by armed men. The interminable struggle between the positivist and naturalist ends up as a sort of merely verbal dispute over what we are willing to call “the law,” but contains within it the kernel of a genuine dilemma. Namely, regardless of which position we take, neither seems to allow for the possibility of law as an autonomous field in its own right. Rather, positivism renders law a confused sort of sociology or psychology and naturalism leaves it a wrongheaded sort of moral philosophy. The idea of law qua law cannot be sustained under either interpretation. Given how positivism and naturalism frame the debate over the nature of law, one may find this quite a problem.

The positivist, cynically or pragmatically, recognizes law as a system of power. Law allows speech acts to compel coercion by the state against a population in roughly the same way the rules of basketball allow a referee to disqualify a player from the game. To study law is to study the actual conditions under which legislators write and pass statutes, judges decide cases, and the state punishes violators. Positivists see questions of morality – of how the law ought to be, rather than how it really is – as flights of fancy best left to the philosophers. The study of law becomes a rather restricted subfield of psychology, sociology, and those related social sciences which study a human practice without succumbing to the “bias” of normativity. The project of legal positivism would be complete with the invention of a supercomputer which, when input a history of a judge’s past rulings, political affiliations, what they ate for breakfast, et cetera, would yield a correct prediction about how they would rule on any given case placed in front of them. Under this conception, the study of law could in principle be reduced to the study of physics. The positivist claims to study something called “law,” in other words, but their methodology ultimately undermines the idea that law ought be accorded its own field of study. We might imagine that an alien looking into courthouses or jails through a telescope would end up a legal positivist. That alien, just like the positivist, would be unable to tell us anything we cared about in the study of the law – like whether a case was rightly decided – but could provide myriad statistical generalizations about the propensity of any given judge to pen “Affirmed” or “Denied” after a host of people flap their lips in front of them.

The naturalist, naively or optimistically, recognizes law a system of norms. Law creates the conditions under which society justifiably binds its subjects to a set of rules. To study law is to study the creation and correct interpretation of social rules. Where the positivist sees a realistic approach to law, the naturalist diagnoses a nihilism regarding the very possibility of law; merely using the word “law” and donning nice robes while one utters it does not a law make. While law ultimately concludes in the actual exercise of power, its proper subject matter is the adequacy of the reasons justifying that exercise.

Identifying the nature of law presents an intractable problem for the positivist, who should be happy to pawn this work off to the sociologists and psychologists. The situation seems less dire for the naturalist, who has cordoned off a pasture in the field of norms and set off to graze. But a problem looms wherein law, though not reducible to empirical science, turns out to be political or moral philosophy by another name. If law’s domain is normativity, then lawyers, judges, and legal scholars have thoroughly missed the mark: where they cite case law, they should really be citing Kant. A judge ought decide not by reference to precedent but through rigorous argument to normative legitimacy. The naturalist, in other words, should take law as a subset of moral philosophy and be able to draw a line from any particular legitimate decision back to the fundamental normative principles from which it derives. Any less in the service of state coercion amounts to barbarism.

We are left with the following dilemma: either law is the empirical study of actually-existing legal practice (positivism), in which case law is a subset of descriptive psychology, sociology, or even physics; or else law is the study of the legitimacy of legal practice (naturalism), in which case law is a subset of moral or political philosophy. Both horns yield the conclusion that law has no fundamental nature qua law, and legal scholars and practitioners are systematically confused. Positivists should be running experiments and handing out surveys; naturalists should be deriving judicial decisions from first principles.

The political rhetoric of reason

reading silence.png

A certain view of politics conceives of it as a convincing, by pen or gun. Certainly political philosophy lends itself well to this conception, being, as it is, in the business of convincing the reader the truth of the political conclusions offered by the text. One succeeds as a political philosopher when one convinces their interlocutor that one’s proposed system of politics rises above all others. One succeeds as a professional philosopher when one convinces their colleagues that one’s ideas are meritorious, either because they are true or, as is more likely, because they substantively further the interminable dialogue of the profession.

On a certain very cynical conception of politics, one will take this convincing to be rhetorical rather than truth-seeking. Rhetoricians convince without regards to the truth of what they convince. What differentiates the rhetor from the philosopher is the latter’s concern for the truth, regardless of how (un)convincing it might appear. One need not look far for examples of the counterintuitive in political philosophy. Nozick argues that taxation is tantamount to theft and, indeed, slavery. Marx argues that a voluntary, free labor contract between a worker and their employer is fundamentally exploitative. Rawls argues that wealth inequality is preferable to equality because it makes the worst-off better-off in absolute terms. But of course it is not merely enough to state the counterintuitive and expect assent. All three philosophers proceed from assumptions which ostensibly demand compliance from any reasonable human, and go on their merry way demonstrating the implications of such assumptions.

The problem with rhetoric in the written form: one must meet their audience as they come. A text on its own permits no discretion as to who partakes in its contents (well, at the very least they must be literate). A political community must meet its audience as they come. A society on its own permits no discretion as to who partakes in its practices and institutions. At this juncture it must be clarified that these are idealizing assumptions which presuppose an impossible independence between language and its participants, between a society and its citizens, when of course these categories are mutually constitutive. A text prefigures its audience just as a society prefigures those who live in it. The reader introduced to language takes up well-worn conventions which undergird even their most elaborate experimentations with the word. The citizen introduced to society develops their characteristic habits in context of social practices and institutions — via education, religion, media exposure, and so forth. But idealizing assumptions are appropriate when investigating the logic of a discourse — of politics and political philosophy — which conceives of itself in the ideal, as the derivation of what ought to be without necessary regard for what is. And in investigating the idealizing logic of such a discourse, with the recognition that its methodological presuppositions are not quite borne out in the world, we may produce a systematic clarity with regards to its contents. So we return to the idealized problematic of rhetoric and politics: one must meet their audience as they come.

There is nothing complex about this problem. K. believes fundamentalist religious doctrine should serve as the law of the land; M. ,an atheist, thinks religion ought be abolished. A political philosopher must convince both of a single conclusion; a legislator must convince both to obey the same law. If we could speak face-to-face with K. and M. we would tailor our talking points to their particular character. To K. we might focus on doctrinal reasoning against the notion that religious law should serve as general law, that to think of such debases the divine, that in any case it would only foment further religious persecution, and so on. To M. we might focus on the infeasibility of such drastic reform, on the requirements of pluralism in a democratic society, on the possibility of separating religious life from secular life, etc. In being able to address the particularity of K.’s and M.’s concerns our rhetoric achieves maximal effectiveness, for, in a manner of speaking, we know and can choose exactly what buttons we need to press. But in our writing we are agnostic to such particularity in our readers. Rawls’ veil of ignorance is instructive. The veil of ignorance serves not just as a conceptual tool for analyzing political arrangements but also as a reflection upon the position of the author in relation to her readers. She knows naught of their desires, dispositions, dreams, and yet must meet all of these as they come. What to do?

A more thorough cynic, or perhaps skeptic, would argue that reason was invented precisely to solve this problem: that it is merely a subset of rhetoric which aims to address all people — all rational beings — rather than individuals or smaller groups, and that truth is just shorthand for a universally-applicable rhetoric. And some truth indeed lies behind this cynicism. Reason gives one access to a technique of convincing which, unique among all other such techniques, can convince anybody. Specifically, reason binds anybody, insofar as they are rational, which really amounts to a tautology: reason binds all for whom reason is binding. The power of it is that it is so hard, so undesirable to be irrational, and even to ask why one ought to be reasonable amounts to a performative self-contradiction. The issue cannot even be formulated and, when we try, we find out we have been playing reason’s game all along. To convince someone strictly through reason amounts to providing a valid proof without premises (in the strongest case) or, at the very least, a proof with premises everybody should or actually does accept (a case which might, upon analysis, turn out to be equivalent to the former). Regardless of anything else about a person, they cannot help but accept a valid proof with no premises — at least insofar as we can communicate with them at all. One who cannot be compelled by reason, we think, cannot be compelled by anything.

It is banal to say that one can investigate the presuppositions of a political philosopher by analyzing what goes into their concept of a rational being. The key to all of Hobbes lies in his conception of a rational human abstracted away from society: a self-interested actor who places supreme value on their self-preservation, and who pursues this interest by any means necessary. From this mostly-formal conception of a rational human, everything else about the Hobbesian architectonic falls into place: the sacrifice of freedom toward the maximization of self-preservation via the social contract. The State as omnipotent and omniscient protector. Leviathan.

Banal because what we are really saying is that the philosopher becomes a rhetor. The transformation occurs, from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde, when substantive features of an audience are snuck in to what supposedly should apply to any audience at all. One reads Hobbes and wonders, how could it be that one sees all humans as being so close-minded, so selfish? I am not such a human; nor my family; nor my friends. One objects to the Hobbesian account of rationality, which purported to describe a universality inherent in all beings, on the grounds that it has failed to deliver on such universality. A single counterexample crumbles the whole elaborate structure because the point was not to deliver an empirical generalization of behavior, open to exception, but rather a normative ground for the legitimacy of behavior.

Why have we not focused on human nature? We very well might have; it functions quite similarly in providing an axiomatic basis for the derivation of conclusions about just political society. It is likely right to conceive of rationality as one of the features comprising human nature — for some philosophers, as the exclusive feature comprising human nature. The reason to emphasize rationality in particular is to highlight the logic of political philosophy, its constitutive form. Within the content of their theories, political philosophers may very well appeal to human nature as the substantive basis for their conclusions. But even if the political philosopher takes the content of their theories to follow from an account of human nature, such an account must itself follow from rationality, because it must be able to convince any reader of their text. If the account of human nature appealed to could not convince a rational reader, then we are left with the aforementioned problem of Hobbes, in which we might simply deny whatever aspects of human nature are not rationally binding. Indeed, perhaps the only component of human nature which cannot be reasonably denied is that of rationality. Regardless of content, what formally constrains political philosophers is the requirement that their argument be convincing to any who might read their work. For it is precisely the goal of the political philosopher, who seeks not only some abstract truth of the matter but to make such truth operative in the world, to convince their audience of their position’s legitimacy.

The necessity of convincing most apparently binds the philosopher of democracy, for whom the fact that a member of the polis might not assent to its laws presents an obvious objection. One who grounds political legitimacy directly in the will of the governed would surely see a failure of assent as damning. But even those who do not must yet do some convincing. Plato had to convince the philosopher-kings. And even the most antidemocratic thinker must end up convincing themselves with their theorization.

Such self-convincing cannot be presumed on the basis that one must tautologically be convinced by one’s own beliefs. In a sense this is obviously true. But one can only find their own beliefs convincing insofar as they are justified. And justification, in order to function as such, must appeal to some public and non-individual criteria. For suppose it did not — that justification could appeal only to some private knowledge to which the despot had privileged access, and which was inarticulable in terms of public reason. Would the despot, in this case, find their politics justified by merit of a particular sensation which corresponded to their entertainment of some political conclusion or another? (e.g. “it seems right to me that. . .”). How would they know that such particular sensation was really a sensation of feeling-right-that? And how could they confirm that their particular sensation at an earlier time was the same as their particular sensation at a later time? And what if their sensations came into conflict?

In short: even a despotic political regime must be reasonably convincing. But insofar as the despot may be convinced of their regime, and insofar as such convincing takes place in the space of public reason, then — assuming such convincing has proceeded legitimately — is it not the case that all reasonable beings should assent to it? It turns out we have no despotism, after all, for a despot with the assent of the governed ends up being a democratic ruler. Democracy inevitably awaits us at the conclusion of our inquiry as the only possibly legitimate form of political governance; it ends up that all we must flesh out are its contents.

Breaking intuition’s chains (part 2)

lightning-flash

(part 1 here)

How, then, should we conceive of intuition in relation to our inquiry? The mistake, to make it quite explicit, involves the introduction of a dichotomy at the heart of intuition. One takes it that an intuition has particular content, generally a proposition. Such content presents itself in a particular manner — say, according to a certain causal history, and with a certain feeling of plausibility — which we might call its form. An intuition has content, the fact at which it points, and form, which is the fact of the intuition itself as a psychological event. The unresolvable issue, then, becomes the relationship between the form and the content of the intuition. Anti-intuitionists like Della Rocca argue that intuition must be condemned if its form bears suspect relation to its content. One who intuits that “abortion is immoral” merely because they have been primed to the plausibility of such belief, e.g. by a certain religious upbringing, cannot justifiably infer the truth of such intuition’s content: namely that abortion is immoral. After all, one may be primed to the plausibility of many false beliefs, as shown by the history of the sciences. An intuition thus has no necessary connection to the truth of its content, and insofar as it does have such connection we still need to appeal to alternate methods of justifying this content; the intuition falls out of the picture. A thoroughgoing anti-intuitionist would claim that the form inherent to all intuition — its seeming certainty or appeal — has no relation to the truth of its content, but rather comes about as a result of certain psychological features of ourselves at the point in time at which intuition strikes us.

We may go a step further from such negation of intuition which, true though it may be, only presents us a case in which thought falters and stops short of completing the project at which it aims. And there must be some way to make sense of these damnable coercions of thought which strike one as lightning bolts setting the mind ablaze. In a not altogether different context Benjamin writes that “in the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows” (The Arcades Project, N). One must make sense of the legitimate progression from the lightning flash of intuition to the thunder which follows. A child is taught to count the seconds between the flash and the rumble, and in doing so to grasp the location of the storm by a particular schema: 3 seconds = 1 km. The task the philosopher must set upon is to construct such schema as proper to the understanding of an intuition.

Spinoza offers his example of a human body under the sun, a foundation as good as any to work from (Ethics, s2, p35). One glances up from their walk and sees a bright yellow circle situated about 200 feet away embedded in the sky like a shining hole. Here, after all, is where divinity has punctured through. One may intuitively believe this to be the case. No matter how hard one tries, it may be impossible to shake the feeling that the sun lies hundreds rather than billions of feet away. Spinoza points out that strictly speaking such a feeling and the corresponding desire to make an inference about distance are not at all false. These are true psychological facts explained by the interaction between the body of the sun and the body of the person in question. The sun really does present itself as a nearby golden orb given the particular effect it produces on the human sensory system.

It is only a smidge better to declare such presentation false as to hold, based on its immediate plausibility, that the inference such presentation seems to permit (that “the sun is 200 feet away”) is true. The substantial question rather involves assessing what bodies must be like in order for their relation to produce such effect. We may imagine a quite sophisticated explanation which assesses just that: burning 93 million miles away a gaseous star emits rays of light which strike the cones of the eye and trigger neurological responses so as to give the impression that the source of the image lies only 200 feet away. Such explanation demonstrates the relationship between the form of the intuition and its content, showing how the particular manner in which the intuition presents itself (in this case via the complicated story we tell about the relation between the body of the sun and the body of the person) produces its content (in this case the effect of the sun upon the person producing the sensation that they are only 200 feet apart). The content is true inasmuch as we understand its truth to involve the effect produced by one body upon another under certain determinate circumstances (the glancing at the sun), and false inasmuch as we understand its truth to involve the properties of a particular body apart from such a relation, e.g. as a fact about the sun’s distance from the earth — as an essential property of the sun in its spatiotemporal position. At this juncture we are always tempted to fall into reification due to its overwhelming simplicity. Much simpler to say we perceive the sun as hanging up in the sky 200 feet away because, in actuality, the sun hangs up in the sky at such a distance. Much more of an ordeal to articulate such perception as a relation between bodies. And ever we are tempted toward simplifications, though they invariably give out under the weight of their insubstantiality.

Everything falls out of joint when one proceeds from the content of an intuition and attempts to deduce the legitimacy or significance of such intuition on this basis. It strikes one as obviously right that one should pull the lever in the trolley problem. One experiences this effect upon one’s body in its encounter with the thought experiment; experiences a sensation of plausibility corresponding with the entertainment of the proposition that “one ought pull the lever in the trolley problem.” Thus far all is well and good. One errs in presuming that this effect, the plausibility, proffers knowledge of the proposition simply because its entertainment in the mind correlates with such plausibility — that the plausibility of the proposition that “one ought to pull the lever in the trolley problem” implies that one ought to pull the lever in the trolley problem. We are again in the case where the plausibility that “the sun lies 200 feet away in the sky” supposedly implies that the sun lies 200 feet away in the sky. We mistakenly proceed from the effect to the cause in our botched attempt to inquire as to the conditions for the possibility of our intuition.

Breaking intuition’s chains (part 1)

intuition cave

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852

Wont to think of intuition as Avicenna did, a divine illumination, a serendipitous co-harmony between our limited intellect and the celestial emanations, an experience rather like surfacing for air, we should remind ourselves that we drown in it. Intuition is all well and good when it delivers us to some desired result of inquiry, when it accords with the world and the rest of our considered beliefs and provides impetus for further investigation. But we should recognize that intuition is an affliction, an inescapable inability to grasp a belief as anything but true, an optical illusion of the intellect. One does not choose intuition. It simply emerges, fully-formed as though Athena from the head of Zeus, and commits us brutely to a particular train of thought. More than any amount of education or training it is intuition which births the philosopher, the one who follows it with such singleminded passion that they scarce see the scorched countryside they leave in their wake. It is very possible to give up everything for an intuition; to condemn a whole project of thought, entire fields of study, a career, a life. But intuition on its own presents no signs of such external imperative. For by the time intuition strikes us it is already far too late. We only seize upon a truth as a fly seizes upon the web of the spider or the nectar of Dionaea muscipula. To its credit intuition coerces us to its side with the common decency to make us feel such a move agreeable (and do not say coercion functions inappropriately here; how else to describe the interaction between a student and their wizened professor who asks, prefiguring the answer, “but what do you think of this case?. . .”). And we are always chained to intuition by ghastly figures: philosophical zombies, botched products of teletransportation, daemons, swamp-men, a whole cryptid menagerie pushing levers and turning cranks in the recesses of imagination, grinning, hoisting lights like anglerfish.

In his 2013 “The Taming of Philosophy” Michael Della Rocca makes roughly the same point albeit in more sobering language, though one still gets the creeping impression from his paper that philosophers one by one have succumbed to a sinister entity parasitic on thought, method, and argumentation; in other words to intuition. Della Rocca argues that reliance on intuition leads to “the ungrounded [read: illegitimate] limitation of philosophy’s engagement with reality,” condemning us at once to a conservativism (of endorsing status quo belief), psychologism (of reading facts about human psychology as facts about the nature of reality), and arbitrariness (of choosing between competing intuitions) (190).

Della Rocca’s criticism elucidates a crucial question for any philosopher relying on intuitions: what are the conditions for the possibility of intuition yielding substantive philosophical conclusions (rather than, say, data about contingent psychological features of the human mind)? For the natural charge against intuition specifically and introspective philosophy generally is that it is a mere psychologism. It purports to offer fundamental facts about the nature of reality while peddling nothing but contingent facts about one’s mental state at a given moment. A contender for a response to this transcendental question is Kant’s — against charges that the First Critique was mere psychologism, he replied that the object of his study was both necessary and universal among all cognizing beings. With necessity and universality come philosophical significance. To make the distinction perfectly clear we need only consider the difference between one’s intuition that vanilla ice cream is delicious, which is neither necessary (imagine you grew up hating sweets) nor universal (there are those who hate vanilla and eat strictly chocolate), and one’s intuition that bodies in space must be extended. To be sure these may both present themselves as immediately plausible conclusions about the world, and we might even preface either judgment with an of course. But only one merits the designation of “intuition” in any philosophically meaningful sense, and it is not the intuitive nature of the conclusion per se which merits such a designation but rather the judgment’s necessity and universality. Surely an unsatisfying response to the intuitionist, for here the whole significance of intuition drops out as totally peripheral to the truth of what is intuited.

Indeed, Della Rocca rightly points out this tension in the method of the intuitionist: insofar as they are an intuitionist, they seek to develop a philosophical system which accommodates intuitions. But given that truth about reality stands as the object of our inquiry, philosophical or otherwise, shouldn’t it rather be that we develop philosophical systems which accommodate reality? But, in what really becomes the only disappointment in an otherwise outstanding piece, he never treats the intuition itself as something real. Rather he can only conceive of it as an epiphenomenal pointing-at some belief which, regrettably and all-too-often, ends up being false. Where the intuitionist claims the irrelevancy of the contingent conditions under which one’s mind produces an intuition as to the truth of its contents, Della Rocca (rightly, again) adopts the negation of this naivete: if the conditions are suspect, so too should be our faith in the content. But, as happens often the negation of a falsity, rather than bringing us straight at the truth, only makes apparent the juncture at which thought has taken the wrong turn. To put it rather crudely the debate focuses on the relation between the form of the intuition (the manner in which and by which the intuition presents itself) and its content (the belief the intuition renders obvious or obviously false). Intuitions are either damned to irrelevance by merit of its inadequate relation to the content of the belief (“…it seems obvious only because you were raised a certain way!”) or otherwise defended (“…well yes, but mathematicians and geometers too must be raised a certain way, and we do not doubt Pythagoras’ theorem nonetheless.”). Della Rocca wages battle admirably on this terrain, but not even the greatest tactical skill can prevail in a campaign in which the enemy sets the terms of engagement. For the intuitionist in times of trouble may always play their trump: “you have argued very well that our conviction in the truth or falsity of a belief is an illegitimate hold-over of biology, upbringing, and environment, a contingent psychological fact that cannot serve as the basis of philosophical knowledge. But know this — in damning us you damn yourself, for all things you believe and say succumb to the same mighty critique; if we are not left with intuitionism, we are left with barbarism.” One can hardly negotiate when such antinomy, the philosophical equivalent of a mutually assured destruction, lurks at the end of the discussion.

(part 2 here)

Euthyphro, moral relativism, and dialogue as the space of reasons

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Socrates, Euthyphro, and other Athenians in the forum

Socrates asks Euthyphro whether something is pious because it is loved by the gods, or on the contrary whether something is loved by the gods because it is pious. We may replace “pious” with whatever we’d like – the term appears at least a little foreign to modern ears – and the question may be asked of justice, morality, of anything else of value under the sun. Is something valuable because the gods deem it so, or do the gods deem something valuable because there is some further reason which justifies their deeming? If the former, then value becomes brute and inexplicable: Socrates has forced Euthyphro to admit that the gods are irrational in their valuation, for there is no further reason explaining why it is they deem a thing to be of value. It simply is so. If the latter, then value is intelligible, and the gods perhaps rational – but, consequently, unnecessary to ground or determine value. For what is valuable is valuable on the basis of independent reasons: the gods do not determine what is valuable, but may rationally love what is valuable on the basis of its value. To put the dilemma in a sentence: in asking for the justificatory grounds of a religious prohibition or valuation, either the justification is an appeal to the unjustified will of the gods, or there is some independent basis for the justification – in which case appealing to the gods is extraneous. Either horn of the dilemma leads us to the conclusion that neither piety, nor morality, nor value, nor what-have-you, can be justified via appeal to divine will.

A similar dilemma emerges when we consider some formulations of moral relativism. Suppose one believes what Fred Feldman calls conceptual relativism: ‘that sentences of the form “act a is morally right” are either meaningless or else short for sentences of the form “act a is morally right in society S.”‘ Conceptual relativism relativizes the criterion for moral rightness to a society: what is right in one society may not be right in another. We tease out the Euthyphro dilemma by asking: on what basis would a society S justify that a particular act a is morally right or wrong in that society? Is action a morally right because society S deems it to be morally right; or does society S deem action a morally right because it is morally right? If the former, we end up at the unpalatable conclusion that there is no basis for society S deeming that any given act is morally right or wrong – it is a brute determination for which reasons cannot be provided. If the latter, then it turns out the moral rightness of an act is not relative to the judgments of a society but rather depends on the independent moral value of the act in question (which can in principle be justified). Conceptual relativism, though it seems to offer a criterion for determining whether an act is morally right or wrong, in fact can do nothing of the sort.

What similarity allows us, in both cases, to apply the dilemma? The dialogic nature of Euthyphro is instructive. To be in dialogue means to enter a space of mutual reasons. What is asserted must in principle be defensible – in other words, one can’t expect their interlocutor(s) to accept their claims at face value (though conversation most often proceeds smoothly through shared premise). One asserting X, in other words, cannot respond to the other who asks “why X?” by appealing to one’s bare assertion of X. Or, to put it another way, insofar as one fails to respond to a demand of producing the reasons underlying their assertions, one exits dialogue. One rather finds themselves in a wholly different space. Ostension, perhaps – a pointing at the bare brute fact of the matter (“…of course the ship is sinking,” to the incredulous crewmate, “would you just take a look at that hole?!”). Or rhetoric, insofar as one enacts a compliance of thought via deceit (and the relationship between rhetoric and dialogue, as Plato knew, is quite complex, quite deadly). To phrase it bluntly: the space of dialogue is the space of reason, and this cannot be doubted.

With this understanding we can frame Socrates’ question another way: do the gods occupy a space of reasons? Can we engage them in dialogue, even if only indirectly? How will they respond, asked on what basis they love what is just, what is moral? (Zeus: with a lightning bolt). And the dilemma, then, is this: either the gods dialogue, or they do not.

If they do, there is reason for what they do which undergirds what they value – reason in principle accessible to humanity. The gods in this case can disobey the moral law, as time and time again in the Greek mythos they do, for it is distinct from their whims and wishes. And so the gods can be no source for value, morality, or what have you. They drop out of the picture; their desires bear no more weight than yours or mine in our evaluation of the truth.

If the gods do not dialogue, however, then they definitionally and brutely act in accord with the moral law. In this case there is no further reason justifying whether their action is consistent with the moral law – what is moral, is moral simply because it is loved by the gods. To ask the gods, then, why it is they love what is moral, is to ask a question impossible to rationally answer. The implication, of course, is that morality is fundamentally irrational. All that is good and right fades to inscrutability and obscure; all that is holy is profaned.

What a mission, then, Plato (via Socrates) lays out for philosophy: to establish a dialogue with the gods.

Adorno on Kantian autonomy, or: how can one freely be bound to law?

kite-1386220_1920

Alas, kites can be neither free nor autonomous.

What Kant grapples with in his moral philosophy, Adorno argues, is the tension between freedom and necessity as it pertains to human action. At the most obvious level the tension presents itself as the impossibility of moral human action in a world governed by causal laws. Insofar as we are empirical beings constrained by the doctrine of cause and effect, we cannot be held accountable for our actions, for we have no more agency in conducting ourselves than the billiard ball bouncing off the pool cue. The iron necessity of causality in this case subjugates us to the dictates of nature. We do not choose natural law, and yet we must abide by it. Hence we are heteronomous – literally, governed by the laws of another – and so unfree.

At this juncture one may very well conclude that genuine freedom involves action according to no rule, which springs from some unnatural font of spontaneity (e.g. an immaterial soul). Indeterminism fails to provide a substantive grounding for free action, however, for the same reasons that nature’s determinism does. Just imagine somebody who acted according to no principles whatsoever – whose action sprung mysteriously from some unknown source. Their choice in deciding to do X over Y would be unintelligible, more like the accidental outcome of a die roll than of the sort of deliberation characteristic of decisionmaking. So the way out from determinism to freedom can’t just involve the negation of determinism.

Instead, Kant’s answer is that moral choice must involve the right sort of determination: determination by reason. To act morally is to act in accordance with reason, and to act in accordance with reason means obeying strictly its laws. What differentiates these laws from those of nature is that the laws of reason are self-imposed – they are autonomous, auto-nomos, self-law. Adorno points out the tension in this approach: to secure freedom, Kant must establish a necessity in the moral sphere akin to the causal necessity present in the empirical sphere. Adorno puts it like this:

“…reason generally makes its appearance with the claim of deductive necessity, with the claim that everything it implies follows in accordance with the propositions of logic. And this element of necessity already presupposes an affinity… with the causality that is supposed to hold sway in the realm of empirical phenomena… the whole of Kant’s moral philosophy is tied to the concept of autonomy which is regarded as the realm where freedom and necessity meet. What this means is that the moral laws are indeed the laws of freedom – because as a rational being I give them to myself without making myself dependent on any external factor. At the same time, however, they have the character of laws because rational action and rational deduction cannot be understood except as acting and thinking in conformity with laws and rules.” (Problems of Moral Philosophy, Lecture 8, pg.80)

A problem immediately arises: in what sense can we act autonomously in accord with reason, if we are empirical beings who inhabit the determined world of nature? Adorno claims that “here Kant falls into a trap of his own making” in articulating a solution to this problem (81). Kant argues variously in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason that “as empirical beings we experience the obligation to perform certain actions, or to leave them undone” (Adorno 81). Proceeding from the fact of this experience, Kant asks as to the conditions for its possibility: what makes possible the experience of conscience, of the sense that one should and should not engage in certain actions? Such transcendental critique comes unsurprisingly as part and parcel with the rest of the Kantian system, but in this case Adorno points out its potentially damning implications:

“…if [Kant] desires to exclude every empirical element from his foundation of moral philosophy – and that is his aim – he cannot then appeal to the empirical existence of the so-called moral compulsion in man himself because this compulsion is itself an empirical fact… in short, the unity of moral obligation and reason that Kant insists on is not altogether unproblematic if we reflect a little more deeply on this obligation; indeed it becomes highly dubious.” (Lecture 8, pg 82)

The quite obvious Kantian response in this case involves an injunction against mistaking the empirical conditions by which we come to know a phenomenon for some essential feature of that phenomenon. In other words, such a criticism mistakes the process by which we contingently come to experience our moral duty for the characteristic qualities of that moral duty itself. It is a similar mistake to one who takes the truths of mathematics to be contingent upon empirical observations about the world, just because one has learned them through such observations.

But in this case such a response does not save Kant, because it introduces a rupture within the human being which is the subject of morality, splitting asunder the experience of morality from its essential nature. There are three possible ways we can conceive the relationship between the empirical experience of moral duty  (conscience) and the “formal, abstract shape of the moral law” for which that experience serves as evidence.

First option: Conscience is coextensive with the moral law. This is a highly repugnant conclusion. To accept this is, in essence, to deny that there is any thing as a moral law in the first place. For it identifies the empirical constraints on moral thought (the psychological experience of moral duty) with the moral duty itself. One might imagine this position as involving an acceptance that “whatever one feels is moral, is moral; whatever one feels is immoral, is immoral.” An unacceptable conclusion, in short.

Second option: Conscience is totally separate from the moral law (though it grounds the moral law). This is a more palatable conclusion – presumably the one Kant took himself to be endorsing, in the last instance – but one which Adorno argues cannot be the case. For suppose it were true: that there was no substantive relationship between conscience and the moral law. Or, to put it more precisely, that there was no relationship between the motivational import provided by conscience and the demands lain upon it by the moral law. In this case, any case of moral behavior would be a merely accidental one of the sort Kant routinely decries in the Groundwork, e.g. of the shopkeeper who treats customers fairly not because it is moral, but because it brings them the greatest profit. Except in this the explanation for all moral behavior would be that, e.g. the shopkeeper treats customers fairly only because of some empirical-psychological motivation stemming from their conscience, and not because the moral law commands them to do so. In this case the pure abstract formality of the moral law might be preserved, but at the expense of its possible enactment.

Third option: Conscience is related somehow to the moral law. This is the only option which remains, but that “somehow” is a problem which – Adorno argues – we cannot solve using only the tools given to us by Kant’s system.

Adorno concludes his exceedingly fascinating eighth lecture with a concise statement of Kant’s, distinguishing the determinism of nature from that of the moral law:

“‘Reason therefore’, he continues, ‘provides laws which are imperatives, that is, objective laws of freedom which tell us what ought to happen – although perhaps it never does happen,’ – you see here [Kant’s] indifference towards effects – ‘therein differing from laws of nature, which relate only to that which happens. These laws [of reason] are therefore to be entitled practical laws.'” (Lecture 8, pg. 88)

Reason’s irresistible imperative

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19th-century Flammarion engraving

Rarely in inquiry does one get a satisfying answer to the skeptic. They are as inescapable as one’s own shadow, waiting patiently for the right moment to begin delivering their interminable “why?”. You think you can trust your perceptions? Why should you? Might you not be deceived? Why think you aren’t? Rarely can we come up with a satisfying response. But, in at least one case, we can.

“Why be rational?”. A common thought, maybe, one which flits through the minds of anybody agonizing over some decision, drafting up elaborate lists of pros and cons, when they’d really just like to make a choice. A fitting thought, in other words, for a Hamlet. Perhaps an aesthetic or moral rejoinder, a reminder that there’s more to life than just reason and logic and valid deductions – an injunction to just live a little, stop worrying about it. A laugh in the face of the principle of sufficient reason, which holds that for each thing there must be a sufficient reason which explains its existence. In any case it’s a question which can be formulated, and one which may even have strong motives for its formulation.

But unlike most other skeptical questions it admits of simple rejoinder. To put it briefly: the skeptic of rationality, in their demand for a reason to be rational, engages in performative contradiction. They are caught in a dilemma. Either they are formulating a genuine inquiry, in which case they have already accepted the validity of rationality – for rationality just is (at least in part) the practice of providing reasons for belief. Or they are not formulating a genuine inquiry, even though their utterance grammatically takes the form of one. In this case they cannot substantively articulate what they mean by their question, for how else can “why be rational?” be answered except with a reason? Either way, the skeptic is in a double bind – either their question is an intelligible inquiry into reasons, in which case rationality has already been presupposed, or it isn’t an intelligible inquiry into reasons, in which case the question can’t even be asked in the first place. Regardless of which option the skeptic chooses, they fail to meaningfully critique or challenge the validity of rationality.

It may be useful, at this juncture, to introduce another figure to compare the skeptic against: the wild person. The wild person lives alone in some imagined state of nature. Like the skeptic they ostensibly have no positive beliefs about the issue in question. They have no doctrine of the relation between perception and reality. But unlike the skeptic they do not demand one, either. For them it never enters into the realm of thought, never becomes formulated as a concern. And, unlike the skeptic, they do not ask for reasons. One can imagine them outside the space of reason, acting and thinking according to instinct or intuition instead. To choose the second horn of the dilemma outlined above – to accept that the question, “why be rational?”, does not commit oneself already to the validity of rationality – is to adopt the perspective of the wild person. Rationality genuinely fails to be authoritative for the wild person, but this no more poses a challenge to rationality than does the existence of animals.

The specificity of abstraction

specificity

Hegel begins the Phenomenology of Spirit by refuting an unexamined, commonsense view about the nature of sense perception. This view holds that our richest, most accurate, and most genuine knowledge of the world emerges from our immediate sensory experience. I see a rolling meadow, a tree upon a hilltop, flowers dotting red and white along the countryside – and then I read that very same description in a book, or in a blog post. Surely, the commonsense thought goes, I am better acquainted with the world in the former case, when I stand in that meadow and direct my attention to it, this, in the here and now. The petals of the flowers flit in the wind, a rabbit peeks her head out from above the tall grass. On what grounds could I possibly dispute this, the rich specificity of my immediate experience?

The first step comes in recognizing that, if I’m really to be relying on my immediate experience, then I can have no recourse to such descriptions as in the paragraph above. After all, these words are hollow ghosts which describe, but are not, the experience itself – they are the experience as it is mediated through language (among other things). So we do away with them. I stand in the meadow, silent, head empty, and concentrate on the scene before me. This. Here. Now.

I leave the meadow and head for the woods, set camp in a copse along the way. The trees loom above me like spectres, but I am warm in front of the fire. I survey the scene before me. This. Here. Now.

The point, in any case, is that no matter where I am, when I am, nor what I’m experiencing, the only thing I’ll ever be able to come up with when asked to share my supposedly rich knowledge of the world is: This. Here. Now. I look at the sky, the This is the moon, and it shines softly amidst the stars, here, now. Hours later I do the same, the sun beats upon my brow, that blazing this, here, now. At this level of conceptual determination, I am unable to distinguish between the one and the other – I am unable to grasp the particularity of the moon nor the sun.

All I grasp, it turns out, is an abstraction which, it seems, can be applied to whichever sensory context I please. There is no sensory context in which it would not be appropriate to describe what one sees as a this, right here, right now. For this reason, the concept which we thought captured the world in all of its rich particularity ends up being one which captures the world at its emptiest. I yelp. The world, the flowers, the rabbits, the trees – so close I can touch them, smell them – in the end leave me Tantalus, grasping at but never reaching their truth.

. . .

What’s one to do? Hegel goes on to demonstrate how one progresses from this emptiest of abstractions to ones progressively richer, which encapsulate conceptually not only the properties but the dynamic relations between specific things in the world (including ourselves!). The speculative history of our progression from immediate sensory experience as the grounds for knowledge to more refined forms is the history of our self-realization as rational members of a rational world. In the end we are left with a conceptual scheme as rich and varied as the world it purports to describe, though at the expense of the naive and alluring simplicity of immediacy.

In a way this mirrors the developmental progression from childhood to adulthood – meals are not longer just given, and one must actually set themselves to work. And yet, a sort of childlike wonder is genuinely lost in this process of development. For in the empty abstraction of the this, here, now there really is a genuine mystery – one experiences the scene before them without a clue as to what its constituent parts are, nor how they relate, nor even that one is a separate thing from the world around them. All there is, is immediate sense experience, swaying and swirling greens and reds and blues and the cool of the breeze and the warmth of the sun – though not even these, for there are no concepts nor words at this stage to specify our experience.

Only this, here, now.

 

Stripping down to philosophical kernels (part 3)

(part 2 here)

There are at least three ways we can go from here.

If we’re pessimistic or bold enough, we may very well be fine with an infinite regress of criteria. Our inability to get a hold of a correct conceptual scheme would at the very least guarantee philosophy a spot in academia for all time to come. The endless working-through of different conceptual schemes may lead us, if not to a fully adequate conceptual scheme, then at least to one less objectionable than that which we began with. No surprise that our intellectual faculties, limited as they are, fail to let us see sub species aeternitatis. At best we tug at the robes of Klee and Benjamin’s angel of history:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

But let’s say we’re really, really bold. In our concept-generation we’ve seen not just the possibility of a better conceptual scheme but have glimpsed, as though rays of light cutting through the dark and looming canopy, some final judgment which might be rendered upon us. One need not articulate what this judgment consists in, but only point out that some trend or feature of our conceptualization pushes us toward a determinate conclusion of thought. Given enough knowledge about certain mathematical series (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16…), though certainly not an exhaustive listing of all of its members, one can after all ascertain that it yields a determinate sum (in this case, 1). In this case we stand with Hegel, who took it that reasoning would yield some Absolute which fully justified its own grounds. This Absolute would constitute a conceptual scheme fully adequate to a criterion of adequacy derived from itself.

In either case, regress plummets us from extravagant heights. We may not wish to take the leap. Denying the regress means denying that the adequacy of our conceptual schemes derives from other conceptual schemes. In other words, it involves accepting the primacy of the non-conceptual in determining the success of the conceptual. Such was the critique Marx levelled against his fellow Young Hegelians: they took the realm of thought to be independent of the material context in which it took place, believing genuine progress (philosophical or otherwise) to be possible merely by thinking through the concepts involved. Rather, Marx argued, critique must refer theories to the conditions of their genesis. Regardless of how a given theoretical position conceived of its goals and commitments, what was essential was to examine the actual ends to which its theory was put – the actual social function it played, or could play – as well as how its specific positions and arguments were made possible by and expressive of the real social conditions which produced them. It is not that our concepts are the means by which we make the world intelligible – quite the opposite. The world renders our concepts intelligible and provides them with a criterion of adequacy.

Take, for example, divine command theory as a conceptual schema for organizing political life during feudalism. Political authority flows from the king, as the representative of God’s will on earth, down through the princes and lords and knights all the way to the serfs who comprise the mass of society. Such a model of political organization, patently absurd to contemporary ears, was in its time legitimated not for its intellectual merits but for its plausibility to lived experience. Those in positions of power who each day made decisions governing the lives of those below them must indeed have found it plausible that their will on earth, functioning as it did like God’s in heaven, must have derived from the divine. Correspondingly those serfs who toiled for their masters due to happenstance of birth could at least make sense of their interminable labors as willed, if not by them, then by God. Feudalism as a conceptual scheme was overturned not (just, or fundamentally) because theorists discovered the possibility of a more equitable, secular society, but because the world it made intelligible had passed out of existence.

Whereas with the positions accepting regress we fell from lofty heights, with Marx’s position we seem not even possessed of a chance to attain them. For if conceptualization just reflects in thought the givens of material reality, then it becomes tempting to condemn it as a redundant fatalism. Thought, which from its outset strove to act as mirror to nature, finds itself always-already condemned to a derivative role. Its epistemic virtue – that thought might accurately describe the world – reveals itself an ontological vice, the crippling realization that wherever it looks it cannot but help stare unblinking at its double.